Onslaught Of Nightmares
The house stood lonely and dark on a rarely traveled road. Gloomy, a mood of evil hung about it. I was grievously ill and for the first few weeks I had nothing but nightmares after a horrible series of events. The bloodshed and the wars going on in various places rang out like gunfire in the world, and even the semi-automatic weapons were vivid enough to cause very realistic dreams. But waking from them was another story. Too weak. Given up on all chances of survival.
Those tunnels lead to enclosed brick chambers, where it'd be possible for hiding long amounts of time but so dim and covered with years of decay and pollution that one would have to be desperate to live in the first place. Only a soldier could endure.
I saw some unknown people hiding there. I could stand right in front of them, and they'd never see me. Then a soldier appeared and walked past a fire within the chamber. Appearing to be some forgotten relic from the Vietnam era and although he looked as any other living soldier from that time, like some animated playback, it was as if he were a shell and that I was seeing just the memory of his image. There was an emptiness and somewhere in that there was something else. Another layer that slowly unfolded. The soldier spoke.
"You ever stand on the Platform of Challenge?"
"Maybe. The dead air in some places is more unnerving, though. That was one just point of origin."
"It's dark. Save for the candles." The soldier said.
"Why are there massive hotels, homes and schools and those immense buildings that within is nobody? No footsteps fall or tread the floors but there's always something stirring in them." I reflected.
"What are you even going in those places for?"
"I thought I saw something. Besides it was cold outside. I sought shelter." I said trying to think of why.
In a way, those places are worse than the tunnels and the dim, distorted chambers, they're reflections of all that is despairing, the greed of the world, murder and death. How full they all are and yet there is infinite emptiness. My thoughts wandered off and I felt beyond weary. The soldier now sat and stared out into space. I was reading his thoughts as they echoed in my ears.
"I see it all, you know?" I said. "I see these things in everything, everywhere, and everyone. They sleep all the time, carrying on in celebration. I don't know what the occasion is, I always come in on another hour."
"Ah, the sleepwalkers. The sleep of they who walk. Then fall down and break all their bones on the deceptions they were shown." The soldier spoke in almost a defeated tone of voice.
"What is their problem? They're there among such chilling scenes of utter evil and don't even notice any of it!" I said. It bewildered me to recall what I had seen, and remembered that any escape would lead to stranger lands. Stress, anxiety and worry were the least of concerns to be addressed here. This is a dark world. With nightmarish experiences. One barely sleeps in solid places but it would all reawaken more vividly in dreams.
It was the second night and the dark creature leapt out from nowhere again. A long series of past days I would witness in the form of years before I even arrived, would begin. With everything the way it was, the soldier would only walk along. I noticed the slight darkness in the air as the end of a century came to a close. Clear and sharp it was. More of a sense of awareness than a sense of abandon. There was a dead, silent air that proceeded the onslaught.
The soldier was gone momentarily but a second soldier came into full view. "You're afraid, aren't you?" The voice seemed to come out of nowhere.
"You are not the keeper of the realm." I told him. He sat near a ruin of stone and bamboo.
"Is there any comfort in the final hours? The torment of an ongoing death? That pain?" By now I felt frozen tears fall and my heart broke into a thousand pieces. It was still cold outside. Then I felt that I was on fire and I stood motionless.
"You could end the suffering and join in on the sleep. Take comfort and be away from all this." The voice now seemed disguised but was so doleful and out-of-touch with time and place. It was both comforting and yet even dreadful.
"Well, I'm not afraid like that. On that count, you're wrong. I've dared many a demon and battled them." I said finally. "But what shall stop death? You can't. Those walls can't shut it out."
"Your father has and will." At that my hands froze against my heart, and I was struck by the beauty of those words. I was listening and there was silence.
As usual, this was some distant drumbeat that never shakes the ground. A justice that never proceeds, it only winks from behind somewhere that can never be reached. The gavel was already shattered. That was what I heard a lot louder than the drumbeats. But I could hear something behind the dead air. Although it was stagnant. I heard the dull winds pick up. I clutched my hands again, still cold but not as frigid.
There was an onslaught of the most evil things that accumulated as I watched helplessly. I could not see everything but felt it all the same. There were a multitude of years of dark deeds that rushed past me like a tidal wave.
"Leave the Platform of Challenge behind you!" The voice seemed to boom behind a wall of haze.
"What about this place?" I felt that I sobbed for hours because everyone was dead but those words were spoken almost as if an afterthought.
"What do you mean?" The voice asked in a softer tone.
"A green place of serene beauty, cleared walkways winding through palms and carpets of grass with the sun shining in a day that never stung and lasted long, has turned into a dank, deep and sunken jungle, twisted with black wood and endless vine."
I recalled what it all seemed to me. Then I spoke again with more resolve. "Once I go over into the other side, I will seek after the enemy there. A bounty I will imagine, a bounty I will remember! I will bring something for the price of pain that I paid." I stood upright and my eyes flashed and pierced all corners of darkness and I was burning with an intense fire.
I continued. "I will be a terror in the blackest hearts and they will loathe my vision for I will see everything and somewhere in their sleep, they'll know I saw them. A fury they will harbor and unleash all battles inside that realm, and there is where I'll bring them to their bones. I was a spirit and they were flesh. I am the counter-balance of nightmares. I dream in awareness."
Then there was a complete silence, the mock voice of reasoning had somehow abandoned the area. Death overcome, weapon given and I walked off the platform of challenge and the soldier was resting. All those structures stood without harboring ill will and they waited for the soldiers who passed, where there was finally a waiting host.
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