The first dream was off-putting. After visiting a book-peddler shop stocked with video games, and contemplating stealing the lot of them, I head upstairs. About a half-dozen of my friends are there, and we're in an empty room, five or six floors up in at the sacred heart hospital. The room was mostly empty, except for a few streamers, a handful of colorful balloons in the corners, and a table which held several discarded pizza boxes. They were having a party. It's a pretty grey and blue sky outside, and everyone is giving me little congrats on something, but I don't know what. Everyone goes outside to the parking lot, tells me they had a great time, and they jump into a giant white cube of light, vanishing.
I wake up the first time. My alarm clock has three green slashes where numbers should be (my clock in reality is red). I realize it's far to early to be up, and go back to sleep. But when I do I can't get up. I can't move. I'm being encompassed, surrounded, choked. I can't see by what, and my blanket doesn't protect me. Everything is crushing me. The universe is crushing me. The I wake up into a dream.
Now I'm in the parking lot of the hospital. There are a few scattered cars and people outside them, all looking at the sky. I see my old car, the navy cutlass ceara, sitting in the parking lot. I walk over to it. I know this is a dream. This are moving slow like honey, and the there are no man-made structures aside from the monolithic hospital building and the parking lot. The Sky is everywhere. Rob, my old manager from Rockies pizzeria, is leaning on the trunk of the car. He turns to me. Rob says, nice sky, and I turn to look at it. It is a beautiful sky. Grey and white clouds streak across the stark blue of the sky like a masterful painting. And like a painting, it does not move. I get lost in the sky for a moment, then turn back to Rob. He has something to say.
"You know this is a dream, right?" I nod my head.
"Good," he says, and looks at the sky.
"Dreams have physical, tangible power. Know that." He says wisely. "Look at the sky." And I look, to see what's coming.
The sky moves, like someone hit the unpause. The clouds stream forward, into the horizon. It's breathtaking. Then terrifying. The clouds in the middle of the sky turn black. They start to gather above the horizon, swirling into a massive inverse sphere of darkness. They spread and encompass the sky in a matter of seconds. And then an opening appears. It's like someone punched a hole through the sky, right out into space, into something past space, a purple-black nebula of something I can comprehend. It devours the world in a heartbeat.
And then for a second, lacking body or mind, I regain consciousness inside of it. I look into it's terrible anti-logic guts, a branching spiral of black cubes connecting through angles that can't possibly be real. Something inside this terrible machine touches my mind, speaks to me, and I loose every spark of sanity and willpower I ever had. I scream with every fiber of my non-existent body, knowing total permeating fear. And I keep screaming.
I wake up and I know more of the dream. I remember it all, and I remember the Knowledge Rob told me, and I hurry to write it down.
"It's a machine." Says Rob, eyes fixed on the spot in the sky where the world will break open. "I mean, not really. It's just that this is a dream so it's not real. I can't explain it to you in real terms. They're aren't any." Pause. "But yeah, say it's a machine. It was built by things we can't begin to comprehend before time even came into conception. The logic it uses is unspeakable, terrible, and all-encompassing. It's here to destroy." I realize he's speaking in my voice. "It was built for order, you see? And life, or change, of any kind, is a threat, if a completely planned one, to that order." It begins to thunder. The sky remains still. "And it will. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a million years. But it will." He looks at me, almost like he's accusing me of something. "It has a name. Ma.." Then thunder. And the dream resumes, as previously stated. But now, awake, I know the name. It's what it said to me before it devoured my sanity and soul.
I act on it. I head to the library, and begin my search. I find the name mentioned nowhere, except for a few out of state books. I find connections to those books though, through hours of keyword searching and cross-references. I find that it's connected to all kinds of folklore, usually the bad kind. Dead walk the earth, end of the world type stuff. Then I find something. An old film reel, made in the 30s. From the tin, it says it was made by Walt himself, as some kind of private animation project. It was never formally released, and was auctioned off some years ago for a charity, ending up on lone to the library. I set up a private screening room in the basement, and watch the film.
It's a mixture of live action and animation, detailing a child who finds a frog that has been possessed by an angry entity that has made the frog's eyes turn black. By dunking it underwater, the child returns the frog to normal. It goes into detail. Walt knew about the machine entity, and others knew too. He goes on screen to talk about how it can bend physics with nary a word. It can Possess people, animals, and objects; they become angry, bloodthirsty, and evil; but can be cured by being doused in water if the infection is caught early enough. Walt says this is probably the cause of various baptism rituals around the world. The Entitity can also curse people to rise as the walking dead, killing and creating more of themselves each time they kill. They cannot cross water though, and can't survive without a head and torso. Overall, Walt says, the outlook is not good. The more he looks into the subject the more people die because of it. So he's decided to stop looking at all, and had made this film to help the future. Godspeed Walt.
I decide that I have to people about this, so that night I gather my neighbors in my house and describe to them the events and information that I've found. I even show the film in my kitchen. The crowd doesn't know what to make of it, they mumble among themselves, as a thunderstorm hammers down outside. Then they stop arguing. There's a shadowy figure in the doorway, a man in a brown raincoat, looking very much like he has answers. He walks in and the dream takes an odd tangent. It's Captain America. He's right, Cap says, The boy's talking about the truth. They all know him, and they all shut up and listen.
Cap talks about how he's encountered evidence of the entity long ago, during the second World War. He even worked together with Walt to investigate it back in the 30's and 60's. He found me when his contacts revealed that some one had been investigating along the same lines he had so many years ago. And then he asks us to forget about it. Just let it pass. He says we can't fight it, not yet, maybe not ever, but even looking for a way will kill us and our families and friends. Everyone is pretty upset about this, after all they just started to believe it, now they have to dump that belief, but they seem ready to comply. Then I go and do something stupid. I say the name.
At first it's just quiet, like a hush before a crash. Then physics starts to break down. I notice aggie is up and walking around when she should be in bed. And then I notice she's seven years younger. I'm younger too. My parents are older. Time is going up and down for each person in the room. It's affecting cap worst of all, as he starts blaming people for being godless jap scum pretty quickly. He turns into a baby. Gravity disappears for a moment, then returns in the wrong direction. The sky turns different colors. The world goes mad.
Pretty soon things return to normal. Everything settles down, and people begin to worry. I try and calm the crowd down, but Cap is gone, and I'm not doing too well of a job. Agatha seems sick, and I wonder if she might be infected by the machine. My father shares my concern, but my mother is strangely aloof, and starts snapping at us. I swear I could see her eyes turn black for a second. The crowd holds her, and we decide the best course of action is to head down to river, and everyone to take a dunk so we can be sure no one's possessed. After that, we can decide our next move.
We head down, and exosist my mother. As we do so I hear a voice in my head, an ugly grating thing, "you are cursed, and forever shall be" it hisses, and then disappears. I hope that it doesn't mean what I think it means, but as we begin heading up the hill back to the house, Pete, and elderly man who looks like Santa and built our house, trips and falls, the yolk he was using to carry two buckets of water breaking his neck in the process. His wife runs to him, crying her eyes out, but a spark of happiness appears when he starts to get up. The spark is gone when he begins to tear open her neck with his teeth, and then they both turn on the crown. Chaos ensues. We run.
Then it's months latter. Nothings changed. My family, myself, and a few others are still on the move, running from the dead and possessed. And that's how it ends. There's no hope for us, no hope in the universe.
I wake up, for real this time, and I strain every bit of waken mental ability into forgetting the name. I try and forget something I'm not even sure I know.
