4077212's Journal, Part II

December 6, 2009

            Can’t stop crying. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Trying to cry quiet. In the library. Can’t let him hear. He’ll bring me in again. Can’t let him hear. Can’t go back. Not crazy. Too real. Too, too real. Why haven’t I heard from the fucking nurse?! What the fuck?!

            Breathe. Have to calm down. Need to talk. Need to be coherent. Breathe. Calm. Calm.

            Okay. We were in bed. Everyone was sleeping. I got up to go to the bathroom. This sounds crazy even to me, but it was too real not to be. Too real. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I was standing in front of the sink, looking in the mirror. I look like hell. I’ve always had insomnia, but it’s gone from bad to worse.

            As I stood there, I started to get the creeps. I don’t know what else to call it. Like I wasn’t alone, but I could clearly see that I was. The light was on, and it’s just a small half bath. Toilet. Sink. Mirror. Shelf. That’s it. I felt like I was being watched, and my bare feet were starting to sweat on the tile from my nerves. And I felt a cold hand on my left shoulder.

            All of a sudden the hand was gone and I was in a deep cave. It had a circular tunnel like a hobbit hole. I have no idea how I got there. I was just looking in the mirror a second before. It was cold. The rock was mostly brown with some white marbling to it, and it was very wet. At the end of the tunnel was a wider space, with a strange sound coming from it. It was almost like a small room, except where there should have been a wall opposite the tunnel there was a large opening in the rock, like a window, barred with stalagmites and stalactites. The sound was coming from the other side of the window and was much louder here. It sounded like water.

            I became aware of other people with me, but … not. I don’t know how else to say it. It was more like I had a vague knowledge of faceless shadowy forms rather than actually seeing people directly. And when I looked, it was as if they dimmed. I was terrified, but I couldn’t go back to the tunnel because they were behind me too. Just standing there. Not moving.

            I went to the window to see if I could get out that way. Pressing my face between the rocky bars, I was looking down into a larger opening with more stalagmites and stalactites all over the other side of it but only smaller ones in the middle of the ceiling. Glancing behind me, the shadowy figures still hadn’t moved. God, they were creepy. I looked through the window again. The larger room was deep. I had to look way down to see an underground lake with a small but powerful underground river to the left flowing into it, although the lake water wasn’t rising.

            Wiping tears from my eyes, I notice that what I first thought was large rocks in the river weren’t stationary. It was carrying … I still can’t believe it. People; bodies; corpses, floating like logs in a log-jam into the lake, where they simply ceased to exist. Into my mind came a close-up picture of the face of one of the corpses. It was a man. His short brown hair was wet and plastered onto his pale, slightly bloated face. His face was crudely made up and rouged like they used to do in the old west, yet I could plainly see that there were odd circular red spots scattered over his skin. Each spot was about the size of a dime, and the skin of each spot looked raw and sore, almost like cigarette lighter burns, though I’m not sure what they were. The image flew from my mind like a photograph thrown Frisbee-style, down to the river and attached itself to a body.

            And I was standing in my bathroom again, blinking from the harsh suddenness of the light bulbs overhead. I wondered if I’d dozed off standing there, but I realized the vinyl tile under my feet was ice cold. I couldn’t have been standing there long. Shaking, I opened the door to the bedroom and peered over to the clock on my nightstand. There’s just no way. It was five minutes earlier than it was when I got up to go to the bathroom. Five minutes earlier. There’s just no way.

            -J