Mutilation Experimentation

I had been taught to fear my dreams. Not by scary stories or whispered rumors. I would never be afraid of those false tales. I feared my own. Every night I would lie awake for hours, dreading the oncoming darkness. That didn’t mean my fear of the dark, mind you. I would toss and turn, restlessly avoiding the shadows, and what awaited within.

But over and over, they came. Night after night, week after week, even years later, they have not left me. Of course, they are not as frequent as they used to be. The mind of a seven year old is quite different than that of a sixteen year old.

I learned to forget some of them, for a while. I managed to lose them in my thoughts along with everything else. But there was one. It still haunts me.

I wake in my bed. It is the middle of the night. Why did I wake up? The clock says 3:00. I only knew this as of two years ago. I never looked at the clock until I was fourteen.

It’s quiet. It always is. There is never any sound, imagined or not. I still wonder why I woke up; at least, I used to. By the time I was twelve, I knew why I was there. I knew the ending. But I could not stop it.

Despite my knowledge, I walk down the hall, from my room to the top of the stairs. I can see into the living room from here. If I had been awake, I would have seen the dining room as well. But the entire downstairs is different.

It is wrong.

In the center, a sprawling contraption glows and sparks, radiating lights of green, blue, and purple. I notice the chair, like one might see in a Frankenstein movie, but it does not hold some unknown monster.

Before I understood what I was seeing, I would scream, and I would run back down the hall to the other door, my father’s studio. I would be trying to find him, of course. I didn’t understand why my best friend, a family member, or even one of my classmates was being tortured and mutilated on the metal table below. Later on, after years of seeing every single one of my closest friends on that table, I no longer ran away in a panic. It was a bit sad, I would watch them for a moment, sometimes they were still alive. They would look at me, but I could not help them. The bad man was down there. He was destroying them. As long as I did not go down there, he could not hurt me. I simply turn back and walk to the studio, silent.

As a child, I would rush into the studio, trying to find my father, as I said, but he was never there. I would search the whole room, just in case, until finally going to the window to look outside. Once I got older, I only went to the window. I knew I was alone.

It is always raining. Yet outside is different. Normally, I would just see the street below, and the trees in our yard. When I looked here, it was a hill covered in shadows, lit with some ghostly orange aura. There was a scarecrow on the hill, also in silhouette. I could see over the years that the doll on the post would change. It took me about three dreams to realize that the scarecrow was the remnants of whatever the bad man had last murdered. I would stare at it, all emotion draining out of me. If I was young, I would still cry, but not for a reason I could think of.

I heard something the last time I had the dream. Something, someone screamed. Everything was in flames, but only for seconds, and then it was black. It always ends in blackness.

I float in the void for a while.

Then I wake up.