WHEN THE NIGHTMARE ENDS
WHEN THE NIGHTMARE ENDS
by Robert Stahl
Heather wakes in the morning and stretches out into the cool, soft sheets, feeling amazing — until she sees the tarantula on the bed. It’s a big one. Furry. Black. She can see her own horrified reflection in its many hungry eyes. Her blood turns to ice, her body grows still. The spider tenses in response, mandibles twitching. Heather acts quickly. In one frantic motion, she flings the sheets up with all her might. The spider hurtles across the room, thunks against the wall, falls stunned to the floor. Heather sprints across the room to get a broom or some Raid or a goddam chainsaw or whatever but her heart almost stops when she opens the door. The creepy-crawly fuckers have infested the hallway. They’re on the floor, the ceiling, the walls…
She slams the door shut and bolts back into the bedroom. With shaking hands, she manages to claw the window open. A few seconds later, she’s out on the ledge, ready to jump.
“Sir,” a young man’s voice says, echoing across the cavernous chamber. Overhead, a bat stirs, adjusts its grip on the rocky ceiling, and goes to sleep again. “She’s getting away.”
Johnson is writing the daily quotas on a whiteboard when the comment interrupts him. He sighs and glances at his wristwatch. It’s not even an hour into the shift. At this rate, he’ll never get to those expense reports today. He tosses the marker onto his desk and scans the room where the employees sit in their headsets and crisp, white shirts, all focused on their monitors — except for the new guy. Voss. He’s staring at Johnson with a dumb look on his face. Of course, it would be Voss. Johnson’s trudges through the rows of desks, his indigestion flaring.
Voss’s monitor is in split-screen mode. One side shows the target’s driver’s license photo. The other shows a rendering of her dream, with a few menu options below.
Johnson fishes an antacid from his pocket and pops it into his mouth. “What program are you running?”
“Arachnophobia 2.0.”
“Intensity?”
“Forty percent, sir.”
“Vitals?”
Voss types a command on his keyboard. The info blips across the screen:
Subject: Heather Sawyer
Age: Twenty-four
Location: Schenectady, NY
Heart rate: 135 bpm
“Dial up the first program by fifteen percent,” Johnson says, crunching the chalky tablet between his back teeth. “Introduce Basophobia at level three.”
“L-level three?” Voss asks, wide-eyed. His young face goes white.
“Do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Heather looks down from the second-floor ledge. The landing’s going to hurt. It’s either that, though, or the spiders. She jumps, bracing for the impact. Instead, her feet punch through the lawn like its paper. The darkness below swallows her. She falls and falls and falls, into the all-consuming void. Her heart hammers inside her chest. Focus, she thinks. Breathe. She gulps air into her lungs, and exhales, forcefully, methodically, until she is calm again.
A rope falls through the air nearby, maybe twenty feet away. She doesn’t question where it comes from, only tucks in like a skydiver and glides toward it. Her hair whips across her face as the rope gets closer. She feels a surge of relief when she catches it, then wishes she hadn’t. It’s not a rope at all — it’s a web strand. Her hands stick to its gluey surface. The more she struggles, the more it clings. Now her arms are tangled in it, her legs, her entire body. And worse, she’s being hoisted up like a fish on a hook. She looks up the length of web and into the many eyes of an enormous spider-god.
At last, Heather screams.
Voss’s screen flashes. Electricity hums out of the back of the computer through a cable. The cable joins to a bundle of other cables that feed into a hole in the cavern floor.
A smile widens across Voss’s face. Johnson pats him on the back. “Nice work.”
With the distraction out of the way, Johnson makes his way back to his whiteboard. Quotas first, then the expenses.
+++
Only when the last worker is gone does Johnson rest for a moment. He sits quietly at his desk, same as every day. From a drawer, he pulls out a picture frame. The glass is cold to the touch. His eyes sting as he traces over the image of the woman. He chokes back emotions and puts the photo away.
He scans his card into a reader. The elevator takes him down. The chamber he enters is large and dark and cold. Cables slither through a hole in the rocky ceiling and terminate in a large capacitor. Suspended in the air below that, is a jagged fissure made of energy. Electricity crackles and sputters along its edges. The fissure seeps a substance that reminds him of TV static. It hurts to look at. Indigestion twists in his belly like a dying child. His body shivers. This is the part he hates.
He takes a deep breath and pulls a lever on the wall. The gathered energy surges into the capacitor. The fissure hisses and sputters and dilates. Not much, a few inches? Enough for today, anyway.
Johnson steps toward the fissure. Beads of sweat dampen his forehead. An enormous, unblinking red eye glares out from the other side. Gray tentacles wiggle from the hole like worms. Where they probe Johnson’s face an ochre slime remains. He swallows hard, and his bowels threaten to loosen.
“A l-little closer today, M-master.”
A screeching voice that sounds like pain says: “Yezzzzz.”
Johnson wipes at his sweating brow. Though he asks it every day, he must do so again. It is a compulsion. “Master,” Johnson says, his voice quivering. “Y-you will bring her back? When you’re here?”
“Yezzz. Among many other thingzz.”
For Johnson, it is all he needs to hear.
Fiction © Copyright Robert Stahl
Image by tookapic from Pixabay
Unbeknownst to Robert Stahl, his body is an empty shell, telepathically controlled by a brain in a jar, which was buried long ago under the floorboard of his home in Dallas. Consequently, his days are filled with the urge to write: stories, letters, articles, whatever. At night he listens to music and when he drifts off to sleep, the brain laughs, a humorless, pitiful sound, as it jiggles alone in the dusty darkness. His work has been published at Dark Moon Digest, The Dread Machine, and Crystal Lake Publishing..
