The Nightmare

I have this reoccurring nightmare where I find myself alone on the top floor of a housing complex with an elevator. Once I’m there, I can’t go back down.

I’m in primary school, aged five, maybe six, and it’s always dusk. The grey sky looms over me and colours everything within its reach, giving a dull appearance to my surrounds.

The dream always begins the same way, with me waiting to be picked up from school. I wait and wait for my mother’s car to pull into the long winding entrance, but it never does.

I’m always the last child standing.

My time on campus surpasses the teachers assigned to watch over the collection process.

Before the last teacher leaves, I’m brought inside to wait in the school’s reception.

There, I sit on a wooden bench lined with a thin cushion. It provides just enough support and comfort that I fall asleep waiting for my mother, and then, I wake up in that room.

I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t even remember stepping foot into that elevator. The steel doors remain open, and although I never attempt to use it, I know it’s inoperable and that I’m stuck there.

The room itself is impossibly large and never ending. The floor curves under my feet as if it’s built and affixed to the natural landscape of a hill. 

The walls and ceilings are painted stark white. There are no windows, and it’s warm the way a top floor always seems to be. Slightly stuffy and hard to breathe. 

There are no light fixtures, but the room remains dimly lit.

Above me, the ceiling has panels that are an entryway into the attic, and at first, these panels were immaculate, blemish free.

As the nights pass, greasy hand prints accumulate on the surface of these panels, and they remind me that he’s coming. 

I’ll be alone in the room, and suddenly I’ll feel a shift.

At first it was subtle; it used to catch me off guard but soon I would come to expect this presence.

He slides himself into the room from the liminal space above and circles me. 

I used to run to the other side of the room, but somehow the wall I was facing would move and it seemed to keep the same amount of distance from me, no matter how fast my pace. 

He never spoke a word and never made a sound.

Tall and featureless, this entity had an unseen force, its own gravitational pull akin to a planet or black hole. I felt that had I stared too long, I’d fall in, as if it were a vacuum and portal to worse things.

In the waking world I can’t remember any distinguishing features of this thing that seems hellbent on haunting me. No face, eyes, mouth, nose or defined form that I can describe. It possesses a body but is seemingly shapeless, still following some rules of physics, but, like the room, it too exists outside the laws of nature.

The first few dozen times I woke up in that room, I was defenceless. Left to wander with nothing but the clothes on my back and a mobile phone in hand. The only contact number saved was my mother’s and at five or six years old, it was the only number I remembered by heart.

I’d call and call, but there was no answer, stuck on a loop of dial tone, never ringing out. 

I begged the walls for my mother, hoping that she’d somehow sense that I needed her, and that she’d come to my rescue.

Over time I stopped, realising how hopeless my cries were.

Then I started to wake in that room with a knife. A machete.

By this time I was slightly older, more capable, but the figure transmogrified too.

On the surface of this man, this creature, was a layer of gunk. Slicked with a shine that resembled old motor oil, and black as tar.

I would threaten the tall and skulking figure, slashing the air in front of me if it came closer. This was always a bluff and eventually I was treated as I had been before acquiring the weapon.

The figure would slink behind me, tailing and taunting. Hours would pass in that room this way.

One night I struck it and it began to laugh as if it only tickled. So I swung my knife into it again and again, cutting deeper each time, until I had beheaded it.

The head rolled away from me, picking up speed, leaving a trail of blood as it neared the open elevator doors, making a thud as it rolled over the space between the floor and the elevator.

Still, its body lurched towards me. So, I continued slashing. I used so much force that I managed to cut through bone, creating a clean line down its spine where I separated the figure in two. 

I lugged its body, carrying it over one shoulder before throwing it down, reuniting it with the head that was lying in wait.

Then, something that had never happened before: the elevator began to move. With its doors still open, I watched it go down, and then I woke up.

The next evening, as I slept, I found myself back in that same room, and I knew that it wasn’t over. The figure appeared from the attic above as it had done all those times before, in one piece.