Polar Wakefulness

[TreeRhino]

Mick’s fingers tapped a thoughtless percussion anxiously on his leg as he waited for his waffle. Some days he would drag himself out of bed by the scruff of his own neck to make the trek all the way over to this particular dining hall on the far side of campus for waffles. Today, he’d practically ran out of bed. Usually Mick would just appreciate having a good waffle and taking the time to read the sorry excuse for a university daily newspaper. But today, he’d been running from his demons. Maybe literally…
Mick didn’t dream much. He’d heard once from the zeitgeist of arbitrary information that made its indeterminable way into his skull that it was a sign of sanity issues. Considering the lack of source, he suspected that it was load of tripe. He just blamed his dreams on a lack of imagination. Mostly, he would just wake up with scattered notions of incoherent impressions and chaos. The last vivid dream Mick had managed to remember in the morning had impressed him with how exactly boring and normal his imagination was when everything was let loose in dreams.
But last night, he’d dreamed much more vividly than before. He remembered every detail as if he had lived through it awake. He remembered the vaulted ceilings. He remembered the almost darkness that shrouded but didn’t repress. He remembered the inane patterns chiseled on blocks that hung static in midair. He remembered the dogs…
“Hey,”
Mick snapped back to reality for a nervous minute with one of the underpaid student workers handing him his waffle from behind the counter.
Grunting awkwardly, Mick dropped the plate onto his tray and grabbed the standard two packets each of butter and syrup. A bottle of fake orange juice on the way to a swipe of his meal card later he was vaguely paying attention to a morning sportscast on one of the TVs as he picked at his breakfast.
It had to have been real…
No, he was sane. That was only a dream, nothing more; there wouldn’t be anything more of it. Mick knew he scared easy. He was just having a fright from having a bad dream, it had happened before. He was still in one piece. His leg had been torn off, right? And here he was jittering it anxiously. He was fine. Nothing was beyond his imagination and the monsters in your head can’t hurt you.
Right?

Classes flowed by on autopilot. Stumbling through the maze of the day with glazed eyes, Mick couldn’t get his mind off of his dream. It didn’t get out of his memory. He couldn’t distract himself no matter how hard he tried or pretended.
A half-hearted workout at the gym ended cut short when Mick just couldn’t seem to put much effort into the weights. Vaguely skimming through his notes and books, Mick filled out just the bare minimum of work he had to get done by tomorrow. Hours would slip by him without a second thought. His mind never failed to return to the cavernous hall he had fled through. They had been all around him while he hadn’t been able to see them until the very end. Their howls and shrieks still echoed in his head right along with the sound of his own screams echoing off the vaulted chambers.
Lying in bed staring at the ceiling looking right into the improbable certainty of going back, Mick repeated to himself again and again how he was alright. It was just a bad dream. He was too fixated on it. He had things to do tomorrow that he needed to sleep for. Dreams couldn’t hurt him and he would drift into peaceful, dreamless sleep like always.

I was back.
I looked at his hands, I patted down his clothes. I’m dressed somewhat practically. I haven’t worn these pants in a long time, but everything was definitely mine. This was real. This is all very real.
Isn’t it?
I’m underground, I can say that much. Stonework arched tunnels going in something like a grid from what looks like every direction I can see from the junction I’m standing at. Torchlight flickered from every direction, odd bit was, I don’t see any torches around.
Might not be the greatest idea, but all I’ve got is screaming for help. Yelling at the walls and down the tunnels about as loud as I can, it really seems like these stones just soak up the noise. It doesn’t look like any of this is helping. But I’ve got four even directions that look just about the same. I take another spin to look down each tunnel to make sure, but they’re all identical. I don’t know how I got down here; I don’t know where I came from to get here. All I know is I’m all sorts of lost and probably in danger. Old, catacomb looking tunnels like this with flickering, nonexistent light don’t bode well with me.
I’m not about to move without a good reason, but that reason came with the bloodcurdling scream that cut through the moist underground air. The voice cracked as it screamed for everything it was worth. It pleaded for help; it cried to someone unknown not to leave, it swore in a pitch devoid of dignity. It was a scream of certain death. It was the scream of a young person cheated of life and cursing the brief glimpse it had been given.
I ran. I rationalized my decision after I’d made it. That’s my only option, now. I can run toward the sound, or away from it. Unfortunately, I guess I’ve got just enough of a hero in me to try it this way.
I sprinted for all I was worth through the crumbling corridors of stone as the scream turned to cries of utter pain. Desperation and overwhelming fear and pain reared their heads in the screams as I ran toward the sound.

He never finished the waffle, but today, Mick was looking at an empty plate. He didn’t remember eating it. But he felt the hefty weight of a massive Belgian waffle creating a toxic concoction with the over processed orange drink in his stomach. He heard some people talk about how they couldn’t eat fast food garbage and super-processed stuff, but Mick never had a problem. Really, he liked all the horrid junk food.
Mick had always figured he had an iron stomach.
In his mind’s eye, dizzying flashes of flickering light crept from openings to underground corridors in even, nauseating succession as his feet pounded into the sand covered cobblestones. He saw the ominous figures, all with their backs to him as they regarded the dying flames eating away at the flesh of a slight corpse on the scorched flagstones. The smell wafting through the dense underground air, making Mick wretch in protest. Oh god, the smell…
He must have an iron stomach because none of it turned his digestion now. He should be, he wanted to lean over and wretch on the patterned tile in violent protest. But none of that happened. Mick calmly rose from his breakfast just like he always did.

I came to the realization of what burned in the grey light. It was a body. A body contorted with blackened agony in death on the flagstones. The taste of vomit rose in my throat. Fear prickled its icy, electric way down my spine as the depths of a single hood regarded me.
As if on some unspoken command, every hood turned as one to look at me.
Stumbling over my own feet, I ran for everything I had. My feet dug into the sand covering the stones under and my hands clawed for air as I tore down the corridors. Darting left, right, left, left, right, right, left, right, and everywhere I could go to lose the robed figures chasing me, I lost whatever bearing I had entirely. The sounds of feet running came from all around.
Turning another corner, a hooded figure stood at the next junction, looking right in my eyes from the depths of the singed red fabric of its hood.
The sand was treacherous. My worn shoes slipped over the stones below and I scrambled on all fours to turn my body around and run. But there was only yet another lone hooded figure facing him coldly. Footsteps sounded above the pounding of the blood in my veins from all around me.

Notes had appeared on the ruled page on the white fiberboard desk in front of Mick. This wasn’t uncommon to him, Stats was a tough class and he’d grown used to taking a couple pages down every class. Graphs, figures, and equations wove their way around the even lines of the page as if to disrupt the orderly light blue lines with their hastily drawn streaks of graphite.
“Now, with this example, the scurrilous figures we’re using for car fires in the nation will change the outcome substantially because Omaha, Nebraska has far and away more than any other major city in the U.S.” The professor always used real statistics to illustrate the concepts he was teaching.
Mick raised his hand. “What does scurrilous mean?”
The squat professor laughed and straightened his thick glasses to fix Mick with a wry look. The rest of the class had looked up too, paying a little more direct attention. They didn’t know what scurrilous meant either.
“I get the impression that’s a good question,” The fat, little balding mathematician laughed. “If I go off and do something like that, stop the works and make sure you know what I’m talking about. If you can’t understand what I’m saying, I don’t think that you’ll figure anything I’m trying to teach you.”
Mick wrote down the definition of “scurrilous” as an occurrence that was outside the norm enough that it shouldn’t be included with general findings. While his pencil scratched down the information, his mind was the only other place it could go, sinking into its lower tenancies. He was a cornered dog now and he wasn’t about to get burned alive without burning with them.

Screaming inarticulately, I pushed my burning legs into the ground again and charged toward whichever direction I ended up was facing in this disconcerting grid. I was mad with fear and desperation, violence and murder that flowed in place of lower emotions as I willingly ignored the knife in the hooded figure’s hand.
I didn’t know what I’m doing. I’ve had never been in a fight. But that didn’t keep me from driving his elbow into the depths of the figure’s hood at full speed. A fiery pain coursed through my arm as he drove his fist into the hooded man’s face again and again. There was no form or substance to my undisciplined strikes. My knuckles burst open and the bones of his hand cracked. Tears streamed from my face as pain coursed through my very bones.
Forcing the knife from the shrouded figure’s hand, I knew there were more. There were so many more. Blinded by anger and desperation or maybe just the blood in my eyes, I lashed out recklessly. A cold burn lanced into my chest, but that couldn’t stop me, he latched onto the hand holding the knife within me and hacked, and slashed, and stabbed.
My own blood streamed over my limbs as another blade plunged into his back and the blood of the man in front of me sprayed everywhere under my animalistic violence. Succumbing to the trauma of my wounds, I fell to the ground sobbing a cacophony of wet, animal cries as blood clogged in my throat. No order or rhyme came to the noises coming from me; every bit of sanity had been replaced by primal defiance.

The hoodie he had thrown over his head in the morning was making him sweat in the noontime sun as he trudged back across campus. Once, he had calculated it all out one day and figured out that he usually walked at least four miles in a given day. Usually, those miles had to be hauled over pretty quickly to get to his next class on time. Mick knew he should look more carefully at where the classes were located in the future when he signed up to keep from having to hike back and forth over the sprawling campus in a crazed crisscross every day. The weight of every book and his laptop in his backpack didn’t help either.
Usually, this part of the day would have Mick coming back to his Dorm to relax a couple hours before the responsibilities weighing on his mind pushed him back to his feet and got him working again. This time, he wasn’t sure what to do. His feet weren’t taking him to his Dorm. He honestly wasn’t sure where he was going.
Having noticed the automation of his body that his brain had been carrying on in his absence had stopped. Mick stood at the intersection of two immaculate white sidewalks that had just been put in the last semester. They hadn’t seen the heavy foot traffic of too many mornings of students swarming through campus, or the rubber skid marks of too many bikes, or even the chips left by snow removal in the winter.
Clutching the straps of his backpack with white knuckles, Mick turned first one direction, then to his right. Turning all the way around, he looked back to where he had started again and then whirled back to the one way he hadn’t looked. For a moment, he was back in the underground grid of corridors. Each one looked like the other with eerie symmetry and spacing.
For a moment, Mick was lost in the dark. Standing at the junction of a uniform line of corridors where none of them went anywhere. No option was better than the others, but it was important not to get lost. For your own damn sake, don’t get lost.
“Scoot, buddy!” A girl on a bicycle made to look like an old-school cruiser model like half of all the other ones on campus these days bore down on Mick and swerved around just in time.
Loosening his grip on his straps, Mick turned to head back home.
It had struck him a little while ago that he referred to his room in the Dorm as “home” in his head now. Sometimes even out loud, which had struck him as a little odd considering that it was the second room he’d been in after the same number of semesters at school.
Taking the stairs, Mick started up for the fifth floor. He didn’t trust the elevator in this wing of the dorms in the slightest. The first, and only, time he’d used it, the doors had closed and the light behind the floor number had flashed off. The elevator had moved so slowly that Mick hadn’t been able to feel it and panic had set in inside the outdated little box on his own. He could run down the hallways, but it seemed like just an illusion that crushed in on him. He was so tired. There was no way out.
Mick swung his keys out of his pocket by the lanyard in a practiced motion. With only three keys on the ring, it was easy to flip the right one over his finger. He always put the key in the lock as kind of an informal door knock for his ever-present roommate.
He watched his hand plunge the key into the lock, but his mind saw him plunge a rusted, curved knife into the chest of a shrouded figure. Except this one’s hood had fallen away. He was burned so, so bad. Mick stood there as he remembered the face of the figure as he had killed the horribly disfigured monster. It had once been a man, but the face had been burned beyond recognition as human. One side of the face showed a deathly corner of a grin through the tatters of seared lips.
“Hey dude,” Mick was pretty sure his roommate didn’t actually know his name. For all the time they spent together in the room, somehow, the name had just slipped.
“Hey man, wassup?” Mick managed, dropping his bag on the ground at the foot of his bed where it always went and fell into the unmade sheets. At the far side of the room, the way they had the furniture set up made it a bit darker during the day. Mick welcomed the shadows and the anti-social nature of his roommate.

Burning liquid splashed on my wounds as I writhed on the floor. My bladder and bowels evacuated themselves violently as every function of my own body screamed protest against certain death. Fire burned my skin and choked my lungs. I finally died.
I felt myself die. I went through every part of it firsthand. I know what it meant to lose my life violently. Every fiber in me had been felt in death. Every fiber straining to live against pain, shock, and certainty looking me in the soul.
I had awoken calmly that morning. Not with a start, not drenched in sweat, not with my heart beating a million beats a minute. I had slowly come to himself looking at the red digits of his alarm clock in the curtained light of morning. My mind was sound in my head, my skin was unburnt, and my ribs were not broken and forced apart by knives. I had been fine.
And that scared me more than anything else.

Mick hadn’t tried to do anything else that day. He didn’t even leave the room. After he became bored reliving horror again and again while staring at the ceiling, he had forced himself up and set his mind to his homework. There was always work to do and he had immersed himself in it. He had embraced distractions as long as they kept his mind from returning, and had pushed the thoughts away from himself. The memories of the dream would hold in his mind, but he began to reason with them. He stayed up late that night, even working ahead to the point of exhaustion as the only light that remained in the room was the harsh yellow glow shaded onto the stained surface of his dormitory desk.
Scrubbing his tired eyes, Mick pushed the feelings of foreboding and embraced the fear and called it delusion as he moved himself very slowly to the frightening embrace of his bed. Terror gripped him and pulled him down as his spine hit the sheets. Frighteningly similar to suicide, Mick gave himself to the embrace of the night and closed his eyes.

The rock was carved intricately in glyphs structured into each other to make a much larger pattern. Like a fractal with no section entirely the same, the carvings had been worn. Entirely flat at a slant, I know that I’m standing on a cube as the sound of water crashed around me. The mist of the waterfall split by the massive carved cube had slicked the stone surface I stood precariously on. my feet found purchase in the foreign literatures I studied.
Realization began to dawn on me as I looked to where a larger cube hung steady above my head. Like a section had been cropped out of it, the larger formation hung motionless in the air with nothing to support it like a superimposition over the section I stood on and the earth pushed against.
I was back. Wonder was dampened by knowledge as everything came to me. This place was the same. Oh God, it was the same.

[Rabidwerewolfie]

I REALLY liked this story. You caught my attention from the start and held it to the end with a constant feeling of foreboding throughout.

A few minor issues distracted me, though. For one, this line. "I didn’t know what I’m doing." That mid-sentence tense change made me have to reread that sentence. This happened a few times in the story.
Also, while I love the swap from third to first person denoting the difference between dream and reality, that too started getting confusing when it went from "I" to "he" and back again. For example "I looked at his hands, I patted down his clothes. I’m dressed somewhat practically." Who is "he"? I kept waiting for this to be explained but it does this random with no explanation for it.
My only other complaint, and I'm certainly no one to talk on this point LOL, is that a few of the sentences were run ons.

Again, I REALLY enjoyed reading this and I love this kind of story. One that can accomplish a feeling of impending doom without resorting to over the top gore like a cheesy B movie. Thank you for posting this.