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The Subterranean

MEMOIR PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

Dream date: Spring, 1987, just before high school graduation.
Posted as I wrote it a few years later as I attempted to write like Poe.

My high school graduation was only weeks away and the only mishap that could prevent my graduation would be if I did not turn in the research paper laying on the seat beside me. The project was due in two days, and I was en route to Alice’s house to have her proofread and type the paper to my teacher’s standards.

Enclosed in the dome of the firmament was the farrago of a typical Midwestern spring day. From out of the rich blue sky, desultory winds were wisping many strange reveries in and out of my mind to the rhythmic shadows of lofty clouds passing before the sun. The soft yellow sphere was glowing just strong enough to warm my skin, only to be tickled into goose-bumps by the teasing breezes that were darting in and out of my car.

The residential road I traveled to Alice’s could, on any given day, be a picture perfect scene of the stereotype of Smalltown, USA. But today, rather than flaunting the presence of life reborn after a long and dreary winter, the quaint and usually gleeful houses that were gliding by were now speaking with a tongue of great fear and foreboding. The beaming upper story windows only gave hollow gazes. The verdant beards of grass which should have been a fountain of youth-crazed children, women planting flowers, and neighbors exchanging memories, now beheld the serene desolation of a graveyard in autumn.

The houses stood shut up with solemn faces as if anticipating the Angel of Death, praying that it would grant them mercy and pass over their trembling dwellings. They, being the houses, the large oak trees that lined the road, the whole hidden community, radiated a tense energy that seemed to be revolving around me, as if I were about to perform some dark entertainment that they were going to watch from behind draped trepidation.

I noticed the wind had ceased. The sun was trapped behind a light gray cloud, diffusing the town in a pale light. I began to feel as though I were in a vacuum as the realization came over me that since I left my house, I had not seen another moving car, nor passed any person engaged in any sort activity along the way. I was the only person on the streets and premonition told me that everyone knew it.

Alice’s house was in an awkward place. To get to it, I would have to make a left onto a narrow gravel road that was more like an alley. Her house was sandwiched in between the houses on this street and the houses on the next. The turn was approaching and the gray feelings I had on this incongruous day became even grayer when I saw standing on the grassy lawn before Alice’s gravel road, an antique family dressed in their 1800s Sunday best as though posing for a Daguerreotype photograph. Stoic faces went along with their apparel. Father was next to mother and three children stood in front of them with the daughter in the middle and the two sons on either side. The father’s hands rested on the boy’s shoulders. They stood statue still; only their heads followed my approach. As I drove closer, I could read an expression of deep loathing on their faces. A dark secret was watching me through bars behind their stolid eyes. Deja vous filled my soul, not in the sense of being in this situation before, but as if I knew these people who were watching me and making me their axis of black attention. Methodically I rounded the corner and they continued to follow me with their blazing stares. I suddenly felt paranoid, as if I committed a crime unknowingly but yet they somehow knew. I quickly searched my perplexed soul and decided that my paranoia should rather turn into an attitude of irritation from their false accusations so I yelled out the window, “What are you fuckheads looking at?”

They did not flinch; they only kept watching poignantly as I completed the turn to the sound of gravel crunching beneath my tires.

Shrugging off their eerie gazes, I shifted my attention forward only to be confronted with an anomaly so absurd and terrifying that my mind cramped and I mashed on the brakes with both feet. The car slid in the gravel to a stop at the edge of a wall of forest and foliage. I was on a dead end on a road that normally continued on for blocks. The forest was so thick I could only see a few yards into it.

What happened to Alice’s house? What happened to my town that was once so real? I was not given a chance to ponder for very long, in an instant, the sky darkened with churning black clouds and sent a freezing frenzy of wind through my open car windows. I turned my head and covered my face to protect it from the chilly blast. I heard a rippling sound and felt papers being blown past my head. I turned back towards the passenger’s seat and removed my hands just enough to see. Immediately I lunged for the last few pages of my research paper left on the passenger’s seat. I was too late, the wind had already breathed them in and exhaled them onto the lawn of the weird watchers before my hands even touched the vinyl seat. I didn’t stop to think about what I did next. I was in a situation that had repercussions nearly as extreme as life and death to me so I was filled with the courageous adrenaline that imbues those who perform miracles at the scenes of car accidents and burning buildings and such. The fate of my whole life up to that point was strewn across the lawn of this strange house. Without my research paper I could not graduate from high school and I would battle the fiercest of beasts if it that’s what it would take to get my paper back just so I could graduate from high school. I would rather be slain than to spend another year in that institution. I slammed the gear shift into park, flung the door open and burst onto the lawn. I picked up the papers in a state of frenzy like the wind that stole them from me in the first place. The wind had stopped but I knew that at any moment it could pounce on my papers once again and steal away my dreams of graduation. I allowed myself to steal one small glance over towards the bizarre family I had seen on the corner moments ago. They had left the corner and were hobbling towards me like zombies and it would have been more appropriate if they would have had their arms straight forward and moaning, but instead their arms were at their sides and they were clumsily bumping into each other, leaning forward a little as they walked. The faces and whole demeanor of the parents were still stoic, but it was if the stoic image was only a mask and a costume. Underneath their skin I could feel their eyes focused on me like the sun through a magnifying glass. The children seemed as though they were looking through eyes filled with some strange anger or hatred that they didn’t understand. Hatred towards me given to them by their parents for a wicked act I was obviously being wrongly accused of.

I turned my attention back to the trail of papers and tried to ignore the creeps that were like worms slithering around my spine. The adrenaline that was pumping through my blood kept me from using my senses during this whole nightmare otherwise I would have been very suspicious of the fact that the paper trail lead straight into a perfect rectangular opening in the lawn. The opening resembled a subway entrance, with an iron railing surrounding three of the sides, and stairs crawling into the earth from the left un-railed side. And had I not been so frantic I might not have so willingly transcended these stairs that were gray and made of stone and glowed with a strange yellow hue, but due to the severity of the situation, I was oblivious to logic, fear, or just simple common sense. I had become super human and immortal and in that state of mind I crammed paper after paper between my arm and chest and followed the trail down the stone stairs, turned left at the bottom, and continued on a cobblestone path. As I scurried I couldn’t help but to notice that the air was hot and steamy and almost like a sauna and I felt a little dizzy going from the crisp spring day to these tropical conditions.

Although I was underground, the moisture on the black stones reflected a yellow light. It was a peculiar light too, as if the whole underground world were lit up by those ugly yellow lights you see on porches and decks that supposedly keep bugs away.

I was gathering these details unconsciously, but the deep incongruity was too much, and I was without desire to investigate any further; and, only later did I realize that I noticed these things at all.

By the time I reached the last piece of paper, I was mentally exhausted, confused, angry and feeling a little queasy from the adrenaline rush. Clutching the papers between my arms and chest, I stood up straight and looked around for a moment. I was in the middle of a cobblestone circle. On my left and my right were park benches made of concrete the color of blood and ash mixed together. A pathway cut through a forest of deep green ferns: behind me the path lead to the stairs and in front of me it curved to the right some and passed a shack-like dwelling. The moist air was a sponge saturated with the ugly yellow light that hung over the pathway like the Will o’ the Wisp, and despite the fact that the illumination only traveled a few feet beyond the pathway’s boundaries, I sensed that the cavern, or whatever it was I was in, was vast, compressed, and eerily still.

It only took a few seconds of observing this subterranean world for its intensity to engulf me. I had sludged into an atmosphere of invisible gelatin that closed around my every move within it. The air, the ferns, the cobblestones, the benches, the deep darkness, the eerie light; they were all connected by this gelatin that acted as the eyes, tongue, nose, ears and skin for some unseen entity; and like the community above, they too were all holding their breath and hiding their faces.

Not a leaf moved.

Nor did a bug buzz.

Nor did a clap of thunder from above crash into the world below.

I was completely isolated.

The thick sound of silence filled my ears, raising every little hair that grew on the back of my neck.

And as the tingling tide of trepidation rolled into my spirit, the light flickered. Something had passed before its source. Something that moved awkwardly, almost stumbling with every step. The something was in the dwelling in the back of the cavern. A dwelling that was no more than mosquito net stretched over the wooden frame of what would be a shed or a shack. I could see the something moving through the shack with much effort but the light reached around the something, making it an indiscernible hobbling blob of yellow shades heading to the right wall that the cobblestone pathway lead up to. My blood, once again, transformed itself into adrenaline. But all of this rocket fuel was weakening my courage, and nauseous fear was slipping in through the high pressure fissures. So when the screen door on the shanty opened, I ran like my pants were on fire.

Orbs. Ten wicked orbs tried to freeze me with fear when I neared the stairs in my attempt to flee. The children looked through the railing, the parents loomed above. Their expressions, although only slightly altered, made it quite clear to me that my actions did not satisfy their desires. Behind them dark clouds—churning like creamy gears in a factory—billowed out crazy winds that played with the watcher’s hair fanatically. Howling was the wind I am certain, but with the exception of the sounds of my own footsteps, all was sickly silent. All was sickly strange. All was sickly frightening.

But the stranger things became, the angrier I grew, and the angrier I grew, the more motivation I felt to spite these bizarre fears so I leaped up the stairs two at a time and glared at my watchers with an impish mocking smirk. Once free from the humid pit, I would just run as fast and as far away from this house until I dropped from exhaustion, but first I had to make it to the world above. I moved in surreal slow motion until my body burst from out of the tropical underworld and into the chilling arctic air of the upper world. And as if I had just surfaced from a long underwater swim, I was attacked by sound—loud and sonorous—and wind—dashing and frigid. My hair lunged across my face and the howling was nearly deafening. I tightened the grip on my papers. My skin jumped into bumps. But I was free and my smile radiated around my head which I promptly turned to the odd family, and, in my most agitated and haughty voice, I yelled at their faces, “Fuck you!” But my smile turned pale when their expression had a sudden twinkle to it. I knew I was in for… Pow! I was knocked on my back by a mammoth gust of wind. My arms flailed and the papers became loose in my arms for a brief second, but in that second, the pit below sucked the loose pages into its belly and I looked down the stairs in time to see a few pages being whisked around the left turn at the bottom.

I chased the papers while launching into a battery of swearing that occupied my mind so that before I knew it, I was in the center of the stony circle again, reaching for the last piece of purloined paper. But the extension of my hand stopped in mid-flight when I noticed an old pair of tennis shoes on top of the paper. The white rubber toes were gray and scuffed. The black canvas was ripping away from the sole and the laces were grungy and decayed. I didn’t lift my head an inch, only my eyes which were level with the waist. Upon the waist were worn faded filthy and baggy oversized blue jeans cut six inches below the crotch to fit the length of the legs; crusty frayed strings from the bottom of the cut offs dangled over the shoes. When I looked up further, my mind sizzled as the image of this creature before me seared itself into the tissues of my memory cells like a brand that would ooze puss for years to come before closing up into a wicked scar.

Beneath lumpy translucent wax-like pale skin that sagged around the nipples, the creature had the framework of a boy’s body around the age ten, but its legs were about a foot too short in proportion, elongating the torso hideously to the eye. The right arm of the creature was withered up and rested across the abdomen; the left arm was emaciated but had doubly thick bones that extended to twice the body’s length and was bent at the elbow which nearly touched the cobblestones. The forearm was aimed straight into the air as an oversized hand crowned with foot long fingers and pointed nails stretched forth in a hopeless grasping gesture.

Under a bald skull, its eye sockets were deep and dark and the lids laid heavy on the eyes that glistened, but were not visible through the slits they peered through. The nose was almost piggish and the ears dwarfed and crumpled.

It looked down at me and its face contorted into an expression of extreme agony and forlorn. In its grasp was such a presence of loneliness and despair that it surpassed the comprehensible limits of most mortal men and delved into the world of the supernatural: the world of demons that torture and afflict those who are cursed. Trembling, like a rabbit paralyzed by a bright light, my legs felt like rubber bands and my stomach filled with sickness. As I looked into the creature’s eyes and I was filled with its sorrow, the fat lips separated and it inhaled through stringy saliva that formed a net over its mouth. Reaching for me while simultaneously opening its monstrous hand, all was still, the world held its breath, and the gelatin flexed around me.

Then it roared.

“MMMMNNNNNNLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!” broke through the lips of the creature in a tone like a beast wounded and enraged. The ferns tossed wildly and I covered my ears.

I woke with a scream, threw back the covers and stood up, but my legs were weak from the dream it was hard to stand and I trembled as I looked around the room fearfully. It was a habit back then to leave a desk lamp on because of my frequent nightmares so I could see everything was back to normal reality, but it was what I couldn’t see that I was looking for and so I growled into the room, “In the name of Jesus Christ, get out of my house!”

I then made my way out of room, through the basement rec room, up the stairs—literally crawling my way up—and went back to sleep on the living room couch.

The next night, when I told my mom the dream, she told me I must have picked up a Devil Spirit over at the Easton’s house because Linda, who was pregnant at the time, must have been harboring fears about having a deformed baby, and the Devil Spirits associated with those fears must have followed me home and caused the dream.

END
© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on October 8, 2006 in
Emotion: Fear, Type: Dream