The October Amaryllis: Everything Has a Cost

Chapter 25 - ????

I’ve had the same nightmare for several years now. In it, I find myself unable to walk and have to resort to crawling. This would typically be nothing more than highly annoying, but the dream always seems to place me in dangerous situations, such as right next to the train tracks. They say that nightmares are based on our fears, but I never figured out what caused them.

This time, I crawled through an abandoned dystopian future, the exact opposite of Arcadia. Architecture-wise, it seemed to be based on French Baroque, which confused me beyond any words. It was as if two distinct realities combined into one in a blender. In fact, I would have thought that I was in the past had it not been for the advertisements for Cyzortan hoverboards like the ones in Back to the Future. The sign read, “Get the future today!™.”

What happened to this place? It looks like it was abandoned years ago. Where is everyone? Is this what the end of the world looks like? Did I cause a nuclear war of some sort? A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’

Moving around the place, I found countless statues dedicated to one person, as if he was the only important person who had ever existed. Every time I tried to read the inscription on the figure, it became so blurry that I couldn’t make any sense of it. I could see the writing, but my brain could not make any sense of it, as if I got hit on the head with a sledgehammer. The best way to describe it is that I became extremely farsighted.

I wonder where all of this takes place…

Crawling forward toward what looked to be a massive palace, I witnessed giant silver-colored robotic centipedes with crimson-red eyes that hissed and snarled any time I tried to get close to them. Their mouths looked razor-sharp, as were their legs, which they had about ten of. As far as I was concerned, they wiped out the entire town. Their mouths kept making these horrible clicking sounds as if warning me to stay away. Their clicking sounds almost sounded like bones being broken; I hated that sound beyond all description.

This was when the dream became very surreal, as if it was a David Lynch movie. The ground before me crumbled, and I was trapped in a black void with many voices echoing in the distance, calling out for me. No matter how hard I tried moving, I couldn’t move an inch, as if I was glued to the floor. (?) The voices became louder and louder until, eventually, they overwhelmed me. I heard many disapproving voices around me and wanted to crawl into a ball and stay in that position forever to escape the agony. Here are some of the things that I heard them say.

“Look at him wasting his life away, the fool!”

“This will eventually kill him, and he doesn’t even realize it...”

“I’m dead because of you!”

“Time isn’t meant to be played with, Clive.”

I tried my best to escape the blackness with all my might, but the harder I tried, the more I became trapped. It was as if I was swimming in a pool of superglue. There was no escaping this situation.

It somehow got even stranger after that. The black void disappeared, and I found myself situated next to the side of a highway. I heard a motorcycle crash and crawled over to where I heard the sound out of curiosity. There I saw a bleeding biker who begged me for help. I had the strangest sensation of déjà vu at that moment; I swear I saw him before somewhere.

“Please help,” he begged with blood running down his forehead. The poor guy looked pale as snow and sounded like he was a second away from dying.

“I’ll help you,” I said, trying to prop him up. As I did, he pulled out what looked like a Desert Eagle from his jacket and shot me point-blank in the chest.

I didn’t even realize what happened at first; I looked down and saw that there was a hole in my chest. I dug into the hole with my bare fingers and pulled out a .50 Action Express cartridge. As soon as I did, he disappeared, and I felt my legs give in ten seconds later. I collapsed and lay on the ground in shock.

I could feel my life slowly being drained away like sand inside an hourglass. My only question at that moment was why he shot me out of nowhere. Being shot felt like being hit with a baseball bat with the force of a Mack truck. My vision gradually faded, and before I knew it, the entire world turned black.

Oh, and it got even worse after that…

I saw my funeral and my family putting flowers and teddy bears on my grave. Seeing my own funeral tripped me out so much. I heard my mother crying and heard her say, “Now I lost you too…”

I called out to her, and she looked all around, shocked to have heard my voice.

“Where are you, Clive?” she asked desperately.

“I’m right here,” I said about a foot away from her.

“How are you talking to me if you’re dead?” she asked unnerved.

“I don’t know; how long have I been dead?” I asked, curious.

“You died two days ago,” she said with tears in her eyes.

Following this, my mother disappeared, and I found myself in my bathroom at home. I thought nothing was off at first until I started hearing police officers knocking on the door, threatening to break it down if I didn’t open it. I heard them shouting that they would arrest me for a double murder, and at the time, I didn’t realize how bizarre their reason was.

Out of terror, I opened the door and, to my surprise, there was no one there. After I opened the door, I hallucinated a bunch of EMTs who walked over to me and told me they were taking me to the hospital.

“I’m sorry you wasted your life away,” one of them said as they picked me up and put me on the stretcher.

“What happened?” I asked, confused.

Instead of replying, all the EMTs disappeared, and I realized at that moment that I was talking to my reflection the entire time. You have no idea how terrifying it is to realize that what you experienced was nothing more than a hallucination.

As I stared in the mirror, I witnessed my face morph into a demonic figure with blood-red horns and skin as red as the Soviet flag. I opened my mouth in horror and saw that all of my teeth became jagged. My hair became jet-black and reached my shoulders. My neck became replaced with what looked like some sort of ribcage. The scariest part of the figure was its eyes. It had no irises, and the white part of the eyes (whatever the hell it’s called) was instead pitch-black. All I felt was pure unadulterated dread as I looked at it, and the longer I looked at it, the worse I felt. Ironically, I was too fascinated to look away. It’s like watching a car accident. You just can’t look away.

Since describing the hallucination with words will not do any justice, I’ll show you what I drew of it.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/XiWsSBZxu87mKdrV9

The demonic face started speaking to me telepathically in the mirror a few seconds later. It would keep repeating, “My, what sharp teeth you have!” in a distorted robotic voice.

“You think I can’t see that, you moron?” I asked in an annoyed tone.

“My, what sharp teeth you have!” was its reply.

“Can you say anything else? I mean, what are you exactly?” I asked curiously.

“I am Azrael, and I am you.”

“Who is Azrael?” I asked. I got absolutely no response after that. The one time I wanted it to talk, it went silent. People always speak when they shouldn’t and don’t shut up when they should.

My face eventually returned to normal, but my surroundings thought it would have been hilarious to turn into a bar.

In front of me was a bartender and to the left of him was the karaoke stage filled with drunken idiots thinking they were the next Pavarotti. I heard one of the worst covers in history there. This one guy was covering Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen and forgot half the words. Besides skipping half the song, his singing voice sounded like someone drowning.

I walked up to the bartender to ask what this place was, and he replied with something like, “The dead are never free because the pancakes are purple said Henry.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” I asked, bewildered.

He said nothing in return, but his facial expression started morphing. I didn’t realize what was happening at first until I realized I was having a full-blown conversation with myself.

I don’t remember too much after that, but I remember looking at the walls and seeing piles of skulls on them that rotated in a circle. After the heads disappeared, I saw the words YOU DID THIS appear on the walls in my handwriting, followed by math problems that were also in my writing. Oh, and I hallucinated Hitler doing a Nazi salute because that’s what this was all missing…

“Are you okay, Clive?” the doctor called out in real life, finally allowing me to awake.

“Yeah, I couldn’t be better.”

Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known. Can’t wait for tomorrow. I might not have that long. I’ll tear my heart out before I get out.