Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

Dream a Dream

He flicks the electric blanket off and rolls around on the bed for a few moments as he tries to find that sweet, comfortable spot. After several agonising minutes of torture, he finally comes to a stop as he finds it. Then, with a broad smile on his face, he reaches up, and turns off his bedside lamp, closes his eyes, and digs himself back into the spot, anticipating that maybe tonight will be the night he actually gets some sleep.

The past three weeks have been a virtual nightmare, with him only managing to find sleep in small blocks—thirty minutes here, an hour there—but nothing that one would call restful. It’s not the fact that he can’t sleep that’s the problem; it’s what happens when he eventually closes his eyes. It’s what greets him on the other side: images of violence, bodies twisted, broken and bloody, screaming in pain and agony, and a vision of something, enveloped in laughter. A demented, cantankerous laughter, and if he were to be honest, out of everything, it’s the laughter that disturbs him the most. He doesn’t know who the laughter belongs to. It’s a deep, male voice that’s always laughing at the pain, at the screams, at the suffering of those broken bodies.

Many nights, like tonight, he lies there staring at the clock, closing his eyes every few moments, only to have them snap back open again. Sometimes, he finds himself relieved to still be in his bed; other times, disappointed that he’s not, that he’s in this other world.

Tonight, he hopes finally for comfort, finally for sleep to take him on an endless trip through the darkness.

He closes his eyes in anticipation. After four hours of agitated fear, thirty-seven minutes ago, he took two tablets his doctor prescribed to help him sleep. His doctor referred to them as light sedatives and told Jeffery they should not only help him fall asleep, but with the correct dosage, he would also not dream.

At first, he was hesitant, but his doctor talked him around, assuring him that unlike many of the other sedatives on the market, like Valium, for example, these should not put him in a coma-like state. As he begins to feel himself drift away, he smiles, finally feeling like tonight is his night.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed, how long he was wandering in the darkness before he opened his eyes again, but when he does, he leaps from his bed in a panic. Around him is no longer the room he knows. Instead, his bed has somehow been transported into a rundown, filthy old shed. He can hear the roof creaking in the wind, and a cold breeze rips through his body. Then, he hears it—a dripping sound coming from somewhere behind him. Slowly, he looks around, somehow falling off the bed and crashing to the floor in a heap. He springs up, terrified, nervously looking over the bed at the bodies that hang down from the ceiling, a sea of blood beneath them as they drip, drip, drip into it.

“W-W-What the fuck? What the fuck? Wake up! WAKE UP!” he stammers to himself. Suddenly, he feels a hand slap down on his shoulder. His eyes dart over his shoulder, and he scrambles backward at the sight of the smiling man, dressed in a bloodstained white jumpsuit with a rubber apron tied around his waist.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Jeffery, did I scare you?” the man says with a wry smile on his face.

“H-H-H-How the fuck do you know my name?”

The man laughs. “Why wouldn’t I know your name? After all, it is your dream, isn’t it?”

“I-I-I, I don’t know what the fuck this is, but this is not my dream!”

“Really? Well, this is a terrible development. If it’s not your dream, then whose dream is it? Oh, sorry, wait, yes, yes, you’re right, I see what’s missing. Let me get the ambiance back,” he says, clicking his fingers.

Almost instantly, the screaming starts, and the hanging bodies behind him begin to twist and turn. The lights flicker on and off as Jeffery forces his hands over his ears, tightly closing his eyes.

“STOP!” he screams. Then, everything goes silent. Slowly, he opens his eyes and finds himself sitting on the floor of his room. He lets out a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he says softly.

“Don’t thank that interloper, always ruining my fun. Thank me instead, for I’m the one who made all the voices go quiet,” the man says. Jeffery darts a look over to a chair that sits in the corner of his room, and the moustached man slowly peeks his head out of the darkness and smiles.

“W-W-What the fuck is going on?”

“Everything, my dear boy, everything and nothing. Weeks, months, years of work—things your puny little mind would never understand no matter how much information you were given. All you need to know is that you’re mine now, and forever, to do with as I please, as I have with all the other disconnected souls that have haunted your dreams for the little time we have so far spent together. Don’t look so worried, my pet; there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Embrace what is to take place, let all that you have seen seep inside, so you can better prepare yourself for forever. For even as your earthly body lies in an eternal slumber, never to wake again, it will eventually die, and when that takes place, the real fun begins,” he says with a smile.

“W-W-What the FUCK are you talking about? Who the hell are you?”

“I’m talking about always making sure you read up on what you’re taking, Jeffery, old boy. Trusting the wrong people, for you never know who it is that’s slipping you a Mickey. Take me, for example. You thought you could trust me because I wear a nice white coat, but really, who am I?” he says with a big smile.