June 16th, 2016 Subject Name: Naomi Starr
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
~Edgar Allan Poe
Things were different now.
I felt like I had been asleep for months and hadn’t woken once. I was stuck in this endless loop of dreams and nightmares…and most of them weren’t even mine.
Most were people in my apartment complex, some were patrons of the shop I worked in, and others just seemed ancient…almost Biblical.
I just floated around inside people’s heads like a damn ghost, watching the strangest things play out in front of me.
It went on like that for days.
I finally got so frustrated that I changed the focus of a dream I was in. A man was running, terrified of some sort of unknown force; a dream that had played out in front of me for the thousandth time.
“Why can’t you just wake up!? Pretend like you’re running from something funny, for Christ’s sake! Always with the nightmare shit.” I cussed aloud and watched the man dash by me being chased by…a giant hot dog with all the fixings.
The man turned to see what was chasing him like he always did, but this time it was a hot dog in a bun with little cartoon arms and legs rushing behind him.
Instead of continuing to run like a maniac, as he always did, he laughed. He laughed so hard that the hot dog stopped and looked around itself to see what was so damn funny.
The more he laughed, the more the hot dog became confused and I watched as it dissolved in front of us.
I sat bolt upright in my bed, wide awake. It was the first time I had been awake since right before my birthday.
Peering around, I noticed that my room didn’t look anything like it had when I had fallen asleep. Call me Rip Van Winkle, because it looked as if I had been asleep for decades.
My room was coated in cobwebs, obscuring my furniture and anything else that lay about.
“What the?” I exclaimed as I slid out of bed and wandered around my room, pushing through the webbing as I made a trail out to my kitchen and got a drink of water from the tap.
My living room and everything else looked just as it had when I had come home from a long night of partying for my 30th birthday; a big difference from how my bedroom looked.
I was at a loss for words, but figured maybe a bit of TV would calm my nerves. I filled my cup up with more water and sat on the sofa, flicking the television on.
“In other news, a mass suicide that occurred on the evening of June 5th is still under investigation. Police have no leads and are currently trying to obtain some sort of guest list to see if anyone was missing. Over fifty bodies were found in the cemetery just outside of New Orleans.” A news reporter spoke before shifting to video footage of the crime scene.
I almost spit my water out as the video showed the same cobwebs that were in my room, draped all over the cemetery headstones and mausoleums. This webbing didn’t look like your typical cobwebs, though. It was almost tinted blue; a color that was practically lost to the average eye.
“The Police are currently looking for Jeremy Beaumont who inherited the cemetery from his family, but his whereabouts are unknown at this time.” The reporter finished as they moved on to a new segment.
There was a connection there. A connection between why I had been asleep for well over a week and a cemetery party in the Deep South; New Orleans was a city that I knew quite well.
I was probably going to be fired for this in the morning…
