Always the Same

| Always the Same

The nightmare was always the same. Miles had charted its course since the first night. Eventually he’d written it so many times that he felt the need to post it on a few ghost story forums, just to see what people made of it and possibly get some free counselling. He knew it had been a long shot. A handful of posters took it as a cursed local legend and reshared it in other hidden places to try and build its mystique. The rest offered him constructive criticism on the plot points (which he had had to go back and dig out), and on his rudimentary use of religious imagery. But this was years ago.

His dream diary was peppered with words layered over others and hastily scratched out as other memories clambered to the front of his mind. Thoughts all bled into a colourless mess as things which a moment ago had seemed crucial to remember now tumbled into obscurity. By all accounts it looked precisely like the diary of a lunatic. Which he supposed it was, if you wanted to be literal about it, as all his fevered scribbling was completed by the light of the moon that lit his duvet on every clear night.

***

The kitchen was cold and empty. A single bulb cast long shadows into the corners, its sphere of influence coming to a hard stop at the hallway threshold which stood, black, open, impenetrable. Tears of old grease were held in suspended motion on linoleum tiles, refracting the light.

A penetrating saline odour that may have been stale cat food, long dried in its plastic cat-eared dish, a bluebottle ensnared in its jelly, which on his first two write-ups he mistook for a sultana.

He had never seen this house, and he had seen it every night for the last 7 years. Every night the same.

Time was marked only by the endless dripping of the tap. On leaving the room, he knew the Drip. Drip. Drip. would blur into the ticking of the carriage clock on the living room mantel.

Sitting at the kitchen table with an empty plate covered in crumbs, a mug with a fine crust of milk parched and cracked in its bottom. Staring past the empty seat opposite into the dark. Rising to his feet as the kitchen light starts to flicker, a moth bouncing off its surface. Deciding, impossibly to push into the black of the hallway and finding himself in the living room, the resounding tick of that carriage clock seeming to come from all directions, filling the air as promised. Net curtains sagged, stained yellow with tobacco smoke, Christmas lights strung at their top bathing the room in dim neon.

The boards creaking upstairs. For the first year or two, he’d tried to control what happened next in every way that he could, but had only ever succeeded in speeding it along. He’d tried every kind of meditation, read up on lucid dreaming, seen a therapist, a sleep therapist, a reiki healer, crystal therapist, had his chakras realigned, cut out drink, then drugs. It had all helped in its own way, but eventually he’d come to understand that the only way he could truly control his dreams was to stay awake.

And this brought its own problems.

The boards droning on, growing louder as she moved above him around to the near side of the bed.

The living room door was always closed. Its handle opened upwards, he knew from experience. Dread rising in him with the tick. tock. tick. as he went to the alcove, knowing as he did so that she was just out of his sight, sitting in her armchair. Without looking, he watched her watching him. Of the shelves in that alcove, he only ever examined one. Thin teak stained dark, surface covered with hundreds of sharp white stones. Their rattle and scrape against the coarse surface of the shelf as his fingertips brushed over them. Bulbous and spiny, they emerged from under his hands as small human teeth.

Her shifting in the chair. Without turning, he faced her. An old woman, small in stature, but before her, he was a child. Her hair long and dirty with grey streaks, her own teeth long, black, and pocked with blood spots. They spread into her face in a wide open grin. She reached out for him with fingers like dry, knotted branches, skin split and bleeding at the knuckles, fingernails gobbed up with loam. Him running for the door and falling instead back into the kitchen, although it was only half the kitchen from before, with its table and ambient stench of damp, but now factory-sized and lined with empty steel tables.

Floorboards creaking again overhead.

At the far end, an oven reaching up to the ceiling, its flames lit and roaring. Three shapes huddled around a table. Dressed in white, working away on something. Something screamed. The white shapes became more. A tide of dread surging through him but his body was no more his to control than theirs were.

So he crosses to the busy table, looking for a space between the bustling shapes, pushing into the first gap he could find. The bustling stops. Looking back at him from the empty table is his own reflection. Arms clasping, dragging at him from every direction, wrestle him down onto cold steel. The dread fills his throat.

Faceless coats spin the table and push him to the far side of the room, the dull roar of the oven audible even over the trundle and click of wheels beneath him. The tears gathering in his eyes disappear just as fast.

His skin swells toward the heat, the hair on his arms reaching for the door as it draws open. The room turns around him and he lurches onto his palms and knees. His skin sears through a hundred layers at once and keeps burning. There’s no time, no space to scream. Pain fires in every neuron and cell in his body. His heart races as if from electrocution as a layer of steam rises from him and he curls like wilting paper. Everything happens faster than he can breathe to catch up with it, and with infinite slowness. He feels as if he has always been here and will remain forever, burning in an endless fire not hot enough to finish him.

The figures outside watch as mannequins at a shop window.

***

He lay against the wall of the tube station, neither fully awake nor asleep, shivering with the cold and twitching from page to page. He felt sick. Or sicker than usual. His eyes burned with the strain of reading by the light of the sign. Cloud cover overhead. No frost tonight.

***

His feet are bare on the floorboards. The woman sits before him on the bed, her hands together in her lap, between the neatly ironed pleats of her skirt which gathers at her knees. The same woman, he knows, but clean, young. Beautiful, with dark brown curls which rest on her shoulders. She smells of warm baths, apples, fresh laundry, and she’s beaming at him.

White dolls line the walls of the room from the top of the mirrored wardrobe, along the windowsill, the dresser, the trunk, the drawers. They are surrounded by this unblinking army, swathed in bonnets, cotton and lace, she and him.

She reaches out to take his hand. Come with me. Her hand is gone before he can reach it, so he follows after her in his vest and shorts, both caked with mud and a dozen streaks and stains he has no memory of accumulating, but he knows they mean shame. Her pink shoes shine like the cheeks of the dolls.

There are doors on either side of them. She moves towards the banister at the end of the hall, her neck stretching, towering out of the blouse collar that rests atop her woollen jumper. The doors are mirrors of one another. All are shut. All are brown, but for pale scratches and wood shavings peeling from their surface, speckled with sawdust, both at their centre and along the bottom edges.

His finger snags on something out of sight – a sharp pulling pain. He hears the tear and looks down. His fingernails are slipping and then falling, one by one from his hands onto the burgundy carpet runner.

She doesn’t like a mess.

He looks up to find her, but she’s already gone. The click of her shoes echoes from some distant corner of the house. On his knees, he collects them up and puts them in his back pocket, winces as the ends of his fingers catch on the hard seam.

The closed doors continue to pass him as he hurries on down the hallway, following the sounds of her footsteps. She doesn’t like for him to be late, and Father will be home soon. The smell of boiling leeks comes at him from below, seemingly through the skirting and up the staircase all at once. Eventually, he finds that the door on his right has been left ajar. He stops. Her footsteps have stopped.

As he nudges the door open a little further, he sees that she isn’t here and the room is empty, but for a wooden chair and a bucket fallen on its side. He notices a creaking sound, which, it occurs to him has been there all along. Following the sound brings him to a pair of brown leather brogues, polished to the same immaculate sheen as hers, swinging gently against the top of the chair.

He vomits on the floor and as he turns to leave he sees a flash of pink and his head is thrown into the doorframe. Her hand claps to his face, slamming the back of his head into the frame once, twice, three times and he falls sideways into the room. The door locks behind him. As he regains himself and the dizziness and burning settle into a thrum, the creaking starts again. He sees her watching him through a sliver of daylight between door and frame. Behind him, someone draws breath and two shoes tap onto the chair, pinning it in place.

The man steps down from the chair, a red leather belt in his hand with stretch marks up its side. His face looks like a spot that has just popped. He folds the belt in half to get a better grip. He asks Miles a list of increasingly confusing questions about the mess he has made, how he means to clean it up, and why he thinks a fine woman such as this should not only have to feed and clothe him, but also to bathe and clean him up every day. He pushes him against the wall and lashes him across the back with the belt.

The dream ends on the seventh lashing, when the man slips, the buckle comes loose and splits a long hole in Miles’s skull.

Except now, before this happens, Miles sees a face between the railings of the chair. A boy dressed just like him is cowering by the fallen bucket. Circuits of blood rime his toenails. He cries out.

***

The nightmare was changing. A boy with black eyes, his face sallow and greying. Cheekbones protruding through gossamer skin, the webbing of veins showing clearly even outside of the dream. How long had he been there? Miles flicked back and forward for every dream mentioning the boy. Eventually he found the place where he was first mentioned. First dated 11th Nov ‘93. Two and a half years.

Traffic was starting to build up again. Sirens rose and fell in the distance. The slow patter of rain darkened the slabs on both sides of him. The distant call of thunder rolled between the buildings.

He saw his reflection in the side of a passing taxi. A face not unlike the boy’s. He ran his fingers over the strip-lump in the back of his skull.

“Do you think she may have been your mother, this woman in the dream?” Bertha had said, back when he still saw her.

“Hardly takes your fuckin Master’s degree to see that, does it”, he’d replied at the time. But the longer he thought on it, the more he did wonder. She didn’t look much like his mother, what he could recall of her. Long stretches of his memory were blank, especially the years before the dream began. But the face of this boy, he knew - it came to him now as clear as sunlight.

He adjusted the duvet about his knees, accidentally kicking over his cup and spilling loose change, bottlecaps and fag butts onto the kerb. Commuters deftly sidestepped or crossed the road.

The face belonged to his brother, Jason. When he was 9 years old, Jason had left school one afternoon and never came home. Their parents, the family, the school, the entire town had been out looking for him and no one could find the lost boy. But Miles knew exactly where his brother was, because he had told him, not one day before. And all of the children at his school would have known, but their parents wouldn’t believe them, if they weren’t too afraid to tell. Jason had gone to the witch’s house. Every child at their school knew the witch’s house. Miles knew that his brother’s friends had dared him to go inside and find the witch. And his brother wasn’t afraid of anything. Miles carried the fear for the both of them. While their family were out searching, he snuck out of the house with his father’s torch, a blanket and a box of sandwiches, and he had knocked on the witch’s door.

Later, the authorities found them both alive, but they weren’t the same boys.

He couldn’t remember what happened next, or where his brother was now. So much of his head was full of useless, horrible dreams and he didn’t even know if his brother was dead or alive. He stood, let his duvet fall to the floor and watched as it soaked up brown water from the pavement. He stepped out into the road, past cars screeching sideways to a halt beside him and noticed for the first time that his soles were dragging along the road. At the other side, he tossed the dream diary into the bin, and started walking towards home.

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