Dreaming: Sometimes I worry there are hallucinatory bugs scuttling round and setting up house in my brain

This is a short, very rough, unfinished piece I wrote some time ago. It was based on a rather disturbing dream I had. The meaning of said dream has yet to become clear.....

 

Playing House

After the invasion the house was never the same.

The Fat Man now ruled the attic with his living Victorian dolls.

The Ground Floor had fallen to the sea and its monstrous sea snails and lizards. Only a small island remained untouched near the conservatory. The dreaming forest the scientists had been experimenting on had resisted the watery attack. Many had fled to its branches for safety but only those test subjects who had become symbioted with it in the trials had survived.

No one knew what had happened to the quiet mole people who had populated the Basement.

The remaining survivors now live on the Third and Second floor. Living conditions are cramped and unhealthy. Food is becoming scare due to the kitchen being situated on the Ground Floor. We’re having to make to with biscuits and stale rock cakes scrounged from the small parlour on the second floor and what mushrooms we could grow in the Third Floor bathroom.

The Stairs have to be guarded constantly. The sea never rose further than the fourth or fifth step but the sea snails and lizards constantly try to breach our defences. Some of our braver members made forays down the first flight of steps in search of food. A few made it back.

The wooden ladders leading to the attic are another matter. At first we thought we could merely shut and bolt the trap door but the Fat Man had altered it so it was jammed open. He never comes near the opening, he doesn’t have to.

The Fat Man collects beautiful men. From the few glimpses we’ve seen through the slats in the ladder and the shadows thrown across the opening, after he takes them he dresses them in Victorian underwear – corsets and bloomers and petticoats. They seem hypnotised, moving sluggishly across the floor, their footsteps dragging so we hear the scrape of their feet through our ceiling. We hear them in the daytime, we hear them at dusk. We hear them at night and at the break of dawn. Sometimes we hear a heavy thump and then the chorus of feet is one less.

But the Fat Man calls down the ladder and any pretty man nearby is helpless to do anything but follow his voice up the ladder.  The chorus is growing, despite our earwax, our mufflers, our earplugs and headphones. Most of the men now keep to the Second Floor. The women guard the ladder and their men.

Our numbers are now greatly reduced due to one enemy or the other. Once infighting had been a problem as well but that quickly stopped once we realised we were running out of people to argue with. Besides, none of the people whose fault this all are alive to blame.

I’m talking, of course, about the astralnauts.

The astralnaunts had been a campus joke. No one at the facility had taken them seriously – not even the folks in the archives and they were sweetly, but terribly gullible. The astralnauts believed in the existence of other planes that could be reached through the correct application of drugs and meditation.  The other scientists wrote them off as hippies chasing dreams.

Turns out, the scientists were right. They were chasing dreams. Until one they caught one, and brought it back with them.

The Dreaming Forest was a miracle. When the astralnaus woke from their deepest trance yet they found it had sprung up around them, flooding the dimmest, dingiest lab on campus with greenery and an eerie light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The astralnauts were ecstatic to finally have proof of their work. The other scientists were fascinated and started to experiment on it at once.

They didn’t realise that it was experimenting back.

At first the scientists merely examined the outer branches of the trees. After this yielded little in the way of information some of them ventured inside.

It turned out the inside was far greater than the external view had let on. Some of the scientists never returned, becoming lost within the ever-deepening trees. A few returned and spoke of the slow, even breathing they felt coming from the trees themselves and the queer yellow green light haze in the air.

We would find them constantly returning to the forest, drawn back to it. Soon, they too became part of the experiment.

The last time I had seen one of them it had been during the invasion. A lizard had pinned me to the ground, choking me in the putrid water that was flooding the ground floor. Suddenly its weight was lifted from me, a man stood before me, holding the thrashing lizard by its tail. He stared at me coolly, his yellow green eyes seeming to be unaffected by the chaos around us. I could see the skeletons of dead leaves under his skin. He turned and walked away, dragging the lizard with him. The remains of his lab coat blew in the gale that streamed through the broken windows.

We first started to notice certain changes around about the time some of the scientists started acting like they were lost to a lullaby. At first it was just little things, the appearance of things changed subtly, the decoration of the rooms altered from day to day. We were never sure about whether we’d always had carpet or not but we definitely knew the chintz was new.

The most frightening thing was that the campus seemed to be shrinking. We never lost any rooms but buildings that were once on opposite sides of the campus were now flush together.  Distances shortened and eventually disappeared. By the time we noticed how serious it was the buildings seemed to give a massive lurch and we were presented we a coup de grace. The facility was now one building.

And it was a house.

Understandably everyone was bewildered. How could a fairly large area of sprawling buildings turn into a four-storey house? The archives had turned into a cool dark basement. The First Floor had absorbed the labs, workrooms and canteen. Only now they were a conservatory, a kitchen, booked lined studies. And a dinning room with full-length windows that looked out on the churning sea. The forest had installed itself in the bright conservatory.

The Second and Third floors had entirely been given over to living quarters and dainty little common rooms with wing backed chairs and delicate little side tables. The bedrooms were more spartan but everywhere there was bare polished wood and the suggestion of dollies.

We didn’t bother to look in the attic. Perhaps we should have done.

Even the location seemed altered. The facility had always been based near the sea. But had the countryside around us always been this deserted? Had the grass always looked so wild? Had we always been quite so close to the slope down to the gritty looking shore? And had the grey sea always waved at us so maliciously?

We were in a daze, wandering aimlessly around. So in shock that we didn’t even try to make sense of our surroundings. That lasted right up until the point someone tried to open the front door.

And then the back door.

And then the windows.

Pandemonium broke out when we realised that we were trapped. People ran around screaming or just collapsed where they stood, shaking uncontrollably. We tried every door in the house, getting more and more frantic on each attempt. Soon people were throwing the furniture at the windows, using bookcases as battering rams or even trying to set fire to the glass and wood front doors.

That’s when the infighting broke out – everyone blaming everyone else for what had happened. Had the astralnauts been there they would have been ripped into bloody, mismatching puzzle pieces. As it was they had vanished weeks before, victims of the forests lure.

All the remaining scientists immediately began running tests on the forest, trying o undo what it had done. But with no one co-operating with anyone else the tests were disjointed and random. All that happened was that the trees began to lose their lustre and colour, along with our surroundings. The furnishings seemed to fade before our eyes and the polished wooden floors became duller by the day. But we were so intent upon escaping that these seemingly insignificant details passed us by.

Neither did we notice how close the sea had become. Not until we woke one morning to find it slithering against the dining room windows.