I know it is a dream because I have dreamed of this house before but never seen it on the surface, and because it is a dream and because I am in this house again I know that the man is here, the laughing man with the bunny’s face and the knife that always kills me. The hallway feels longer than ever this time, the arabesque rug longer than the red carpet at the Oscars, and now cameras are flashing in the windows as the bunny-faced man emerges into the hall and raises the knife the show me its shine. I turn and start to run, but it’s as hopeless as it always is, like running underwater, my legs and arms taking all of my energy to move, the soles of my feet hardly gripping the rug and the hardwood floor enough to propel me forward. I want to wake up, but I know that I won’t. I only have a few seconds before he kills me. I’ll turn to face him, raising a hand in defense. The knife will go through my palm, come out, enter again just below my shoulder. I have to do something different this time, but what can I do? Run? Defend myself? All I ever do is remember. That pale rodential face. This endless hallway. Stop. Turn. The eyes and the knife-- and the laughing, always laughing. Look well and take it all in, so that you’ll know if you see it on the surface. Raise your hand to block the blinding light.
Recurring dreams are never really the same dream twice, at least not in my own experience. They always have some element in common— a place, a feeling, a theme. Maybe you dream always of falling, maybe you dream of vampires, zombies, or something else that takes over the people you know. For me and for alextheking469, a frequent poster on dreemit.com, the dream was always of the hallway and the man with the face of a rabbit— the bunny-faced man I’d always call him when I’d tell my parents of my latest nightmare. I must have had that dream a hundred times growing up. I couldn’t wake up until he’d killed me, and I used to fear falling asleep because I knew that was the one place he could find me, and he always found me. The dreams finally stopped coming around the time I reached high school. I started smoking weed regularly, and being high before I went to sleep seemed to keep me from dreaming. That made me smoke all the more, until I was smoking every night and never dreaming at all. I never forgot those nightmares, but you could say that I forgot to remember them. They ceased to be something that haunted me in my waking life or concerned me before sleeping. On the rare occasion that I dreamt, the nightmares didn’t return.
I went at least two years without thinking of that hallway or the bunny-faced man until I got into dreemit.com, a platform where people share the dreams they’ve recorded through SoulStream. I had none to contribute, but I liked to experience the dreams of other people. I’d never seen so many beautiful and inexplicable things, and it amazed me that other people could live such rich internal lives, acting out fantasies and exerting an awesome power over their self-contained reality. For most people, it seemed, dreams were a place where you were permitted to control your own reality, rather than your reality controlling you. Of course there were bad dreams there— exams I was unprepared for, parties where I knew no one, movies where I was the lead actor but didn’t know my lines— but while many of them were bad, none of them were truly terrible. None of them were scarring, at least until I streamed that post from alextheking469, and for the first time in more than two years I was in that same hallway stretching away from me, my legs like jello, understanding the whole topology of that knife as it passed into me again and again, the leering face and black eyes of the rabbit-faced man who laughed as he killed me.
The obvious explanation is that I’m misremembering something. To you, perhaps, it seems I must be coloring my childhood with the memory of someone else’s dream, or maybe coloring someone else’s dream with the memories from my childhood. Maybe I’m so far gone that it’s not even my own childhood I’m remembering— it’s really alextheking469 who grew up having that nightmare. These explanations seem more plausible, I’m sure, than the truth, which is that in my own childhood nightmares and in the nightmare of this complete stranger exist the same hallway and the same hideous man. I have no causal explanation for this synchronicity. They say that every face in your dreams is someone you’ve met in your waking life, whether you remember seeing them or not. But who, I ask you, has ever seen the face of a man with the nose and eyes of a rabbit? I do not believe that I have ever met alextheking469 or that either of us has ever really encountered the dream figure in question. My theory, which I do not expect you to believe, is that this stranger’s dream has been influenced by my own, and mine by his. This anonymous stranger and I share some link that pays no regard to time or space, a link facilitated perhaps by some correspondence in our brainwaves, the mirroring that occured when I streamed his memory, brief though that memory may have been.
The curious thing about this sort of phenomena is that the more you look for it, the more you find it. A few years ago I became convinced that a similar psychic link existed between myself and an author who died a century and a half ago (I will withhold his name for your own good). It began with a scene that mirrored a real-life experience of mine, and after I’d noticed it I started to notice more things, characters with the same names as friends of mine, a protagonist with my (highly obscure) last name, a description of a hallway in a house which, despite a normal Victorian architectural style, extended infinitely for anyone who tried to walk down it. Most disturbingly, the same book that contained this hallway also contained a description of a woman’s pet rabbit who was said to have the expression of sinister amusement, “as old money might laugh at the plight of a beggar.”
“Who created this backwards world?” the downtrodden protagonist asks us in the final chapter. “Whoever it was, they must have a charming sense of humor.” A throwaway line, but something about it struck me, for if the idea that engendered my nightmare was not truly my own, if it was shared by people whom I’d never met before, then whose idea was it? Who first thought of the bunny-faced man? Is he just an archetype, existing beneath the surface of reality, bubbling up wherever pressure permits him to rise? Must I take responsibility for what happened, or was it his own work or the work of fate that allowed him to spread?
It had been two months since I’d been to dreemit.com when a friend texted me and told me someone had stolen my dream and it was on the trending page, I had never posted or even saved my nightmares, so I knew that they hadn’t been stolen. I assumed my friend was referring to alextheking469’s old post, which had trended once before and had perhaps been rediscovered. It wasn’t alextheking469’s post, though. It was mysticalalchemy’s, but it was the same dream. I wondered what this meant, or what it might lead to, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Within a week there were two more dreams of the trending page that involved the bunny-faced man. The hashtag #bunnyman had over one hundred posts.
Within two weeks, the whole trending page was filled with different people’s nightmares of him. More than two-thousand dreams of him had been posted. It was all over Reddit and Twitter, which of course led to it making it onto Instagram and Facebook and eventually the news. It was a great promo for dreemit.com. They added almost a million users that month. It was a better promo for the bunny-faced man. He’s nearly ubiquitous now, and there’s even a movie coming out about him next month. I’m sure to most people it just looks like another shitty horror movie, but when I saw the trailer and saw him staring out at me from the screen of my laptop, it seemed he wasn’t looking at a camera, a character, or anyone else but me. He was looking out as if to say, here I am. I made it out. Only a few more layers of clay before I’m flesh.
As a child when I’d wake up from those nightmares, I always felt that the bunny-faced man was in some way real and that his goal was to find me on the surface, where if he killed me I would never come back. My parents thought there was something wrong with me whenever I said it, and I don’t blame them. Now with all the hype around the movie coming out, the news is saying there’s copy cat killers running around, donning bunny masks and killing people with knives. “Disciples of the bunny-man” they’ve been calling themselves in anonymous forums. It is fair to say that he has reached the surface, and that feeling of dread I remember so well from my nightmares has now become a constant, waking horror. I feel certain that he will find me in some form or another. With him on the surface now, it seems my only choice is to slip below, to the formless depths where no one can follow.
I have a cereal bowl full of blue and white pills beside me, everything I had in my medicine cabinet. The only noise in my apartment is some idiotic E! TV show, playing a recap of the Academy Awards fashion successes and failures. “Oh my God,” the effeminate male host says, “Who on Earth made Veronica Chastain’s fox-fur coat? It looks like she’s wearing the pelt of a dog!” I have said my goodbyes to my dog. I fed him, walked him, petted him for the last time, then I asked my next door neighbor to look after him for the evening while I’m “out of town.” I haven’t texted anyone I know to tell them what I’m going to do. I’ve put my SoulStream earbud in and set it to post automatically in ten minute increments, so anyone interested can see what I’ve been thinking in this last hour of my life. It seems less personal this way than with a phone call or a letter, but at least this way no one will try to stop me.
One glass of water isn’t enough to swallow all the pills. I took a sip then poured a dozen pills into my mouth like drinking the milk after a bowl of Frosted Flakes, but there wasn’t enough water to swallow it and three of the pills nearly got lodged in my throat. I take another sip of water, swallow the three pills, take another sip of water, swallow four more pills, another sip, more pills, another sip, more pills, and now I’m out of water and still have twenty pills left. I can feel the ones I’ve swallowed churning in the hollow pit of my stomach. I’ll probably throw them up. Let them come up! I’ll lap them off the ground if I have to. But for now I need more water. Twenty more pills and I don’t want to waste them. I take my glass and I throw my feet off my bed and onto the hardwood floor. I walk out into the hallway, my stomach feeling like its filling with something black, like black bile or tar, and there’s a sharp pain in my chest upper chest, maybe the pain they always warn you about with heart attacks: if you experience chest pains, numbness, or loss of vision after taking Chantix, please call your doctor right away. The pain’s getting worse. I’m out in the hallway now and I can hardly see the end of it because the lights are all off and something’s going on with my vision. I can still hear the TV behind me in the bedroom. The same host says, “Oooohh don’t look know, but here’s the bunny man! Who is it under that mask?” I turn around to look back in at the TV but all I see is the hallway stretching out in front of me. It feels longer than ever this time, the arabesque rug longer than the red carpet at the Oscars, and now cameras are flashing in the windows as the bunny-faced man emerges from the bedroom and raises the knife the show me its shine. I turn and start to run, but it’s as hopeless as it always is, like running underwater, my legs and arms taking all of my energy to move, the soles of my feet hardly gripping the rug and the hardwood floor enough to propel me forward. I want to wake up, but I know that I won’t. I only have a few seconds before he kills me. I’ll turn to face him, raising a hand in defense. The knife will go through my palm, come out, enter again just below my shoulder. I have to do something different this time, but what can I do? Run? Defend myself? All I ever do is remember. That pale rodential face. This endless hallway. Stop. Turn. The eyes and the knife-- and the laughing, always laughing. Look well and take it all in, so that you’ll know if you see it on the surface. Raise your hand to block the blinding light.
TO BE CONTINUED
Cover Photo: Image Source
This story just keeps getting creepier and more unsettling.
I love the way you seem to so effortlessly weave technology into your stories. About five years ago, I realized I wasn't working tech into my fiction in any kind of useful way. Hell, I don't think my characters even use smart phones a realistic amount. Your work, however, has inspired me.
So I'm currently working on a story that integrates some simple tech. I don't know if it's going well or not, but it's necessary practice. Thanks for the inspiration!
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I just read this sci-fi dystopia on Terraform (2000 words or fewer) called "Skinned."
That's right up your alley. As much as I love reading your stuff here, you need to be submitting for more cash in publications like that (20 cents per word). You're certainly a skilled enough writer. Here's the page with the submission link.
Sorry I just saw this! That was actually a really cool story. It packed a lot of creepiness and social commentary into just a few pages. Thanks for thinking to send it to me and for the kind words! I'll definitely try to submit something if I can find something of mine that'll work or write something new that I like
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