Welcome To My Nightmare...

Let me take you into a typical night (read: nearly every night) in the Bane Brain. Turn back if you don't want to take the walk...it can get sticky in there, there's some sharp edges, and things that don't like you even one little bit.

Sometimes it's the 'Zombie Theme'. A bonus is the rare 'Cheerleaders With Big Tits And Sexual Aids Theme', but alas, last night, those perky vixens were nowhere to be seen. Last night it was the 'Vampire Theme'.

Oh, I know where it all came from...I've been reading Stephen King's Gunslinger series, and the priest from 'Salem's Lot is featured, with various vamp action. And just before I turned off the TV for the night, I was watching one of these reality shows that was covering people who actually practice vampirism. Stir in the fact that I believe in vampires (and that, my friends, is a whole nother blog entry) and the table was set for an all night banquet of blood and terror.

I am both a Lucid Dreamer, and an Out of Body Traveler, and again, that is a whole nother blog entry, and you can believe it or not. I don't care. I dream from the moment my eyes close, until the moment they open. This has been proven by actual sleep studies I've gone through, so don't try to hand me any nonsense about dreams happening in the few seconds before waking. My wife is always amazed at how quickly I fall asleep. She used to talk to me, thinking it was impossible that I was asleep, and I would bitch her out (gently) because I was already dreaming. I dream dreams with a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If I get up to whiz, the dream usually picks up wherever it left off when I go back to sleep. I have woken up and outlined stories and novels, and written poetry without correction, that I had written in my dream.

So, last night found me in one of my familiar landscapes. I was in a hotel, a large, old-fashioned luxury hotel, somewhat gone to seed. Some areas were being maintained for high paying guests, some were being rented out by the month, and some were offices and small businesses. It was one of those places that takes up an entire city block, with entrances on all four sides, and its own basement garage. The ceilings are high, trimmed with dark wood. The doorways are high, and topped with transoms. I know that if I stand on a doorknob and peer through the glass, down into the room, sometimes I will see a Dark Thing doing a Bad Thing to someone. The hallway walls are papered in a light pastel green, sporting twining green vines with fading red flowers. The staircases are wide, sweeping affairs. On some levels they curve grandly down in a gradual spiral, on others they take a more utilitarian turn, zigging and zagging down in crisp left right left right angles. In all cases, they are wide enough so six or eight adults could stand abreast on each carpeted step. The elevators have dark, wooden doors. An arrow points at the numbered floors, and the buttons seem to be made of ivory, or maybe Mother of Pearl. Or maybe tooth enamel. When the doors gape open, you get the feeling that something is hungry, and really wants you to step inside where it can dim the lights and...just get to know you. I never use the elevators, in my dreams, unless it is in extreme emergency. I bound up and down the wide staircases, sure that I can lose whatever is chasing me.

It started with a bang, it did, last night. I don't hold with Papist trinkets, but I had a cross on a business type card someone had left in a phone booth to direct the homeless to a shelter for a hot meal and a bed, and I was calling upon the Power of God to infuse this symbol I had cupped in my hand, and a bolt of blue white energy straightened my arm with a spastic jerk and then the paper cross spat blue flame into the snarling face of the Master Vampire that I had just discovered there outside the Penthouse doorway. He screamed and was blown back halfway down the hallway, but he was far from done with me. I bolted for the stairs. I knew I had a few minutes before sunrise, and the stairwell had windows. He gathered himself, and came streaking down the stairs after me...I turned, and my arm jolted another blast into him, tearing open his immaculate suit front and exposing his writhing guts, blackened with the stolen blood of innocents. As the flesh began to close, I ran again. I had to make it to a room I had taken, where I had weapons prepared. I had just been brought in to investigate, and had run ill-prepared into a full blown infestation. The Master had been taking the building from the top down for untold nights of horror, and now, my way to the outside was blocked by his snarling servants, in various stages of decay and rebirth. Rebirth into something resembling the snarling monster that was screaming down the stairwell behind me like a thousand damned souls that wanted to bathe in my blood and squeeze my organs dry for every last drop.

I made it to my room and locked the door. Outside, I heard fell snufflings and gruntings, and enraged whispers and screeches, heard more in the mind than in the ear. I ran to a large refrigerator I had in my room, grabbed a gallon size freezer bag out of a box on top of it, then proceeded to fill it with ice cubes from several trays I had filled with Holy Water when I had first taken the room. I put this brimming, dripping bag in my large right hand coat pocket, and then loaded up my other pocket with speed loaders for my Smith and Wesson .45. The speed loaders were full of fat silver slugs, loaded low power so they would stay in a body they were fired into, and not spall on through and let the beast heal. I use a revolver in these situations because a jam with an automatic is too horrifying to imagine with teeth trying to close on your throat. I snapped the scabbard to a razor sharp Lee-Enfield bayonet that I had had plated with silver over the left side of my belt, and with the pistol in my left hand, pulled open the door to the hallway.

It caught them flatfooted. They had expected me to cower inside, and were waiting for the Master. I reached into my pocket and grabbed an ice cube and flipped it into the crowd...PHOOMMPH! a silent implosion, like a grenade as it touched the first vampire and then exploded into what became for them a sizzling, spattering horror...one of them, was blown back into me and I shot a chunk of his spine into his heart along with the bullet and he fell hissing into the ruined puddle of another, and then I tossed a handful of cubes in each direction to their great consternation...the cubes in my pocket were melting and I scooped up some of the water and slung it in an arc into snarling, grey faces with too much teeth showing and their skin split and burned and they had better things to do than me and my gun boomed twice at a thing that was grabbing my legs and I was back in the stairwell and I could see the rosy hue of the sun just beginning to light up the windows in the stairwell and there below me was the Master, smiling and my left arm jolted as I pumped two hot silver rounds into the area where not too long ago I had seen his black heart beating and as his face was changing as he began to snap backwards I put the last round into the bridge of his nose between enraged red eyes.

I popped open the cylinder and punched out the empties and clawed out a speed loader and reloaded and then leapt over the Masters twitching body and...I ran, down floor after floor, trying to stay in what little sunlight the high windows afforded, trying to get to a floor where I could rest and take stock in my situation. Periodically, I would go out onto a floor and assess, and the newly dead, and the hungry dead would send me fleeing back into the stairwell. Once, I found my way blocked by the not quite dead, and they were being controlled by someone, perhaps the Master. I couldn't guarantee he was dead. Though still mostly human, they came up at me, and I took the zip-lock bag out of my pocket and showered their upturned faces with the last of the Holy Water, emptied my pistol, jumped square onto the back of the one closest to the door (his spine and ribs made a satisfactory crunch! as they shattered) and ran out into the hallway and...

There was my wife. She was skeptical. She had my four year old daughter by the hand. Here is where the nightmare begins. All the rest, hey, I would pay good money for a ride like that. This, though, is not funny. There is immortal danger here, and though I have told her, she does not believe me. If we are to get out of here whole, and with our souls intact, I have to prove to her, because right now she wants nothing more than to get away from a wild-haired lunatic with a smoking pistol, covered in the goo of the living dead. And proper Christian ladies don't believe in those sorts of things, so just come on honey, let's leave Daddy to his craziness.

I finish snapping six more rounds into the pistol, snap the cylinder shut, and grab my daughter by her free hand and pull her away. If her mother won't learn, I at least need to open my daughter’s eyes. In an atrium just to the right of the stairwell, I have spotted a small bundle on the floor. It appears to be two small bodies, covered with a throw rug, at the side of a settee furthest from the window, and between a potted plant and the cavernous hallway we stand in. I drag my daughter over to the bundle on the floor, and my wife trails along, reluctantly. Humoring the guy with the gun, but waiting for the opportunity to bolt, taking my daughter with her, unarmed and ill-prepared for what lurks in the dark recesses of this conquered hotel. This is for your own good, sweethearts, I tell myself, as I bend down and with my daughters hand in my left, and with the barrel of the revolver in my right, I flip back the edge of the throw rug nearest the wall, and reveal from the chest up two little girls, about eight years and ten years old, respectively, but dressed in the same dresses, probably sisters. Sisters in death.

Their long brown hair is curly, and crusted with blood. Their skin is pale, slightly greenish. As what weak sun there is coming through shines on them, they arch their backs weakly and mewl like kittens, their lips pull back from nearly translucent fangs, long and sharp...'milk teeth', I think as pale lips pull back to expose them in a sleepy, animal snarl. One of them opens dead eyes to look into mine. Once a bright blue, they are now opaque and cataracted, and just beginning to show a tinge of red. Behind me, my wife gasps at the snap those teeth make as the dead girl champs at my gun hand.

Startled, I flip back the throw rug over their faces, and they begin to still. I look at my wide-eyed daughter, and I see she has gone over a threshold no little girl that age should ever have to cross. I see her mother is pale now, too. I raise my gun to fire into the lumps that represent their heads. I don't like leaving the enemy 'alive' behind me. The thought of my daughter seeing the rooster tail of those little girls brains spattering up the wall is more than I can bear, so I lower my gun and we turn to flee, together.

Well, that's it, sports fans. Oh, there was a lot more to it, to be sure. Six, seven hours worth. Twists, turns, and some really scary stuff. I think this is quite enough for one day, don't you?