Midnight’s Fables

Nightmares For Boring Truth

You do not feel that Midnight appreciated your comments about hope for Humanity. This thing, whatever it is, it thrives on suffering, on tragedy and horror and fear and despair. More and more you feel that you are coming to understand it, and more and more you wish you were not. But, you must understand it to escape, and so you ask:

“Show me a story you like. One of your favourites,” you suggest.

Midnight perks up at that, and leads you hurriedly through the halls of its Museum. Eventually, you reach a display stand upon which rests a small battery-powered torch, like something a kid might own.

“That one?” you ask, pointing to it. At this point you are almost numb to the horrors, resigned to your fate of being told terrible tales. What awful fate is about to befall the child that owed that torch, you wonder. “What’s that one?”

“The nighttime reading torch of Amanda Lousey,” Midnight nods thoughtfully. “She found the world a boring place and tried to change it. In the end, I think she decided normality was not so boring after all…”

***

Amanda was exhausted at school. She was always exhausted during the day. It didn’t matter what she did, how many energy drinks she drank, how hard she tried to stay awake, the daytime just wasn’t her time. She’d pass out in class, take naps during lunch, and sleep on the bus all the way to school and back.

But at night…

To say that Amanda read at night would be an understatement.

She devoured books. As a starving man might devour a banquet, Amanda consumed books at an almost supernatural rate. Epics of fantasy and history, thousands of pages, would be absorbed by her eyes and swallowed into her mind every night.

For at least eight hours every night, Amanda hid in the dark and by torchlight would read at a ravenous pace. On a good night, she could get through more than 200,000 words in a single sitting.

It took her three nights to get through Tolkien’s epics, and she swallowed Homer’s in less than two.

Yet with each story she consumed, her appetite only grew and grew and grew. She didn’t just want to read more, she needed these stories to be true. She needed to see them, to live them. Reality was as nothing to her, she desperately needed any escape she could find.

Even books, in time, lost their appeal to her. She soon spent her nights on the internet, reading tales of horror and twisted reality, stories and creepypastas about the merging of reality and fiction. She devoured every article on the entire SCP site in less than a week.

And she needed more.

It wasn’t enough any longer. To read of these things and want more, to learn of the strangeness of reality and yet live nothing but mundanity. She needed more.

Soon she had burned through the libraries of Lovecraft and his Necronomicon, The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Malleus Maleficarum,  and The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.

She set about beginning summonings and conjurings and all manner of evil rituals to bring about a foul and permanent change to the world.

None of them worked.

The world, no matter what she did, would not bend. Reality remained mundane. Fantasy and horror and the things beyond imagination failed to escape into the real world that Amanda inhabited.

This, she found, was unacceptable.

She prayed to Gods whose names had not been spoken in millennia and begged them for a return of the old ways.

She made sacrifices and offered bargains and deals with Demons whose names were inscribed in pages carved from human skin.

She offered her own soul to The Devil itself, that reality might just be made interesting for once. That the darkness would finally step forth from the shadows and declare true war on the light.

When Gods and Demons and the darkest powers did not answer her, Amanda sought out the truth. Whatever truth there was beyond her boring world. The truth of nightmares and from whence they come. Where do we go when we fall asleep? Where do nightmares come from?

And how could she bring them back to the waking world with her?

She found online others who, like her, felt the urge to escape reality and enter the shadows beyond. Be they fairytales or nightmares or the horrors of elder worlds, there were plenty of disenfranchised young people who desperately sought to find a way out of this world.

Some suggested the use of hypnosis or drugs to enter a state of altered reality. Some found ways to lucid dream as an escape from reality, while others suggested a more permanent way of escaping the known world altogether.

Suicide felt a little extreme for Amanda, though it was an idea she considered as a back-up. Lucid dreaming, on the other hand, was too weak. It was temporary, and unaffecting to reality as a whole.

So… hallucinogenic recreational substances it was.

Getting access to magic mushrooms and ketamine on the internet as a fourteen-year-old girl was worryingly easy for Amanda to accomplish. Perhaps, when reality was reshaped, that was something she would change. Then again… if reality was changed, why should she stop some from being able to venture further out into deeper unrealities? What if she grew discontented with the new way of things herself?

The ketamine would make sure she went to sleep for an extended period of time, and the mushrooms would make sure that while in the proverbial land of nod, her dreams would be vivid and far beyond any sense of normal reality.

Her plan was simple; learn the true nature of dreams, find out where nightmares come from, and make a bargain with whatever power controlled such thing to bring them back with her to the so-called-real world.

The drugs worked as she had hoped and within moments she was unconscious.

And her dreams of the impossible began.

***

Amanda awoke in a foul cave in which water pooled on the ceiling, dripping up from stalagmites that grew from the ground into quiet puddles that gathered above her head.

Peering out from the mouth of the cave, an ocean broiled and raged in a storm high above, waterfalls crashing up from the cliffs towards the ocean sky, while far below a barren wasteland stretched in all directions, marked by deep fissures of sulphurous yellow gas and burning acrid smoke. The horizon, between the sea and the land, was the colour of fresh pus, and seemed to drip with poison that rose into the oceanic sky.

Creatures smaller than mice and covered in scales and claws scurried out of the cave as it breathed deeply, and roared, propelling Amanda out across the barren lands below, where she struck hard on the rock and rolled straight into a fissure.

She fell through the smoke and sulphur for what felt like hours, burning and coughing and wailing in pain as the feverish yellow light below grew harsher and harsher.

Then the light faded and Amanda opened her eyes to realise it was sunlight, and she was lying in a verdant meadow beneath a rosy pink sunset sky.

Except… the sun was directly overhead, and much bigger than normal. And the sun and the sky both grew redder and redder in colour and…

And that was not the red of sunlight but of blood as Amanda climbed, drowning, from an open-topped barrel of blood and tumbled out the back of a van that bumped along a cobblestone street. The houses yawned and blinked at her and the night sky above watched hungrily as she tried to wipe the blood from her eyes.

Shadows boiled at the edge of her vision as she climbed to her feet. Things began to reach out between the cobbles and the bricks of the buildings, but Amanda tried to focus.

She had a job to do.

She had to find whoever was in control of the world of dreams.

She closed her eyes and tried desperately to focus as unseen mouths began to scream in the darkness, and eyes watched from every direction around her, the stars themselves staring and hungry.

“You called, little thing?” a voice asked and she spun around at once to see a figure stood behind her in the alleyway. A thing that oozed darkness and terror and was in no fathomable way Human… stood… behind her, watching like the sickly stars above.

“Who are you?” Amanda asked. “Are you the one who rules dreams and nightmares?”

The creature’s face peered forth into a dim light that faded into place under the moon, and revealed a twisted, malevolent face that spread wide into an unnaturally wide grin with far, far too many teeth of too many different types and shapes.

“Who are you?” Amanda demanded, faltering slightly and taking a step back as the nightmare leaned further towards her.

“That… is not a question I’m sure even makes sense, little thing. Asking after my personhood is less sensible than a bumblebee asking you whether you are a worker or a drone. You exist in a far more complex and expansive manner than being either a worker or a drone, like a humble bumblebee. I, similarly, am something which your mind, being so very, very small as it is, cannot comprehend.”

The thing grinned and a hand emerged from somewhere in its tall, slender mass, extending forth on an unnaturally long, crooked arm, and patted Amanda’s head gently.

“I need your help,” Amanda begged, falling to her knees. “I need your world to enter mine. I need reality to change. It’s broken, I know it is, something is broken, and my world needs to become more like yours. Everything is like concrete, everyone is so fixed in place and unchanging, the world is too… fixed and solid and binary, too restricted in its stupid idea of normal. Please. Normal needs to change. You have to help. You have to make the world weird again.”

“Again?” the thing asked, and Amanda realised the world around them had grown still. Eyes still watched them unseen, the stars still stared, and hands still reached out of the shadows, but they drew no closer as Amanda communed with this thing of nightmares.

“When I was young I got told fairytales. I’ve read about how wonderful and weird the world can be and… and then I grew up and I learned none of it is true. None of it is real. It’s just… made up! Made up fantasies and lies that they tell to children. They make it up so they feel like the world is interesting, and they told it to kids like us so we could care about the world, but guess what? It’s not real! It’s a lie, it’s all just… just a big lie. Adults lying to kids again, what a surprise! What a fucking surprise!”

“You’re very angry for such a small thing, little creature,” the nightmare crooned, its hand retreating into its darkness. “So, tell me, what exactly do you want me to do?”

“Make your nightmares real. Make the world interesting! I want to live in a world where fairytales are true, where people go on quests and adventures and everything is rich with a history of magic and wonder and… I want to live in a world where I can actually get invested in reality. A world where the most I can look forward to is more than just eventually earning enough money to afford a mortgage and dying before the climate kills us all. I want to live in a world I can care about!”

“You think I can make your world like this?” the thing asked, raising a smug eyebrow. “You think I hold this power?”

“I will do anything,” Amanda begged, falling to her knees with a crunch of bones breaking on cobblestones. “I would die for this. Take my soul if you will. Just… please. I can’t live in a world like this anymore. I need fantasy. I need magic. I need it to be real. Because if it isn’t, then… then… then the world I know is it, and… it’s hollow and lifeless. I need the mystery and I… please. Please. Please… make the world interesting.”

“Little thing, you don’t have a single idea what I am, do you?” the nightmare crooned.

“What are you?” Amanda pleaded.

“I am a Nightmare. An emanation of the darker half of Dream. The Unreal. That Which Could Be But Is Not. There is Reality, the Cosmos you think you know, even with its implausible Outer Realms which form the border between this place and that one. It is That Which Is. There is The Void, which is Nothing, That Which Is Not A Thing To Be. And there is Dream. The Unhappening. The Weird and Impossible. I am an expression of the darker half of the master of this existence. And I do not exist. I am imaginary. Everything in this place is imaginary. Every part of The Omniverse which is not. Everything which could exist but does not. Including all the nonsense that wouldn’t even make sense to exist. Thus, it does not exist. I do not exist. I am a hallucination, little thing. You are dreaming, and I am the face that Nonsense has chosen to represent itself to you. You are asleep, little thing. That is all.”

Amanda began to sob, her shoulders heaving uncontrollably as she broke down into tears, wailing and crying out as the truth washed against her.

“Is there nothing you can do?” Amanda begged through her tears.

“The world is weirder than you think. There is more magic and mystery and wonder than you will ever be able to comprehend, already in your world. I would encourage you to leave your fictions behind and find it for yourself.”

“I can’t,” Amanda wept. “I can’t. I can’t deal with it anymore. Reality is awful and I… I can’t…”

The thing shrugged. “If that is your experience, then your reality may well be hollow. But you are one small, subjective creature. Objective reality continues to be nonsensical and vast, I assure you. Your Cosmos is far larger, more complex, and more impossible than you can ever comprehend. You don’t need me to change anything to give you wonder in the real world. I would encourage you to awake and find the beauty for yourself.”

Amanda just shook her head and sobbed. “I think it’s too late.”

“And why is that?” the thing asked.

“I don’t know how to wake up. I don’t know if I can.”

Something felt wrong to Amanda, irrevocably so. Something inside her was broken in a way she couldn’t comprehend. A terrible, dawning feeling of doom overwhelmed her and deep in her spirit, she somehow realised that something had gone wrong.

She was suddenly afraid she had gotten her doses terribly, terribly wrong, because all of a sudden she became painfully aware that her heart was no longer beating.

***

“That’s… that’s it?” you demand, and Midnight nods emphatically.

“Tragic, isn’t it? She never even left Dream! She never woke up dead, she just died. Her soul was trapped in The Dream forever. It is rare and hard to achieve, to wholeheartedly send one’s soul to Fiction, but it happens, occasionally. There was beauty in her world after all, and if she had ever spent time in the real world awake and looking at it properly, she might have found its quiet beauties. But instead she spent all her time either reading or dreaming. She never experienced reality. She never gave herself the chance to find the magic she so desperately yearned for. I love it!” Midnight grinned.

You react with disgust. “She was a child! A little girl so desperate to feel something that she accidentally overdosed and died! That’s not a brilliant story. That’s a horror! That’s a tragedy! That’s sick, you’re sick!”

Midnight just nods again, missing your point entirely. “Yes, I love horrors and tragedies. They’re the best, aren’t they?”

“No!” you protest. “I mean… yes, I like a good ghost story or a bit of gothic horror but… this is sick, Midnight. This is horrible. This is absolutely fucking horrible and I hate it and I don’t want to listen to anymore of these!”

“Oh…,” Midnight says in a voice dripping with heartbreak. “I… I see. Do you want me to send you back? Let you go to your death?”

You shake your head emphatically and take a step back. “No, no, I’m not saying that I just… do you have any happy stories? Anything where the heroes win and the villain loses? Anything without death and drugs and monsters and kids dying and deep space. Something nice. A comedy, a fun sci-fi romp, a bit of fantasy, anything?”

Midnight cocks their head for a moment in pause. “Those are… not my domain. I do not… deal in such things. But, I think I understand your point. Come, I may have something you might enjoy…”