With Blades

I received the call on Wednesday morning, telling me my brother was dead.

It was suicide, apparently. He hadn’t shown up to work for a while, and eventually one of his colleagues had gone round to check on him. They found his door unlocked and him sat at his kitchen table. They say he had driven a kitchen knife up into his neck. I listened to the phone call, feeling numb. An hour later I was stood in front of the covered table in the morgue. They pulled the sheet back and I mumbled that yes, this was my brother Scott. The wound on his neck had been washed out. It looked insignificant, no more than a scratch.

“I’m sorry.” I said to the corpse. “I…I should’ve…” The attendant said something along the lines of it wasn’t my fault, but I barely heard him. I was thinking back to the day before. The last time I had seen him alive.

I knocked on his door, the curtain on his front window shifted, and a few seconds later the door opened slightly.

“James? Is that you?”

“Obviously it’s me. Let me in.”

I was yanked inside, and the door was slammed and bolted. Scott looked terrible. His hair and beard were a tangled mess and he had lost a substantial amount of weight. He was dressed in old tatty clothes, so he resembled a scarecrow, and he was giving off an unpleasant smell like he hadn’t washed in weeks. I started to ask him how he was and he bundled past me into his living room, barely acknowledging I was still there. I followed him in as he collapsed down onto the sofa. Despite the state of himself, the house looked pretty neat. So neat, in fact, it looked like no one had been living there at all. There seemed to be a layer of dust on everything like it hadn’t been moved in a while. The one part of the room that looked disordered was the small area around where my brother was sat. Old pens and scraps of paper were strewn about in an almost perfect semi-circle a few inches round the sofa. I caught on pretty quickly that Scott hadn’t moved from that spot for a long time. I started talking as he picked up one of the pens and started scribbling on one of the pieces of paper, balancing it on his knee.

“So, uh…what’s been going on? Mum said you haven’t been answering your phone. She’s been worried.”

He looked up from the paper, but his hand kept moving, scrawling down various words.

“Me? I’m fine. Not so good. Both, really, I guess.” He talked quickly, with a slightly manic expression on his face.

“Been writing. I’ve been…it’s been weird, to be honest.” He looked back down at the page.

“Yeah…yeah I see that.” I noticed on a shelf in the corner were various little pill boxes. I walked over and looked through them. Sertraline, Diazepam.

“Have you been taking your pills? Maybe you should talk to your doctor.”

“I have been, actually. Taking the pills.” I turned to look at him again. He was looking at me with a much calmer expression, almost normal.

“It was them that allowed me…made me…” He paused to shuffle through the papers. “See...them.”

“Them?”

“When I was asleep.”

I thought about that for a second.

“They gave you dreams?”

He didn’t answer but picked up one of the papers and held it out to me. I took it and stared at the picture he had drawn on it. It vaguely resembled the shape of person, but distorted and smudged.

“You…dreamed about this?”

“Eventually. First the house, then more…” He resumed writing on the page.

“I’ve been trying to get it all down. What he wants.”

I was about to ask who when my phone buzzed. It was a text from work, ordering me back in. I considered ignoring it, but I was on thin ice with my boss as it was. I looked at Scott scribbling on the page for a second, then said:

 “Look, I need to go, but I’ll be back soon. Just…don’t do anything stupid, ok? And talk to Mum, alright? She’s worried about you.”

“I will. Maybe. Probably best you should go.” He got up off the sofa and started pushing me towards the door.

“Go on, go go go.” I was out the door in a second.

“Look, Scott, are you going to be ok. I can stay if you need…”

He cut me off.

 “I’ll be fine, ok, scared a bit. Just go.” He slammed the door and I heard the door being bolted again. I hesitated for a while, then decided he would be alright left for a few hours. As I walked away I realised I still had the drawing in my hand. I shoved it into my pocket and left. When I finally got away from work it was late, and I resolved to go over and check on him in the morning.

And now he’s dead. I pulled out the picture and stared at the strange, distorted image. The police think my brother killed himself. I could believe that. He had suffered from problems all his life. Anxiety, depression. Maybe it all became too much. But there was two things that kept rolling through my head. What had his medication made him see in his dreams? And the door. Why had it been unlocked? It seemed like he had been keeping it bolted obsessively. Maybe I was wrong, but I couldn’t silence the little voice of doubt. Whatever had gotten into my brothers head, imaginary or not, I was determined to find out.

I stood in my brother’s living room, staring at the small zone of chaos around the sofa. If it weren’t for that and the faded red stain on the kitchen table, you would think it had been abandoned for years. I pulled open the curtains, letting in the evening sun, and sat down. I picked up one of the random pieces of paper dotted about. My brothers scratchy handwriting ran down it, topped off by a jagged looking number five.

5.

This is it. Done. I tried to reason with them. They want me to write it, but I can’t. I can’t give him what he wants.

I quickly read the page, then gathered the random pages into a pile, desperate to find out more. The next page I picked up was just black, as if he had coloured in the entire page. The next had a phrase, scrawled over it in big letters: THEY COME WITH BLADES. I shuddered looking at those words. I picked up another piece. The writing was much more legible, this time headed off with a number three.

3.

The first creature finally reached the house last night. It stood outside the window, its blank white face peering in. I wasn’t really afraid, standing in front of it. I wanted to know more about it, what it was, whether it wanted to talk. Through the window I simply said “Hello.”

A strange mixture of sounds emerged from the creature. It seemed to be speaking, though in no language I had ever heard.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

It took a few steps back then and raised its arms. In the space between its hands strange bright symbols seemed to appear out of thin air. After floating there for a few seconds they suddenly reformed into letters. They spelled out the words WE WANT.

“What? What do you want?”

WE WANT YOU TO WRITE.

“Write? Write what?” A strange thump from behind me made me jump. I turned to see that on the table a book had appeared, open. I walked towards it. The pages were blank. I picked it up, and suddenly I was standing in my living room. My real living room, awake. In my hand I was holding the pad I’m writing in now. I guess they want me to keep recording the dreams, but what their goal is I have no idea. Hopefully, I’m going to find out.

I searched through the papers, trying to find one marked as one. The lowest number I could find was two.

2.

I have decided to start writing down the weird shit that has been occurring when I fall asleep, mostly just because I don’t want to forget it, although I don’t think that is really going to be a problem. Unlike normal dreams, I can remember everything clearly, like I’m watching a film reel in my head. One of the side effects listed on the pills I’m taking is nightmares, but honestly, I don’t think these are just dreams. If they are, they are unlike no dream I think anyone has ever had, completely lucid and indistinguishable from reality.

I’m in what appears to be my house. Except, where my house has two floors, this one only has one. The staircase to the second floor simply stops at the ceiling. The rooms all seem to be mostly empty. There is a table and chairs in the living room, and against one wall there is a bookcase full of books I don’t own. The writing in them is completely illegible, shifting and changing when I try to get a good look at any of it. It’s outside the house, though, that really ups the strange factor. Looking out the window reveals...nothing. And I mean absolute total nothingness, like the house is floating in some vast abyss. It isn’t that it is just dark, there seems to be no existence outside the dream house at all. Curious, I tried the front door. Locked, as well as the back door and all the windows. Not that I particularly wanted to go out into the nothing. And it was then, staring out the window that the nothing seemed to become something. Off, far into the distance, there seemed to be something moving. It was barely perceptible, but I got the sense looking at it of something unimaginably vast. Terrifying. And just as the movement ceased, I woke up.

That was the first dream. Although it left me sweating and freaked out beyond all belief, I chalked it up to merely a side effect of the drugs and my own fucked up brain. Then came the next night. I thought that if I have a similar experience this time, I would contact my doctor and see if he could give me something else that was less traumatising. I did have a similar dream, although this one was a lot more active.

I was back in the dream house. The doors were still locked, and the top floor was still missing, but outside the darkness was not so complete. Far off into the distance, I could see what appeared to be a man, standing straight up as if on solid ground. The total darkness made him appear to float. Beyond him the strange, almost imperceptible movement continued. I watched him for a while, wondering what he was or wanted. After a while I couldn’t stay silent and shouted out:

“Hey! I want to talk to you! Where am I? What do you want?” The words seemed to echo strangely as I said them. I had no idea how he would have been able to hear me over the vast distance, or how I could even know he was a man, but I did, and he seemed to hear me as well, as he started walking towards the house. He moved incredibly slowly, ponderously putting one foot in front of the other and swinging his long arms. When he got much closer I could start to make out features, or, to be more exact, a complete lack of features. He appeared to be a completely white humanoid shape, hunched over slightly with strange elongated limbs. As I watched him approach, he seemed to shift, growing and shrinking in size and swapping into various different colours. Another movement in the corner of my eye made me look to the left, and I realised more of the creatures were emerging out of the darkness, walking at the same slow deliberate pace. The first creature eventually stopped at a still considerable distance away and lifted one of its arms, holding it out towards me, seemingly in greeting. Then my alarm went off, and I was thrown out of the dream.

I decided I didn’t want the dreams to stop, then. I was fascinated. I wanted to know what these strange things wanted. I decided to keep this journal to avoid forgetting anything that may occur in the dreams, but as I’ve already said, that’s unlikely to happen.

I sat back on the sofa, thinking. Outside the sun was setting and the room was growing dim. I got up and turned on the light, then sat back down and continued shifting through the papers. I did not want to believe the things my brother had seen were real, but I had to know what had finally driven him to end his life. More drawings were mixed in with the writings, similar to the one he had shown me. Distorted, smudged images of vaguely humanoid shapes. Others looked like he had scribbled all over the page. I finally found another page of writing, number four.

4.

Whatever the creatures want, I don’t know why they think I can give it to them. It seems they want me to decipher the strange writing in the dream house’s books, but try as I might, once I’m awake, I can’t recreate it. It’s like it shifts and changes, never keeping one shape. How can I possibly work something out if it changes every time I look at it? I tried to reason with the creature at the window. At first it just kept repeating the same words, WE WANT, using its strange symbols. After a while though, it suddenly slammed its hand up against the glass. Its fingers stopped the strange shifting effect and solidified into long white blades, tapered to a point. With its other hand it conjured up more symbols, which reformed this time into the words WE COME. It dragged the blades down the window, creating a horrid screech from the glass. It was obviously meant to be a threat, but I’m not scared of the creature. I’m scared of whatever is behind it, the vague movement out there in the darkness. Whatever it is, it’s so all-encompassing it feels like it could swallow the earth whole. I’m scared they might take me to it, let me meet it. And if that happens, if I come in contact with something so incomprehensible…

Then what’s the point?

That was it. The last thing Scott had written. I sat back on the sofa and tried to figure out what to do now. Had Scott killed himself to stop from seeing whatever it was he thought was there in the darkness? Why had he unlocked his door? Had something made contact with him, or was all this just a result of a chemical imbalance in his brain?

Suddenly, I started to yawn. I hadn’t really slept much the last few nights, and it seemed to be catching up with me. I sunk down into the sofa. My eyes fell on the still open window. It was pitch black outside, completely black. I couldn’t see anything. I closed my eyes, just for a second.