Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
Dreams are supposed to be bits of your subconscious vomited up into your sleeping conscious, undigested half-thoughts. I would believe this, but I feel that in turn, that would make me believe by default that my brain thought, at some point, about what I dreamed about. With nightmares, that’s not a pretty thought. I may be completely loony tunes, but I’ve never been overly violent or macabre. To the contrary, in fact — even when I started losing it, I grew more and more addicted to beauty in its stranger forms. Seedlings sprouting melted my heart, city lights at night made me gaze longingly out my window, odd combinations of colours — seaside blue and chocolate brown — soothed my eyes better than a vial of Refresh. Blood, guts, and the like had never really appealed, still didn’t. Maybe because they reminded me of hospitals.
It made little sense. Dreams very rarely do, mine, at least. I was in a room like an underground car park, ill lit and dirty. My feet were bare, and the concrete felt like the surface of an iceberg beneath my feet. There was an intricate maze of pipes on the ceiling of the place, possibly storm water drains or something else…plumbing has never been my forte. The sheer number of them, twisting and turning and coiling about each other, gave off a sinister, dangerous sort of vibe, and made it feel like the ceiling was weighing down on me, trying to press me down into the ground via my shoulders.
The area stretched out as far as I could see. There was no way I had come in through a door, because there was no door. Just an endless stretch of iceberg-concrete and pipes. I shivered, my feet were freezing and my arms were turning into icicles. I rubbed them vigorously, trying to coax warmth back into them, and looked around. That was when I saw them walking towards me.
A pack of them. First I thought they were people…but no human being had a smooth, completely featureless face. Nothing but an expanse of skin, like the surface of an egg. How could I tell that they were malicious, if they had no eyes, mouth, eyebrows, nothing to communicate their intentions to me? Was it in the way they moved, walking with the eerie lope seen in experienced predator? I didn’t know. I’d never seen all that many predators in my life — television didn’t count, I hardly watched it. But since when are dreams supposed to make sense?
They circled me easily. I was too frightened to move, my limbs had gone completely numb. The ice of the cement floor had crept upwards into my body and paralysed me. Everywhere I looked, there was a no-face, and every time I moved, it was like someone had drugged me. My body wouldn’t move fast enough, it wasn’t obeying my commands. And the no-faces came closer and closer.
One of them reached out for me; I screamed and tried to duck out of its grasp. A stupid idea, seeing as I was surrounded — another one grabbed me as I whirled around. It brought my face close to its non-face, and if something without a visage could grin, then this thing was grinning. I could tell. I could feel it.
“Go away!” I screamed. “Leave me alone! Get away!”
This served absolutely no purpose except to amuse the no-face. It leaned towards me as if it was sniffing me, scenting me out. The panic turned it up a notch, and the adrenaline began pumping through my veins. I kicked, I bit, I screamed. I whirled about savagely, yanking my arm out of the no-face’s skinny (far too skinny) hand and bolted like a rabbit under the hunt. I had no idea where I was going, I just knew I had to get away, away, away — I didn’t want that empty face, head, whatever it was, anywhere near me. I had to run. And I ran hell for leather.
It didn’t matter. No matter how fast I tried to go, I could hear their footsteps behind me. They were close enough for me to feel their breath upon my neck, which made me a little more crazy still: how could something with no mouth or nose possibly breathe? How could I feel something that wasn’t there? Where were they? Where were they?!
I tripped over. Over what, I didn’t know — a crack in the concrete, my own feet, a breath of air. Any of it was possible. At the best of times, I was clumsy. Of course, when I was running for my life or my sanity or both, I wouldn’t be able to move is a straight line without falling over. It was practically assured.
They were on me within a second, pinning me down to where I’d fallen, six, seven, eight, I didn’t know how many. I tried screaming again, but fear had strangled my voice and trapped it in my throat. I tried struggling, but the no-faces were stronger. I couldn’t move. It was the end.
The leader no-face was still standing, staring down at me without eyes as its fellows kept me pinned to the concrete. I wanted to glare at it, wanted to spit, to cry, to swear at it, but nothing came. And it started to laugh. The fear became intolerable; I thought I was mad before? I was reaching new levels of lunatic now, with that sound tearing the freezing air in two.
Then its face split in half, horizontally.
I half-expected to see muscle and blood and skull, perhaps brains or something of the like. What I actually saw was much worse — a gaping maw lined with teeth not unlike human molars. There were no flat front teeth (I couldn’t remember the word for them), no incisors. Just two rows of molars. Its hideous parody of a mouth stretch into a grin, or what I took to be a grin. It ran its tongue — a human tongue — over the molars, and leaned down, close to my head. The grin had given way to sickening giggles.
“Thank you,” it croaked. “Thank you…thank you…thank you…”
With a movement too savage to be human and too intentionally malicious to be animal, it sunk its teeth into my head and began to tear at my face, to eat.