25 Sep A Dream of Tunnels

Posted at 00:00h in Locations and Sites, Strange and Unexplained, Suspense and Thrillers by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on September 25, 2023

“A Dream of Tunnels”

Written by Hank Belbin
Edited by N.M. Brown
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by Paul J. McSorley

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 11 minutes

Rating: 8.33/10. From 3 votes.

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“Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.”
— Rumi, 13th Century

I had a wife once, aeons ago; but I can’t remember her name. I can’t even see her face in my dreams anymore. I must write all this down before any more of those memories leave me for good. Since waking up here in this cold infernum, so many of those thoughts have faded and been extinguished forever, like lone flames in the endless darkness; and all that remains now are these dull echoes of the past in the twilight ether of my mind. Every time I sleep, those remaining memories fade a little more and soon my old life will be as obscured as my own identity. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore. I don’t even know how I got here. I don’t even know my own name!

I must start with what I remember for certain. I was born in Boston; just after the second great World War of the 20th century. I know that for a fact. I stayed there and worked in the dockyards for many years. I met my wife around this time, yet I cannot remember any more specifics other than that and that she often smelt of lavender. Goddammit, what has happened to me?

I guess I remember the dockyard the most vividly; the smell of crude oil and the salty spray of the sea against my face. The interminable grey skies. There were rows of warehouses and a small construction manager’s office at the far end of the dock where my desk was. I think it was blue. It had metal stairs and a handrail leading up to it.

I think now the reason why I still remember this place is because that it was here that caused the whole thing; the circumstance which brought me to this point in my existence. It was a cold day when it happened. It was raining hard and I couldn’t see much beyond twenty feet. Everything was a blurry grey smudge. Even the rows of ISO containers ahead were almost indistinguishable from each other. That’s when it happened. Marching down the main thoroughfare, I heard a fog horn blare out somewhere at the edges of the mist-covered dockyard. Then, as if coupled with the sound, I felt something move closer behind me. It cast a shadow over me in the rain. My head darted around, expecting to face some giant monster lifted right out of my childhood nightmares looming up over me in the downpour. But instead, it was the back end of a lorry reversing closer, bearing down on me. I barely had a moment to scream or slap the back of the van to alert the driver before it hit. It pinned me against a concrete barrier and I felt the crunching of my legs between it and the rough wall at my back. For an instant, the pain in my legs was agonising, and then, I felt nothing from my stomach down.

I sagged down into myself and almost vomited. My head fell against the back of the lorry and felt as if I were about to pass out. The pain above my waist was indescribable. My vision blurred, and all I could see were these specs of orange—people in High-vis coats—all coming towards me. The pressure in my skull throbbed and I think I heard someone ask me something. But the pain took over and everything went black.

I wasn’t sure how long I was out for, but, I eventually awoke in a daze, with all manner of medical tubes and ECG monitors hooked up to me. They had taken me to Boston General Hospital A + E and I had woken up a week or two later, so they told me. Everything apart from my legs burned. The sensation in them remained elusive, and I knew why. Beyond that, I had only a vague awareness of where I was and what had happened. It was all a blur. I was in a complete daze and my eyes would not focus and adjust to anything. I laid in the bed and all I could make out were the doctors and nurses that moved swiftly about me in a hazy smear of shadows against a blinding white backdrop. I briefly recall now I was lulling in and out of consciousness when I heard the doctor explaining to me that I would never walk again, and in all likelihood will be confined to a bed for the rest of my natural-born days. It was like a single spear right through my heart. What would life be without mobility?

After he left, I sank back in on myself and slept. Time meandered forward without definition. The hospital kept me on a steady supply of pain relief medication. As a result, I spent a great deal of time heavily sedated or unconscious. I can only assume I must have been in that ward for over a year because the leaves fell off the trees twice outside my window.

I hated the place. There was an old man in the bed opposite me. He would do nothing but stare vacantly at the ceiling and it really began to annoy me. Everything about my entrapment did.

My only reprieve from the pain was my own mind and the imagination that stemmed from there. Whenever I did wake up from the slumber, I would press for morphine from the analgesia pumps and send myself right back down into that nameless nothingness. It soon became my escape from the prison of reality. It became entertainment, morphing into addiction. The longer I slept, the more vivid and surreal my dreams became.

I soon lost interest in the outside world and ultimately my mind retreated in on itself. I lived in a realm of pure delusion, no longer considering being a part of reality. In my mind my dreams were real and I no longer had to suffer. All I had to do was stay in them. This must have gone on for a very long time. I must have been edging on being comatose for months. Then things began to change.

I remember after one dose, I closed my eyes, seemingly for the last time. I had somehow found a way to stay under for much longer than usual. I forced myself into a deep and dream-filled sleep. It was long and steady. I slept and slept. The amount of time that had passed was completely indiscernible to me. I just felt like I was just drifting along endlessly in an ocean of infinite time.

Then I opened my eyes at some point. Maybe for the first moment in months. When I opened them again I was faced with the searing halogen burn of the ward’s ceiling lights, their glare cutting downward into my retinas. I squinted and looked away for reprieve. But, as I laid there, my eyes slowly adjusting and taking in the surroundings once more, I realised something was wrong; everything was not in its correct position. It was not the ward I was accustomed to. It was no longer filled with hurrying doctors and unresponsive patients in the other beds. There was something bizarre about it all now and, at first, I figured it was just a dream. Yet, it was not. There was a schism in the building. What is it? What’s going on? Even the old man was gone.

I blearily looked across and noticed something in the centre of the room. Some kind of hole in the ground. It took on the appearance of a meteorite crater. A mound of broken tiles and earth surrounded it. When I fully realised what I was looking at, I recoiled and didn’t know what to do with myself.

I dared not go near it in the beginning, but I guess an hour had passed and I decided I must have a look. I remember somehow rolling out of the bed and crawling across the room and towards the shaft. I dragged my weary body across the cold tiles with a groan. Once at its edge I peered down into absolute blackness, yawning abyssal night. From the bottom, there was an eerie draft or a howl that seemed to want to tempt me in. I was down on my stomach as I stared down into that horrifying void. Droll fell from my sedated mouth as I looked down with my emaciated arms folded over eachother. The pit below me was like the bottom of the ocean. It sloped down and backward like a dreadful mineshaft.

After some time pondering, realising I had nothing really to lose, I went in. I crawled in all the way, and, as I did so, I had the sensation of going down the U-bend of a giant toilet. Once I was in completely, I turned around to face the way back up to the hospital ward. It was no longer there…

The light from the infirmary seemed to disappear behind me and I saw no choice no but to continue moving forward in the utter blackness. It felt as if the tunnel was breathing all around me. The noise made me wonder if I was crawling down the throat of a great animal. A humming that almost resembled an engine idling was emanating from further down the shaft. At this point, I realised I was trapped. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. I couldn’t move backwards, even if I had wanted to. Anything was better than that damned hospital ward.

As I moved forward in the darkness, the dirt under my hands and knees gradually became oddly soft and furry, resembling some kind of moss. I suddenly began to feel weak, weaker than normal. My crawling became slower and my breathing was heavy and laboured. It felt as if I was drawing in part-oxygen and part-sand. I tried to push on but soon, I could go no further and stopped altogether. My body felt so enervated of strength that I had to lay down on the soft pulsing moss below me. It was moving as if it were a floor of worms. I could not advance, even if I had wanted to.

I remember feeling very confused, yet I was not frightened. I had no idea what was going on but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The humming continued and chimes of some unseen metallic objects became louder and louder. I soon felt myself swirling around as if I was in a pool of thick salty water. My skin tingled and eventually, I lost all feeling in my limbs. I didn’t know how long I was in that pit. All I really knew was the floor fell away. Then I fell away too, into something abyssal. A vortex…

Down there, whatever it was, in that swirling nothingness, I had the unyielding feeling of life repeating itself. Ad infinitum. It was as if I had been there before; like I had always been there. And, I slid down further into a deeper darkness, a different kind. It was warm. No names anymore. I was no longer a body, but some kind of abstract essence, or even merely an idea of a human. The waves of oblivion rolled over me endlessly and everything about me departed forever. This went on for what I perceived as aeons. I had travelled time and space itself.

Then came a light at the end of the blackness. Pulsing energy. It unfurled before me and I began to float through it as if I were on rails. The light was a tunnel of swelling colours. Orange, green, red. I moved towards it. Then… something snapped in my brain. It felt like rope giving way. A horrible rough tear somewhere in my thoughts. Something within my synapsis buckled, and once more… I was aware.

Somehow, I came back. The same as in the hospital, I opened my eyes slowly to face the ceiling. I was laying on my back. Dull amber bled into my vision. But there was something different now. There was a loathsome smell of sulphur crawling its way up my nostrils. The ceiling was no longer a clean white tiling. It was thick wrought iron sheets fastened in place with rivets now. I sat up in the bed, looked around, and imagined myself to be in the bowels of a submarine. Where the hell am I? was my first thought.

I bolted upright in the bunk and looked around. It was dirty and dusty. Only a desk and a metal chair. The walls were rusted and corroding and everything had the stench of death. I was wearing a set of faded blue overalls with boots that looked like they were salvaged from the bottom of the ocean. My head was absent of hair and my hands were battered and scarred. I looked around in stunned amazement.

Then someone came into the room. They knocked first on the heavy bulkhead door and did not wait for a response. The person who came in was a strange-looking and pale humanoid figure. They said their name was Acheron. They gestured for me to stand up and, after a brief visual examination, they then asked me to follow them out into the hallway of this bizarre and rusting labyrinth of industrial shafts and tunnels and air vents. I blearily followed behind Acheron, trying to snap myself out of this nightmare. That was what I hoped it was anyway.

“Where am I?” I asked as I followed him.

“Beg your pardon?” Acheron replied over his shoulder.

“I mean, where am I? What is this place?”

“Are you skunked in the head?” Acheron said.

“I don’t understand…”

The blur of nameless humanoids swam by me in the hallways. They looked smooth and unclean. They all wore an amalgamation of ceramic and neoprene that had the appearance of bodysuits designed to be an extra layer of skin. No one has any hair anymore. All their features are strangely rounded and soft. From what I can glean there are no more defining features between men and women; they just all look the same.

“Look, for fuck’s sake, can you just tell me what this place is!” I barked.

“You’re in the Last Cube, friend. This is all that’s left. And we will not tolerate obscenities here…”

I shuddered at the sentence. “What is the Last Cube?”

“This is the last redoubt. The final bastion against… those out there.”

When I looked across at them, I realised their face had tightened and contorted. “What’s out there?” I asked.

“Everything…” Acheron said and their eyes glazed over with a horrible grey awareness. “You really don’t know where you are, do you?”

“No! Jesus fuckin’ christ… what year is it?”

“We honestly don’t know. But our scientists estimate— using the Christian clock—that it is the century of 6100.”

With that, I stopped walking and fell against the railings of the walkway and sobbed. “No… no, no, no! I had a wife! We lived together in a house… there was sun. There was the sea. What the fuck is this place!” I shrieked in protest and clawed at my uniform.

Acheron stood over me like a wall of stone. “I don’t know what world you’re referring to, but this is it. This is all that’d ever been.”

“That’s not true! What about the Romans? What about the British Empire? What about the dinosaurs?” I panted.

“You’ve lost me completely,” Acheron said with a confused frown. “This plane has always been shrouded in night. That’s all there’s ever been. That’s all there ever will be.”

“That’s not true! I fucking remember it!”

“A common symptom from the wake-up procedure.”

“So you’re saying I’ve been artificially awoken?”

“We found you in the twilight lands and brought you back here. It took days to stabilise you. And now you’ve awoken you can’t seem to comprehend the reality you’re in. As I said: a common symptom of the wake-up procedure.”

“No! Fuck you! This isn’t real!” I screamed and tried to stand up.

Acheron had no words. They simply looked down at me with pity.

“I’m not sure where you have come from—I don’t know what you know, but—this is where you are… So you better deal with it, or the Higher Order are gonna carve you up and toss your body to the pits. You understand me? We’re all hungry, friend. But, there’s no room for abstraction. If you don’t tug the line, then they’ll use you for something else…”

I closed my eyes and sobbed some more.

Acheron told me there is no light left up there. It’s only darkness. At some point in the past millennia, the sun died. The world fell into eternal night and with it, grotesque entities bred and grew up there. Things that should not exist now move around in the tattered remnants of earth. Sometimes those things try to come down here and feast upon what remains of humanity. It’s all too much to comprehend if I’m being honest with myself. As I write this, I do not know what is real and what isn’t anymore. Yet they tell me that the world above is dead and we must stay down here to stay alive. Nothing makes sense to me.

I wonder if my old life ever existed? Is this life just a dream and am I still in that wretched bed? I am positive my old life was real. But I must acknowledge the possibility that I may never know now. It has been a week since I woke up here and Orion, the bunker’s leader, demands that I go to work in the protein farms. So I must…

Tonight, I shall force myself back into that sleeping state to find out the truth. I long for the day when I wake up and see her face again, yet I don’t know if that day will ever come, or if it ever existed. I don’t even know my real name. All I know I only dream of tunnels now…