Hallucinations are dreams for the undying | short story

I want to get back to sharing more original writing here. I used to share it often, more so in the past before I delved into the world of self-publishing and developed the Working Author Mindset™️. Of course, I want to get paid for my work like any other creative, but I also want more of my creative writing to be out there that isn’t behind a paywall. There are also a lot of short stories and drabbles just sitting in my writing folder collecting dust that I’m very fond of. I’ve even got a series of shorts that are just for the days when I want to write but am not quite feeling it. I want to start sharing those here, too.

As for this short story, I had a nightmare several months ago that stuck with me, mostly because it involved Vexis, who is not only a character in my Requiem Series of books, but they’re also one of my plural headmates, or an alter. I wrote it down upon waking, and while I loved the short horror story that evolved out of it after fleshing it out even more, it didn’t really fit anywhere.

Still, I wanted to share it. Maybe it will whet your appetite for The Requiem Series, Open Wound more specifically, or maybe you can appreciate it by itself as a weird dreampunk horror short.

This is particularly unsettling and disturbing, so be warned that there are descriptions of mental instability, violence, and gore. The gore is in one scene near the end of the middle.

* * *

Hallucinations are dreams for the undying

Vexis sat up in bed. The room was dark, and the digital clock on their nightstand read 1:00. They had been lying there for some time trying to sleep, but insomnia had won. It had the night previous, too, and it hadn’t let up. By dawn, they’d have been awake forty-eight hours.

Vexis swung their legs over the side of the bed and stood. They were in their usual red sweater and black skirt, their long, dyed purple hair was messy from where they’d tossed and turned, and their ghostly white eyes could see in the dark where humans couldn’t. They sensed something crawling toward them from a far corner.

They turned to see a knife on their nightstand, and they grabbed it to test its sharpness with a finger. Perfect. When they turned back to the thing crawling toward them, they stared at a disembodied hand scuttling slowly on five digits.

I’m hallucinating. I must be. They shook their head, but the hand remained, and in one sharp movement, they flicked their wrist as the knife shot forward and pierced straight through the middle of the creature. Blood seeped onto the floor, and it lay limp.

A smile spread across Vexis’ face. Could hallucinations bleed? They approached the paling hand and ripped the blade free, observing it once more. There was certainly blood staining the silver surface.

A familiar feeling of instability caused the smile to drop. They didn’t care about their mental health, so it didn’t disturb them, but a bloodlust they often tried to tame rushed up inside them as they looked at the hand once more. It was like a dog that had finally had its first taste of blood, and it wanted more. It wasn’t the first time Vexis had harmed something, of course, but it had been the first time they’d actually killed something, if a mobile, disembodied hand could be considered among the living.

They threw open their bedroom door to be met with a dim yellow light shining down the hallway. They calmly walked down the stairs which led into a kitchen with old wooden cabinets and black and white tiled flooring. What year was it again? Sometime in the 80s, if the house’s design and furniture were any indication.

A woman with long, wavy brown hair wearing a white apron and flowery dress turned to them. She looked strangely like them, in some way, but Vexis grew perplexed.

They didn’t have a mother.

“Can’t sleep again?” the kind woman said sadly. “I’m finishing up the dishes, but when I’m done, why don’t I cook us a late-night snack?”

Vexis clenched their jaw. Speaking to them like a child made their blood boil, no matter how kind she was. If she truly was a mother from one of their lifetimes they’d forgotten, she should know better.

Vexis bit their lip to try to hide another invasive smile. Had they hurt her in a past life? Maybe they would in this one.

Quiet scuttling alerted them to the threshold of the laundry room, and another disembodied hand crawled toward them. Its nails were black, and old, decayed black stitching lined its detached wrist.

“Do you see that?” Vexis said to the side as they watched it.

“See what, dear?” the woman asked.

Vexis scowled. “Are you fucking blind? The hand.” They pointed their knife toward the thing that halted before them. It flexed its digits in what appeared to be preparation to strike, not unlike a spider.

The woman sighed and dried her hands on her apron. Vexis glanced at her to find a look of sympathy on her face. Their hand squeezed the blade as it itched to cut that pathetic frown right off.

“You’re not feeling well again, are you?” the woman said. She approached a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of pills, and then presented them to Vexis. “Here, you haven’t been taking your medication.”

“Fuck the medication!” Vexis yelled. Their eyes shifted as they often did when they became upset; the whites turned to black, and the pupils became a glowing crimson to reflect their inhuman shadow form. The woman flinched as they raised the knife, but they directed it at the hand instead that had leaped into the air. The blade shot it right back down to the tiled floor, pinning its lifeless form to the ground. A few drops of blood landed on Vexis’ face.

“Look!” they said, irritated. They pulled the knife free and picked up the hand, which was solid and cold, and held it inches before the unnerved woman’s face. “A hallucination wouldn’t feel like a solid object.”

Vexis’ supposed mother looked off to the side and brought a hand to her mouth. She shook her head and took a deep breath before regaining a sense of calm, and then smiled as she looked at Vexis once more. “Okay, no medication.” She reached for their face, and when they flinched, she paused with her hand in midair. “You’ve injured yourself again. There’s blood on your face.”

“You can see the blood?” Vexis swiped a hand across their cheek, and the tips of their fingers were red.

She was messing with them, she had to be. How could she see the blood but not the thing that shed it? Unless Vexis had hurt themself thinking it was the hallucination, and everything was just warped again because of their illness.

‘This is but a mere dream of a life,’ a deep voice whispered.

Vexis whipped around and saw a shadow man with bloodshot, sad eyes staring from the doorway to the living room. An old friend they hadn’t seen in a while; the shadow man that had once frustrated them with its irritating silence, that had been considered a mere hallucination by a woman in a white coat in a psychiatric ward.

Their guide was back again, and they knew not to ignore it.

“What do you mean?” Vexis asked. Their knife hand twitched as bloodlust rushed through their veins like fire. They’d never felt it so strongly before, not that they could remember. “Did I die again? Is this another purgatory?”

‘You will find out when you awake.’

The shadow man disappeared.

“Fuck!” A coldness not unlike that of the vastness of space swirled within Vexis’ stomach as it moved up into their chest, and a flicker of fear, although small, caused them to run through the front room and out the door.

Their feet crunched as they sank into snow. More fell from the sky as it suddenly became cold, although Vexis wasn’t affected by it. They never had been. The winter was a comfort to them.

“Please, no.” Their breath quivered as they looked up toward the sky. No fog formed from it. “Please don’t tell me I’m in another fucking purgatory! I tried this time. I really, really tried.” They clenched their jaw as their body became unstable, and their shadow form eyes came back. Black tendrils seeped from their body before withdrawing again.

A horse’s sputtering sigh averted Vexis’ eyes toward the edge of the front yard near a quiet road. A tall, black horse that was skin and bone with white eyes like pearls stared at them unflinchingly. After a few minutes of silence, it pounded its right hoof into the snow and flicked its tail.

A sign of death? Vexis stepped forward to see what it would do, and it remained still. “Did I die again? Tell me!”

The horse just stared its hollow, undead stare while it watched Vexis quietly. As they opened their mouth to ask again, the horse walked away, its hooves not making a sound in the hard snow. It faded like a whisp into the silent winter night, the snow swirling where it had once been.

Vexis grew dizzy, and they walked in the direction of the swirling snow that had started to calm in the horse’s absence. They couldn’t think clearly, the only thing on their mind was the sight of blood. They’d always found it beautiful; they’d even hurt themselves once to see it. The scars on the corners of their mouth that formed two Xes on either side were a sign of that.

More.

Vexis shook their head as they walked down the side of the road that was empty of cars. Were they some sort of vampire or something in this life? The craving was much, much worse for violence than it had ever been, and they felt powerless. Something else was controlling them, or maybe they’d snapped. If they truly had died again and this was some sort of purgatory in the void, maybe it was their punishment.

Whispers started from all around, and Vexis tried to ignore them. They came from the trees across the road, from the houses they passed by. Disembodied hands emerged from deep within the snow and followed them, stopping when they stopped and walking when they walked. They raised their knife to run one of the things through, but it would have been pointless. More would just pop up in their place.

By the time Vexis reached a large parking lot with a few cars, they were trembling. They hadn’t suddenly grown sensitive to the cold, rather, they’d developed an itch that needed scratching. When they looked through the sliding glass doors of the twenty-four-hour convenience store, they knew they could scratch it there.

The disembodied hands disappeared as the doors swished open. Vexis looked around like a predator searching for its prey, and they froze like a threatened snake when a man in a blue vest approached them.

“Welcome! Is there anything I can help you find tonight?”

Vexis’ lips twitched as their shadow tendrils seeped out. He was too cheery for their liking; he would do for now.

Bliss flooded Vexis’ veins as their tendrils wrapped around the man’s limbs and they plunged the knife into his jugular. All sense of reason had left them, and they took their time pulling the blade back out to watch the blood pour from an artery. It stained their hand red, and when they lifted it to take it in like a work of art, they caught their reflection in the red knife. They were half-shifted into their shadow form with red eyes, but otherwise, they appeared mostly in their human form with pale skin. The expression on their face was that of a starving rabid animal.

Screams finally faded in, and Vexis looked up to see people running toward the back of the store. It was pointless. Maybe if a human had been after them, they’d have stood a chance.

Vexis darted toward the nearest woman in a work uniform, and their tendrils twisted her head to the side as her neck crunched loudly. Her body fell limp and silent onto the floor, and her head cracked against it as blood seeped across sparkling white linoleum. Vexis straddled her legs and raised the knife with both hands, jamming it over and over again into her chest cavity as blood splattered their face.

They threw the knife aside to pry open her ribcage, and they dug their hands into the gore that spilled a dark puddle of crimson around them. Their breathing came short as they hyperventilated, and they shook with excitement as they squeezed a heart that was still warm.

And then, it abated.

Vexis paused as they looked around them. The store had gone silent with everyone hiding in the backroom, and the clarity they’d lacked for too long came flooding back. They looked down at the body they straddled, and they realized they were stained in blood from their legs to their face. They dropped the heart and organs they held in both hands, and then stood to take in their surroundings.

Vexis nearly slipped as they stepped over the woman into the puddle of blood, but they righted themself again and headed toward the front doors.

It wasn’t the dead body or the gore that unnerved them. It was the loss of control. The fact that they’d killed people for the first time concerned them greatly, as they’d only ever hurt people who pissed them off before. They’d once cut some asshole’s face in the park after he’d made fun of them with his friends from afar, and they’d pulled a pocket knife on a belligerent customer at work. But that’s all they’d ever done.

‘You can’t watch someone suffer if they’re dead,’ they’d once said in one way or another to a psychiatrist, for that’s all they really wanted. Besides the blood they found so beautiful like an artist found paint applied to a canvas, they wanted to watch people suffer. They hated humans, despite once wanting to be one, but they’d never actually wanted to cause death. Death was too easy.

Unless you were Vexis, that is. Death was hell for them every time, if this time wasn’t clear enough.

“Hey!” they yelled into the parking lot. It echoed off into the trees. “Don’t fucking hide from me right now!”

Despite the desperation in their voice, the shadow man was nowhere to be found. Not even their earlier hallucinations came back. They fell to their knees and caught themself on their hands, and they stared at the freezing asphalt.

“Oh, dear,” a kind woman’s voice said from above. When Vexis looked up, they saw their supposed ‘mother.’

“You made a terrible mess,” she continued. “Come on.” She reached down to take their hand as they sat back on their knees. They ignored the offer. “Let me make us a late-night snack, and it’ll make it all better. Then in the morning, we can see the doctor.”

Vexis would’ve had no qualms with killing her. If they truly were in another purgatory in the void, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Too bad they’d left their knife behind in the store. “Leave me alone. I don’t have a mother. I can’t have a mother.”

“You’re just confused.” The woman frowned. “If you just wake up, everything will be alright again.”

Vexis rose to their feet and stared at her as they furrowed their brow. “Wake up? How do you ‘wake up’ if you’re dead?”

The world grew black around the edges as something heavy weighed on Vexis’ shoulders. They took a shuddering breath as everything began to fade. Was that it? Had they reached the final death? Or were they simply returning to the eternal slumber they’d once tried to escape? No, they didn’t want to return to that.

“Just wake up, dear,” the woman said as her face warped like a melting painting. “Sleep has never been your ally, has it?”

Vexis’ breathing quickened as they spun around to see the world dissolving. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. This is it. This is really it. It’s all over. Back to the stars, to my prison, after one last taunting dream.

Tears formed in the corners of their eyes as the void closed in. “The universe is a cruel motherfucker.”

* * *

Vexis gasped as their eyes opened wide from where they leaned against a pale wall. They looked around to see a familiar bedroom in the shadows of the early morning sun, and they turned to see a familiar form curled up on the bed, sleeping next to another they recognized.

They lifted a hand to wipe their face, and tears stained their pasty skin. They were back. A dream. It was merely a dream.

‘Sleep has never been your ally, has it?’ a voice whispered.

Vexis spotted the shadow man in the corner next to them by a closet door. They swallowed hard. “No, no it hasn’t.” They’d been a fool to try it again after so many years. It was a part of the human experience they’d neglected due to their dislike of it, considering their distant past.

But they weren’t human. They would never be. And they would never try sleeping again.

* * *

If this piqued your interest, you can find The Requiem Series so far on my website here.