This is too good for me to just let it go, so I’m sharing it with you all. I’m currently experimenting with melatonin to try to get over some sleep issues I’ve been having. One of the potential side effects is vivid dreams or nightmares, and sweet swinging Jebus they are not joking about that. This is really long, and I know that I didn’t begin to capture how insanely freaky it was in my mind at the time, but I gave it my best, verbose shot. Without further ado, I present The Nightmare.
I don’t fully remember the beginning of it, so I’ll just go ahead and say that it must have been somewhat similar to Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, only with a sober quest to do a load of laundry rather than a stoned quest for burgers. There were three of us, one guy, one other girl, and myself. I had my canvas laundry sack slung over my shoulder, and we walked across campus to the laundry room. The campus itself looked not just unlike the campus where I lived; it looked unlike anything in this part of the country. Everything was very green, with big trees and lush grass and such. It was humid, as well, almost swamp-like.
All the machines in the laundry room (which was identical to the real laundry room here) were, regrettably, in use. Rather than just wait, we went back outside and wandered around the mysteriously-empty campus, looking for another laundry room. We went up the hill to the student center, which was under construction. There was just enough of a breeze to cause the plastic sheeting tacked up to flap slightly. There were no construction noises, or people noises, or or any noises beyond our own footsteps. The power seemed to be off and it was fairly dark inside, though sunlight did come in through the windows in the corridor. Finally we encountered a construction worker, just standing there looking at a wall frame. He had a white hard-hat on and a gray beard, and told us we shouldn’t be just wandering around, it wasn’t safe.
“But I need to do laundry,” I protested. “Do you know where I might be able to?”
He thought about it for a minute, as if I’d asked him something deep and thought provoking. “Boy, I don’t know. You can try the laundry room down in lowers, but,” at this point he lowered his voice and glanced around slightly, as if expecting that someone was eavesdropping. There was no one else within sight or earshot. “…I doubt that’s worth it, if you know what I mean.” I did, somehow: apparently where we’d been was dangerous. “Best I can think is try to find the other laundry room.” My group of nameless companions exchanged looks. None of us knew what he was talking about. “You know, they say they built another one, here, in this building.” He was practically whispering at this point, as if this were a deep secret. “I’ve never seen it, but they say you can get in somewhere through the old pool. Downstairs, by the loading dock. But you didn’t hear it from me, and be careful. You never know.”
We thanked him and decided to go looking for this mysterious laundry room, and he wished us good luck. We carefully made our way down the pitch-black stairwell, fumbled for the door at the bottom, and finally stepped out onto the basement level. It was clearly being used only for storage. Some construction tools, covered with dust, littered the hallway: a ladder, a wheelbarrow full of bricks, some sacks of cement, buckets of tools. Double swinging doors, like you’d see leading to a restaurant kitchen, were in front of us. To the right was a locker room. Both would lead us to the pool. We went through the double doors.
It was a short, wide hallway that slopped downward slightly. We were at the top. The floor was covered in those blue plastic mats you see in locker rooms at pools, the gridded type that let water drip beneath. Along the sides of the hallway were pool maintenance things: a stack of boxes of chemicals, a diving board lay propped against the wall, flotation devices, coils of lane dividers. It was dark, but there were windows in the far doors that led to the pool, and the pool area had one wall knocked out, replaced with translucent plastic sheeting, so there was a little light. “This isn’t so bad,” said my male companion.
“Except for the bodies,” I said, quietly, and pointed. A foot or two away was a big metal-and-plastic box, about six feet long and the same tall, maybe three feet deep. There were two bodies in it, skin shrank tight around, flesh wasted into nothing, eye sockets empty. One of them was facing towards us, jaw open in a deathly rictus. The box was sealed, no air holes. There was no smell. I dropped my laundry sack and pushed past the other two, running for the door, back out into the construction-tool graveyard.
My two companions followed me, more slowly. We gathered ourselves. Two dead bodies. They were dead, they couldn’t hurt us, right? It was fine. I tried to tell them I’d go through the locker room and meet them by the pool.
“We can’t split up,” the woman said. “If we do they’ll get us. Besides, I think there’s something in there.”
I looked at the locker room door. It didn’t look like a good idea. We went back through the sloping passage, trying not to look at the bodies. I kept as far from that box as possible. We picked up the sack I had dropped, and got through the far doors, onto the dry tile around the pool. The pool was completely empty, though the air still smelled of chlorine. One of the walls was mirrored, from a foot above the floor up to a bit below the ceiling rafters. “This way,” said the guy, and led us up to the mirrors. We investigated them, prodding, looking for tell-tale gaps, for hinges. The last mirror on the left had a little tiny gap between the bottom of the mirror and the wall. I knelt down. There was enough space for my fingers to slide into the gap, and with a little bit of pressure the mirror swung open. Behind it was the mythical laundry room, gleaming white and sterile, with harsh fluorescent lights above. There was a bank of washers on the far wall and dryers on the next. A human corpse sat on each washer, fish-belly white and sunken-cheeked and dead, but really not dead, sitting there staring blankly at us. They weren’t alive but they sure as hell weren’t dead.
“You can’t be here yet,” they said. They spoke in monotone unison, one voice from six different bodies. “It’s not your time.”
This was a conversation for me to have and not the others. “I need to be,” I said. My voice was shaking and my knees had gelled. “I found it, didn’t I?”
“It’s not your time,” they repeated. “This isn’t your place. You need to leave.”
“But I’m already here,” I said.
In one motion they all slid off their washing-machine perches and took one step towards me. “You don’t belong here,” they said. “Leave, now, or you’ll suffer.”
I left, and instead of going back through the sloping hallway, I stepped out through a space between plastic sheets, onto the loading dock. I didn’t know where my companions had gone. Outside, across the road, the dense green woods were burning and I could feel the heat from where I stood. Trees popped and crackled as the flames consume them. Somewhere behind me, within the building, someone screamed. “Because of you!” the corpse-chorus shouted. “All because of you! It’s not your time!”
And then, I finally managed to shake myself awake, only to have a moment of greater fear, because I couldn’t see and couldn’t move. I’d gotten tangled up in my blankets, and still had my sleep mask on. Once I got that sorted out and caught my breath, I spent a good while lying in bed convincing myself that laundry-room dwelling zombies are not going to set the world on fire because of me, nor am I going to encounter a clear plastic dual-person casket on my way to my school’s (non-existent) disused pool. It was absolutely ridiculous, but even in the light of day it’s creeping me out, if only because it was probably the most vivid dream I’ve ever had: it felt absolutely real, not at all like a dream.
And I need to do laundry this weekend. Anyone have any idea how to ask a friend to go with me without admitting I’m now afraid of reanimated corpses?