Bad Dream

As Phillip mentioned during his preface to my preface of the previous document, my frostbite is rather worse than I initially cared to reveal. I have agreed, at James’ urging, to refrain from actual typing, settling instead on letting Miss Waterman type out what I dictate to her. She is the fastest typist in the group, after myself, so this avoids both Phillip’s interminable demands for me to speak more slowly while still allowing me to update the archives.

Or, at least, to eventually update the archives. This particular post is, as you can likely surmise from the title, not a document. It is, rather, part of the “journal” side of this online journal. At Miss Waterman’s urging, I am taking the opportunity to add a description of last night’s dream to this record.

We are still in a motel, and still all in the same room. You will have to excuse me for not going into more detail than that, for reasons previously stated. Following the upload of the previous document, I went to sleep.

At 3:07 a.m., I “awoke”. In hindsight, it was, quite obviously, a dream, but it was quite vivid, sharper than many waking memories that I possess. In the dream, I possessed a pressing need to relieve myself, and so left the bed (or, rather, what small portion of it was not occupied by Phillip) to move towards the bathroom.

I relieved myself, I am happy to say, without incident, and to spare the minds’ eyes of Miss Waterman, Phillip, and James, I shall avoid going into further detail on that matter. The true “meat” of the dream took place after this, when I began to turn to leave the bathroom.

There is, you see, a metal knob on the door into the bathroom, which is ordinarily a flat bronzed or argent tone, always dull and uninteresting. But, when I turned to leave in this dream, the knob seemed inordinately polished, to the point of being very nearly a full mirror. I was able to make out my own features in it, distorted as they were.

Then I caught sight of a slight movement in the warped reflection of the bathroom behind me. As the room is less than ten feet on a side, hardly wide enough to contain the commode and shower stall that are its only features, this meant that there had to be someone very close behind me. Yet, when I turned to look, the stall was empty, and upon returning my gaze to the knob, it had returned to its original, dull appearance.

Thinking to warn the others of something that might constitute evidence of danger, I opened the door, only to find myself… well, almost precisely where I had hoped. But only almost. Anyone who has visited a cheap motel for the night should know the arrangement of the bathroom in relationship to the sink and mirror, as well as the rest of the room: the sink and mirror are set into a recess in the back of the room, with a door leading into the bathroom in the side of this recess.

When I opened the door, however, things had shifted. The main hotel room was no longer visible. Instead, the sink and mirror were set directly in front of me, with blank walls on each side. The only source of light was the bathroom behind me, by which I could make out my own reflection in the mirror.

And so I left the bathroom door open behind me as I stepped into this new area. I was prepared to, at the very least, throw a few punches before whatever the thing that was undoubtedly behind this felled me. But nothing presented itself. Despite my lingering in this area for what felt like hours, nothing of interest occurred. The only indicator that any time had passed at all, in fact, was my own racing heart.

Yet I could not shake the feeling that, somehow, I was being watched. I paced the room restlessly, waiting for my execution, for what felt like hours. Finally, I did the only thing that I could think to do. I moved towards the counter, clenched my fist as best I could with swollen and bandaged fingers, and prepared to make an attempt at smashing the mirror.

But, when I did, my hand never made contact with the glass. Rather, I felt my bandaged knuckles make contact with another hand. Before I could fully grasp the implications of this, I felt a shrieking, unbearable pain, and looked to see that my hand had begun to shatter like spun glass, cracks spider-webbing their collective way across its surface, and I found myself incapable of moving as those same agonizing cracks appeared elsewhere on my body.

What happened next is not something that I care to recount in detail. Suffice it to say that my doppelgänger was not a victim of the same paralysis that I was suffering, and that the sensation of being shattered and broken like so much spun glass is not a pleasant one. Finally, though, it tired of its sport, and when it moved in to shatter my skull like the rest, I awoke.

We have decided that we shall sleep in shifts from now on. Miss Waterman and her group have always rotated night watch duties between the three of them. Now, we shall have two people awake at any one time. One will watch the surroundings for any sign of attackers. The other shall watch for any indication of bad dreams in the sleepers.

James has just returned from checking us out of the motel. It is time for us to leave, so I will have to end this dictation here. I wish those of you who are reading this, and in similar situations, luck.