Don't Check His Surveillance Footage at Night
Declared a vegetative patient, I was deemed to have no consciousness.
My family wept by my bedside daily;doctors insisted I felt nothing.
They didn't know that every night,I endured long, coherent nightmares.
In these dreams,I was a living statue trapped in a decaying garden, consumed daily by black vines.
Until that day,when the new nurse dimmed the lights in my room, and the vines in the dream suddenly swiveled in unison—toward her.
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The darkness was viscous as oil, coating every inch of non-existent skin. He—if this chaotic mass could still be called "he"—knew the "Garden" had returned. There was no beginning, no transition; consciousness was brutally forced into this realm of eternal decay.
The air was stagnant, saturated with a sweetness so cloying it induced nausea, as if billions of flowers had been snapped at their stems in full bloom, left to rot into sludge under oppressive heat. He was a "statue," fixed at the heart of this stench, on a slightly raised mound. His material was neither stone nor wood, but more like some cooled, rigid wax, roughly shaped into a humanoid form without features or clear limbs, defined only by a posture of captivity.
He could "see," perceiving his surroundings in a horrifying, fixed-focus, 360-degree panorama. His view was an endless "garden." The soil was a dark purple, slick with moss and patches of suspicious, slow-moving fungal growth. Twisted shrubs tangled together, their leaves blackened and curled, edges dripping with glistening, cobweb-like mucus. In the distance, shadowy outlines of figures similar to him stood, some broken, some collapsed completely, melting back into the filthy earth. The sky was perpetually the same despairing leaden gray, hanging low over the tops of the malformed plants.
Then, they came. Seeping silently from the damp soil, growing from cracks in dead branches. Black vines, like tendrils condensed from the deepest night, their surfaces smooth but shimmering with an oily sheen. They slithered with purpose, aiming unerringly for him, the only "living" thing.
The tip of the first vine touched his "ankle." There was no temperature, only a slick, tough texture, followed immediately by a pain and itch so intense it could make a soul scream. This wasn't mere contact; it was erosion, drilling, a slow, relentless rooting into his solidified "interior." He could "feel" the cold, foreign presence advancing, fibrous filaments branching, spreading, greedily sucking at something—perhaps time, perhaps consciousness itself.
One, two, ten… more vines coiled around him, wrapping his "torso," climbing his "arms," even probing toward the faceless center of his head. The consumption began. Not a sharp bite of agony, but an endless, minute stripping away and dissolution. Every inch touched by the vines slowly lost its "substantiality," turning to nothingness, absorbed by the blackness. He could not move, could not scream, could only endure. Each second stretched into an execution by a thousand cuts; each act of "consumption" carved deeper into his chaotic awareness: You are here. You are being digested. There is no end.
Despair was the fertilizer here. He had tried to "count"—the number of vines, the rhythm of their squirming, grasping for fragments of order in the absolute chaos. But the counting always dissolved, scattered into pieces by the boundless torment. He had also tried to "remember," digging frantically in the depths of his consciousness for clues about who he was, why he was here. But only fragments flashed back: blinding white light, the screech of brakes, a crystalline storm of shattering glass, and a vast, spinning darkness—the darkness that had ultimately swallowed everything and thrown him here. A name? An identity? Warmth or love? All blank, wiped clean by the slick vines and the stench of rot.
Time lost meaning. It might have been an instant; it might have been ten thousand years. Until a faint disturbance came from a distant elsewhere. Like a tiny pebble dropped into a stagnant pond, its ripples almost imperceptible. In reality, the light in the hospital room had changed. Not the usual day-night cycle, but a deliberate, slight dimming.
In the dream, the rotting Garden lurched to a halt.
All the squirming black vines simultaneously stopped their consumption. The cloying stench of decay seemed to freeze for a second. Then, hundreds, thousands of vines—their slick, oil-sheen tips—unanimously detached from the tightly coiled "statue" and turned toward the same direction.
Toward a previously empty "point" in the Garden.
Without eyes, the force of that "gaze" was intense, focused, carrying a new, bone-chilling scrutiny, firmly "nailing" that direction. As if, piercing through the barrier between dream and reality, it had "seen" the being who had just dimmed the ward lights.