Digger - The Doctor Will See You Now by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 15

Sleep had become a rare commodity. Even after his mind had finished in its haunting for the night, Ryan found himself too agitated to recover back into any state of slumber. More than that, he’d come to deeply fear the images and sensations his mind cast onto the theater of his dreams. Every day brought an increasing degree of effort to keep his thoughts organized. Over time, Ryan walked down a trail that began at the cabin and ended at the edge of a sparsely covered field. He sometimes spent several hours sitting near the field, trying to clear his head. Occasionally, he stopped at the narrow brook that transected the path and, sitting on a nearby rock, would soak his bare feet and its cold trickling water.

The images and videos from the Internet were making less and less sense. He had deleted most of the police photographs due to the chaotic dismemberment of the subjects. But the autopsy videos that had once been somewhat helpful became boring, as he had so few of them. Ryan thought back to the time he’d spent in the anatomy lab at UNE. Having a cadaver was an excellent learning tool. But access was now impossible, and if caught, the penalty would be severe. Ryan considered animals as potential subjects, but when he dissected a frog he found dead near the brook, his frustration peaked upon discovering what should have been obvious. The organ set of the human body is, in no way, similar to that of a frog or any other animal common to the area. Ryan would have to muddle through what information he had. But this would not be enough. There had to be another option.

That afternoon found Ryan, once again, walking the now well-worn trail to the field. It was only about a mile and a half, but it was enough to take his mind off the difficulties of studying without the essential tools of learning. However, on that day, with his usual wilderness diversion ineffective, he sat exhausted in a small clearing slightly off the trail. He began to wonder if his efforts would ever pay off, if he could accomplish what he set out to do, especially under these conditions. His academic needs were so few. Yet, without access to UNE’s lab, any further work would continue to be difficult at best.

The afternoon light moved and shifted among the wafting boughs of pine trees. The sky brought a noticeable breeze, marking the change of seasons from spring into summer. Ryan sat with his back to a birch tree. They seemed to be common toward the tree line. Soon his mind slipped into a quiet place he had not visited for months, perhaps years. His body relaxed as a sense of calm pulled him beneath the boundary of consciousness, and for the first time in days, Ryan drifted off to sleep. The clamor of his nightly phantasm seemed to take refuge elsewhere, as the somnolent world of forgetfulness finally found him.

His soul drifted on a glassy ocean of quiet solitude as time became lost in the eternity of a dead sleep. Suddenly, his mind was swept away to a familiar place, one he had visited many times. Ryan opened his eyes to a windless night. As real as any other. But this nocturnal vision found him standing atop the hill of Evergreen Cemetery, over the road of burial vaults he had often frequented as a student. It served as an escape, a place of calm anonymity. But there was something different, something indefinable drifting unseen through the still-night air. Surrounding him were the fields of gravestones, arranged like hedgerows of fruit trees or the rows of a garden grove. Ryan walked down to the nearest road and aimlessly wandered the burial grounds. He looked up at the night sky and found it empty. Yet, the cemetery seemed dimly illuminated by a vague light that had no traceable source. As he walked among the resting dead, he felt pulled by the grip of something that could only be described as highly magnetic. It pulled him off his feet, dragging him to an unmarked, freshly dug grave. The dream-world muted his screaming to silence as time seemed to slow the pace of melting ice. It drew him through the large mound of earth piled at the foot of the open grave. A glimpse to one side revealed the frightening figure of his own image, a foot placed on the blade of a gravedigger’s shovel, a grin scrawled across its ghostly face.

With breathless fear, Ryan found himself floating face down over the cold open earth, staring down into the cistern, and in spite of the dim glow that surrounded him, the darkness that filled what he believed was his final resting place left him unable to see its bottom. The force that brought him to the fractured earth unexpectedly spun him onto his back, as Ryan took a sudden gasp of terror, convinced he was to be buried alive. His breathing became tense as tears ran down the sides of his head. His mirror self, standing at the graveside with shovel at the ready, walked over and, bending down over Ryan’s face, whispered, “You’re going to help me, whether you want to or not.”

Ryan’s breathing quickened as the figure stepped back from the edge of the grave. Pulling the shovel from the ground, his shadowy twin returned to Ryan’s hovering body, and as the shovel was raised, a whisper clawed its way out of Ryan’s mind. The thought was not his own, but the voice of the familiar-faced phantom standing over him. “What’s it like to die?”

Ryan, still held in the grip of whatever had dragged him across the grassy earth, let out a cry as a child suddenly separated from its mother. His ethereal counterpart swung the shovel, planting it deeply into Ryan’s chest, with the blade evenly separating both sides. The terror of the dream world had taken control of Ryan’s voice. But even this could not mute his agonizing screams, as fiery pain exploded from the gurgling chasm that continued to split him down to just below the navel.

His assailant stepped back and faded into the night, leaving him helplessly suspended over the gaping fissure of repose. The shovel, still firmly resting in his chest, began sinking under its own weight deeper into his body. He felt the invisible grip holding him aloft suddenly release him as Ryan let out a wild scream. His eyes widened with fear and panic, falling into an endless black abyss of eternal death, his voice fading into nothing.

The intensity of this otherworldly reality of shadows and illusion woke Ryan with such violence that, upon standing, he discovered the front of his pants was broadly soaked with urine.

“Fuck!” he screamed.

Feeling the blood falling from his head, Ryan bent down and grabbed his knees. The return of blood was almost immediate, and as his face began to flush, his breathing began to slow. He stood cautiously, clearing his head, he realized how long he’d been asleep as day turned to night. Although Ryan had no way of illuminating the way back to the cabin, he had walked the trail enough times that it's winding way was committed to memory.

Having arrived at the cabin, Ryan fumbled his way through the unlit foyer. He thought he knew its layout well enough to find his way through the dark, but tripping over his own feet landed him hard on the wood floor. “God dammit!” he yelled.

Getting back to his feet, he felt along the wall for the light switch. As it turns out, finding the floor is a lot easier than finding a light switch in a pitch-black room. But within a few minutes, Ryan located the plastic switch that, once in its proper position, illuminated the room through the bulbs of the ceiling light. Walking across the room, he collapsed into a sitting position on the couch. The nightmare played itself over and over in his mind. If Freud was right, the elements of this horrific vision supposedly held meaning. But as much as Ryan tried, the significance of any part of it eluded him. Perhaps it was a warning -- but of what? He didn’t believe in such things as omens and superstition. For him, science and logic represented the true path to enlightenment.

Ryan struggled for days, trying to dismiss the nightmare from his mind. Occasionally, he found himself with his hand placed in the middle of his chest. The nightmare was far more intense than he had initially thought. Studying was becoming more difficult than usual, as his mind seemed to be spending a great deal of time trying to sort out the images from the evening’s slumber next to the trail. Even when he tried not to think about it, it was there, like an act of violence he was forced to witness over and over again. The psyche can only tolerate so much horror before reaching its breaking point, and Ryan was, unknowingly, reaching his.