Hospital Nights

image courtesy of my own bad self

Late night in the hospital. Sunday morning my wife went into the hospital. She's ok, but they're keeping her for a few days. Thus, I spent the night and will be spending subsequent nights laying at her side on a strange fold-out faux-leather sofa bed thingy. It's not comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either, so take that to mean whatever. It's strange. Hospitals are big buildings, and I've always harbored a strange fascination/excitement at the prospect of what goes on in large, modern buildings in the middle of the night. Last night I was fairly out of it so other than penning what I now believe was probably a completely incoherent message to the inimitable Chester Whelks I pretty much just passed out. But I dreamt. Boy did I dream...

In the first 'episode' of the dream I was in a small, possibly New England town. There was a lot of running around. I got the impression that there were people I knew there and also people who were recovering from something. I am unsure whether this was recovery from something that happened to them or something they did to themselves. At some point I believe I ventured off from the others - I was in an old New England style house, real old, as in run down. I was running through the house. Then other people were there as well, but I don't think it was the same people. I take this to me an overturning of acquaintances? Or perhaps, because I've been in contact with quite a few people I've not talked to in a while of late that could factor in here as well. These new people were also running, only behind me. Not quite sure if they were running with me from something or chasing me. Either way the tone was the same - there was something terrifying behind me/us.

I had tried to take someone out of using what I believe was an old book (of course!) to conjure the devil. It may have been my good friend The Goatchild. He did not listen and the next thing I can remember after the frantic chasing is running alone, up a broken, dilapidated and gently curving staircase. There were pieces of the balustrade missing, and the stairs themselves, while solid enough below my feet, looked a lot like the rest of the house in that it was old, dusty and unkept. Suddenly from behind and above me a crazy, screeching, evil monkey swung out over my head and attacked me. It bit my right hand on the top, opposite where my palm would be. I screamed and grabbed the monkey. It jumped back toward the underside of the floor above and I caught its head with a ball pein hammer, grinding its skull so that I could actually feel the bones break and the brains squish.

It was disgusting.

The monkey was a representation of the devil (which I should point out I don't believe in in the traditional sense, except for about three hours after I watch The Exorcist) and I had the feeling I was marked. I woke up stretched out on the little chair-thing, buzzing like a live wire from the fear that carried over from my dream. There's a window just in front of where my head was. It looks like this during the day:

Not too scary, right? Well, I woke up sleeping on my stomach, facing out the window. Along with the fear, when I surfaced out of the dream I brought with me this little voice that insisted that I had had similar dreams before, and that I was marked by the devil (who again, I don't believe in in this Christian/Hollywood way) and that these occasional dreams were his way of manifesting to me. While all this was running through my head I scanned the darkness outside the window. Across the street, beneath a tree there was something that looked more than a little like a human-shaped dark shadow...