Yet somehow I learned to live with it. Oh, I worried about it—and worried more than a little about the state of my mind—of course I did, who wouldn’t? But since it obviously wasn’t going to go away…well, as that old saw has it, “familiarity breeds contempt.” But in fact it wasn’t so much contempt as an awareness that there was nothing I could do about it,
In my early teens, following a year long hiatus, the nightmare returned in a new, far more disturbing format. Where before its main focus had centered upon a blurred, twisted, frustratingly familiar face, now any sense of familiarity—of recognition, however remote—was absent, replaced by something completely unknown and utterly terrifying.
It happened like this:
Having earned a course of advanced education as a reward for my exceptional grades in Jr. High, I was attending a local college and sleeping at home. On the night the dream returned, taking on this more definite, truly horrific form, my parents were visiting with friends and didn’t hear my shouting…or more properly my screaming. I’m not ashamed to admit it: this time I woke up screaming for my life, screaming my lungs out!
In the dream:
At first there was only the darkness and a certain uneasy awareness; I had felt this before, and so knew what was coming. Then the darkness swirled, like smoke made luminous in the beam of a movie projector. And there in the gloom, out of this weird ectoplasm, the face gradually firmed up, coalescing into a more solid projection. But it wasn’t the usual face, or at least it didn’t seem to be. And:
“Don’t!” That ethereal warning, even before the thing had fully developed. “Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t!”
I wanted to answer—to ask what it was I mustn’t do—but my mouth was dry, made clammy with sleep and fear. And all the time this foggy outline putting on flesh…or losing it? For abruptly, as suddenly and shockingly as that, the face was full-formed. But it wasn’t nearly a full face! And:
“Don’t you do it!” the scorched thing gurgled yet again—this crisped and peeling, bodiless, agonized visage—hanging there like an apparition in the dark. “Don’t you dare do it!’”
Its hair smoked, burned away from one half of a blistered scalp. Its left eye was a gaping, blackened hole in a scorched and peeling roast of a face whose seared cheekbone was clearly visible. Its mouth was welded shut in the corner on that side, causing its withered lips to writhe as they issued its urgent, stilted, inexplicable warning:
“Don’t do it! You mustn’t…mustn’t…do it!”
And finally I was able to swallow, to squeeze saliva into my throat and moisten it, and choke the question out. “What is it that…that I mustn’t do? I mean, what do you want of me? What are you asking?”
At which the thing—this ruined face, this apparition—twitched, blinked its good eye and despite its awful injuries somehow managed to assume a bewildered expression as it slowly backed away. And emboldened I called after it, “Wait a moment. Don’t go. What is it you don’t want me to do?”
But then its attitude seemed to change, to harden. For a moment it hung there in midair, gazing at me intently through that one good eye. And as I in turn tried to back off—which needless to say I couldn’t, because one can’t in nightmares of this sort—so the thing rushed upon me, angry now, frustrated that it wasn’t getting through to me or because it didn’t know how to. And as I tried to ward it off:
“Don’t!” it shouted, spitting blood and yellow pus in my face as frustration split its welded lips, and strips of seared skin curled like wafer-thin shavings down its chin. “Don’t you do it!”
Its voice was full of pain, and its teeth were white, red and clenched; they were grinding where they showed through that fretted left cheek!
Which is when I woke up screaming, screaming my lungs out, and I’m not ashamed to admit it….
After that…thankfully the nightmare’s incidence in this its most recent, more grotesque form was only sporadic, and by chance or sheer good fortune I was seventeen before it once again came to the notice of my parents. By then, however—having scared the wits out of my mother one night with my gibbering and shrieking—I had decided it was time to reveal the extent of my problem and perhaps seek help.
By then, too, I had submitted four extremely well-received scientific papers and had been assured a position in one of the country’s finest experimental labs when my formal education was complete, and I knew the last thing that any future colleagues of mine would want to discover—or that I would be prepared to reveal—was that since my childhood through young manhood I had been suffering from…well, how best to put it? A deep-seated persecution complex? Mental depression? Some rare psy-chological disorder? Any or all of these things? Possibly.
I saw several shrinks (please excuse my use of this term, and try to understand: I’ve never had much faith in psychiatry, so this was somewhat of an ordeal for me), one of whom went so far as to attempt regression. Perhaps my cynicism was to blame for his total failure; or perhaps it was simply that there was nothing in my past, my childhood, that he could focus in on or pinpoint as the source of any emotional problem whatsoever.
And so, not knowing when it would strike next, I was left to suffer the nightmare, all through my final term of education and well into my nineteenth year, when mercifully its fortnightly, then monthly, then quarterly incidence seemed to indicate a gradual remission. So that by the time I took up my position at “the facility” (whose location I may not reveal for reasons of national security) I had again begun to believe that perhaps this time my troubles were truly behind me—
—When in fact they were ahead….
The facility.
While I may not reveal its location—for fear of making it a prime target in any future conflict—its purpose isn’t any longer a matter of national security. Indeed, and for the last decade, a majority of the world’s technologically advanced countries have been engaged in just such research.
As for the research in question:
Wasn’t it Einstein himself who declared the concept of a past, a present, and a future—the concept of time, in fact—an illusion, albeit a persistent one? That at least was the substance of it if not in so many words. Temporal physics, yes, dizzying even by quantum standards. But as to why anyone would want to travel through time, to speed up their passage through it, or indeed reverse it….
Well, I shall risk my status as a citizen and a hero and propose one of my own theories. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to slide a century or so back down the space-time cone and adjust history somewhat, just a tweak here and there? No of course it wouldn’t! And I know that any reasonable, reasoning mind would recoil in sheer terror at the notion. Ah, but tell that to the government, and to those military men who believe that a world without Hitler—a world which had never known men such as Mao or Osama, or a hundred others of that ilk—would be a better world. Perhaps they are right, but what if they are wrong? At least the world we know is stable, the status quo maintained.
But of course I’m only guessing (despite the presence of the CIA and certain uniformed types in an allegedly “advisory” capacity.)
And so at just twenty-one years of age—and because we all have to earn our keep—that is where I had been working for two years and some months when my nightmare manifested yet again in its final, most monstrous form and at the worst possible, indeed the only possible, time….