Dear god, I feel like I'm in a waking nightmare. I'm at work; paranoid, jumpy... out of adjectives, too. I quite literally jumped when I saw a reflection in my glasses as I was turning my head a moment ago. Adrenaline is roaring through my veins, and my peripheral vision is on overdrive. Every last reflective surface is being noted by my brain whether I realize it or not, and I've got this horribly pervasive feeling of being watched because of all of that. Hell, a dude came into the store a second ago. I managed not to jump or yell when the door buzzer went off, but as I was heading to the counter I kept watching the guy. Intently. Desperately. As he walked between the racks and shelves, I kept trying to get glimpses of him to make sure he wasn't melted or dripping. Making sure he was intact and verifiably human. I made sure not to turn my back to him, and he only left my sight for a moment at a time. And then, when I turned to get his cigarettes, I was positive he was going to *change* somehow and then lunge across the counter at me. I'm freaking out over here, man.
I think it started with having a really long dream about being robbed at work over and over and then waking up to a house full of smoke due to somebody leaving a pot with a couple of packs of ramen in it on the stove to burn. No, that wouldn't be right. I think it was before that. I'm certain it was before that.
"The old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall." That's where it started. That simple, silly-sounding sentence. It seems innocuous enough; just a handful of words strung together in a nonsense phrase. Yet it's been circling through my mind, endlessly repeating every morning for the last few days. Always in the wee hours before the sun rises, but after everyone else has retired to the sanctuary of sleep. I sit, solitarily awake, in a chair placed at the center of the room with a laptop in it's natural position before me. With the sound muted I browse along, sipping my beer and occassionally venturing out for a smoke or a trip to the bathroom. Then, out of nowhere, the phrase comes to me. "The old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall."
"Well," I think, "That's an odd thing to come up with. Kind of has a ring to it, though. 'The old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall.' Funny."
But suddenly I don't feel so alone in that chair. I get the feeling that maybe something might be watching me watch the blue glow of the computer. Something dark, corrupt, and putrescent. Something mostly silent as it oozes down from the ceiling, unseen and stealthy behind me. I get the unsettling image of something long left to rot into a black, brackish jelly bubbling out of the pores of the wall in slowly writhing tendrils. "The old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall."
Suddenly the phrase doesn't sound so silly to me anymore.
I decide that a smoke and another beer would be a really good idea right about then. And some light. Definately some light. So I get up and go into the kitchen, trying not to gasp as a hulking, shapeless thing materializes in the faint glow from my lighter. Nothingness. A trick of the mind. I flip on the lightswitch for the basement hallway, trying to keep as far as I can from the darkness filling each doorway I encounter. "The old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall."
Why does it repeat itself if it makes me feel so anxious? Why do I let it repeat? So I try to distract myself; concentrating on my cigarette and my beer, trying to plot out what to do when I next go to work, ignoring the swirling shapes in the darkness, sensing congealed masses working their way out of the floorboards and forcing their way around the doorjamb behind me at every turn. But I won't think it again. Won't let (The old man...) myself even (...drip, drip...) think about (...dripping...) looking at (...down...) the wall. So I retreat to the bathroom. I hear dripping. I glance into the bathtub, but there's no water. It looks dry. I look away, and hear it again. Drip... drip... dripping dow- except I'm not thinking about that. The furnace kicks on and suddenly there's hot air against my back and I can't hear anything and I can't look everywhere at once but at least before I could hear everything and- drip. Dear god, I know there's no water in the tub or the sink, yet I can still hear it. But it's not water. In my mind and just under my vision are images of (the old man) something clinging to the inside of the shower, dead yet (dripping) moving steadily closer to where I'm standing. The thought is so strong that I douse the lights and nearly sprint to the bedroom and the safe, sane glow of the laptop.
Sitting down, I settle in for what's sure to be a very long morning. A couple of hours still remain before I can rationalize going to bed, and at least an hour of that will be spent in darkness. My mind is running on overdrive. Every time I look into the shadows beyond my computer screen, I see shapes and shadows of waking dreams leaping and creeping; yet, safe again in my chair, I seem to be calming down a bit. Getting a grip. All those fanciful thoughts are fading as my mind slowly allows me to rein it in. There's no old man, no dripping, and nothing standing directly behind my chair. Nothing at all. Yet the phrase keeps repeating like some sort of evil chant, and it keeps getting louder in my head. With each repetition I lose a little more control over my mind, and my heart begins beating faster and faster. Again, every creak of the house becomes some loathsome thing slithering just outside my view; every glance into the darkness reveals the nearly seen glimpse of monstrous things neither quite liquid nor solid. I'm dreaming with my eyes open and I realize it, yet the realization does nothing to break the irrational fear. And the words keep running in my head. "The old man comes drip, drip, dripping down the wall."
"The old man comes drip, drip, dripping down the wall. The old man comes drip, drip, dripping down the wall. The old man comes drip, drip, dripping down..."
A vision comes out of the darkness, vivid as reality. An amorphous, churning blackness writhing and dripping over and into itself, dappled with spots alternately void of light and highly reflective. It looks as though it should reek of the grave, and my mind knows instantly that it was once human despite its current formlessness. With the suddenness of a striking snake, a taloned, skeletal arm shoots out of the sludge; ringed with pitch-black tendons and tipped with unnaturally long fingers. It's gone from my mind as quickly as it appeared, but not before I can see sharpened ribs within its mass, the ends gnashing together like an unholy mockery of a slavering maw.
About that time I decided to go to bed. Yet even still the phrase repeats itself. Where it came from, I'll never know. Perhaps an overactive imagination, or perhaps... Perhaps it was a thought born from truth, a warning of the unseen things lurking in the dark? I never saw whether anything hides behind me in the dark hours before dawn, but sometimes I get the feeling I'm being watched. And occassionally, once in a great while, I think I hear something sliding. Oozing. Dripping.
The old man comes drip, drip, dripping down the wall...
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