Read Part 3 Act III here.
Skip to Part 1 here.
The Ringing
Several things happened all at once…
The alarm rang aggravatingly loudly. The cat dug its claws into my chest and hissed angrily. And the doorbell rang.
I jumped out of the bed. The cat hissed, meowed, then sprang out of the room. The doorbell rang again. I stumbled over a slipper and nearly bumped my head into the windowpane. My legs could not carry my weight for a good, long moment. When I stood back up, the doorbell rang a third time and someone called, “Blake!” while knocking on the door and ringing the bell simultaneously. The cat was screaming and the alarm still ringing. I could feel every fiber of my being ache. My muscles ached strangely; my fingers were swollen and I could scarcely see with my eyelids still half closed.
I used the windowpane frame to help myself stand upright and tried to yell, “Coming!” but the words were barely a hiss. The knocking was harder, as if by force my intruder was trying to break the door.
“Coming!” I repeated as I grabbed the pair of pants that were lying on the floor and put them on, stumbling and nearly falling once again. I quickly walked to the door and opened the door, although the doorknob slipped out of my grasp a couple of times before I finally managed to hold onto it right.
“Yes?” I yelled as the door opened.
There stood a woman who looked furious, at least with my narrowed eyes that still had sleep and tears in them. She pushed the door and barged into the room.
“Where the hell have you been? I have tried calling you a hundred times!” She yelled, looking me up and down with piercing brown eyes. At first, I could neither decipher her words that drowned in the noise of the still-ringing alarm nor could I understand why I did not recognize her.
I rubbed my eyes hard and then looked at her. She was grimacing at me. And the cat was still meowing loudly.
“What happened?” I asked casually.
She walked to the cat, knelt beside her, and petted her softly. “What happened?” She glanced back at me. “When was the last time you turned on the TV?” she asked as she stroked the cat’s back.
“I don’t know.” I said, “I was sleeping. What happened?”
“They declared it a pandemic. We are to remain at home until we are escorted to a safe zone. But there are no safe zones. They do not even know what it is, whether it’s a virus or a biological attack. People are not waking up, and I wanted to make sure that you are alive.” She continued speaking, but my focus was no longer on what she was saying. Things seemed to fall right in place when she spoke, although the words she spoke did not register at first.
I knew her. I knew the curve of her face. Not only was she recognizable, but familiar; she was homely. She was my colleague from work. And her name…her name was Bridgette. She was Bridgette Alfons, my colleague from work. And despite not remembering what work I did, I recalled that we sat in cubicles near one another. No, we sat next to each other, only separated by a wall, but every time I would stand up, I could see her familiar face, and every time she stood up on her tiptoes, I could see part of her face.
“Bridgette!” I exclaimed and she met my call with narrowed eyes and tightly closed lips.
“What?” she exclaimed after a moment.
“I think I had the strangest dream,” I said, “It was a long dream. I did not know who I was. I don’t remember how it started, but there was something about a rabbit. And there was a strange man. No…” I paused and slumped into a chair.
She watched me carefully, concern vividly visible in her eyes. She was still kneeling, patting the purring cat.
“I was hunted down by something dreadful. It was weird. But I think I was asleep for a long while. At least it felt like it. It…that thing, it was playing with me. It made me think that I was something or another. I was a detective. And it shot me. Then I was looking for someone. I don’t remember who it was. And I was on an island. Or…we were on an island. It didn’t make sense. There was a man in there, someone who did not have an identity, or he had one, but he lost it somehow. That thing…I don’t know what exactly it was, it was like a sleep-paralysis demon, you know? It took his identity, it kept him as some wandering lost soul on that island. But that man escaped. He was…I don’t know how to explain it, but there was a rabbit.”
I paused. Bridgette looked at me with more concern than ever. She stood and filled the cat’s bowl with dry food, and then she told me to stay still while she prepared some coffee.
At that moment, I realized that the alarm stopped ringing, and I remembered something rather peculiar. I did not have an alarm. It was in my head. Was I dreaming about the sound of an alarm ringing? I did not know.
She came back a few moments later with two mugs of coffee, black and unsweetened and sat across from me on the floor. That was one of the things I liked about Bridgette. She sat on the floor when she could have taken a seat. But down to earth as she was, she did not care for the comfort of things as much as others did.
“What about the rabbit?” she asked.
I thought I caught her twitch for a moment, but perhaps it was just a trick of the eye. I took a sip of the coffee that burnt my tongue. Ignoring the pain, I leaned back into my seat and continued, “That man could duplicate himself. I think he was looking for a way out. It seemed so real and surreal at the same time. There were things moving where they should not, and where they could not. There were things happening all the time. And he made me drink something strange…onions?” I paused and then looked at her as I took another sip of the coffee. I looked into the mug as if guided by some strange intuition and saw the ears of a rabbit printed onto its inside.
“You went down the rabbit’s hole?” She asked curiously. “But Blake, that is just what they were talking about in the news!”
“What?” I asked.
She sighed and held her face, “I told you, they declared a state of emergency. It’s a pandemic, man. Something is happening to people when they sleep. Some are just left in a frozen state, they cannot wake up.”
“How long have I been sleeping for?” I asked, feeling my heartbeats grow faster.
She shrugged, “I don’t know! I’ve been trying to reach you for four days now! You haven’t been to work all week. Even Martin asked about you. And every day fewer people showed up to work.”
“What do I do for work?” I asked her.
There was a moment of silence. She looked at me, “You know, we do the customer service thing.”
Something stirred inside of me. The cat glared at me, or perhaps it glared at Bridgette. I repeated, “But what do we do?”
“How does that matter right now?” She asked reluctantly, “We don’t even have work at this point. They are calling this disease the un.”
“The what?” I asked.
“The un! As in, the unawakening? Or something like that…” She said.
And the alarm rang. It did not ring from an alarm clock. It did not ring from a telephone. It rang in my head.
I looked into the mug, nearly emptied of coffee. There was a residue of something bright and florescent in there. And over the residue, the rabbit printed on the inside of the mug hopped into the bottom and vanished, leaving nothing but a black hole.
I dropped the mug immediately and looked at her. There was a sinister smile on her face. She tilted her head and stood up. Something was off. Neither her posture nor her dimensions seemed real. Her head tilted to one side, then to the other, then back again. She bared her teeth, yellow and sharp; her eyes were distorted, wide, uncanny, un…
Her fingers, reached my ankle as she was standing up; bent so as not to hit the ceiling that enlarged and shifted. She pulled on my ankle and dragged me. Everything was growing hazier and stiller. “You have much…much to tell me.” She…it, the un, the un, uttered.
To be continued...
Written by Amr Abbas.
Cover picture by Amr Abbas.