This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DarkPlaces on 2024-09-07 06:10:49+00:00.
I was having a dream much like any other I’d had before. There was some loosely strung-together plot, apparent only in retrospect—somewhere I had to be, an object of my pursuit that seemed to elude and taunt me. I moved forward without understanding why. There were people around me, and who those people were changed without warning, and sometimes I was no longer acting but instead watching myself act as if viewing some abstract and esoteric film. That all changed when I found his wallet.
It was brown leather. Worn and scuffed from many years of going into back pockets, then back out, from being tossed on the counter when he got home, from being sat on. It was sitting in a puddle under a bridge I did not recognize and could not find again if I needed to. I picked it up and turned my head, looking for whomever it could belong to; noticing, only then, that I was alone. The faceless and shifting and impermanent throng of dream travelers was no longer with me. It was gray January and gentle rain fell everywhere except under the cover of the bridge and the wallet was damp with cold and I was alone holding it.
There was money inside the wallet—red and blue bills with faces on them that I did not recognize. Strange, nonsense denominations: a six note, a thirty, one thousand units of whatever currency this was. My instincts told me to take some. Just one of those dream thoughts you have no control over. I stuffed a few bills in my side pocket. I remember a moment of pause as I realized I was wearing an old pair of cargo pants that, in reality, are sitting in the back corner of my closet, unthought of for some time. His ID was in the front flap behind a thin plastic film. His name was Harold Heaying-Harris and he was smiling like he knew something. Something about me. I decided I didn’t want the wallet and dropped it in the puddle where I’d found it.
Strange dreams often stay with you for a few moments upon waking. At least that’s how it is for me. Usually I come back with only a few pieces. I lay in bed, hesitant to move or change anything, scared that motion will draw me further into the waking world. All I ever want is to go back to sleep. I live my days in anticipation of that moment. Climbing into bed, pulling the covers up until they cover my mouth and my nose, breathing my own exhales. The way your body eventually starts to dissolve. You feel heavy, half-paralyzed; there’s a comforting warmth as your stomach goes up and down with each breath, drawn autonomically.
Laying there, trying to preserve my comfort. That’s usually when other pieces of the dream return. That night—it was still dark, somewhere in the quiet moments preceding twilight—I lay thinking about where I’d just been. Somewhere familiar in many ways, the dark evergreens, the gunmetal sky, but not anywhere I’d ever actually been. Likely not a place that truly exists, I thought, just a creation of my mind. I remembered the rain. How cold it had been. I thought about the puddle, and suddenly I remembered the wallet. The strange bills. Harold’s picture. I could see it so vividly. Could see his name. I rolled over in my bed to face the window. It’s always been my theory that if you want to fall back into the dream you’ve just woken from, your best bet is to stay in the same position. Don’t move a muscle. Close your eyes and let yourself drift back to the place you just left. I imagine it has something to do with blood pooling in certain areas of the brain. Our thoughts occupy physical space inside our head. The things our imaginations conjure are not entirely intangible. A lot of people don’t get that.
I had no desire to go back into that dream. I feared it. So I turned over, hoping that would help. Icy rain pelted my window in wind-driven bursts. Every time I closed my eyes my thoughts returned to the dream—walking in a crowd, pursuing some undefined thing that was just beyond my ability to recall. Finding the wallet. Harold Heaying-Harris.
I sat up in bed. I have enough experience falling in and out of the same nightmare to know how this was going to go unless I did something to stop it. What you need in those moments is an interruption. Get out of bed. Go to the bathroom, get some water, walk around for a minute. Anything that functions as a reset. After making the circuit—bathroom, kitchen, back to bed—I decided to check my phone. I don’t remember seeing what time it was. I don’t even remember opening Google and typing in his name. I suppose I thought it might help to quickly confirm what I already knew, that Harold was not a real person, that he was simply a thought inside my head.
What I found was his blog. It was a Wordpress site. They’re easy to identify—the one I built to post my writing years ago had a similar layout. Nearly one hundred entries, each with his name at the top. There was a small picture next to his name in the byline. The same picture from his wallet. The same smile. I turned on my bedroom light and waited for sunrise.
Harold appeared to be some sort of lifestyle blogger. That’s as close as I can get to describing what I found. He lived in a city called Khadash and wrote about his days there. I skimmed the entries. Most were boring. “Today I went for a lovely walk down 21st street. The leaves are beginning to turn. If you’re looking for a delicious cup of coffee in the area, consider…” Stuff like that. A few, though, were strange. I began to wonder if there might be something wrong with Harold, some sort of condition, and if this blog might best be viewed as almost voyeuristic insight into the mental degradation of a sick man. “Earlier today, in the gray hours of the morning, all the birds fell out of the sky in unison. Did anyone else see this?” I was ready to stop reading until I stumbled upon that line. I kept scrolling to see if it was an outlier. I found others. This one, buried at the end of a long entry about the best thrift stores located on the sleepy main strip: “I noticed the cashier from Second Chances following me to each subsequent store I visited. He was hiding behind a clothing rack in Exchange. I found him sitting alone in a locked dressing room in Moonlight Jewels. I’m worried he may have followed me home. I took a much longer and less straightforward path back to my place, but couldn’t shake the feeling someone was behind me, lagging just far enough back to stay out of sight. He made me very uncomfortable and I don’t think I will be returning to the store, despite their excellent selection of second-hand cutlery and china.”
Each post contained a link to a map which traced his path. Places where he stopped, like restaurants and bakeries and shops, were noted. I zoomed out from one of these maps, curious to see where in the world Khadash was located, and was disturbed to note it was in my state, not far from my home. I’d nearly driven past it many times. It was north and west of me, close to the Pacific Ocean. Strange that I’d never heard the name before. I checked the map on my phone, comparing it to Harold’s. I zoomed closer and closer, but where Khadash was on his map was nothing but empty green space on mine. A featureless spot in the woods with no roads and no shops and nothing else of note except for a small lake. The lake was on both maps. I found an entry of Harold’s which involved it.
“Walked to Kressman Lake today. There’s a bench at the edge of the water where I like to sit. You’ll find a lot of flat stones at the base of this bench, perfect for skipping across the glass-like surface of the water. It’s a good place to spend an afternoon when you need to clear your mind. I worry that he will return soon. I see him in my dreams.”
The lake—Kressman, to him, unnamed, to me—was a 90-minute drive from my house. I had no plans for the day, nothing to stop me from filling it with three hours of driving, round trip, plus however much time I would spend at the lake. Doing what? Looking for him? I didn’t stop to think. I opened my closet and packed a few changes of clothes, quickly, feeling an urgent need to get on my way. Logic would necessitate that all I needed were the clothes on my back for such a trip. That makes me wonder if I knew even then what I was going to find. If I knew, somewhere in that part of my brain which can’t speak—not out loud, at least—where I was going.
The first hour of the drive was navigating from my residential street to the highway and then heading due north. It was the same boring, uneventful drive I’d done hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I chased bright blue skies up the round of the Earth. It was an unseasonably beautiful day; blue and gold with viciously cold wind. The weather lifted my spirits. It was easy to forget what I was doing. The mountain was on my right, slowly falling behind me with each mile I drove. I watched its white, snowy bulk travel from my passenger window to the rear window to the rear windshield, before vanishing altogether. It was time to head west.
Two miles further along the road I’d exited to, a nondescript state road with numbers for a name, my GPS commanded me to turn right onto an unnamed, unmarked dirt road that carved a path through gray, barren trees. I could see that it went straight for a few hundred feet before curving, out of sight, to the left. The road was wide enough for one car, and full of dips that shook me from side to side as I passed over them, going no more than ten miles per hour. Somewhere along this road—which connected with so many ...
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