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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-09-24 22:56:12+00:00.
DAY?
I’ve been in and out of conscious control of my body for a while still, unsure of what’s happened for the last few hours or days. I’m in a constant dream state, somewhere between awake and asleep on the permanent edge of night. Everything around me is so vivid, and the horrible things that have been lurking around the subjects have started acknowledging me when I observe. I worry that they may turn their wrath to me, and it’s time to enact my plan before it’s too late. I believe at this point we’re thirty days in.
I… I had a memory while I was paralyzed at one point, body shutting me out of control while my mind told me anything to keep me busy. I could see my mother, gaunt face staring at me with wide, unknowing eyes that were in the throes of insomnia, just like I was now. I remembered our last moments.
Her symptoms came on slow at first, just the occasional sleeplessness here and there, nothing too bad. Over the next few weeks it began to fill more nights, staying up even after taking the strongest sleeping pill her doctor could prescribe. It wasn’t getting her anywhere though, and soon enough she was getting maybe… maybe five hours of sleep a week.
Soon, not long after her sleep dropped off under twenty hours a week, she started having the hallucinations. She kept telling me that she could see my father, that he was screaming at her, berating her again for something beyond her control. That was just another Tuesday night at home growing up, seeing the old fuck get drunk in front of the television until he was ready to take out his frustrations. When he finally died, I was thirteen, and I don’t think I had ever seen mom more content with life. After a few weeks, her bruises were finally healed, and she was practically glowing with energy to make things better for both of us.
She only had four more good years after that before all of this happened. The hallucinations got worse, with paranoia becoming a major part of it. She swore that there were shadows watching her from every corner, waiting for her to go to sleep so they could take her body for their own. Soon, she refused to turn lights off in the house, having me install the brightest bulbs I could to try and keep them at bay. I did it, of course, because what else am I supposed to do for my mother while she’s staying awake up until her final hour? I could at least humor her and put her mind at ease a little. Not that she knew I was her son at this point, constantly asking me who let me in or confusing me for her older brother at some points.
Finally she had this like… moment of lucidness. She actually spoke to me like I was her son again, not some stranger in her home.
“Mikey, I want you. to end this.” She said to me one night as we sat watching Jeopardy. She always loved Trebek, and there wasn’t a single night we missed out on watching. We had made it a game for the longest time between ourselves, seeing who could outscore the other. She didn’t know what was going on anymore, but I was hoping it was something that could give her peace in the middle of it all. I was surprised, not expecting her to even talk other than babbling gibberish at this point. “You don’t deserve to go through this. Nobody does.”
”Mama, what are you talking about? I’m taking care of you until it’s done.” I said, looking over at her and expecting sanity to break again at any moment. The solemn stare she gave me let me know that she was one hundred percent in control right now, completely sane and sober to a fault.
”We both know this is as bad for you as it is for me. I want you to let me go on my own terms, Mikey.” She said, tears in her eyes as she kept contact with me. “I don’t care how you do it just… just make it quick for me. Please. I can still see things and I can’t take it much longer.
”Okay. Okay, mama.” I was sobbing now, nodding that I would help her. I don’t know what else I was supposed to say, but her speaking to me like that again, after the weeks of nothing but screaming and terror we had been through, let me know that she was right. She knew when it was time, and she knew that prolonging this only made it worse.
It wasn’t something I could just… do. Days passed while I grappled with it, the morality aspect and if I could even do it. This was my mother, the woman who raised me and protected me all those years, taking the brunt of my father’s anger and rage. How could I repay her by killing her? Every time I think of her, all I could remember was what she told me, even until the end. Every time something new ran us down, every time our situation went straight to shit for the umpteenth time, through all the beatings from dad, through being homeless for weeks just to escape him, all the tears I cried not knowing what was going on, afraid he would come back any moment to beat us again. Those same words, “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you, even when you don’t.”
I waited until she had taken one of her doses to attempt a little sleep, watching her doze off into a restless nap. That was when I did it. Taking one of our couch pillows, a heavy, fabric woven throw with feather stuffing she refused to throw out, I put it over her face, pressing down with all my weight as I looked away, tears stinging in my eyes. She struggled for a minute, body fighting back instinctually to claw at life. I pushed down harder, beginning to match her muffled screams from under the pillow with my own long, dreadful wails.
Finally… she was still. It was gradual, movements beginning to slow, becoming smaller, weaker as she lost oxygen. Finally, she was sleeping, eternally, safe from the hell her brain was putting her through here.
I told the doctors I found her like this, putting the pillow under her head so she looked like she had just drifted off. Considering her condition, they didn’t bother with an autopsy so I was in the clear. A secret I would keep until death, when I would be able to apologize to my mother personally.
This was much earlier than I had planned to do it though. Over the past few days of slipping sanity, I could hear her muffled screams coming in clearer, the same sounds as her last breaths. Before long, she was visible, standing right there near me, staring me down.
I’ve tried to keep ignoring her, making my way around the facility to check on the others. By all accounts, the only ones who should still be alive are myself, Taryn, and Murray. The others are all far beyond the point of death, still somehow living and functioning. One had taken to wandering the facility, making finger guns at various specters and causing viscera to fly from their bodies. He got the same treatment in turn though, with the wounds he was suffering now something akin to shotgun blasts. Much of his body was shredded, and there was a bone splintering out of his hip, causing him to limp and walk with a stagger through the hallways.
Somehow I haven’t gone noseblind from the intense smells scattered through the facility, though they’ve begun to mesh together as things get worse. The subject quarters smelled of excrement and death, while our quarters were filled with the stench of burning flesh, cooking over an intense fire with the smell of burning tires to accent it. I was constantly paranoid there was a gas leak somewhere, thinking we would all go up in flames at any moment.
Taryn has been having more moments of clarity lately, and though we’ve both been going through dissociative episodes, we have been able to talk and try to theorize what the hell is going on. In our deductions, we’ve come up with a few ideas that, in hindsight, should have been massive red flags.
First, I had no part in the subject selection, and she says she didn’t either. Doubt Philip had any kind of say, either. Now, considering the lack of sleep beforehand for subject One, and the relative similarity of all five subjects, which we didn’t see until arriving and at a point of no going back, there were far too many inconsistencies to pull off the experiment in the first place. That’s what leads us to our second belief.
We’re all subjects. This one was obvious at this point, but they were the preliminary trial, while we were the main event. We got to see everything happening to them, observe it, then see it all happen to us in real time. Where we’re split is on what the purpose is. Nothing adds up to a typical experiment, and whoever is pulling the strings seemingly is just throwing shit at the fan to see how it splatters on the wall behind. Then Murray entered the conversation, giving us a whole new view.
He was a former intelligence officer, worked in a lot of espionage stuff before going into the private security sector. From everything he had seen here, he suggested we were guinea pigs for the gas. Some new kind of weapon, meant to possibly take out enemy strongholds from the inside, making them turn against their own allies as the paranoia takes hold. As much as I hate to say it, it makes the most sense. We go in trying to do some good, trying to find cures for sleeplessness and diseases like mine, only to become a weapon test for someone. Doubt we’ll be the last.
We turned our attention to the next issue at hand- the phantoms. We could all see them at this point. The students, the sewn together girls, the drowned family, rabies patients… and the limbs. Nothing but mountains of limbs filling the space around Five. Mur...
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