Into the Darkness: Chapter Three - Previous Chapter
Chapter 4
Sleep claimed Damien gently at first, like the hand of an old friend.
He slumped sideways on the damp park bench beneath the skeletal elms, the rain tapering into a whisper, the world softening around him. The cold no longer bit. The ache in his ribs receded. His mind slipped down through the folds of reality and into the dream—a place that felt, at last, merciful.
He awoke to sunlight.
It poured through gauzy curtains, turning dust motes into drifting gold. The air carried the scent of summer—honeysuckle and linen and the faint sweetness of something baking. Somewhere, water trickled in a fountain. The world was impossibly still, as if time had stopped to watch him wake.
He was home. Not the grimy flat or the bench beneath the trees—no, a home he somehow recognised without memory. Wooden floors gleamed with polish, sunlight pooling on them like honey. His reflection flickered in a framed mirror: clean-shaven, bright-eyed, younger. He laughed softly to himself, a sound he hadn’t made in years.
“Good morning,” came a voice.
She stood in the doorway, her hair falling like spilled ink over her shoulders, her dress pale as dawn. Her smile was effortless, intimate—the kind that feels earned through a lifetime of shared mornings. Her eyes caught the light and held it.
“Good morning, my love,” he answered without thinking.
The days came and went, or perhaps years did. In dreams, time is a trickster.
He worked in the garden, she read on the porch, the world reduced to rhythm and peace. They made love beneath linen sheets while rain pattered softly against the glass. He memorised the curve of her collarbone, the small sound she made when he brushed his thumb over her lips. They danced in the kitchen, barefoot, the gramophone humming out some half-remembered waltz. Sometimes he wept from joy, and she held him, whispering that everything cruel and lonely had been worth it to reach this—their forever.
He believed her.
But little things began to change.
A chill crept into the corners of the house. The light dimmed earlier each day. The roses in the garden, once blooming violently red, began to lose their colour, fading into a bruised gray. When he touched them, petals crumbled to dust. He laughed it off. Dreams do that, he thought. They bend. They shift.
Her laughter began to sound different too—slightly delayed, slightly hollow.
At dinner one night, she served a roast that bled onto the plate even after it was cooked. When he looked again, it was fine. Perfect. She asked if he was all right. He nodded, but the air around her seemed…thicker. When he reached across the table, his hand met hers and found it cool, almost damp, as if she’d just come in from the rain.
Time stretched further. Decades, maybe. Their faces in photographs never changed, though the walls behind them grew discoloured, speckled with creeping mold. The curtains hung heavier, the air metallic, full of dust that tasted faintly of iron.
He began to dream within the dream—nightmares of the sea, of drowning, of a voice beneath the waves calling his name. When he woke, she would be beside him, smiling as always, though her teeth now seemed too sharp in the dim light. “You were crying,” she’d whisper, brushing his hair back. “But you’re home now, my darling. You’ll never leave again.”
The words should have comforted him. Instead, they rooted in his chest like ivy.
Then came the wedding again. The scene replayed, warped. Guests without faces, their laughter muffled by gauze. The priest’s words slurred into wet sounds. His bride’s veil fluttered though there was no wind. As he slid the ring onto her finger, her hand split—just a little, at the seam of her knuckles—and black water welled up, trickling down her wrist. She didn’t flinch. She smiled wider, a grotesque parody of the joy he once knew.
“Forever,” she whispered.
The world began to peel. The sky sagged like a soaked canvas. The grass underfoot turned to ash. He tried to run, but the ground writhed like a living thing. His house collapsed inward, swallowing itself, the walls pulsing, breathing, exhaling clouds of mildew and rot. He called her name, but her voice came from everywhere at once, layered and wrong: You promised, Damien. You said you’d stay.
He stumbled into the parlour. The gramophone was still spinning, the needle scratching endlessly against the vinyl, playing nothing but static. On the sofa sat his wife—or what was left of her. Her skin was thin as paper, her eyes wide and white as porcelain. She smiled, that same eternal smile, as her jaw unhinged slightly and whispered from the dark pit of her throat:
Wake up, my love.
He gasped—his body jerked upright on the bench, or perhaps it only felt that way. The world convulsed. His spine arched, every muscle drawn taut as if pulled by invisible strings. A violent shock ripped through him—white-hot, blinding—leaving his mind ringing with light.
Somewhere far away, a voice shouted.
“Charging—clear!”
Then came another surge, and Damien’s body seized again, breath tearing from his throat. He tried to cry out, but the sound was lost beneath the low drone of sirens and the hum of the current coursing through his chest.
“Come on, stay with me—one more time—clear!”
The words drifted to him through water, muffled, meaningless. He couldn’t tell if they were inside his head or leaking through from another world. His vision swam with colours that didn’t exist—violet lightning, pale green shadows—and then, as suddenly as it began, the pain stopped.
Silence.
He blinked. The park was gone. The cold, the sirens, the shouting—all dissolved into the soft warmth of sunlight. He was home again.
His wife lay beside him, smiling, her hair a dark spill across the pillow. The air smelled of lilacs, faint and sweet, though underneath lingered something metallic, almost burnt.
“Darling,” she whispered, brushing his cheek with fingers too cold to be living. “You came back to me.”
Her body pressed against his, light at first, then crushing. Her lips found his, and he tasted damp earth and iron. When he tried to pull away, she only smiled wider.
“You were gone too long,” she murmured. “But it’s all right now.”
Another flash—another jolt of light—and suddenly they were elsewhere. The room was bright, white, humming. No, not a room—a shop. They were standing before a mirror. His wife held up a scrap of crimson lace, pressing it against her hollow chest, the fabric almost luminous against her colourless skin.
“What do you think?” she asked, her voice lilting, the skin of her jaw tightening as she smiled. “Do you like it, love?”
People in the store had stopped to stare. Their faces were pale, horrified, as if they could see what he couldn’t—or refused to. Somewhere in the distance, a voice called again:
“Pulse is back—we’ve got him!”
The lights in the shop flickered. The mirror shimmered like water. For an instant, he saw himself reflected not as a man shopping with his wife, but lying on the park bench, rain pooling around him, his shirt torn open, electrodes clinging to his chest. A hand pressed to his throat. A flashlight beam cutting through the dark.
Then his wife’s reflection shifted. Her smile split too wide. Her eyes blackened. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Not again.”
Her hand reached toward him, and the air crackled with another unseen charge.
“Clear!” someone shouted.
The sirens faded into a hum, folding into the rhythmic beeping of machines.
Light—white and sharp—poured down from somewhere above him. The air stank of antiseptic and ozone, the residue of the storm still clinging to his lungs. Damien’s eyes fluttered open. He was no longer on the bench.
He was in a hospital bed, the world around him unnervingly still. Tubes ran from his arm into clear bags that swayed like strange jellyfish. A monitor blinked beside him, the green line rising and falling with mechanical precision. He blinked again, trying to steady his breath.
A nurse passed by the doorway, face haloed by the fluorescent light. Another stood at the foot of his bed, whispering to someone unseen. They spoke in calm tones, but the words tangled in his ears, half-swallowed by static.
“…vitals stable…”
“…cardiac arrest, no neurological damage…”
“…tests all clear, nothing abnormal…”
Nothing abnormal.
He wanted to laugh. He had died. He knew he had died. His heart had been struck like a drum by lightning. Yet here he was, whole, clean, the faint scent of lilacs still clinging to his skin.
A doctor appeared beside him—a man whose smile seemed kind but too measured, too symmetrical. His eyes were the colour of candle soot. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Beckett,” he said softly. “Your heart stopped for nearly six minutes. But you came back. Most don’t.”
Damien nodded weakly, his throat dry. “I… saw her,” he managed. “My wife.”
The doctor’s expression didn’t change. “Of course you did. Many patients report vivid experiences during clinical death. Dreams, memories, hallucinations. It’s the mind trying to keep hold of itself.”
The man’s voice was melodic—almost soothing—but it carried a rhythm that felt too deliberate, like a song played backward. Damien watched his mouth move and thought he saw, for an instant, the faint flicker of something beneath the skin, like a shadow trying to crawl free.
He blinked, and the doctor was gone.
Only the hum of the machines remained, their rhythm strangely uneven now, echoing the thud of his heart. He stared at the ceiling, where the fluorescent lights buzzed faintly. The hum began to change pitch, becoming almost a murmur—soft, whispering syllables that slid just beyond comprehension.
“Rest now,” the whisper seemed to say. “You’ve been wandering too long.”
Damien turned his head, and there she was again—his wife—sitting by his bedside, smiling that patient, terrible smile. Her hair hung damp around her shoulders, and her hand rested lightly on his.
“You shouldn’t have left me,” she whispered. “He doesn’t like when they wake up.”
Her eyes flicked toward the door.
Damien followed her gaze. The doctor stood there again, only his shape was wrong this time—taller, elongated somehow, the shadow he cast bending at strange angles. For a moment, his outline seemed to ripple, and Damien thought he saw something animal within it: the curve of a tusk, the glint of a wet snout, the faint, deliberate blink of too many eyes.
Then the lights flickered, and he was just a man again.
“I’m glad to see you’re resting,” the doctor said, his smile fixed. “You’ll need to stay under observation tonight. We’ll keep the sedatives mild.”
He placed a hand on Damien’s chest, just over his heart, and Damien felt a pulse—not his own, but another heartbeat, slow and immense, echoing beneath his ribs.
Sleep pulled at him again.
He tried to fight it, tried to sit up, but his limbs were leaden. His wife leaned closer, her face tender now, familiar. “Shh,” she breathed. “It’s all right. We’ll be together soon. He’ll make sure of it.”
Her words slid into his ear like a warm breath.
The lights dimmed. The machines slowed. The doctor’s silhouette lingered at the edge of the bed, his head slightly bowed. For a moment, Damien thought he saw a ripple beneath the doctor’s coat—a twitch of something vast and unseen, the suggestion of fur, of bone, of an ancient creature wearing the memory of a man.
Then darkness took him again.
The first thing Damien noticed was the silence. Not the soft, peaceful kind, but the kind that hums beneath the skin—thick, absolute, like the air inside a sealed tomb.
He woke standing in a corridor, barefoot on tiles that glistened as though they were wet. The walls stretched upward forever, sterile white at first, but streaked with something darker the further his eyes wandered. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and rot.
He was still in the hospital—or some version of it. Machines blinked at intervals, their screens filled with lines that didn’t correspond to anything living. Down one hall, a heart monitor flatlined and never stopped.
“Hello?” His voice echoed, dull and endless. “Is anyone there?”
Something moved behind him.
He turned—and saw her. His wife. Or what was left of her. She stood a few feet away, her wedding dress torn and gray, clinging to her bones like wet paper. Her skull grinned beneath the veil, a mockery of tenderness. And yet, when he took a step, she followed—jerking forward, head tilted, as though drawn by an invisible leash tied between their hearts.
“Stay back,” he whispered.
She didn’t. She only tilted her head further, the bones of her neck creaking faintly. A sound escaped her, low and affectionate, almost like the sigh of a dog that has found its master.
He started walking. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to move. Corridors split and rejoined in ways that defied sense—each turn leading him deeper into a place that no architect could have imagined. The light grew dimmer, shifting from cold fluorescence to the amber flicker of lamps. Shadows leaned too close, and his reflection in the windows lagged behind by a breath.
He passed a nurses’ station. Behind the counter, papers lay scattered and water-stained. On the wall hung a series of portraits—old, sepia-toned photographs in gilded frames. At first they seemed ordinary: a man in a physician’s coat, standing proudly beside a hospital bed; another, a woman holding a clipboard. But as Damien stepped closer, the faces blurred.
He blinked.
The man in the white coat now had the body of a bear—massive, fur matted and coarse. The woman’s face had stretched into the leathery snout of an elephant. Another portrait revealed a creature with the ears of a rhinoceros, the tail of an ox, and the hooked, striped paws of a tiger. Each set of eyes gleamed with the same dark intelligence—the same unbearable hunger.
Damien staggered backward.
“What is this?” he whispered. “What is happening?”
A voice answered, soft and close to his ear.
“You’re inside what remains when the body forgets to wake.”
He spun around, but no one was there. Only the whisper of movement from his skeletal companion. Her bony fingers reached out, brushed his arm. Her touch was warm now, incongruously tender. He flinched but didn’t pull away.
The corridor ahead widened into a vast ward. Dozens of beds lined the walls, each occupied. People lay still beneath yellowed sheets. Some breathed shallowly; others were waxen, motionless, their mouths open as though mid-scream. A few murmured softly in their sleep, repeating fragments of the same plea:
“Please wake me… please…”
Damien stepped closer to one of them—a young man, his eyes moving rapidly beneath his lids. The monitor beside the bed blinked rhythmically. But the pattern on the screen was wrong—symbols instead of numbers, black spirals spinning endlessly.
The lights flickered.
When they steadied, the patients were gone. In their place were shadows—blurry, shifting shapes that writhed across the beds like ink in water. The air grew hot, humid, breathing. Somewhere beneath it all came a low, steady sound—something feeding, a wet, rhythmic swallowing.
Damien clapped his hands to his ears. “Stop it!” he shouted.
The sound did not stop. It laughed.
The walls pulsed as though alive, the portraits rippling with motion. From within the frames, the creatures began to move. The bear-body stirred, the elephant head tilted, the tiger paws scraped at the gilt edges of the frame. All of them turned to look at him at once—their many eyes focusing with dreadful serenity.
“You should be grateful,” said the same voice from before, though now it filled the whole ward. “Few mortals get to live in the warmth of their own dreams forever. Most simply… fade.”
“Who are you?” Damien demanded, though his voice trembled.
A pause. Then, softly, “I am the one who eats what you dream.”
The lights died.
Something immense moved in the dark—slow, deliberate, every footstep a thud that rattled the glass in the windows. Damien could smell it now: musk and incense and blood. When it spoke again, its voice came from everywhere at once—above him, behind him, inside him.
“Sleep, Damien. You’ve fed me well.”
He ran. The corridor folded in on itself, the walls melting into a dim infinity. Behind him, the rattle of bones followed faithfully—his wife, his tether, his witness. Ahead, the hospital sign flickered one final time before dissolving into nothing.
And as he fled, somewhere deep in the architecture of that place, the Baku smiled—its many faces watching, its tusked mouth glistening with the sweetness of another dream devoured.
The lights in the corridor flickered like the flutter of dying moths. Damien stumbled toward the portraits lining the wall, each frame trembling faintly as if something inside were trying to breathe.
At first, the paintings were distinct. A man with the body of a bear. A woman whose face stretched into the long snout of an elephant. Another with the pale, staring eyes of a rhinoceros. Each figure bled into the next, their edges running like ink in rain.
Then, with a sound like paper tearing, they began to merge.
The glass shattered outward, drifting through the air in slow, weightless arcs. When Damien lifted his gaze, the many portraits had become one.
A single entity filled the vast gilded frame.
It had the head of an elephant, the tusks dark and curved, its trunk coiling and uncurling with heavy, deliberate grace. Its body was that of a bear, fur black as midnight and slick with some oily sheen. From its sockets gleamed the eyes of a rhinoceros, dull gray and ancient, heavy with unblinking judgment. Its legs were those of a tiger, striped in bands of shadow and gold, ending in paws that could crush stone. And behind it swayed the tail of an ox, twitching idly, tipped with coarse, bristling hair.
The creature’s proportions were impossible. It seemed to stand both within the frame and beyond it, its vast form pressing at the walls of the corridor. The air grew thick, vibrating faintly, humming in his bones.
Damien staggered backward. “What are you?” he whispered.
The thing’s great head turned, and the tusks scraped against the edges of the frame with a hollow groan. When it spoke, the sound did not come from its mouth but from the walls themselves—a low, resonant voice that rippled through the air like the memory of thunder.
“You already know my name.”
And somehow, horribly, he did. The word surfaced in his mind like a long-buried seed breaking through the soil.
Baku.
The name made the air shiver.
He remembered the tales now—half-heard stories he’d once heard. The Baku, eater of dreams. The merciful spirit who could devour nightmares and leave peace behind—if called upon correctly. But if summoned carelessly, it did not stop with the bad dreams. It ate everything.
“You… you’re not supposed to be real,” Damien stammered.
The Baku tilted its great head, the trunk curling, its voice a low rumble that felt like it came from inside his own skull. “Everything dreamed is real somewhere.”
Its form flickered; the walls bent around it. Behind Damien, his skeletal wife hissed and clawed at the air, the tether between them drawn taut. The creature’s gray eyes shifted toward her.
“She is what remains of your longing,” it said. “A feast in herself.”
“I want to wake up,” Damien whispered.
The Baku’s tail swept across the floor, the sound like a whip cutting through air. “Then give me the dream.”
Damien blinked through the dizziness. “Give you…?”
“Yes,” it said, voice deep and patient. “Give me what you made.”
And then—through the fog of fear—something surfaced. A charm. A line he’d read once, tucked in a margin beside an illustration of the same impossible creature. The phrase to banish it, if one dared.
He swallowed hard. “Baku-san…”
The air trembled. The creature’s ears twitched.
“I give you this dream.”
A long pause. Then the corridor itself seemed to inhale.
He said it again, louder, his voice shaking: “Baku-san, I give you this dream!”
The skeletal wife shrieked—a piercing, keening sound—and her bones cracked, smoke pouring from her hollow eyes. The Baku’s form flickered like a broken reflection, shifting between beast and shadow.
For the third time, Damien screamed the words, his throat raw, his voice echoing through both worlds:
“BAKU-SAN, I GIVE YOU THIS DREAM!”
The world convulsed.
The Baku’s trunk unfurled, stretching outward like a serpent. Its mouth split open—not jaws of flesh, but an endless void swirling with starlight and shadow. It inhaled, and the corridor collapsed into itself. The portraits, the walls, the beds—all torn away, devoured by the black maw. The skeletal wife was the last to go, her scream fading into silence as she was drawn into the darkness.
And through that collapsing chaos, Damien heard it—the distant rhythm of life:
“Charging—clear!”
“Again—clear!”
“Come on, stay with me!”
A surge of electricity tore through his chest. His body arched. The dream and the hospital overlapped in a single flash of blinding white.
Then Baku roared, its shape unravelling, tusks and tail dissolving into the storm of light.
And Damien screamed.
He sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, every muscle convulsing. The heart monitor exploded into static. Nurses screamed; a doctor shouted for restraints. The air itself cracked and bled shadow.
From his body, tendrils of pure blackness erupted—snapping and writhing, coiling around him like living things. They smashed the monitors, shattered the windows, sent shards of glass spinning across the room. Alarms blared, metal twisted, lights burst overhead.
The tendrils closed around him, thickening, tightening into a cocoon that pulsed faintly with his heartbeat. Through the maelstrom of motion and sound, Damien’s scream broke into ragged laughter.
Outside, the hospital lights flickered once—then steadied.
Inside the cocoon, all was silent.
And somewhere deep within, in the darkness behind Damien’s eyes, a whisper stirred like a breath:
“Dreams are never truly given. They are only exchanged.”
Chapter 4
Sleep claimed Damien gently at first, like the hand of an old friend.
He slumped sideways on the damp park bench beneath the skeletal elms, the rain tapering into a whisper, the world softening around him. The cold no longer bit. The ache in his ribs receded. His mind slipped down through the folds of reality and into the dream—a place that felt, at last, merciful.
He awoke to sunlight.
It poured through gauzy curtains, turning dust motes into drifting gold. The air carried the scent of summer—honeysuckle and linen and the faint sweetness of something baking. Somewhere, water trickled in a fountain. The world was impossibly still, as if time had stopped to watch him wake.
He was home. Not the grimy flat or the bench beneath the trees—no, a home he somehow recognised without memory. Wooden floors gleamed with polish, sunlight pooling on them like honey. His reflection flickered in a framed mirror: clean-shaven, bright-eyed, younger. He laughed softly to himself, a sound he hadn’t made in years.
“Good morning,” came a voice.
She stood in the doorway, her hair falling like spilled ink over her shoulders, her dress pale as dawn. Her smile was effortless, intimate—the kind that feels earned through a lifetime of shared mornings. Her eyes caught the light and held it.
“Good morning, my love,” he answered without thinking.
The days came and went, or perhaps years did. In dreams, time is a trickster.
He worked in the garden, she read on the porch, the world reduced to rhythm and peace. They made love beneath linen sheets while rain pattered softly against the glass. He memorised the curve of her collarbone, the small sound she made when he brushed his thumb over her lips. They danced in the kitchen, barefoot, the gramophone humming out some half-remembered waltz. Sometimes he wept from joy, and she held him, whispering that everything cruel and lonely had been worth it to reach this—their forever.
He believed her.
But little things began to change.
A chill crept into the corners of the house. The light dimmed earlier each day. The roses in the garden, once blooming violently red, began to lose their colour, fading into a bruised gray. When he touched them, petals crumbled to dust. He laughed it off. Dreams do that, he thought. They bend. They shift.
Her laughter began to sound different too—slightly delayed, slightly hollow.
At dinner one night, she served a roast that bled onto the plate even after it was cooked. When he looked again, it was fine. Perfect. She asked if he was all right. He nodded, but the air around her seemed…thicker. When he reached across the table, his hand met hers and found it cool, almost damp, as if she’d just come in from the rain.
Time stretched further. Decades, maybe. Their faces in photographs never changed, though the walls behind them grew discoloured, speckled with creeping mold. The curtains hung heavier, the air metallic, full of dust that tasted faintly of iron.
He began to dream within the dream—nightmares of the sea, of drowning, of a voice beneath the waves calling his name. When he woke, she would be beside him, smiling as always, though her teeth now seemed too sharp in the dim light. “You were crying,” she’d whisper, brushing his hair back. “But you’re home now, my darling. You’ll never leave again.”
The words should have comforted him. Instead, they rooted in his chest like ivy.
Then came the wedding again. The scene replayed, warped. Guests without faces, their laughter muffled by gauze. The priest’s words slurred into wet sounds. His bride’s veil fluttered though there was no wind. As he slid the ring onto her finger, her hand split—just a little, at the seam of her knuckles—and black water welled up, trickling down her wrist. She didn’t flinch. She smiled wider, a grotesque parody of the joy he once knew.
“Forever,” she whispered.
The world began to peel. The sky sagged like a soaked canvas. The grass underfoot turned to ash. He tried to run, but the ground writhed like a living thing. His house collapsed inward, swallowing itself, the walls pulsing, breathing, exhaling clouds of mildew and rot. He called her name, but her voice came from everywhere at once, layered and wrong: You promised, Damien. You said you’d stay.
He stumbled into the parlour. The gramophone was still spinning, the needle scratching endlessly against the vinyl, playing nothing but static. On the sofa sat his wife—or what was left of her. Her skin was thin as paper, her eyes wide and white as porcelain. She smiled, that same eternal smile, as her jaw unhinged slightly and whispered from the dark pit of her throat:
Wake up, my love.
He gasped—his body jerked upright on the bench, or perhaps it only felt that way. The world convulsed. His spine arched, every muscle drawn taut as if pulled by invisible strings. A violent shock ripped through him—white-hot, blinding—leaving his mind ringing with light.
Somewhere far away, a voice shouted.
“Charging—clear!”
Then came another surge, and Damien’s body seized again, breath tearing from his throat. He tried to cry out, but the sound was lost beneath the low drone of sirens and the hum of the current coursing through his chest.
“Come on, stay with me—one more time—clear!”
The words drifted to him through water, muffled, meaningless. He couldn’t tell if they were inside his head or leaking through from another world. His vision swam with colours that didn’t exist—violet lightning, pale green shadows—and then, as suddenly as it began, the pain stopped.
Silence.
He blinked. The park was gone. The cold, the sirens, the shouting—all dissolved into the soft warmth of sunlight. He was home again.
His wife lay beside him, smiling, her hair a dark spill across the pillow. The air smelled of lilacs, faint and sweet, though underneath lingered something metallic, almost burnt.
“Darling,” she whispered, brushing his cheek with fingers too cold to be living. “You came back to me.”
Her body pressed against his, light at first, then crushing. Her lips found his, and he tasted damp earth and iron. When he tried to pull away, she only smiled wider.
“You were gone too long,” she murmured. “But it’s all right now.”
Another flash—another jolt of light—and suddenly they were elsewhere. The room was bright, white, humming. No, not a room—a shop. They were standing before a mirror. His wife held up a scrap of crimson lace, pressing it against her hollow chest, the fabric almost luminous against her colourless skin.
“What do you think?” she asked, her voice lilting, the skin of her jaw tightening as she smiled. “Do you like it, love?”
People in the store had stopped to stare. Their faces were pale, horrified, as if they could see what he couldn’t—or refused to. Somewhere in the distance, a voice called again:
“Pulse is back—we’ve got him!”
The lights in the shop flickered. The mirror shimmered like water. For an instant, he saw himself reflected not as a man shopping with his wife, but lying on the park bench, rain pooling around him, his shirt torn open, electrodes clinging to his chest. A hand pressed to his throat. A flashlight beam cutting through the dark.
Then his wife’s reflection shifted. Her smile split too wide. Her eyes blackened. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Not again.”
Her hand reached toward him, and the air crackled with another unseen charge.
“Clear!” someone shouted.
The sirens faded into a hum, folding into the rhythmic beeping of machines.
Light—white and sharp—poured down from somewhere above him. The air stank of antiseptic and ozone, the residue of the storm still clinging to his lungs. Damien’s eyes fluttered open. He was no longer on the bench.
He was in a hospital bed, the world around him unnervingly still. Tubes ran from his arm into clear bags that swayed like strange jellyfish. A monitor blinked beside him, the green line rising and falling with mechanical precision. He blinked again, trying to steady his breath.
A nurse passed by the doorway, face haloed by the fluorescent light. Another stood at the foot of his bed, whispering to someone unseen. They spoke in calm tones, but the words tangled in his ears, half-swallowed by static.
“…vitals stable…”
“…cardiac arrest, no neurological damage…”
“…tests all clear, nothing abnormal…”
Nothing abnormal.
He wanted to laugh. He had died. He knew he had died. His heart had been struck like a drum by lightning. Yet here he was, whole, clean, the faint scent of lilacs still clinging to his skin.
A doctor appeared beside him—a man whose smile seemed kind but too measured, too symmetrical. His eyes were the colour of candle soot. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Beckett,” he said softly. “Your heart stopped for nearly six minutes. But you came back. Most don’t.”
Damien nodded weakly, his throat dry. “I… saw her,” he managed. “My wife.”
The doctor’s expression didn’t change. “Of course you did. Many patients report vivid experiences during clinical death. Dreams, memories, hallucinations. It’s the mind trying to keep hold of itself.”
The man’s voice was melodic—almost soothing—but it carried a rhythm that felt too deliberate, like a song played backward. Damien watched his mouth move and thought he saw, for an instant, the faint flicker of something beneath the skin, like a shadow trying to crawl free.
He blinked, and the doctor was gone.
Only the hum of the machines remained, their rhythm strangely uneven now, echoing the thud of his heart. He stared at the ceiling, where the fluorescent lights buzzed faintly. The hum began to change pitch, becoming almost a murmur—soft, whispering syllables that slid just beyond comprehension.
“Rest now,” the whisper seemed to say. “You’ve been wandering too long.”
Damien turned his head, and there she was again—his wife—sitting by his bedside, smiling that patient, terrible smile. Her hair hung damp around her shoulders, and her hand rested lightly on his.
“You shouldn’t have left me,” she whispered. “He doesn’t like when they wake up.”
Her eyes flicked toward the door.
Damien followed her gaze. The doctor stood there again, only his shape was wrong this time—taller, elongated somehow, the shadow he cast bending at strange angles. For a moment, his outline seemed to ripple, and Damien thought he saw something animal within it: the curve of a tusk, the glint of a wet snout, the faint, deliberate blink of too many eyes.
Then the lights flickered, and he was just a man again.
“I’m glad to see you’re resting,” the doctor said, his smile fixed. “You’ll need to stay under observation tonight. We’ll keep the sedatives mild.”
He placed a hand on Damien’s chest, just over his heart, and Damien felt a pulse—not his own, but another heartbeat, slow and immense, echoing beneath his ribs.
Sleep pulled at him again.
He tried to fight it, tried to sit up, but his limbs were leaden. His wife leaned closer, her face tender now, familiar. “Shh,” she breathed. “It’s all right. We’ll be together soon. He’ll make sure of it.”
Her words slid into his ear like a warm breath.
The lights dimmed. The machines slowed. The doctor’s silhouette lingered at the edge of the bed, his head slightly bowed. For a moment, Damien thought he saw a ripple beneath the doctor’s coat—a twitch of something vast and unseen, the suggestion of fur, of bone, of an ancient creature wearing the memory of a man.
Then darkness took him again.
The first thing Damien noticed was the silence. Not the soft, peaceful kind, but the kind that hums beneath the skin—thick, absolute, like the air inside a sealed tomb.
He woke standing in a corridor, barefoot on tiles that glistened as though they were wet. The walls stretched upward forever, sterile white at first, but streaked with something darker the further his eyes wandered. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and rot.
He was still in the hospital—or some version of it. Machines blinked at intervals, their screens filled with lines that didn’t correspond to anything living. Down one hall, a heart monitor flatlined and never stopped.
“Hello?” His voice echoed, dull and endless. “Is anyone there?”
Something moved behind him.
He turned—and saw her. His wife. Or what was left of her. She stood a few feet away, her wedding dress torn and gray, clinging to her bones like wet paper. Her skull grinned beneath the veil, a mockery of tenderness. And yet, when he took a step, she followed—jerking forward, head tilted, as though drawn by an invisible leash tied between their hearts.
“Stay back,” he whispered.
She didn’t. She only tilted her head further, the bones of her neck creaking faintly. A sound escaped her, low and affectionate, almost like the sigh of a dog that has found its master.
He started walking. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to move. Corridors split and rejoined in ways that defied sense—each turn leading him deeper into a place that no architect could have imagined. The light grew dimmer, shifting from cold fluorescence to the amber flicker of lamps. Shadows leaned too close, and his reflection in the windows lagged behind by a breath.
He passed a nurses’ station. Behind the counter, papers lay scattered and water-stained. On the wall hung a series of portraits—old, sepia-toned photographs in gilded frames. At first they seemed ordinary: a man in a physician’s coat, standing proudly beside a hospital bed; another, a woman holding a clipboard. But as Damien stepped closer, the faces blurred.
He blinked.
The man in the white coat now had the body of a bear—massive, fur matted and coarse. The woman’s face had stretched into the leathery snout of an elephant. Another portrait revealed a creature with the ears of a rhinoceros, the tail of an ox, and the hooked, striped paws of a tiger. Each set of eyes gleamed with the same dark intelligence—the same unbearable hunger.
Damien staggered backward.
“What is this?” he whispered. “What is happening?”
A voice answered, soft and close to his ear.
“You’re inside what remains when the body forgets to wake.”
He spun around, but no one was there. Only the whisper of movement from his skeletal companion. Her bony fingers reached out, brushed his arm. Her touch was warm now, incongruously tender. He flinched but didn’t pull away.
The corridor ahead widened into a vast ward. Dozens of beds lined the walls, each occupied. People lay still beneath yellowed sheets. Some breathed shallowly; others were waxen, motionless, their mouths open as though mid-scream. A few murmured softly in their sleep, repeating fragments of the same plea:
“Please wake me… please…”
Damien stepped closer to one of them—a young man, his eyes moving rapidly beneath his lids. The monitor beside the bed blinked rhythmically. But the pattern on the screen was wrong—symbols instead of numbers, black spirals spinning endlessly.
The lights flickered.
When they steadied, the patients were gone. In their place were shadows—blurry, shifting shapes that writhed across the beds like ink in water. The air grew hot, humid, breathing. Somewhere beneath it all came a low, steady sound—something feeding, a wet, rhythmic swallowing.
Damien clapped his hands to his ears. “Stop it!” he shouted.
The sound did not stop. It laughed.
The walls pulsed as though alive, the portraits rippling with motion. From within the frames, the creatures began to move. The bear-body stirred, the elephant head tilted, the tiger paws scraped at the gilt edges of the frame. All of them turned to look at him at once—their many eyes focusing with dreadful serenity.
“You should be grateful,” said the same voice from before, though now it filled the whole ward. “Few mortals get to live in the warmth of their own dreams forever. Most simply… fade.”
“Who are you?” Damien demanded, though his voice trembled.
A pause. Then, softly, “I am the one who eats what you dream.”
The lights died.
Something immense moved in the dark—slow, deliberate, every footstep a thud that rattled the glass in the windows. Damien could smell it now: musk and incense and blood. When it spoke again, its voice came from everywhere at once—above him, behind him, inside him.
“Sleep, Damien. You’ve fed me well.”
He ran. The corridor folded in on itself, the walls melting into a dim infinity. Behind him, the rattle of bones followed faithfully—his wife, his tether, his witness. Ahead, the hospital sign flickered one final time before dissolving into nothing.
And as he fled, somewhere deep in the architecture of that place, the Baku smiled—its many faces watching, its tusked mouth glistening with the sweetness of another dream devoured.
The lights in the corridor flickered like the flutter of dying moths. Damien stumbled toward the portraits lining the wall, each frame trembling faintly as if something inside were trying to breathe.
At first, the paintings were distinct. A man with the body of a bear. A woman whose face stretched into the long snout of an elephant. Another with the pale, staring eyes of a rhinoceros. Each figure bled into the next, their edges running like ink in rain.
Then, with a sound like paper tearing, they began to merge.
The glass shattered outward, drifting through the air in slow, weightless arcs. When Damien lifted his gaze, the many portraits had become one.
A single entity filled the vast gilded frame.
It had the head of an elephant, the tusks dark and curved, its trunk coiling and uncurling with heavy, deliberate grace. Its body was that of a bear, fur black as midnight and slick with some oily sheen. From its sockets gleamed the eyes of a rhinoceros, dull gray and ancient, heavy with unblinking judgment. Its legs were those of a tiger, striped in bands of shadow and gold, ending in paws that could crush stone. And behind it swayed the tail of an ox, twitching idly, tipped with coarse, bristling hair.
The creature’s proportions were impossible. It seemed to stand both within the frame and beyond it, its vast form pressing at the walls of the corridor. The air grew thick, vibrating faintly, humming in his bones.
Damien staggered backward. “What are you?” he whispered.
The thing’s great head turned, and the tusks scraped against the edges of the frame with a hollow groan. When it spoke, the sound did not come from its mouth but from the walls themselves—a low, resonant voice that rippled through the air like the memory of thunder.
“You already know my name.”
And somehow, horribly, he did. The word surfaced in his mind like a long-buried seed breaking through the soil.
Baku.
The name made the air shiver.
He remembered the tales now—half-heard stories he’d once heard. The Baku, eater of dreams. The merciful spirit who could devour nightmares and leave peace behind—if called upon correctly. But if summoned carelessly, it did not stop with the bad dreams. It ate everything.
“You… you’re not supposed to be real,” Damien stammered.
The Baku tilted its great head, the trunk curling, its voice a low rumble that felt like it came from inside his own skull. “Everything dreamed is real somewhere.”
Its form flickered; the walls bent around it. Behind Damien, his skeletal wife hissed and clawed at the air, the tether between them drawn taut. The creature’s gray eyes shifted toward her.
“She is what remains of your longing,” it said. “A feast in herself.”
“I want to wake up,” Damien whispered.
The Baku’s tail swept across the floor, the sound like a whip cutting through air. “Then give me the dream.”
Damien blinked through the dizziness. “Give you…?”
“Yes,” it said, voice deep and patient. “Give me what you made.”
And then—through the fog of fear—something surfaced. A charm. A line he’d read once, tucked in a margin beside an illustration of the same impossible creature. The phrase to banish it, if one dared.
He swallowed hard. “Baku-san…”
The air trembled. The creature’s ears twitched.
“I give you this dream.”
A long pause. Then the corridor itself seemed to inhale.
He said it again, louder, his voice shaking: “Baku-san, I give you this dream!”
The skeletal wife shrieked—a piercing, keening sound—and her bones cracked, smoke pouring from her hollow eyes. The Baku’s form flickered like a broken reflection, shifting between beast and shadow.
For the third time, Damien screamed the words, his throat raw, his voice echoing through both worlds:
“BAKU-SAN, I GIVE YOU THIS DREAM!”
The world convulsed.
The Baku’s trunk unfurled, stretching outward like a serpent. Its mouth split open—not jaws of flesh, but an endless void swirling with starlight and shadow. It inhaled, and the corridor collapsed into itself. The portraits, the walls, the beds—all torn away, devoured by the black maw. The skeletal wife was the last to go, her scream fading into silence as she was drawn into the darkness.
And through that collapsing chaos, Damien heard it—the distant rhythm of life:
“Charging—clear!”
“Again—clear!”
“Come on, stay with me!”
A surge of electricity tore through his chest. His body arched. The dream and the hospital overlapped in a single flash of blinding white.
Then Baku roared, its shape unravelling, tusks and tail dissolving into the storm of light.
And Damien screamed.
He sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, every muscle convulsing. The heart monitor exploded into static. Nurses screamed; a doctor shouted for restraints. The air itself cracked and bled shadow.
From his body, tendrils of pure blackness erupted—snapping and writhing, coiling around him like living things. They smashed the monitors, shattered the windows, sent shards of glass spinning across the room. Alarms blared, metal twisted, lights burst overhead.
The tendrils closed around him, thickening, tightening into a cocoon that pulsed faintly with his heartbeat. Through the maelstrom of motion and sound, Damien’s scream broke into ragged laughter.
Outside, the hospital lights flickered once—then steadied.
Inside the cocoon, all was silent.
And somewhere deep within, in the darkness behind Damien’s eyes, a whisper stirred like a breath:
“Dreams are never truly given. They are only exchanged.”
Into the Darkness: Chapter 5
Chapter 5 The hospital corridor was chaos. Doctors and nurses poured out of Room 312, their shoes squealing on the linoleum, the air thick with the acrid scent of ozone and antiseptic. Someone was sobbing. Another retched into a waste bin. The charge nurse, pale as a ghost, clutched the...
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