Dream Spores - 5. Ward

It was a hall of beds in a hospital, like it was a hundred years ago, with over two dozen occupied beds in one big room. I know that there were in total two floors like this in the building, as well as two or three hallways lined with smaller rooms, like hospital bedrooms today. This was due to the small size of this hospital, I knew.

I had a bed in this big room, which was bustling with the activity of nurses and the other patients. Sitting up, I could overlook most of the ward, because behind me was only a wall and there were no screens around any of the beds. The walls in front and to either side of me, each several rows of beds away, had large windows with the sunny view of a fresh and summery green landscape with trees and grass.

A nurse, in an oldfashioned robe and hat reminiscent of that of a nurse nun from the Great War, passed through my field of vision and puffed up someone's pillow. People were talking, just about everyone was awake, and there was someone sitting at my right bedside. It was an unfamiliar young woman who was here on some professional business. Maybe she was a doctor, or maybe she was only here to discuss something to do with me.

Unbidden, I recalled something dangerous. Instances of when people turned their attention towards other people, and as soon as they began looking them straight in the face that other person would reveal their monstrous true identity. They were not people at all, but predators to us, who had us without hope for escape or defence once we were looking at their faces. Their faces then turned and twisted into dark, glistening grotesque shapes with broad, pointed snouts, large, slanted eyes of jet and a ridged, angular surface. Their hands did the same. As you were watching this, you could not move or look away, or even close your eyes or say anything. You could only feel terror.

This I knew, though I had never been a victim myself, and I didn't even know what happened to those people I saw in these strips of memory then. I didn't know whether they were killed, eaten, abducted, turned insane or something else. It didn't matter either way. They were ensnared and attacked in a devious way, and we were all potential prey to those beings.

After these brief glimpses had flitted past, I suspected vaguely that I was somehow responsible for fighting this danger and that the woman sitting beside my bed was here to instruct me on this. (In retrospect, it might have occured to me then that my suspected job of fighting those hostile entities might be the reason for me occupying a hospital bed at the moment - and not remembering why. But it didn't. Maybe it would have if the moment hadn't been so brief.) However, I didn't have time to ask anything or explore this thought further, because a young man with long hair appeared on the left side of the bed. He stood there and looked down at me. My eyes flitted over him absently, then I saw the woman to my right acknowledging his presence without words (no one said anything), but keeping him only at the edge of her vision with an air of unease and suspicion about her. I immediately, automatically glanced back at him and while trying to keep my eyes from lifting to look at his face, I imagined how, if I let them, he would turn and then ------ what then? Had I not seen him a moment ago over the shoulder of my bedside companion, a few beds down the row to my right? Had he not been staring down a middle aged balding man in his bed, who was looking up at him in dumb horror, devouring him with a twisted half-sneer on a monster's face that no one but me and that man seemed to notice?

If he had, then I hadn't reacted.

So this must have been just a wild thought.

(In retrospect again... I noticed it before, but didn't think anything of it. No one seemed particularly sick or injured in this ward. Might I have been insane?)