Within Shadowed Clutches by Daniel Gonzalez

Within Shadowed Clutches

cross-genre literature by Daniel Gonzalez

Humans spend their brief lives searching for meaning, never realizing that they sleep for half of their mortality. They believe that reality is only in the Waking hours, that this is the only realm where dreams could be accomplished. But in the Dreaming, you can comfortably travel in a hot air balloon around the celestial equator in one night’s rest or relive every excruciating hour of appendix surgery in a twenty-minute nap; for time moves on its own accord down there. But he knew all about the Dreaming and its manipulation of time. He wasn’t sure anymore how long he had been plagued with the reoccurring dream, only that it had been afflicting his sleep every night. They all started the same. The shadow of a muscular arm and thick hand, reaching out from under his desk, thrashing at him. It would snatch his arm and drag him across the floor, then throw him deep into a black abyss that formed under his desk. Which shocked him; he had never seen that black hole by his feet during the day when he was working on his writing. He had spent countless hours at his desk trying to muster up some fiction with at least an ounce of believability in it. Something original that at least felt like it could be real, rather than regurgitating his own life into dramatization. Perhaps, he was so occupied in his Waking hours with his writing that he had never noticed it forming. But now in his dream, a void had materialized, and he couldn’t block it out any longer. There were consequences for ignoring it. The tenebrous demon hand wrapped and clawed at his arm. It knew of the dread which stemmed from his work desk and deliberately chose it as his portal to taunt and haunt him. He would yell, but no one would come. The shadow screeched with delight drowning out his cries for help. He would pull back and heave his body towards the door in the opposite direction. But in nightmares you’re never quite as strong as you think

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you are. Always a sliver weaker than usual, which brings confusion, then disappointment in overestimating your abilities, and finally a blow to your self-esteem. At first it was a nuisance, like a stiff neck nagging at him for sleeping wrong. Just a slight discomfort. But it was after the third time of encountering this nightmare that he realized it was a reoccurring torment. He understood then that each time he had that harrowing nightmare, he would attempt to stop the hand and end the dream. And each time he failed.

The 7th time he had the dream, he tried to bite it to let him go. But his teeth splintered and shattered into the hard muscles of the arm. His smile disintegrated. Only the taste and texture of calcium and iron remained. On the 15th try, he rolled into a ball and threw his blankets over him so the arm couldn’t grab him. The blanket evaporated into the shadows. Then a half dozen arms encircled his bed and held him down. More came out from the shadows and covered him in a quilt of dark flesh and claws. On the 31st attempt, he tried to bend the rules of the Dreaming. He closed his eyes tight and wished for a sharp weapon to stab the arm with. A sharp and elegant dagger apparated into his hand. He was ready for it this time and stabbed the arm when it appeared from beneath the desk. The dagger cut through it like paper, but it was he who felt the sharp sting of a blade piercing into his forearm. He felt the muscles and tendons split and weaken his grip on the dagger, causing him to drop it. On the 57th night of the chronic ordeal, he decided that running away from the massive hand, or trying to combat it, only caused more harm. Instead, he sat up on his bed and stared at his desk, dead in the center of the abyss and waited. Within moments, the hand emerged from the dark and crept towards him. Four strong fingers and an opposable thumb worked in unison to inch towards him like a hairless tarantula. But he wasn’t scared of it this time, it was only a dream, he thought. And so, he spoke to it. “What are you and why are you doing this?” He confronted. But the hand just kept its pace until it reached the edge of the bed where he sat. The heavy tapping of fingers stopped, and it sat on its palm. He felt the eyeless stare of the hand. He dared not break eye contact with it, but even in dreams you blink. And when he did, two hands

grabbed his ankles from under the bed, and pulled him to the floor. The sitting hand pointed towards the desk, and the other arms followed their leader’s command. He tore at his bed sheets as they dragged him once again. Finally, on the 109th night of the persistent taunting, he decided it was enough. Attacking it, running away, and even negotiations with it had all proved futile. He woke up in his familiar nightmare and peeled the sheets off him. He stood up hastily and made his way to the abyss that was his desk before he could be dragged against his will. He looked around and saw that the shadowed arm was not around, not yet. However, that feeling of dread, like sharp nails prickling down his scalp and neck, was still there. He stood over the desk and inspected it. He had never seen it before, but there sitting on top of the desk was an unfinished manuscript. A lump began to build up in his chest. Rather than wait for the shadowed arm, he sat down at the desk and picked up the stack of pages. The paper of the manuscript felt light and delicate, unlike the weight it had in his waking life. They say you cannot read in dreams, but he was able to sift through these halfmaterialized ideas effortlessly. Time within the Dreaming stopped as he read, and the dread that had plagued him both day and night, began to erase from his mind and subconscious altogether. As he read it, he came to the realization that this ethereal manuscript was beat for beat, line for line, down to the last period, the same as the one he spent every waking moment foreboding. He had been procrastinating and avoiding it for months and wasn’t sure how it could have followed him into the Dreaming. He got to the end of the Dreaming manuscript and realized it was incomplete like its Waking counterpart. He had been too afraid to finish it because he thought his audience would see right through his façade and realize that it lacked any real substance. And now this dream only further proved that it was a pointless endeavor in both realms. Now that sinking feeling was coming back. His diaphragm filled with anxiety and stress. The tension and pressure of it all raced through his veins. He understood it then; it wasn’t a demon that had been haunting him. No, it was something much crueler.

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Underneath his desk, a darkness grew. His feet grew cold and stung as if he were barefoot on top of a frozen lake. He looked down and saw the wispy black portal grow but the hand was still nowhere to be seen. For a moment he thought he was safe, until he heard the calculated sound of sharp fingernails crawling his way. He stood up from the desk and kicked the portal, but his foot went through as if it were smoke. His toes collided into the desk, reminding him that pain still bleeds its way into the Dreaming. The air within the dream grew tense, as if the molecules in the atmosphere where being sucked away by some phantom. He was left standing alone in that vacuum, void of any hope or thought. He could feel that evil Arm’s presence through the empty portal inching closer to him by the second. There was no way to beat it in this realm. Not on its terms. Not like this. So, before the cursed demon limb could arrive, he sat back down at his desk. He pulled out a pen from the desk’s drawer and flipped to the last page where the manuscript had left off. Without brainstorming, without hesitation, and without an outline, he began to write. All that came to mind he put down in ink. He didn’t stop to correct any errors, there was no more second guessing in himself. Every idea flowed out of his subconscious and trickled down from his brain to his arm where his hand refined them into the right words. He didn’t dare stop to look at the progress he made; it would only hinder him. He had no need for revision because he was not yet finished. He created fabulous new worlds with interesting characters in extraordinary situations. And as he wrote all this in the Dreaming, time stopped. And the shadowed arm never came. The black abyss shrunk with each sentence he jot down. But he hadn’t noticed. He was in the manuscripts clutches still. He sat at the desk for what could have been an eternity, had he not been in the Dreaming. He continued writing. He knew he was close to the end because his words came out at a slower pace. Then his head grew heavy with exhaustion. Then his arm cramped up as he was on his last page. He had encountered unspeakable and impossible things in this realm, but never had he experienced fatigue in a dream before. He finished the last sentence on his mind, dotted the last period, then dropped his head on the desk and fell asleep within the Dreaming.

Then, he woke up. He stood up and went straight to his desk. He checked under it for the black portal and looked for any trace of the demon arm but saw nothing. He sighed with relief. He was finally awake. He grabbed the unfinished manuscript and flipped to the last page as he’d done in his dream. It had led him here. He knew what his story needed now. The difficult part was to do it. But if he didn’t try, he’d be within the shadowed clutches of the abyss. So, he began to write. He blew through the pages, putting down everything he could remember from his dream before those remnants of ideas disappeared into the afternoon. It was like tracing over a picture the way every word came out with ease. By noon he had finished. He set his pen and manuscript aside and relished in his accomplishment. All his anxieties were relieved, and he was able to enjoy his work. Then, he had an idea for another story. It was different from the last, and would take some time to flesh out, but the initial spark was there. He would just let it permeate in his head for a while and let it grow until he felt it was ready to write. There was plenty of time, he thought. For now, he deserved to go outside and live his life in the Waking hours. He forgot about his new idea and stepped outside. He felt warm and protected under the sun’s rays.

. . . . . . Under his desk, a pitch-black abyss newly emerged. It was small and hardly visible, save for its misty edges. Within it, a shadowed arm grew impatient. It tapped its sharp claws to the rhythm of a sleepy metronome. It would wait for him. He would come back. He would procrastinate. And he would fall asleep.

END

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