Whipping Girl

It would have been easier to believe that it was a dream.

In the months since her mother’s death, sleep had become difficult and almost impossible to come by. The only cure, her only solace in the dread of night was to sleep with the radio playing under the light of a lava lamp, something of a full-fledged ritual this summer of 1974.

It put her out better than any pill. Every night, from the ball radio on her bedstand, lilting late-night rock tunes from WSMD lulled her into an exhausted doze. Every night, when the broadcast concluded and the station went off the air, she semiconsciously groped for the dial to shut it off, nestling beneath the quilts into deep slumber once more.

Her nightly ritual failed to safeguard her from the onslaught of the dream. Or at least what started out as a dream. She could put no other name to it. Like any dream, it came and went, according to whatever laws of psychology, immutable and unknowable, that governed it. Like any dream, she was hard-pressed to remember details while awake. Only during sleep did everything become a bit clearer.

At first came a kaleidoscope of forestry images, sepia-toned like old tintype photographs. They flicked on and off across her mind-screen, one after another, all of them dark, silent and deserted, and always the same, though half-remembered, coasting and drifting on the border of consciousness.

Gradually the black-and-white stills gave way to fluid motion and color. She hovered, disembodied, through dense copses of trees, above convulsions of flowers. As summer nights wore on she was launched across broader vistas—through meadows and glades—now made more lucid by oddly inviting perfumes of blossoms and steaming greenery.

Still later, evidence of civilization appeared in her interior wilderness. It came in the form of a medieval village, where a bell tower thrust forth into the night sky, above altars, colonnades, masonry and facades bordering a central plaza. The place was strewn with ivy, springing from the ground like grotesquely giant hands ridged with great veins. The commandments of basic geometry held court here; the architecture hinted at many cultures yet blended together somehow, entwined and interwoven with styles alien yet hauntingly familiar.

There was nothing in the least alarming about the dream. Just a reprieve to a girl condemned to evenings at home alone—until the nights that followed, when its hold on her grew more insistent.

Through the veils of her mind emerged an unseen presence, gathering substance and form. It snatched and snared her in a remorseless grip and thrust her headlong into the tower, through a maze of huge arched chambers and new sanctuaries of desolation that could not quite be seen. From then on, the dream ended the same way: with a seductive, wordless whisper upon her ear, this nameless entity reminding her this was no longer a dream but something else.

Once she was on the verge of understanding exactly what it was, it jolted her awake, her gradually coherent picture shattering into a thousand gleaming fragments. It left her sleepless in bed, consumed in an odd, vexing mixture of excitement and pleasurable fear.

She thought of the dream more often then—this dream no longer a dream—with all its suggestions of horror.

And wondered whether it was a warning, of horrors yet to be.