Infernum

An alarm clock sounded, quietly at first then louder and louder. Alex rolled over and opened his eyes—4:00 a.m. Images from the night before were still burning in his mind. After a long stop at the toilet he got in the shower wondering what to make of the night before. Was it real? Was it a dream? Alex stood under the hot water for half an hour reconciling his thoughts. He remembered having some unusual and some fucked-up dreams when he first started working at the prison but never anything as weird as last night. Still, it could not have been real so it must have been a dream, Alex thought as he felt every drop of warm water hit his back. Weird, he thought to himself.

Alex stepped out of the shower feeling quite refreshed, more so than usual, it would normally take him an hour of sitting around drinking coffee before he felt this awake. After Alex had got dressed—another thing he normally didn’t do until after his coffee—and coming to the conclusion that it had to be a dream after all, Alex decided to take the long way to work since he had the extra time. He thought the longer drive and change of scenery might just be the thing to help him get his head straight before work. He skipped packing a lunch for work as the thought of food turned his stomach and he was not hungry at all; instead, he just decided to go to work early. He headed for the front door and, to his surprise, it was locked—just another thing that he never did. Weird, he thought again.

As the day progressed Alex could not help thinking about the dream he had the night before, it distracted him from even the most remedial of tasks all day long, even though those tasks seemed to be getting done easier without Alex having to think about them. Images of the battle were ever-present in his mind, and after a while, he began to wonder if it was a dream at all. All day long he would notice weird things around him. The phone at Alex’s post went mostly unanswered all day as for some reason he was occupied with cell searches all day. He would just get a feeling, there was something in a cell or he would smell the scent of inmate-manufactured alcohol and he would just have to find it. It wouldn’t take very long; almost as soon as he entered the cell, he knew just where to look and, aha, there it was. Alex had found four bags of “pruno” (inmate alcohol), three marijuana cigarettes, a tab of black tar heroin and two cell phones in his building by the time did his morning yard release. To find any one of those things would have been a good day, as the inmates often hid them better than anything else due to their high value and rarity, but for Alex to find all of it was like the inmates just weren’t trying very hard to hide it anymore.

Shortly after yard recall, as Alex was finishing up the last of his paperwork from the cell searches, a familiar face walked through the open yard door. “Thompson,” Officer Wilson called out to Alex. “Yo… Thompson!” Officer Wilson yelled again.

“Hey, what’s up, Beau?” Alex replied as he recognized his visitor before he even came through the door. Alex looked up and saw his good friend Beau walking into his building with his usual swagger and his ear-to-ear smile.

“What the fuck man! Answer your phone; don’t you know I’ve been calling ya all day man?” Beau said with a certain “islander being put out” accent in his voice, even though he was white.

“Ya, sorry about that, Beau… I’ve been a little distracted today,” Alex sluggishly answered as he looked over to the pile of contraband on his desk.

“Damn, dude, you have been busy today, and here I thought you were thinking about the honey twins again.” Beau laughed at the inside joke, remembering the two fat, ugly girls they saw at the end of the bar a while back, giving them that nickname after Alex, as drunk as he was, tried to take the two bitches home, muttering, “Sweet as honey,” the whole time. Luckily, Beau was able to stop him before he made a really bad decision about sleeping with the two ugliest women in town.

“No!” Alex replied defensively. “You are never going to let me live that down, are you, Beau?” He thought to himself, The girls wouldn’t have been so bad if only their attitudes were better than their bodies.

“Not in this lifetime,” Beau said, chuckling. “What the fuck is wrong with you today, Alex? You aren’t your chipper self,” he added.

“No? I had a kind of a fucked-up dream last night,” Alex explained.

“It must have been a doosey… Did your wife-beating, piece-of-shit brother-in-law win the lottery again?” Beau chuckled again.

“No, nothing like that, thank God! Hey, are we still on for tomorrow night?” Alex changed the subject.

“Fuck ya we are! I got to get back to my building for yard recall, but I’ll call you later,” Beau said. As he started to walk out of the building, he turned back toward Alex and said, “Snap the fuck out of it man … it’s Friday.” Alex got a smile on his face as Beau left, forgetting the dream for just a moment before getting another one of those feelings and heading toward a cell.

After a long and busy day, two o’clock finally came and Alex’s shift ended. He was glad it was his weekend off and was looking forward to a night out and a chance of redemption for the honey twin incident.

He began his drive home as he did every day down Center Road and then onto Byers Pass; just as the road turned to dirt the dream finally got the better of him. Alex decided to stop along the way just to see if there was anything to this dream of his. He thought to himself, Just a quick stop to look, and then I can finally move on, a rather unusual decision for Alex who prided himself on being a well-rounded, logical person.

He drove his dirty black truck down the washboard road for several miles, trying to find the hill from his dream. Turn after turn Alex looked for the hill unsuccessfully, feeling better about his sanity with each turn, until, with one more curve of the road, there it was. Alex parked his truck and stared at the dirt hill for a while. I’m sure it’s nothing, he thought to himself. He hesitantly got out of his truck taking a deep breath then saying to himself, “This is stupid, Alex, you are a grown man for Christ’s sake!” Then he walked up the hill with an eerie sense of anticipation as he saw another set of footprints in the soft loamy soil.

As Alex climbed the hill, he could see the sun reflecting off something shiny at the top, as he got closer he saw a small black flashlight lying on the ground. As he reached down to pick it up he started to get a sick feeling, realizing that it was his flashlight; and the only way it could have gotten there was if he’d dropped it the night before.

As Alex crested the top of the hill his logical mind kicked in telling him to look for clues about the night before. It was not long before he found the impression in the dirt and a pile of scorched volcanic rock where the beast probably fell. Alex put down the flashlight and dropped to his knees to investigate the impression. He looked at the large impression in the ground. This is where it fell, he thought. A large flat piece of obsidian that had been melted in place on one side of the impression must have been the lava-like substance that flowed from the beast Alex thought. He stumbled around for a while, picking up rock after rock that looked all too familiar to him. When he found a rock that looked like the beast’s head, he knew the beast was dead and that he did, in fact, encounter it.

He found a large rock to sit on as he began to rationalize what happened. His mind began to race as he thought of those golden ribbons that plunged into his back. Are they still there? What are they doing to me? he began to ask himself. The more Alex thought on the subject the more worried he became. Should I go to the hospital? he though at one point, only to disregard the idea for fear of becoming a test dummy for some unnamed government agency.

Alexander Jean, a 25-year-old man, was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere, coming to grips with either the reality of the impossible or the possibility of a mental breakdown. As Alex sat on the rock distracted by his thoughts for what seemed like hours, he heard a soft voice behind him.

“Pardon me?”

Startled by the voice behind him, Alex felt his stomach drop and nearly fell off his seat. He twisted around to find the source of the voice. As he turned he saw a young woman standing a few feet away. Alex was struck by how beautiful the woman was, having to stop his jaw from dropping to the ground. Her long, flowing auburn hair highlighted by bright metallic copper tones was the first thing he noticed. The waves of her deep red hair extended down just below the shoulders of her lacey white blouse, framing and showing off her large cleavage. It was hard for Alex to look further down on this woman, but he wanted to see more. Tight, low-cut jeans complemented both her slim waistline and her firm, round buttocks to complete her perfect hourglass figure. As striking as this woman was, Alex thought her eyes demanded the most attention as they lit up her face with vibrant hues of emerald green. He had to take a second glance at this red-headed beauty; as perfect as she was, it was as if she was not real, like she was created in a lab, she was so very attractive … no lustful … no perfect, as Alex thought to himself drifting into a dream-like state.

In a vain attempt to gather his composure, he stood up and quickly dusted himself off.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there,” he proclaimed.

Then, in a voice as smooth as silk, the woman asked in a condescending tone, “Did I startle you?”

“No… Well, maybe a little,” Alex replied.

“I can assure you that was not my intention,” the woman said in the same condescending yet smooth tone. She then went on to ask in a somewhat inquisitive tone, “Are you here on official business?”

“No… Why do you ask?” Alex answered; then, realizing that he was still in uniform, he changed his tone from inquisitive to apologetic. “Oh! You mean my uniform… No, I was just on my way home from work.”

“I see… But why did you stop here?” she asked.

“I just…” Alex trailed off to think.

“Did you see something odd?” the woman asked inquisitively.

Alex paused at that statement for a moment, thinking to himself, What an odd thing to ask.

“Well…” he said as he continued to look around at the scorched rocks. “No, nothing odd,” he added with a reserved note. With a humorous tone and a slight chuckle in his voice Alex then asked, “You’re dressed a little fancy to be out hiking, aren’t you?”

The woman looked down at her attire then back to Alex. “I was just—” she paused for a moment to survey Alex “—researching,” she said in a calculated tone.

Alex stood up, feeling embarrassed he went to collect his flashlight and apologized to the woman. “I’m sorry; I am not usually like this. I’ve just got a lot on my mind today.” He paused for a moment then turned back toward the woman before saying, “I’m Alex, by the way… Alex Jean.”

The woman smiled. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Jean… If you will excuse me, I have some work to do.”

Alex had always been a little shy around beautiful women ever since his bad breakup last year and today was no different. He collected his things and walked down to his truck, tossing the shovel in the bed before getting in. As he went to start his truck he thought to himself, Alex, you will never forgive yourself if you do not get your ass back up there and at least get her name. He then said to himself out loud, “Suck it up man! Twenty seconds of courage,” remembering some old movie he saw one time. Then, without much hesitation, he got out of the truck and headed back up the hill.

Expecting to see vibrant red hair as he crested the top of the hill, Alex tried to think of something clever to say. Since the woman was working, maybe he would offer her a helping hand or something. As he crested the top of the hill he was slightly put off when he realized the woman had already gone. He scanned the area for the auburn beauty thinking she could not have gone far in such a short time. Alex looked a few hundred yards in each direction but there was no sign of her anywhere. He continued to look around and thought to himself, What the fuck? There is no way a person could be that fast. He started to look farther away, maybe she had a motorcycle or quad he thought. He eventually gave up after a while assuming that he must have been in his truck longer than he had thought.

As Alex looked around, however, he began to realize that she was not the only thing missing. Everything he had previously found was gone, the scorched rocks, the melted obsidian glass, even his footprints were now missing as if he was never there at all. “That’s it! I am officially nuts!” he said aloud as he made his way back down the hill.

All the way home thoughts of the green-eyed woman, otherworldly creatures and the disappearance of the evidence lingered in Alex’s mind. As he pulled into his driveway he decided that the only logical explanation for what happened earlier was that it did not happen at all, he must have imagined the whole thing from lack of sleep; he was, after all, working four doubles a week at work and only getting a few hours of sleep in between. Even though his head was racing with thoughts, he decided it would be best to go straight to bed and sleep it off. He had not felt very good since the night before anyway, and since it was his weekend off he could sleep in, playing catch-up on some much-needed rest; besides, maybe tomorrow would be better, maybe tomorrow would be normal.