How could we have known?  I keep asking myself that question as though it provides an answer.  I’ve always hated it when someone answers a question with a question, yet now I find myself using that same cheap exit strategy in an attempt to excuse the inexcusable.  How could we have known?

The history of histories is replete with dreamers.  Our particular species, Homo sapiens, once believed it was a holy and spiritual experience that no other creature shared.  Nightmares were thought of as direct-dialed calls from the devil himself while most dreams were so overly magical and incomprehensible that they had to be nothing short of gentle touches from whatever god or gods we worshipped.

It was by those primitive standards we found it sacrilegious to consider that any other beast could dream.  We assumed in our simple way they didn’t have souls as we did.  They didn’t pray.  They didn’t know what we knew.  And yet they did dream.  We all dreamed.

As we grew in our understanding of life, the simplest things proved our early assumptions incorrect.  Our beloved family pet lying at our feet whispering and wiggling in its sleep showed us that the experience was shared among many species right here on Earth.  The most basic creatures demonstrated in sleep what had long been the purview of humanity—dreaming.  We all did it.  All life above a certain level of complexity did it.

And we all did it because it was part of who we were.  It was no more an intentional act than it was a violent one.  So how could we have known?

Honestly, we’d grown up doing it, so how could we have possibly known that our actions were inflicting such horrific violence on others?  I can’t see that we could have known.  And as the dream-Beth said, even had we known, the experience of dreaming had grown so overwhelmingly delightful so early in our development that it became part of a shared genetic heritage passed down as part of our very being.  We didn’t go to sleep at night and subconsciously decide we wanted to dream.  We didn’t even decide consciously.  It just happened.  It was a part of who we were, so it just happened on its own.

Yet had we known what I’ve learned—what we’ve learned in the last 24 hours, could we have denied ourselves?  I doubt it.

In the lush forest or wide-open field that only he sees, chasing the prey that so enticed him, could the dog have denied its own nature in sleep and refused to dream?  Offered the opportunity to lounge in never ending sunshine meant to warm it to just the right temperature while insects buzzed lazily about, could the lizard have denied itself the opportunity to dream?  With prey aplenty and always willing to give just the right amount of chase before yielding the ultimate prize—the final catch—could the great predator felines have refused to slip into that world at every possible opportunity to enjoy flourishing savannas and always-comfortable trees where appetites could be satisfied as quickly or as slowly as one wanted?  Given the opportunity to fly without wings, to be young when our bodies were old and feeble, to once again sit by the fire with a loved one long since dead, and to see the wonder and beauty of great mystery, would humans have denied themselves the opportunity to escape into that world?  I don’t think any creature who’d experienced dreaming could so easily give it up even if they understood the repercussions that eventually would follow.  It’s just not our nature; it’s just not like the living to deny what is so desperately desired and readily available.

But even these considerations fail to define where I now find myself.  In a single day on a single planet in an obscure corner of a single galaxy, we’ve discovered the hard way precisely how much such indulgences can cost.  And we’ve likewise discovered that we are not alone.  That realization also carried a horrible truth: we’ve never been alone, and in that regard we were responsible for visiting horror on the world of others, terror we carried to their shores day and night, over and over again, and always with the same selfish intention.  We would take from them what we wanted.  We would enjoy their world as though it were ours and would do with it as we pleased.  We would leave it in mayhem wrought with destruction made by our own hands.  We didn’t think about it.  Why should we have thought about it?  It was ours for the taking.

So when the nightmares came, we ignored them.  They were nothing more than anomalies.  No one had ever successfully defined a dream or why it was what it was.  We didn’t understand the mechanics of how it created the wonderful escapes it so often did.  Under those circumstances, why would one little nightmare every now and then mean anything other than a hiccup in whatever process brought dreams to life?  Why would we have considered them anything other than the mind tripping over a brief obstacle on a path full of beautiful experiences without limits?  We could think of no reason.

As we’ve learned today, life everywhere came to the same conclusion: nightmares could be ignored as a short circuit in an otherwise fantastic oddity that took us each night to the doorstep of some new and great experience that was otherwise impossible.  Yet they were more than that.  They were responses to our incursions into someone else’s space.  They were answers to questions we didn’t know we were asking, and they were phrased using the same language we were using.  So why did we ignore them?  Because they were inconvenient, I think.

And look at the hell we’ve wrought.  In visiting that world and taking from it all the splendor it had to offer, we left behind the worst of who we were.  When the inhabitants of that place watched us and wondered why we were doing such a thing, all we showed them was our selfishness and darkest desires to satisfy ourselves at all costs.  When they spoke to us in our own language and asked us to leave and to stop coming back, we ignored them like so much white noise.

So they learned from us precisely what we ourselves taught them infinite times over infinite lives.  We taught them never to concern themselves with another.  We taught them always to take what they will for whatever reason they had.  We taught them to come and go as they pleased without worry for the harm they brought others.  We taught them eternal suffering.

How comes it then that we humans now stand on the threshold of the end of life on our own planet?  It’s by our own hands, I’m afraid, and even in that realization I have no great certainty.  I’m writing my assumptions based on experiences full of impossibilities.  Can one human mind truly understand the timeless nature of this conflict?  My own pride would like to think so.  I’d like to think I at least comprehend that much of this incomprehensible situation.  I assume even now that I know enough to feel this is our final justice meted out by the designs we ourselves gave to the darkness.  They learned from us …

Their world was a place of wonder.  We could do the impossible.  We could visit with lost loves.  We could always be young and beautiful.  It was timeless and ageless, never changing yet changeable by mere wish.  We took it by force.  We took it over and over again and ignored when its rightful occupants and owners tried to warn us and told us to leave them in peace.  I can’t imagine now trying to blame them for anything.  It would be nothing more than yet another example of our human arrogance to think it was good enough for us to do to them, but somehow it became unacceptable for them to visit the same upon us.

In the process of writing what I’ve already said in my account of this event as well as this final thought, I found myself pondering the question of who the dream-Beth might actually have been.  I’m afraid I have no answers.  She understood enough about me to know the name only she and my mother used.  How did she know that?  I can’t say.  She used endearing terms like ‘my love’ and ‘babe’ and the like.  The real Beth would have called me by such names.  Her insistence on providing me the original warning was heartfelt.  I couldn’t help but notice she’d put herself in danger during the second dream for no other reason than to give me information that ultimately proved unable to save me, yet her screams at the end told me she was subject to the darkness just as I was.  Or just as I would be.  I can’t help but think she endangered her own life—essence?  being?  something else entirely?—so she could warn me.  Why?  If she wasn’t my wife who died two years earlier, why take such chances?  Why put herself through such trauma?  Why face such a threat?

But I’m not alone in this question.  The news reports said billions of people had experienced the first dream.  Each of them confirmed they heard the warning from someone they cared deeply about that was already dead.  Even my own parents said the same with my father hearing from his brother Gary and my mother hearing from her father William.  Those people were dead.  Old George and Margaret gave silent confirmation they’d also heard from a loved one who was no longer living.  What essence provided those warnings and did so knowing they had to take the persona of someone from our past who we would most surely listen to?  What power existed …

Let me stop myself right there.  The question of what ethereal plane could be tapped that might also be able to access that kind of information from our own thoughts has already been answered.  The darkness proved that.  They certainly were able to reach inside us and get whatever information they needed, just as we’d done to them.  And not just us.  It seemed a shared space where all occupants were able to access information not otherwise available.  Or am I oversimplifying?  I don’t know.  I do know it’s beyond anything we could have imagined.

I truly have no answers as to who that Beth was.  I can’t possibly offer an explanation.  She made clear they—and who they are I don’t know&mdahs;they’d been holding the darkness back.  They’d been restraining it somehow to protect us.

Was it some benevolent race of beings out there in the vast expanse of infinity that took it upon themselves to act in the best interest of all creatures who dreamed?  Considering the implications of what the darkness really is, I can’t imagine why that would be a good idea.  Were they some entity or entities capable of reaching into us and drawing out the force of whatever good they could find that would have the most impact on us?  If so, where were they?  If they were that advanced in thought and morality, certainly they’d have known better than to push their opinions of what was right and wrong onto the darkness as it struggled for its own existence.  Was it some remnant of my wife that was left in the dream reality after she died?  Was it a piece of her soul perhaps?  Possibly, and I can’t honestly say why that would be contradictory.

It could also be the same of any number of lives touched by that place.  She said living beings everywhere had made the same mistake.  Nevertheless, I find the thought abhorrent that some part of the most wonderful woman on the planet has been forever caged in a world where she’ll suffer an endless death.  I prefer to think it was something beyond my comprehension.  That seems most likely given how much I’ve learned in the last day that fits that description.  In the end, I simply don’t know.  I wish I did.

Despite all other considerations, I decided to document the events of the last day.  I don’t know why precisely given what’s happened.  Hasn’t enough death and destruction been visited upon the world without retelling the tale?  It’s not up to me to decide.

Irrespective, I strongly suspect this text will remain forever unread.  And yet I still feel compelled to write it and am in this work answering that need.  A force that was ancient when our own universe formed has come to visit us and has given us a taste of our own medicine.  If every creature on this world who has ever dreamed is to be held accountable, I can’t imagine how long it will be before any living thing here is capable of reading this.  Still, I have to write it.  The author in me will have it no other way.

After I sat down on the couch in the office and began typing, I wrote the text you’ve so far read.  It’s an accounting of a simple day from a simple man living in a simple place.  I saw no need to write more than the events beginning 24 hours ago.  What difference would it have made?  None, I feel, and it certainly wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

Once I finished writing it and before I began this self-epitaph that will finish it, I sat in the darkness of this room and spoke to my parents about the last dream I’d had.  I explained to them what the dream-Beth had said.  I described how the darkness kept closing in on me and eventually broke through into the room where I stood.  I even tried to explain the overwhelmingly horrible sight I beheld as they came for me, called to me, told me I was to be taken.  Nothing could make that experience clear to anyone who’d not been there, yet I tried.  In the end, they didn’t understand.

My own mind had already determined what was to come.  She said what we’d seen thus far was nothing more than a tool that preserves.  The real darkness was in that other world.  It was the dream world where she grew so angry about my return.  Until I awoke on the couch with my father trying to calm me, I wasn’t certain why she was upset to find me dreaming again.  Yet I already knew.  I was denying to myself the unthinkable she was trying to communicate.

That was their world.  That was where the darkness lived.  That was where we’d hurt them for so long.  That was where we cast them aside when they asked us to stop.  They’d used the same imagery and language we’d been using to pillage their existence, but we ignored them.  It was their world, after all, and we’d been taking it from them and raping it for infinities beyond infinity.  They only wanted us to leave it alone.  We didn’t listen.  How could we have known?

After talking to Mom and Dad about what I believed to be happening, they thought for the first time in my life that I had lost control of my faculties.  What I was asking of them was not just unbelievable; it was unconscionable.  I tried to make them understand me.  I tried to help them really see what was happening.  The darkness had come as nothing more than a tiny projection of what was really waiting for us out there.  It would take but a moment to slip into that world where they’d have us forever.

But neither of my parents had seen the disgusting view of how it treated Brogan.  They hadn’t heard from Beth what was really happening, even if it was explained in the most perplexing and obscure way.  They hadn’t heard Helene’s screams from inside that realm even as I struggled to get out.  They didn’t know what I knew.

It was here to sustain us for the undying forever.  It came to take over and to stop us from invading.  But it wasn’t just interested in stopping us.  Remember, it learned from us.  We didn’t stop.  We inflicted eternal suffering on it.  They wanted to return the favor.

What came to our little blue planet was a preservative that would stop us from invading but would also keep our bodies alive while they dragged us back into their world.  You see, once they grew strong enough, they were able to take it back from us and change the rules.  It wasn’t going to give us the wonderful and impossible beauties we’d been taking from it.  No, they weren’t going to give us that at all.  Instead, once they’d regained control, it was theirs to do with as they pleased, as it should have been from the beginning and would have been had they not been so weak.

For all we’d subjected them to, they wanted to pay us back.  How would they do that?  They’d keep us alive in the physical world—preserve us—while they dragged us back to their world where the power of their imagination now rules.  Imagine the endless death you could visit upon someone in your dreams.  Imagine the horrors and suffering you could inflict on others in that place where wishes are real.  Now imagine the darkness using that gift against us.

It’s their gift, right?  Why shouldn’t they give us an eternal taste of what we’ve been giving them since the first being of thought dreamed its first dream?  I don’t even know when and where that might have been, but I’ve learned in the last day that it has very little to do with humanity.  The universe became a very complicated place, overlapping realities and existences, limitless places and beings that were older than time itself, and all capable of the cold reach of revenge on a scale I couldn’t imagine.  If the number of beings on our planet capable of dreaming was any indication, my mind failed to grapple with how overwhelming the assault on the darkness had been.

But I couldn’t make Mom and Dad comprehend that.  Their minds, I think, were unable to get beyond the basics of what we’d experienced.  Something had invaded.  It was evil.  It was virtually unstoppable.  Yet nothing was so hopeless to require the solution I offered.  There could never be a reason to go that far.  As religious people with strongly held Christian beliefs, I understood precisely where that was coming from.  I also knew it would lead them right into the hands of the darkness.  I couldn’t let that happen.  I wouldn’t.  I didn’t.

My father made certain he put the gun in a place where I’d have to struggle with him in order to retrieve it.  Mom stayed close to Helene as a means of protecting her from me.  In an instant of revelation, I’d become the enemy, the danger in our midst, the killer in a small room of four people trying to survive the eternally fatal.  Somehow, in a way I couldn’t comprehend, I was the bad guy for suggesting we not allow ourselves to fall into the …  I’d say the hands of the darkness but realize how silly that sounds.

Suffice it to say I’d suggested we not be taken alive.  That made me reprehensible in their eyes.  I was hurt by it.  I was hurt by their inability to understand I wanted the best for all of us and to accept that what I put forth was the best thing we could do.  I guess the darkness had already taken so much from us that could never be replaced.  My parents and their collective response to my proposal was adequate proof of that.

So I took it upon myself to protect them from the fate I knew was waiting outside the door and on the other side of sleep.  With my naked torso and soiled shirt in the corner as proof, I feigned sick.  I visited the bathroom and closed the door for privacy.  While I was in there, I turned off the air tank I’d turned on only an hour before.  And then I went back into the office and waited.

Again troubled by my lack of attention in high school physics, and even then biology, all I could do was bide my time.  I played ill for several hours more and would slink into the bathroom, close the door, and sneak a bit of air from the tanks as I pretended to be sick.  I couldn’t be certain how long it would take for the lack of oxygen to affect them—or is it carbon monoxide poisoning?—but I did know I could be patient.  And I was exactly that.

By the time both of them began feeling drowsy and started to dose off, the computer screensaver showed it was almost 11:00 P.M.  Perhaps it was the lack of breathable air.  Perhaps it was fatigue overcoming them from the day’s events.  It didn’t matter to me.  When my father lay back against the recliner near my mother and Helene, he closed his eyes to rest a bit, so I once again played sick and made my way into the bathroom.  It wasn’t all make-believe as it had been the times before, but I knew what I had to do.

The small room had nothing except a toilet and sink inside.  It wasn’t equipped for anything other than emergencies.  I was glad to find there was an old metal scale sitting in the corner.  It was something I’d brought to Carr Beholden from the house in Dallas, the house I’d shared with Beth.  I’d kept it because she liked it so much and it reminded me of her.  I took it in my hands, swung it around in the air as though practicing something …

Even now as I type this, I’m moved to tears about it all.  Needless to say, I did a bit of preparation before I stepped back out into the office.

The dim light was barely usable.  Even so, I could see my father resting on the floor against the chair where Helene slept and my mother began to doze.  Not wanting to allow them even a moment’s suffering in that other place, I stepped over to them and made my move.

The dull thud of the scale against my father’s head was a sound I’ll never forget.  It was horrible and pushed me to the edge of real sickness.  I knew I couldn’t hesitate though, and I swung it again as Mom stood up from the arm off the chair as she tried to reach him.  Afterward, neither of them could do more than squirm on the floor.  It was easy to retrieve the gun from the waistband of my father’s trousers.  I knew precisely where he’d put it.

As I stood over the three of them and contemplated what needed to be done, I finally became sick to my stomach.  After vomiting toward the bathroom door, I focused on the task ahead.

Blood streaming from Dad’s head was all too evident in the low light.  I had to ignore it.  I also had to ignore Mom’s flailing as she tried to lift herself from the floor.  I couldn’t allow any of them to live.  I couldn’t allow any of them to pass out.  We all had to die.

I made it happen as quickly as I could.  My father was first, followed by my mother, and finally Helene.  There were only four bullets left in the gun and I knew each shot had to count.  I made certain they did.  While I was no master of human anatomy, I’d seen enough movies to comprehend the impact of a shot between the eyes.  Death was instantaneous.

No child should be faced with such a task.  To bring death to those who’d given me life was as terrible an experience as anything I thought the darkness could do.  It had already taken so much, yet in my final act of compassion it took more.  I didn’t think it possible.

But that assumption was wrong.  There was terror waiting in their embrace that would overshadow the horror I’d committed.  I tried to use that to justify my actions, to explain it away by saying they’d have done the same thing for me under similar circumstances.  I was making a lot of assumptions though.  I thought I understood what Beth had said.  I thought I understood what the darkness meant.  I hoped I was right … I hope I’m right.

It’s been about an hour since that happened and I’m sitting at the desk.  I’ve been sick several times.  What have I done?  I can’t stop crying.  Through the tears and dim light I can see the darkness feeling its way under the door that leads to the hall.  So this room doesn’t seal off completely from the rest of the house …  No matter.  There’s still one more bullet in the gun resting here next to the laptop.  I’m going to save this document, send a copy to the printer I’ve just powered on, and finally I’ll do what I need to do.

I thought it was important to write this.  I thought it was important to document our ordeal.  I really thought it was important.  I’ve witnessed the end of the world.  I can’t help but feel I’ve done a moderately poor job of making clear precisely how terrible things have been.  I suppose at this point it doesn’t really matter.  I know what I have to do.  Now I just need to do it.

THE END

[Introduction | Part 16 | Final thoughts]