People Watching Part 4 - Late Last Night
The walls in the Downtown apartments are paper thin and often
in the small hours you will hear noises that chill your soul. Most nights, the darkness in Boomtown can feel
uncomfortable but I recall one night in 1979 when the still air hung like a
heavy blanket over everything and the night felt particularly oppressive.
It had taken me ages to fall asleep and it felt like no
sooner had I drifted away that I was dragged from my deep slumber by a
blood-chilling scream. In what seemed
like a second - but could have been a lifetime - I heard the madness stir
inside my brain as I tried desperately to separate the horrors of the
dream-scape from the reality that I was emerging into. I sensed terror in the shadows and lay there
expecting the scream to reach out of the darkness a second or third time, but
there was nothing.
Had the scream been just a nightmare? Vague recollections of
a featureless white room danced across the no-man’s land between my
subconscious and my wakening. The room
was lit only by an icy blue neon strip in the hall outside and was featureless
except for swarms of buzzing white flies and the deep red blood that started to
seep from the ventilation grills high on the walls. Or had I been in the grips of the recurring nightmare
that had me falling and spinning to my death??
As I became slowly more lucid and reality started to get the
upper hand, I heard a soft sleepy voice from beside me….reassuring….it’s ok,
were you dreaming?
I gulped in a mouthful of air – so heavy I could almost chew
it - and gathered my thoughts….”no, I’m fine”, I replied, must be something I
ate late last night.