I was drowning in a sea of solid color, surrounded by an infinity of dark red, the crisscrossing currents of the turbulent waters passing before my eyes carrying with them motes of solid black. As the currents grew more violent, the motes grew in number, a veritable swarm of them engulfing me whole and leaving me buried in pure darkness. And then, as if from a distance, a faint green overtone filled my vision, so faint as to be nearly black. That was when I opened my eyes to a near empty room, dimly lit by the pale green glow of the hallway’s neon lights, but otherwise dark, cold, quiet and still.

For a moment, I fumbled in the darkness, my arms heavy and uncomfortable. Then I stretched, and the relief was near instant.

With my immediate needs taken care of, it was pretty obvious that the room I was in was a hospital room. The IV in my arm was all the hint I needed. The problem was that I didn’t actually have much of an idea why. Of course, the dream about the very intimidating, if helpful, circus layed out a clear answer. I’d been in a coma, but come on, dreams were dreams, right? Even when they made a shocking amount of sense.

At some point during my internal monologue, I heard the sound of a door opening. Turning, I was met with the sight of a man in a white coat entering the room. He looked young, but in the way that older people sometimes look much younger than they are, and as if to prove it, his face was marred by a void of dark purple around his eyes. A void so deep I was worried his eyes might fall right out. He took a step towards me, his white coat billowing slightly with the motion.

“Hello. I’m doctor Anthony Wilkins, a neurologist. Could you tell me your name?” He enunciated in what was clearly a practiced tone of voice, if with an undercurrent of pure exhaustion.

It was a weird question given that he was, presumably, my doctor.

“Andy Becker, But shouldn’t you know that already? I’m pretty sure I’ve been in this hospital for a while.”

The expression on his face shifted subtly, his bottom lip jutting ever-so slightly forward.

“Well, you seem perfectly put together, Mr. Becker,” he said in a tone so disappointed that I could have sworn he was complaining. “Just like the others.”

What is he talking about? Besides, shouldn’t he be checking my vitals right now or something?

“The others?” I asked, fishing for an explanation.

“I’ve had several other cases of people falling into incredibly shallow comas recently. Which is why I can tell you that I expect you to make a complete recovery like all the others before you. They last about two weeks on average, and as you were only out for four days I have few doubts about your recovery.”

“That’s good to hear?” I half answered, half asked, but it didn’t seem to matter to doctor Wilkins, who carried on talking as if I’d said nothing at all.

“We’ll discharge you tomorrow morning after some perfunctory tests, but I should get to the point. I’m sorry to interrogate you right after you woke up, but do you have any idea what could have happened to you? I’ve already notified the competent authorities of this little epidemic we’re having, but nothing substantial has been done so far.”

And with that, his strange behavior made sudden sense. If there was a plague of mysterious comas plaguing our area of course the doctors would try to get to the bottom of it. A perfect explanation.

“I’m not sure. The last thing I remember was being in a supermarket parking lot after having met this really upset old lady; I’m not sure how she could’ve caused this…”

“I will remind you that anything you say to me falls under doctor-patient confidentiality . That is to say, could you please confirm for me that you haven’t been ingesting any potentially illegal substances? I won’t judge you, but I would prefer to know what’s putting all these people into my hospital.”

“Not that I know of? I suppose I could have been drugged by someone else and forgot about it. Can drugs do that?” I assumed it was possible but I was hardly an expert on drugs, illegal or otherwise.

“It’s possible,” he responded, lazily writing something on his clipboard I wasn’t sure he’d be able to reread later, “Did you experience any symptoms before you suddenly lost consciousness or in the preceding weeks? Dizziness? Shortness of breath? Headaches? Anything at all really.”

“Nothing was wrong with me before, as far as I know. The last thing I remember is the old lady—and a weirdly vivid dream about a magic circus.”

“Tell me about this dream,” the doctor demanded in a kind, but firm voice as his pen started scribbling on the paper like it had gained an entirely new lease on life.

I supposed a neurologist was close enough to a psychiatrist to be asking this sort of question, so I went ahead and gave him a brief description of who and what I saw in my dream, glossing over the conversations. Frankly, now that I thought about it, figures in your dreams making demands of you sounded batshit crazy and I didn’t want to be here any longer than necessary. Least of all in the psychiatric ward.

“Thank you. At least I can say for sure that vivid dreams are a symptom… I’ll send someone by to run all the tests in the morning, but as I said all the others were fine afterwards, so I expect you to make a full recovery as well. If you’ll excuse me, I have to attend to my other patients,” He said, leaving me as confused as when I’d woken up.

----------------------------------------

True to his word, come 6 a.m. the nurses descended on me like so many angry wasps, hell-bent on drawing blood. Personally, I think I handled it with honor and distinction. And only mild squealing.

My labs turned up no anomalies, and all the rest showed up as it would in any other healthy young man. They still told me to come in for a checkup in two days, then the week after, and potentially some time after that too if they thought I needed it.

My mother and sister came to see me around 10 a.m. It was a tearful reunion. Even if the doctor tells you that everything should be fine, hearing about a sudden storm of—admittedly harmless—mysterious comas is not exactly reassuring. Seeing me mostly fine was a huge relief for everyone involved. Still, I was at home by noon, confused, but seemingly healthy.

Within a few days my life more or less returned to normal, I was even back to attending my college classes and was only somewhat behind, though all the professors were unnecessarily accommodating, so It would all work out.

On the Saturday after my discharge from the hospital, mom bought a cake to celebrate my survival. I was all alone in our apartment later that morning, and that was when I heard a knock on the door.

“Coming!” I shouted as I got up off the couch to open the door.

I looked through the peephole and saw a disconcertingly tall woman in an oversized and ill-fitting business suit. Her short blond hair contrasted with her beady eyes, which were such a dark shade of brown that they looked nearly black. Those very same eyes were very clearly looking right back at me, fixed at the peephole. It was freaky, and though she couldn’t see me I stared back at her from across the door.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

She fidgeted, then adjusted her red tie, with her thick, sausage-like fingers then coughed politely, but pointedly. Even a small gesture like that seemed menacing from the beast of a woman. I took that as a sign that I should open the door.

When I opened the door she stepped inside in one unbroken motion, leaving me no choice but to back up as awkwardly as a novice driver further into my home, seriously freaked out and wondering if this was some sort of home invasion.

“Andrew. Hello,” she said politely, gently nudging the door shut behind her with a foot, “I’ve come to elaborate on business.”

At this point I was sufficiently intimidated and confused that I didn’t immediately respond by screaming and calling for help like a sensible person.

Instead of doing the smart thing, I said, “Sorry, do I know you?”

“We met five days ago. You were very rude,” The woman replied, stone-faced, eyes not even looking at me, really, but instead staring straight forward, twitching briefly to look at this or that object behind me every so often before snapping back into place.

There was a pause, and then I made the connection.

“You were one of the nurses in the hospital? Sorry I didn’t recognize you right away, was there some medical information that you had to discuss with me in person or…?”

“No.”

“No?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

There was silence.

“There is business,” she elaborated, “I want to sit down to elaborate. Eat refreshments.”

“...Sure, let’s do that,” I said after a moment's hesitation.The woman definitely didn’t seem violent. She was also so much bigger and heavier than me that there was no way I could stop her if she actually wanted to pull something here. So, I led her into the kitchen/dining room and gave her a glass of water. My mother taught me how to treat guests, so I was not a complete savage.

The glass sunk into her grip until the rim was nearly invisible, drowning in her sausage-like fingers. She brought it up to her mouth almost slothfully, gaze fixed on it like it was a task that required both precise focus and titanic effort, drinking it all in one go, but so torturously slowly that I started looking at the clock to check the time every so often. It took her nearly a full minute.

“So, what is this business you keep bringing up?” I prodded gently once she’d finally finished. I was getting more and more sure that this person had a disability of some kind. Maybe something genetic given how big she was.

She pulled a brown-wrapped package out of her suit, about as big as a laptop but not quite perfectly rigid, and put it on the dining room table.

“You are to deliver this,” she pointed to the package, and then pulled out a clear plastic water bottle from the same place, “and drink this,” she added as she plopped it down on the table.

That made things only minimally clearer.

“Why do you want me to do that?” I asked, confused for all the obvious reasons and then some.

At this point she actually looked at me, instead of just through me, and she made some sort of facial expression. It was an awkward and too wide twisting of lips, cheeks, and brows that I had never seen on a human face and I had no idea what emotion it was supposed to represent.

“I understand that you do not understand. I will elaborate in thorough detail. Jarqual’s Circus worked to wake you up. You chose to compensate it with three favors. This is the first favor. You should do things that you agreed to, otherwise people will be angry. Drink one mouthful from the bottle before sleeping, store the package in a secured, unwet place. Deliver it to the inscribed address within the next two weeks. That is all.”

The reference to the circus made me assume I was dreaming again and I hopped slightly in my chair, trying to fly.

“We are not in a dream,” responded the woman. I felt embarrassed she’d realized what I’d been doing, but the horrifying realizations didn’t stop there. They kept going like a German train on a tight schedule.

“So the entire dream I had about the circus was actually real? Or well, still a dream, but with real people inside?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

There was silence.

I looked up at the ceiling. It was obvious at this point that the freakish woman was someone from the circus I dreamed about. It was a bit jarring that the mafia I was meant to be doing favors for was suddenly so… physical, tangible—possessed of corporeality. I felt relaxed about it in the dream; I felt relaxed about it in the hospital, but now that I was both completely sane and aware it was real, I was not relaxed at all.

What was in the package? Drugs? Body parts? Threatening letters? Threatening drugged body parts? And the liquid clearly wasn’t water either. What was the woman thinking just asking me to drink it without even telling me what it was? It was outrageous, honestly, and—

—CLANG, FRRK, BANG BANG BANG—

I looked back down, there was a dirty plate and some cutlery in front of the woman. A knife and fork that had little dimples in them, as if someone had squeezed them hard enough to bend the metal. Whatever used to be on the, now empty, but formerly full plate smelled of pineapple. The cake inside my fridge was pineapple flavor—my favorite, and not at all common in cake.

“Did you eat the cake in my fridge?”

“Only a portion of it,” replied the woman.

It was surprising how much you could forgive someone when they were capable of crushing cutlery with their bare hands, and when they were fast enough to set the table and have some fucking cake in a near instant. Fuck.

“Alright. I’ll just… do everything you told me to do,” I said meekly, imagining what she could do to my skull, or neck… or spine.

I don’t think anyone can blame me for blindly obeying someone who, while somewhat stunted, knew where I lived and had clearly implied, despite their problems with verbal subtlety, that they could end me in an instant if they wanted to.

“Good,” said the woman, rising from her seat, “I am The Freak, if that was not clear. You were rude to me.”

“I’m sorry. I was out of it and I promise not to do it again while I’m sane,” I responded as quickly as a call center employee reading off their script.

She gazed at me for a moment.

“Good,” said The Freak, before leaving my house in a fairly normal fashion. Except, this time, she had to bend over to fit through the door frame. Freaky.

For a while, I stared blindly at the door, and then I did the dishes and hid all the things she had given me under my bed like a good boy. When the rest of my family came home they were a bit put out by the fact that three quarters of the cake were gone, but I explained—truthfully—that someone I had met while I was in the hospital had come to visit, that they were mentally handicapped, and that I would have felt uncomfortable trying to stop them from eating more cake. The two of them were very understanding after that explanation. Although there were some uncomfortable questions that I had to dance around a bit, in the end I managed to get through it without actually lying. Except by omission. There were a lot of those.

Properly cowed by the visit of what was clearly a brutal enforcer, I dutifully drank a mouthful of the clear liquid from the bottle under my bed. It tasted of citrus and cream with a somewhat grainy texture, all that despite being a clear, water-like liquid.

I was on my bed for a while, nothing happened. Sooner or later I had to stop nervously waiting for something, anything to happen and actually go to bed. So I put on my PJs, turned the lights off and tucked myself beneath the blankets.

When I finally found the courage to close my eyes, the darkness beneath my eyelids was replaced by swirling red.