Prompt Lost
Midnight Climax
Harris woke in the dark, screaming.
It had been a wild night. One of many wild nights. Maybe the wildest. Harris’s head ached something terrible. How long had he been asleep?
Shafts of orange electric light stabbed sharp lines through the ceiling’s pitch black. A cold breeze swept through the room and caught the curtains. Light blasted past as the heavy material whipped around, then came back to rest, plunging everything into darkness again.
Covered in sweat, Harris shivered violently. He sat up, shaking, chest bare, pallid skin goosebumped. Even the small movement sent his head into a tailspin. His guts were in open rebellion and readying artillery fire. He cursed and forced his sickness back down from the middle of his throat. His mouth filled with the acrid taste of bile. He groaned.
Another gust of wind sent the curtains flailing. This time light hit him dead in the eyes. It burned like battery acid. In the flash, he caught a fleeting glimpse out the window and thought he saw ominous figures there. Tall, thin, featureless silhouettes, watching. They passed in an instant, more the specter of a vision than the thing itself.
The wind came again and mercilessly robbed him of his fleeting body heat. Chill racked Harris’s muscular frame. It hurt, like a warm fire after hypothermia, or ice water poured onto molten glass.
He needed to close that goddamned window. Harris forced his feet to swing around onto the darkened ground. He tested his weight on them, decided they were not ready and stood up anyway. Half walking, half stumbling, he made it to the curtain and whipped it back.
With his right hand, Harris seized the curtain as if it were a venomous snake. With his left hand, Harris shielded his desperate eyes from the light of the city. The tall window was wide open on the bottom half. It looked out onto thin air – a vertiginous drop from the 80th floor. Harris leaned forward carefully, scanning the city far below. He shut the window and the wooden frame slammed down with a loud report. He released the curtain and it fell back into place. Returned to the comfort of shadow, Harris took a step back, eyes closed.
Harris could not remember the night before. He knew only that it had been crazy. Yet Harris also thought this was not enough. For some indefinable reason, Harris felt it was imperative that he remember.
His throat was sandpaper when he swallowed, all ache and burn. Harris pitched toward the nightstand for the cup he kept there.
Except there was no cup. Why was there no cup? There was always a cup.
But nevermind that. He was parched, more thirsty than he’d ever been before. He felt as if he’d slept several hours inside a sandblaster as if he’d spent an entire night breathing nothing but sand.
“Water,” he thought he heard himself say. He was the man escaped from the desert, life holding on by a string, lurching behind in his shadow, bait for a pack of eager vultures. Vultures of the soul, Harris thought.
Each step consigned his desiccated brain to more pain. Every part of Harris’s body, it felt to him, fought for the last drops of his precious moisture. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water as he hobbled toward the bathroom. When he made it to the hallway, morbid curiosity brought his hand up to his tongue. The pad of his pointer finger rubbed up against the dry muscle’s surface and it felt to him like touching the cracked salt flat of an ancient sea-bed.
The final few steps saw him trip into the bathroom. Harris caught his fall on the cool porcelain of the sink, right hand groping for the faucet, twisting until a stream appeared, a pillar of liquid salvation. Overcome, Harris plunged his face into the sink’s basin and opened his mouth. His tongue breached the stream and water coalesced over it, sinking into its cracked surface and down its obscene length, a tidal wave of life in his throat.
Harris drank for longer than he felt it was possible to drink. With each gulp, Harris felt his body replenishing itself. His tongue softened and became malleable again, the pain in his throat dissipated: Gulp, headache subsided; Gulp, body heat returned; Gulp, uncertain legs grew strong beneath him.
Harris drank until he felt young again and could feel no ailment, large or small. Only when all semblance of imperfection had left his body did Harris stop. Water still flowing into the drain, Harris stood up, straight and sure, muscles in his back and chest tightening and loosening experimentally. There was a mirror over the sink.
In the darkness, Harris could just barely make out the features of his own face. The crest of a nose, the glint of a cheekbone, the dark movement of pupils in shadow. He searched around for a light switch but found only bare walls. When he turned back to the mirror, he froze.
The bathroom opened into the hallway which opened into the bedroom. In the mirror, Harris saw the curtain fluttering in the wind, and beyond it the bright orange light of the city through the open bedroom window. The cool breeze hit him several seconds later, summoning gooseflesh across the width and length of his bare back.
A warm thrill of apprehension bloomed in Harris’s chest and spread out across his body in a wave. At the same time, the fleeting remnants of an idea or a memory began to form on the edge of his mind. The notion taunted him, a word just out of reach, a cliff edge on the tip of his tongue.
Had he been here before? This was his bathroom? Whose bathroom was this?
Movement in the bedroom in the mirror. Restless limbs beneath sweat-soaked sheets. Harris swallowed his fear and turned around. His feet moved of their own accord even as his mind tried to stop them. Something was not right.
Something is not right, Harris thought.
“Something is not right,” Harris said.
The form in the bed tossed and turned.
“Behold,” Harris heard himself whisper as he drew near to the writhing form, “the Midnight Climax.“
Wind caught the curtain, flooding the bedroom with light, bathing Harris, all sinew and pallor, as he stood tall beside the bed. He craned down, neck rounding first, dragging his upper back after it, until he was hunched forward, a ghoul in the dark, tendons taut, mouth open in a voiceless O, bulging eyes fixed upon his own sleeping face.
Harris woke in the dark, screaming.
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