Sergeant Garnish

At first I was sitting in a car with an older man, his wife and another cook, who was probably younger than I. The man drove, his wife was in the passenger seat, behind her sat the other cook and I was sitting to his left, behind the driver. He was taking us all to work this early, early morning – it was still practically night – for a double shift. We were all going to work for twelve hours at least. The older man talked to us in the back about work, about what to expect of the day, while the other cook next to me texted his girlfriend or whomever about when he would get off from work. I caught the time as he typed it: 18:00. I asked him and he confirmed with a smirk that that was the time for his own shift to end and I nodded to him, telling him in that noncommittal, mumbled way that I was glad for him to not have to join in in the doubleshift-madness.

When we arrived it was in a nightly car park where our driverman rolled the car up extremely close to the right side of a red Smart car, until the flat hood of his almost touched the door. Only when he had managed to get to close to even fit a matchstick between the cars did he start rolling backwards again. I noticed that he was parking crosswise and didn't really understand why, but tried to reason with myself that it was probably to give us all enough room for the doors to open and get out comfortably.

At work then, in the kitchen, the older man gave me directions and an old cookbook to work with, but whatever we were doing was a bit of a blur, until I looked over to a frozen pond with an array of large bubbles on them, at least half a person tall, containing simple hovering items in a cartoonish design, like a table and other things I can't remember now, as well as a table and something else without a bubble around them, but a sort of arrow underneath them on the icefloor, pointing downwards. It was a task that needed doing, in the shape of an easy riddle. Matching things. … or something. I felt I knew almost immediately how to do it, but still needed to start thinking and get closer to figure out exactly what needed to be done. I approached the snowdrift between the pond and myself, where a few more of these large "items" were hovering to work with, and tested the ground with a foot to see whether it would support me, because I couldn't exactly see where the pond began under all this frozen white. The result this foot-test turned up did not satisfy me, so I got to my knees and leaned on the snowy area before me with my hands, patting it really hard. And sure enough, the ground wobbled. But not like a loose layer of ice on water, but rather like a very dense waterbed.

Somehow I went on the frozen pond anyway and got to work: I did whatever thing it was that I was supposed to do with those large, real-life computer game buttons, and unlocked one of the tables with some other stuff that I was supposed to use for my actual cooking job. Now, for that, it was my job to plate a bunch of amuse-bouches, snacks and appetizers for an important function where the guest were all sleek business people, and send those out. Time was short, and both the younger cook and the old man came over to help, taking my lead in how to roll the slices of various things and arrange them on the plates. What I remember most clearly are my frustration at how several slices of ham would fray and tear and look like shit when they were rolled up, as well as garnishing the dishes with herbs and seeds before sending them off. Black and yellow seeds and cress in different sizes and colours made for extraordinary gardens on top of the actual food on the little platters.

After this, I saw the younger cook outside the building in the dark (it was already evening again), getting ready to take his leave because his own shift was over. We said goodbye and I went back inside. The bulk of the work was really over now, so I wondered what we were supposed for the second shift, while I handed the old man his cookbook and other things he had given me to work with.

In the next one I was Sergeant Nicholas Angel (from the movie Hot Fuzz), getting introduced to a group of five police officers with clowny names by their leader, who listed off a few things they were currently doing. The last thing he mentioned was an around-the-clock patrol of a certain part of a street that separated two very prestigious, modern districts of inner London. He said their names and they did sound like London city districts, or as though they could very well be, but I don't remember the words since waking up. It's possible they were just nonsense.

As he mentioned that part of the job, keeping an officer on patrol there "at all times", which apparently had successfully been preventing a large portion of the crime in that area, my view panned over the street he was speaking of, between two large, very chic modern buildings in some glassy and red design, that could either be offices or apartments. The "street" in question was really just a very sturdy, broad and long balcony along the side of one of the buildings, which was part of the house but served as a public walkway. It went around the corner of the house to a row of doors, where it narrowed to something that looked more private and had a roof to keep the rain off.

That's where I went first, the next early morning, to take the patrol and see for myself how exactly this particular corner was so integral to public safety. When I looked around and rounded the corner to that row of doors, I noticed a stack of something wrapped in blue plastic trash sacks sitting to the side in front of one door. The lower half was wrapped in one, and the top half wrapped in the other. Since there was a single newspaper lying on top of that, I figured those were all newspapers, fresh for the day, wrapped in that sturdy plastic to keep them dry in case it rained.

I approached the stack to look at the single newspaper, and when I picked it up, I noticed that it was dry and the plastic around the other was covered in waterdrops. I immediately scented a crime. There was nothing to prompt that thought, really, other than maybe wishful thinking to have something clever to point to while solving a riddle: The dry newspaper on a stack of wet ones. I called my colleagues out and started being awfully clever while at the back of my head really knowing I was bullshitting everyone and should probably stop before I wasted my own time with this.

Ward

It was a hall of beds in a hospital, like it was a hundred years ago, with over two dozen occupied beds in one big room. I know that there were in total two floors like this in the building, as well as two or three hallways lined with smaller rooms, like hospital bedrooms today. This was due to the small size of this hospital, I knew.

I had a bed in this big room, which was bustling with the activity of nurses and the other patients. Sitting up, I could overlook most of the ward, because behind me was only a wall and there were no screens around any of the beds. The walls in front and to either side of me, each several rows of beds away, had large windows with the sunny view of a fresh and summery green landscape with trees and grass.

A nurse, in an oldfashioned robe and hat reminiscent of that of a nurse nun from the Great War, passed through my field of vision and puffed up someone's pillow. People were talking, just about everyone was awake, and there was someone sitting at my right bedside. It was an unfamiliar young woman who was here on some professional business. Maybe she was a doctor, or maybe she was only here to discuss something to do with me.

Unbidden, I recalled something dangerous. Instances of when people turned their attention towards other people, and as soon as they began looking them straight in the face that other person would reveal their monstrous true identity. They were not people at all, but predators to us, who had us without hope for escape or defence once we were looking at their faces. Their faces then turned and twisted into dark, glistening gargoyle shapes with broad, pointed snouts, large, slanted eyes of jet and a ridged, angular surface. Their hands did the same. As you were watching this, you could not move or look away, or even close your eyes or say anything. You could only feel terror.
This I knew, though I had never been a victim myself, and I didn't even know what happened to those people I saw in these strips of memory then. I didn't know whether they were killed, eaten, abducted, turned insane or something else. It didn't matter either way. They were ensnared and attacked in a devious way, and we were all potential prey to those beings.

After these brief glimpses had flitted past, I suspected vaguely that I was somehow responsible for fighting this danger and that the woman sitting beside my bed was here to instruct me on this. (In retrospect, it might have occured to me then that my suspected job of fighting those hostile entities might be the reason for me occupying a hospital bed at the moment - and not remembering why. But it didn't. Maybe it would have if the moment hadn't been so brief.) However, I didn't have time to ask anything or explore this thought further, because a young man with long hair appeared on the left side of the bed. He stood there and looked down at me. My eyes flitted over him absently, then I saw the woman to my right acknowledging his presence without words (no one said anything), but keeping him only at the edge of her vision with an air of unease and suspicion about her. I immediately, automatically glanced back at him and while trying to keep my eyes from lifting to look at his face, I imagined how, if I let them, he would turn and then ------ what then? Had I not seen him a moment ago over the shoulder of my bedside companion, a few beds down the row to my right? Had he not been staring down a middle aged balding man in his bed, who was looking up at him in dumb horror, devouring him with a twisted half-sneer on a monster's face that no one but me and that man seemed to notice?

If he had, then I hadn't reacted.

So this must have been just a wild thought.

(In retrospect again... I noticed it before, but didn't think anything of it. No one seemed particularly sick or injured in this ward. Might I have been insane?) 

Demons and Stars / Flesh Terror

I don't know why exactly, but this man who looked a little like Martin Freeman in a police uniform and was my pretend-husband (and I a person in a yellow raincoat fluctuating between male and female) wanted us to get off the tube at the very last station and hide in a niche at the underground depot. I was pressing myself into a small wallgap to stay unnoticed, whereas he just stood there in plain view of the subway people and no one seemed to care. The subway people finally left and we'd been successful, apparently, but fuck if I know what was supposed to happen next.
Because it didn't, because this was happening next:

In a big old city, I wandered through the inner city at night, past a grand old church and lovely baroque facades, and came across a modern glass-and-metal structure in rectangular shape. It had only a ground floor and was "architecturally" reminiscent of those ugly kiosks and tourist info boxes you may find at some bigger bus station outside of the main building. Meaning it had glass panes for walls, tinted orangered or covered with orangered foil, was framed in metal, and was perfectly straight and angular. And also perfectly ugly and temporary-looking.

A soldier of high rank greeted me. As we passed along the outside first, one of its long sides, I noticed a baneful foreboding, an angry humming and vibration behind the glass wall. It even rattled. The noise and movement were erratic as if originating from a living organism (as opposed to a machine) and did not quite take place in the actual world. It wasn't that the walls were actually growling and rattling, but rather that I got the distinct, unmistakable sense that there was something behind them that shouldn't be contained by them. And wouldn't. I was fairly certain, as we were entering through the main door at the headside, that something really bad was going to break out here during my visit.

The officer (Captain, Colonel ... who knows, who cares - he never said), mistaking me for an inspector of some kind, babbled something about the building's new purpose. He said that since the Doctor had left they had locked down and secured away part of the left side of the building containing the old research - skeptical, I eyed the white glass walls separating said research tract from the hallway. This is secure? - and had turned the rest of the facility into living space for his Romans.
Sure enough, right about then a sliding door (squeaky clean white glass again) opened in front of me in this narrow hallway and I half expected it to spit out a couple of bloodthirsty demon monkeys, attacking me, because it shared a wall (white gla- well you guessed it) with the "locked down" left part of the building. You know. The evilly vibrating part.

But it seemed to be only an elevator. A few women looking ... "Roman" somehow, (it was a mixture of futuristic and ancient in the way they were dressed and wore their hair) stepped into it, ignoring us completely and boredly waiting to go down. Right, there's more underground ... I thought.
It was about then, or shortly after, that shit went down.

It didn't happen in detail, sorry to disappoint there.

However, a high official's lovely trophy wife (looked like Oona Chaplin with jewelry) was sent out during all the ensuing terror to get help. Specific help. So she ran through the city as it turned from nightly to nightmarish, large grating and slithering noises, hollow whoomping and disturbing crackling filling the air, growing, swelling, buildings rapidly dilapidating without actually falling down, a maelstrom of sheer horror and mouths demolishing the small glass building and the people inside, and she looked up at the sky and cried for the Doctor.

He didn't come and she began to call even more desperately, for "Doctor Who!" repeatedly, I looked up at the starry sky as well, and when the terror consumed and blackened up the air around us, obscuring the view and all other senses, I drifted up to a roof to see better. It was actually starry. Not what you usually see from inside a big city, but rather a picture that the Hubble telescope would show you. It was so still. Colourful and glittery.

The Doctor never came.

No one came.

The wife was gone when I returned to the ground.

Out of nowhere a ... living thing as large as an elephant, with a revolting evil baby face and wrinkled, naked skin hopped in front of me and assumed the sitting pose of a dog.

It stared at me.

I was about to say something to it when it suddenly grew tentacles. Thick and leathery, turning it into no more than a writhing, thick sausage, the tentacles grew thicker and sprouted new tentacles. They didn't exactly reach for me but they lunged for and stoppered all doorways and regular walking paths in sight and so efficiently cut off all my exits. I was loathe to touch them but I didn't need to. Managing to avoid the massive flesh writhing on the ground (most of them were as thick as old trees now), I jumped up on a low stone bridge to escape.

When I landed on the railing, another fleshdemondog hopped in front of me and sat. It stared reproachfully.
This time I didn't wait around and just jumped down the other side of the bridge and ran. There was another fleshdog sitting and staring at me, I ran past it, and in the distance by the cathedral I could see another squatting.

It ends here. 

The Lamest Encounter

I walked out into the hallway outside of my room and saw the makeshift bed there by the stairs that lead up to the attic. That made me turn around into my room and start counting the beds in the house, wondering why I'd slept on garden chair upholstery on the living room floor when it was so murderously hot a while ago and not just one of the beds downstairs. I didn't finish my mental count, because my little brother, actually little for some reason, about seven years old and still in his pyjamas, hurriedly put on his house shoes and dashed out of his room and down the stairs. When he came back up he came up into my room where I was timewarpily sleeping again, and he proceeded to play with matchbox cars in a corner by the door. I opened and closed my eyes wearily and imagined that he was being a bit quieter to not disturb my sleep. I could have gone back to sleep but what the hell, I got up and the girl standing in the other corner by the door, in underwear and facing my nightstand with a quiet smile, made me pause on my way out. I had no idea who she was and neither she nor I said anything, but she was in my room in the morning, somewhat undressed, and again what the hell, I just sort of groped her from behind and kissed her shoulder. She seemed to like it. My mind went "Right then," and I went to the shower.

Stone Murderers, God, Ship

I walked into the aisle of a square courtyard at night, with walls at least ten metres high. In the arches on the ground stood dark stone statues of cloaked and hooded people, each with a long dagger somewhere about their person. Most were holding it in one hand. Some stood upright, some were crouched, and none had a visible face or even a mask. Their heads were all hood. They stood in rows of three or four, but some rows had empty places. As I passed and walked between them, one came alive, turned from stone to cloth and flesh, got a face and began moving fluidly out of its stasis. The cloaked person stabbed somebody in the back viciously, hatefully, and moved on. More of the statues turned live, one by one, left their places and began stabbing people in the back. I moved out of their way and saw that there were other cloaked figures who moved into vacant spots in those rows, assumed a stance like the statues and turned to dark stone. I knew, somehow, that were I to do that, I would be relatively safe from them. But I didn't. There was no need, because I didn't think I was in any danger. I went into the courtyard and looked up the high walls, higher than the square court was wide, and saw more of the dark statues standing in alcoves all about these four walls and glowering down, and at me. I hovered up and saw their hateful glares follow me. They were waiting to turn live and some of them did, and they lunged at me but missed and landed on the floor where they went about their stealthy, murderous business on other living people. I wasn't afraid that one of them would get me and didn't hurry upward, but ascended at a steady pace, certain that I'd be able to defend myself somehow if need be. I hovered up into the almost starless night sky and over one of the walls.

Beyond it was deep, black water, with more ancient looking stone structures on either side. The water got wider further on. This must have been a port of some kind. I looked back at the walls of the courtyard, hovering above the water, and saw a ship with at least seven terribly dark blue sails hurry out of that wall - some opening in it - and over the black water.

A shockwave of very unnatural origin or something like that, (a wave of ether,) came out of the courtyard, rippled deep through the water and the air above it, made the water heave and hurled the ship up out of it and forward. It somersaulted and landed on its side. Since I was impossibly large now and felt a mild sort of kinship or loyalty with this something that fled the dark, murdering statues, I took it into my giant hands, lifted it out of the water and set it upright again. The ship immediately sped on as if it had been stuck on something and was now pulled forward by a rubberband. I looked at the still patch of water where it had lain and thought that some of the crew must have fallen out. There was nothing visible on the surface, but I didn't expect any regular human to be conscious after being rattled through like that. They might be further down. For a split second I contemplated simply sieving my hands through the water, but dismissed the idea almost as soon as I'd had it - any reasons for the dismissal would have to be found in retrospect - and instead held my arms and open hands out and concentrated. I tried either magic or the Force or what have you to find and lift anyone out of the black, but it didn't work. I was not disappointed. All my emotions were very dull, I realised, and recalled that telekinesis almost never worked. 

Duck

I was a male mallard and my actual human mother wanted me dead. I fled through the garden because luckily, most of our neighbours had ponds and pools, and some of the shrubbery concealed parts of their surfaces from view from my mother's garden. So I flew and flapped around frantically, trying to pick a good invisible spot in one of the roughly half dozen ponds.

I found one but ended up back in my family's garden after a short while, because they had two bright yellow ducklings for some reason. My little brother (like my mother not a duck) happened to be around while I, now also human, emptied a little cotton sack of its toy contents to put the ducklings in and carry them off. He helped me and carried it with me. He clutched it close to his chest and I held it out by one handle at extended arm's length. I suggested to him to do it like me so he could fly better, but he insisted to hold the duckling bag close like that. We were flapping our arms and hovering awkwardly, and that's where it ended. 

Mattress

A bunch of excellent looking girls in cheerleader uniforms, who were really a college volleyball team, practiced in a half serious mood with hilarious Madonna- and Cyndi Lauper poses, and rounded the unsmiling fun off by pushing one of theirs through the hall in a wheelchair when they left the gymnasium. The girls who pushed the wheelchair bumped it into the legs of the one walking in front, and she began to complain and claim that she was injured now. A cut then showed her in another wheelchair alongside the first. I remember thinking vaguely how odd it was that that school had spare wheelchairs for shenanigans like this.

But none of that had any consequence at all when I got an extremely lovely girl into a room with a mattress. The room was new, somehow, newly renovated or something, and there were boxes standing around. There was also a second mattress.

It distracted me from what I was supposed to be doing on mine, because there was a naked back and bum on it. They removed themselves after a while - they belonged to a young man - and where they had lain facedown was an old woman. She sat up. She was stark naked, too. She was thin and had bright grey short hair. She looked at us with sort of a smirk. I think I asked her something and she replied, her explanation of the situation including something along the lines of: "He wants me to pretend I'm a board."

"What?"
"A board. A wooden plank."

"Why?" I was thoroughly perplexed. She shrugged.

"He likes it that way."

I suspect it was my utter blankness of mind at the realization that this young man got off on wooden boards which switched the dream off.