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my writing, nothing is as it seems, Rhavin answered my question and this is what happened, science fiction, scribbling madly, short fiction, talking furniture, Why are mattresses so comfy?
Human beings actually have a natural life span of about 500 years. You think that’s a crazy assertion, but it’s true. And yes there’s a reason why no one actually lives that long anymore, but it’s not what you think.
Walter was fed up. He had not slept very well since he had moved into the apartment with his two buddies, and it wasn’t because one or the other of them were noisy up until the wee hours of the morning. No, it had everything to do with how horrible his mattress was. Which is why, at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, already tired from his early morning shift at the supermarket, he was walking into a furniture store. The day was grey, but not raining, which he had noted with some pleasure – because that meant it was a very real possibility he could have a brand new bed that very night.
Walter was greeted at the door by a man with a dark complexion who smiled at him as though he were pleased beyond measure to have a customer at this time of day. He pressed his hands together as he spoke to Walter,
“Welcome to the Furniture Warehouse, where our specialty is comfort!” Walter smiled back uncertainly. The man seemed just a tad too intense, but he shook it off. “My name is Kasim. What is it that I can help you find, today?”
The man’s English was that of a foreign man trained at Oxford; clipped and proper with only a hint of his home country – but what that home country could be, Walter found he couldn’t place it. Walter smiled back at Kasim.
“I need a new mattress. I haven’t been able to sleep very well for the last few months, and now it’s totally unbearable.”
Kasim suddenly seemed very sad.
“This is very unfortunate,” he said, and then brightened. “But you have come to the right place! We have a fine selection of mattresses. If you would please follow me!”
As Walter followed Kasim through the store, he noticed that there was no one else in it. Faint music filtered from hidden speakers – a muzak version of a tune he recognized but couldn’t place. True to his word, there were many mattresses available, many lined up against one wall, and several sample ones perched on various styles of bed frames. Kasim started to ask him questions about his preferences and his budget. It seemed like only minutes that he was in the shop, but when Walter checked his cell phone before starting up his pickup in the parking lot, he found it was almost six. Could that be right?
Puzzled, Walter thought back and remembered that he had laid down on one of the mattresses – or was it three? He couldn’t remember. What he did remember was standing up off the last one and telling Kasim he’d take it, and that he’d like it delivered that evening, to which Kasim had nodded enthusiastically and held his hand out for Walter’s credit card. Walter shook his head, it really didn’t matter. He was going to have an excellent sleep tonight on his new mattress.
Walter woke with a start to his alarm clock screeching next to his ear. He blearily turned it off and put his head back down on the pillow. Five more minutes of glorious sleep was all he needed…. and the alarm started to blare again. Slowly, he dragged himself out of bed, patted his new mattress and stumbled into the bathroom to shower.
Over the next few weeks, he slept really well but it seemed to him that every morning it got harder and harder to get up. He even started to dream about it; about being unable to move. He was a prisoner of the comfortable mattress, and only the sound of the alarm could jar his mind enough to allow him to move.
One day, while sitting in the lunch room at work, Walter was gripped with a sudden dread. He had thought that his new mattress would allow him to get more sleep, and thus to feel more energized, more human during the day, but he didn’t. He still felt tired, no matter how well and how long he slept. He found himself craving sleep; the cradling warmth of his new mattress. What did it mean? He thought as he yawned hugely.
That night, Walter entered his bedroom and stared at the queen sized bed, dressed in flannel sheets and beckoning his tired body. Outside, snow fell and wind howled through the railings on the apartment decks outside. The large green numbers on the alarm clock glared at him in the dim light and he suddenly had a moment of deep terror. He didn’t want to climb into bed tonight. He didn’t want to feel what he’d felt every night for the last week or so; a voiceless terror that he would never be able to move again, that he’d suffocate in flannel and down and no one would ever know what really happened, murmuring only that he had died mysteriously in his sleep.
He sat instead at his desk and opened his laptop. He typed in “I’m afraid of my mattress” and the third google hit was a blog post entitled “You have every right to be afraid of your mattress.” Walter clicked on it. The article outlined the same feelings that Walter had and then went on to posit that the mattresses themselves were to blame for the feelings of terror and sleep paralysis. The author claimed that the mattress was not, in fact, a man made artifact, but a creature from some other planet or dimension that fed off the life energy of human beings, and that our alarm clocks were our only allies in waking us up, that they had been invented by an elite underground to combat the master plan of the mattress creatures. The author then challenged his readers to not sleep on a mattress that night and see how they felt in the morning. Walter sat back and glanced sidelong at his bed, and then at the large green numbers on his alarm clock. Walter closed his laptop and took his alarm clock into the living room. Tonight he would sleep on the over size couch.
When his alarm yowled the next morning, Walter opened is eyes and at up groggily. He felt a little sore, but he had not had the terrible dream where he was unable to move and he did not feel as drained as he had for the last few mornings. On his way to the bathroom he peeked into his room. All the bedclothes were on the floor; sheets, duvet and pillows; the mattress bare. Walter felt a chill.
Had he done that? Had one of his roommates? Could what the blogger claimed really be true or was he just going crazy? These thought whirled through his head as Walter showered. By the time he was done, he had decided to track down the author of that blog. He needed to know more and maybe talking to the real nut would convince him that he was just being paranoid.
Walter messaged the blogger from his laptop and was surprised that he received an email back almost immediately.
“So you took my challenge,” the email began. “And have decided that what I say just might be true. This is the first step. Meet me at the coffee shop on Main and Herald in an hours time. I’ll be the one with the Dr. Who t-shirt.” Walter was pleased that the blogger was a local, it cut down on his travel time, but he was nervous about meeting a stranger he met off the internet. He had heard so many strange and horrific stories over the years. What decided him was the public locale, and his burning need to know, to have evidence other than his paranoid thoughts about his bed sheets strangling him in the night. As Walter was about to leave, he grabbed his alarm clock and shoved it into his pocket.
At the coffee shop, Walter ordered a macchiato and sat facing the entryway. A girl came in wearing a blue shirt with a police box on it and Walter blinked. He waved to her and she came right over to his table and sat down. She was pretty in a geeky, sort of unkempt way. Her dark hair was curly and fell to her shoulders in every direction possible. Her glasses were blue-rimmed and had designs on the arms. She smelled vaguely of vanilla and lemons.
“You’re Walter? I’m Cassie.”
“Yeah, I uh. I didn’t realize you were a girl,” he said and she gave him a half smile.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said and opened her laptop. “What matters is that you’re starting to see the light. There are not many of us and we battle a force of medical practitioners and manufacturers who benefit from the sale of these mattresses and it’s an uphill battle.”
“But what’s your evidence? No offence, but even to me this sound a little….crazy,” Walter said and she nodded.
“I know. But have you ever wondered why Tibetan monks live so much longer? I mean aside from all that fresh air and meditation?”
“Sometimes, but that’s a false equivalent, isn’t it? They don’t have mattresses so they live longer? There are a hundred other factors.”
“Bad example,” she conceded. “But you can’ deny that there is a huge industry around sleep and sleep deprivation. There are pills to put us to sleep, special mattresses, clothing, and sounds to make us sleep better, but do we ever actually feel rested?”
Walter had to shake his head. The best sleep he’d had recently had been the one he’d taken on the couch and he said as much. She nodded vigorously and pointed to the data she had arrayed on her laptop. There were diagrams and scientific studies that found the mattresses were disguises for a symbiotic creature that fed on the life energy of human beings. Walter felt very twilight-zone-ish.
“So what do you propose to do?” Walter said after Cassie had nearly exhausted her evidence.
“Do? That’s the hard part, isn’t it? How do you convince everyone that their beloved beds are literally eating them alive?”
“I don’t suppose you can,” Walter said, and then he thought about Kasim and his smile, the lost hours at the furniture store. “Though, I wonder if we could do something about their human agents,” he said. Cassie leaned forward.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think that mattress salesmen know what they’re selling?”
“Maybe,” she said and listened as Walter outlined his experience with Kasim. She was nodding vigorously when he finished. “Let’s go and check things out, after hours.”
When they pulled into the parking lot outside the Furniture Warehouse, the lights inside were dim and the lot was empty. Snow swirled around, but refused to stick to the damp pavement. Walter followed Cassie up to the door and watched as she expertly jimmied the lock and slipped inside. No alarm sounded. Walter thought that was odd but when he pointed that out, Cassie merely shushed him. They crept to the back of the store. A light shone from under a door marked ‘Employees Only”. They pause to listen. A strange sound came from beyond the door; a low murmur punctuated by some kind of muffled mechanical clanking. Cassie opened the door a crack ad they both pressed their faces to the opening, Walter leaning over her so he could smell her shampoo. He was almost distracted by the scent until something beyond the door caught and held his attention.
It looked like Kasim, wearing a white lab coat. The figure was hunched over a console on the far side of the room. Suddenly, light glared out of an enormous screen in front of Kasim and the strangest thing Walter had ever seen appeared. Weird garbled sounds emitted from the screen, which seconds later was echoed by a mechanical voice translation.
“Progress report, human.”
“All is going as planned oh benevolent ones,” Kasim said, bowing at the screen. “I have sold another fifty mattresses to my fellow humans, I am well within my projections.”
“Excellent. What of your colleagues? They have not made their reports,”
“The symbiotes are all placed, but it seems that my brothers have not been as successful as I have in their sales.”
“You must ensure that our brethren find hosts soon or our kind will perish!”
“This is amazing,” Cassie whispered to Walter, who could only stare. “I was right!”
“You weren’t sure?” Cassie shoved him back into the store and let the door shut.
“Mostly! I just had never had direct proof before,” Cassie said. “We need to stop this.”
“But how? We don’t know how many of them there are, or how many people like Kasim there are. What does Kasim get out of this?”
“If we had that computer I bet we could find out. But right now, we need to stop what’s happening here, or more people are going to be come mattress zombies!” Before Walter could react, Cassie charged into the room and right up to Kasim, and knocked him over the head with a statue she’d lifted from a nearby desk. Kasim fell to the floor as the creatures on the screen recoiled. A squealing, hissing sound came through the speakers as Walter joined her and the both had to cover their ears.
“Noo!” the translator bleated.
“Stop!” Cassie shouted.
“Who are you? How dare you?” the creatures hissed. There were several of them, Walter could see now, green and blue and white, all twined together with hundreds of ropy limbs.
“Well who are you?” He asked reasonably, now that the screeching had stopped.
“We are the Somnar,” said the voice, which Walter now realized were several voices. “We come from another place. We are in exile. We require humans to survive. You threaten our species extinction! You have killed our ally!” The sentences seemed to overlap as what passed for mouths on the screen babbled together.
“He’s not dead,” Cassie said. “And we don’t like being used. You are using our life force, you kill us to keep yourselves alive!”
“We do not kill you. We comfort you. We do feed on you, but we are not killing you. We are helpful. We ease your stress so that you live longer. Yes….”
The voices were mesmerizing and Walter forgot what it was he was about to say. Just then, from his pocket, came a ringing sound, jarring them both out of the trance they had both been slipping into. Cassie slammed her hand onto the console and the screen went dark. Walter took the alarm clock out of his pocket.
“That was much too close,” it said.
Walter nearly dropped it. The digital readout had become a face, which smiled.
“Did that…” Cassie asked, pointing at the device in Walter’s hand. He nodded.
“Yes, I spoke. I could always speak. My name’s El. We were designed to keep vigil, to ensure that people did not succumb to the full powers of the Somnar,” said the clock. “You must hurry, this is just one battle in what is a global war.”
“What do we do?” Walter asked.
“Take what info you can from the console. When that is done, we must burn this place to the ground to make sure that none of those things can escape their mattress homes. Then we will go about freeing the rest of the world.”
Walter set to work on the console while Cassie took the truck to the gas station to fill up a couple of gas cans. If El was right, and right now, Walter had no reason to doubt the little machine, they had an awful lot of work to do…
Word count: 2659