Chapter 6: The Logic of Nightmares

Chapter 6: The Logic of Nightmares

The first thing to breach the black void was a smell. It wasn't the damp, ancient rot of the cave, but a sharp, sterile scent of antiseptic and bleach that scoured his sinuses. The second was a sound, a rhythmic, electronic beep, as steady and impassive as a metronome. It was the antithesis of the frantic, chittering chaos he remembered.

Leo’s eyelids felt impossibly heavy, glued shut with grit and exhaustion. He forced them open, squinting against a soft, fluorescent light that seemed far too bright. He was staring at an acoustic tile ceiling, stained with a faint water spot in one corner. He was lying on his back, on something soft. Sheets, thin and starched, were tucked tightly around him. An IV tube snaked from his arm to a dripping bag on a metal stand.

He was in a hospital. The mundane reality of it was so jarring, so utterly disconnected from the primal horror of the cave, that for a moment he felt a dizzying sense of vertigo.

A man in a white coat came into his field of vision, holding a clipboard. He had kind, tired eyes and a neatly trimmed grey beard. “Mr. Vance. Leo. Good to have you back with us. I’m Dr. Evans. You gave us quite a scare.”

Leo’s throat was a desert. He tried to speak, but only a dry rasp emerged. A nurse appeared with a cup of water and a straw, and he drank greedily.

“Thomas?” he finally managed, the name tearing at his raw throat. “My brother… did you find him?”

Dr. Evans’s kind eyes filled with a professional, practiced sympathy. It was a look Leo knew he would come to hate. “The police will want to speak with you about that when you’re a bit stronger, son. Right now, let’s focus on you. You’re lucky to be alive. You have a severe concussion, multiple lacerations, two cracked ribs, and you were suffering from acute hypothermia.”

“No,” Leo rasped, shaking his head, the movement sending a bolt of pain through his skull. “It wasn’t a cave-in. Not an accident. There were… things in there. Creatures.”

Dr. Evans made a note on his clipboard. “Leo, the rescue team from the pipeline crew found you at the site of a major geological collapse. The foreman said their drill breached the wall of the cavern you were in. The whole area is riddled with unstable limestone formations.” He tapped his pen on the board. “More importantly, your bloodwork came back. The air in that pocket you were in was severely toxic. We found dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide and other subterranean gases.”

Leo stared at him, his mind struggling to connect the doctor’s calm, rational words with the shrieking, tactile horror of his memory. “The equipment failed. My camera, the seismograph… they fried.”

“High concentrations of ferrous ores in the rock can create powerful electromagnetic fields,” the doctor replied smoothly, his voice a soothing balm of scientific certainty. It was the exact explanation Leo himself had tried to cling to, now wielded against him as fact. “It’s not uncommon for sensitive electronics to malfunction in those conditions.”

“And the whispers?” Leo demanded, his voice rising with a frantic edge. “The… the text I saw? In my vision? A System. It was talking to me!”

Dr. Evans didn't even blink. He simply nodded, his expression softening further into that infuriating, pitying gaze. “Classic symptoms. Visual and auditory hallucinations are very common with severe hypoxia and the kind of head trauma you sustained. Your brain was starved of oxygen and under extreme duress. It was creating patterns to try and make sense of the chaos. It’s a well-documented neurological response.”

Every single piece of his terrifying reality was being neatly explained away, dismantled and filed under a medical diagnosis. The System was a migraine aura. The Chatterlings were oxygen-starved phantoms. The malice he felt was a chemical imbalance in his concussed brain. The world was methodically, calmly, trying to gaslight him.

“You don’t believe me,” Leo whispered. The rage he’d felt in the cave was gone, replaced by a cold, desperate hollowness.

“I believe you experienced something deeply traumatic,” the doctor said gently. “And your mind is trying to process it. The nurse will give you something to help with the pain and anxiety.”

As if on cue, the nurse approached with a syringe. Leo tried to push himself up, a protest forming on his lips, but his body was a wreck of broken parts. He felt a small prick in his arm, and a pleasant, leaden warmth began to spread through his veins, dulling the sharp edges of his panic and his pain.

Later, a police officer came. He was a local man, Officer Riley, with a weary face and a uniform that strained slightly at his midsection. He sat in the chair by the bed, his hat in his hands.

“Leo,” he began, his voice low and devoid of medical jargon. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. The rescue crew… they found your brother. Thomas.” He paused, letting the silence hang in the sterile air. “He didn’t make it. The primary rockfall at the entrance… it was massive. He was gone instantly. He wouldn't have felt any pain.”

The words were a lie. A neat, tidy, merciful lie designed to close a file and comfort a grieving family. But Leo had heard his brother’s voice. He’d seen the drag marks. He knew Thomas hadn't died instantly. He had died in terror, in the dark, torn apart by impossible things.

“That’s not what happened,” Leo said, his voice thick from the sedative. “They hunted him. They dragged him away.”

Officer Riley sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of a hundred other tragedies he’d had to process. “Son, survivor’s guilt is a powerful thing. You see and think all sorts of things when you go through something like that. You did everything you could. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

He delivered the official story, the one that would be printed in the local paper. Two brothers, one a promising student, the other a beloved member of the community, caught in a tragic caving accident. One lost, one miraculously saved by the timely intervention of the heroic pipeline crew. It was a perfect, logical, heartbreaking narrative. It had no room for monsters.

When the officer left, Leo was alone. The sedative had turned his thoughts to sludge, but underneath it, a terrifying question began to form.

He closed his eyes, concentrating, pushing past the drug-induced haze. He searched the internal darkness of his own mind, looking for the faint, phosphor-green glow. He waited for a message. [STATUS: SEDATED.] [OBJECTIVE: REST.] Anything. A flicker. A single pixel.

There was nothing.

The System was gone. The whispers were silent. The chittering echoes were erased.

He was utterly, completely alone with his memories. And without the System, without the impossible text that had been his tormentor and his guide, he had no proof. Not even to himself.

The doctor’s words echoed in his head. Hallucinations… head trauma… hypoxia…

What if they were right?

What if the cave-in had happened just as they said? What if Thomas had died instantly, and his own guilt-ridden, oxygen-starved brain had invented a monstrous, elaborate fiction to absolve him of his role in the tragedy? He had pushed Thomas to go. His arrogance had led them to that cave. Wasn't it easier to believe in monsters than to believe that his own hubris had gotten his brother killed in a mundane, meaningless accident?

The logic of it was a cruel, seductive poison.

He lay in the sterile, silent room, a prisoner of a truth no one would ever believe, and began to wonder, for the first time, if he even believed it himself. The only thing more terrifying than being hunted by monsters was the creeping suspicion that they had never existed at all.