Anonymous Reflection

More Questions than Answers

                I stared, completely mesmerized by the soft white light. It shone out of nine thin rings on a tank that went up to my waist, and the glow pulsated rhythmically except for an occasional shudder and glitch. The rest of the room was less than eighty square feet of plain concrete and the door was thick and metallic. As I stared at the light, I was not paralyzed by the beauty of the light, but rather, the terror. It was the same light from my dream. I could not explain how this light was different than any other light except that looking at it brought me all the back into that narrow alley in my mind. I wanted to close my eyes or look away but I could hardly move.

                “Turn the light off,” I whispered. The man looked at me, ready to tell me the light was harmless. But in seeing the look in my eyes, he said nothing and hastily pressed a button on the top of the tank. Metal bands wrapped around the rings, closing the light off so that it was completely dark in the room.

                “What is that thing?” I asked into the shadows, my voice weak from the fear pulsing through my veins.

                “That’s the dream you’ve been having, kid. A regular old bleeder,” he said solemnly, placing a hand on my shoulder and ushering me towards the door.

                “I don’t understand. What’s a bleeder?”

                “For now, all you need to know is this: a bleeder is a creature that feeds on our thoughts, namely fear. These things fester in the mind as recurring nightmares, recognizable for their obsession with bleeding the life out of the dreamer during their feeding process. How they get into a mind, how they survive in a physical world when they seem so very mental, how come you’ve never heard of them; these are questions I can’t discuss right now. We don’t have time to talk about it and you couldn’t handle this kind of information even if we did,” the man explained as he led me down the hallway. We walked past the room with the chair and the mirror and past several heavy metal plated doors before reaching the end of the hallway.

                He opened the door, which let out a long and loud groan. This room had a table with some papers on it in the middles, a bed in the left corner, and a desk and chair on the right. I stood uselessly in the doorway as he went up to the table and sifted through some of the files on his desk. He picked one up and opened it. His lips half-mouthed the words he was reading as he skimmed the pages with his fingers and eyes.

                “What are you looking for?” I asked. He looked up at me for a moment, and then continued reading.

                I looked around the room some more as he went through different files and ignored me. There were locked metal boxes under the bed. I saw a small mirror on the desk next to the silenced pistol he owned and some gun-cleaning components. There was also a mask; the one I had seen when I passed out. The cords and tubes that were connected to the mask ran over into a small tank that had nine metal bands on it, like the one in the room. The apparatus must have been some kind of field unit for containing bleeders and the tank in the other room was designed for long-term storage.

                Before I could look at the other devices on the desk, the man grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the table.

                “Okay, kid. It looks like you got it worse than I thought. I pulled your bleeder out so you shouldn’t have reacted to the light. But when you saw it, it scared the hell out of you. I’ve seen it happen before, but not as severe.” He stopped to find a line on the page of the file in his hand. “This one responded to the light as well. He ended up going insane and I had to shoot him. I found out that his bleeder was in him for a lot longer than we thought.”