Chapter 1: The First Dream
The dream began, as most horrors do, with silence.
Jonathan opened his eyes to darkness, feeling the damp press of unseen walls. It was not his room. It was not anywhere he could name. The floor beneath him was cold, almost breathing, and the air stank of iron and rot.
And then—
A scream, sharp and tearing, cut through the void like a razor.
He staggered to his feet, disoriented, and before he could even think, his hand tightened around a handle—something familiar. Smooth. Weighted. A knife.
He saw the shape in front of him: another human being, trembling, pleading, their mouth working soundlessly now. He moved without thinking. A flash of silver, a wet, sickening noise. Warmth spraying across his arms and face.
When he woke, he tasted copper on his tongue.
For a long moment, Jonathan simply lay there in his bed, listening to the clock tick on the nightstand.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Each second stretched into eternity. He felt disconnected, as though his body were someone else's skin he wore.
Was it a dream?
He had dreamed before. Nightmares, even. But this was different. It hadn't been an illusion — it had been experience.
He sat up slowly, his head heavy. Moonlight spilled through the slats of the blinds, painting long, skeletal shadows across the floor.
The philosopher in him, the part that once spent nights arguing abstract ideas over cheap beer and cigarettes, whispered through the fog:
"If an action exists in the mind, does it stain the soul the same as in reality?"
"If you dream of evil, are you not evil yourself?"
He stumbled to the bathroom. The mirror greeted him with cold honesty. Pale skin, sunken eyes, bloodless lips. He stared at himself as if he could find an answer hidden beneath the weary surface.
"It's nothing," he said aloud, to no one. "Just a dream."
The words rang hollow in the tiled room.
The next morning, the sun was hidden behind low, sullen clouds. The city felt heavier, as if mourning something unnamed.
Jonathan didn't turn on the news. He didn't want the outside world intruding into his fragile little denial.
He brewed his coffee in silence, watching the dark liquid spiral and steam, hypnotic. In the twisting surface, he saw the glint of the knife again.
He spilled the cup, cursing under his breath, and decided to walk to work instead.
Maybe movement would shake the image loose from his mind.
Maybe reality would anchor him again.
He stepped onto the street and became one more ghost among the city's restless dead.
It was the sirens that drew him — the primal wail of panic and death.
At first, he ignored them. A city like this wore tragedy like perfume.
But then he saw the crowd.
Drawn as if by gravity, he drifted toward the flashing lights.
People stood behind yellow tape, murmuring in hushed tones, their faces pale. Some took photos with their phones, greedily capturing the suffering of strangers.
Jonathan pushed closer.
And there it was.
A small house.
A shattered window.
Blood pooled on the doorstep, dark and sticky.
The dream.
It had been here.
It had been real.
His knees almost buckled. He staggered back, the world spinning around him. The smells — concrete, burnt coffee, exhaust fumes — faded beneath the metallic tang of blood, just as it had in the dream.
This isn't possible, he thought. This isn't rational.
And yet, he had always known, deep in the marrow of his bones, that reality was fragile. Paper-thin. A skin stretched over something far more chaotic and cruel.
Some philosophers said the world was only as real as we believed it to be. That we conjured it moment to moment with our perceptions, our collective will.
Others believed we were simply meat puppets dancing to the will of incomprehensible gods.
Jonathan had laughed at both theories once. Now he wasn't so sure.
The universe, it seemed, had teeth.
He fled the scene before the questions could catch him.
Back at his apartment, he locked the door, drew the curtains, and sat in the dark.
The silence felt different now — thicker, charged, expectant.
He thought about calling someone. Telling them what he had seen.
But what would he say?
"I dreamed of murder, and now it's real?"
They would lock him away.
Maybe they should.
After all —
If the dream was a warning, he had failed to stop it.
If the dream was a memory, then he was a killer.
And if the dream was a command—
Then what?
The clock ticked on. The hours bled together. Night fell again, cold and black.
Jonathan sat by the window, staring out into the endless sea of lights. Every glowing window was a story. Every shadow was a secret.
He thought of the victim — a faceless figure now lost to the cruelty of fate, or something worse.
He thought of the knife in his hand, the weight of it, the terrible intimacy of it.
"Is evil in the action or in the thought?" he wondered.
"Can a man damn himself with dreams alone?"
The answers eluded him.
But deep inside, something shifted.
A crack in the mind. A splinter in the soul.
And far below, in the black depths where thought became command, something smiled.