Squee! Squee! Squee!
Snoozed on October 9, 2011.
The fimbriated man appeared to me again this week, in a dream this time, fimbriated gules with a chief argent. Beneath a narrow beam of pale light he uttered individual letters of the alphabet to me, fuzzily spelling out words that were neither English nor Buginese. Absurdities were written on the dim wall all around him, written like graffiti and tacos. Eyes painted amongst the graffiti watched me as I watched the fimbriated man utter his alphabet soup.
Perception squelched and attenuated. The pale light faded but the fimbriated man kept uttering at a drunken angle, skewed and tilted at a distance both near and far at the same time. My perspective muted, leaning crazily to the northwest. (Or was it left?) Sound was muffled as if trapped in the maw of a mighty muffleupagus once again. The man’s sable and azure besuited exterior gave way suddenly to a label gules charged with mullets Or, and then it happened.
The fimbriated man had a device that he used to turn whomever he wished into a small puddle of iridescent green ooze, and then he would steal their briefcases. He had more empty briefcases in his tiny little apartment than any man could ever hope to count. And he left behind lots of puddles of chartreuse slime, too. Shuggoths oozed and striated their way out of the bubbling pools of slime, their bubble congeries forming and unforming as only shuggoth bubble congeries can do. Horror gripped me as I realized my shuggoths hadn’t been fed in two days, and here I sat intertwined in a hazy dream about the fimbriated man and his collection of briefcases.
My picayune brain lurched right then and screeched its awareness that this was all a dream; I awoke with a start. I sat upright in bed, rigid as an electrocuted hen under the noonday tide. Befuddlement slowly retreated as my mind forcibly unfuddled itself and tried to claw its way back to reality.
“My shuggoths!” I bolted out of bed and ran for my bestiary before it was too late. Bounding down the hallway, I tripped over my vast collection of after-dinner mints of all shapes, sizes, flavors, and toxicities, and went flailing headlong into the rough green carpet that coated all the floors of my palatial house (especially the hallway floors).
A suppurthine thickness filled the air, attenuating what little light there was in the hallway. Despite the Klieg light I employ as a night light in this particular hallway (#87-B, thirteenth floor, connecting bedroom #50 with my primary bestiary), details of all the wall fixtures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned my hallway were muted, imprecise, and lacking in actual detail. There were the usual electrical outlets, and light switches placed curiously on half-walls that I didn’t know I had. But the details lacked detail, and over this I pondered for a few more ergotismatic minutes, urgency rising in my throat, until I realized: This was still a dream—a nightmare of elephantine proportions.
Thinking I was awake, I had remained asleep. And being asleep, my devious and twisty-corridored brain had hornswoggled me into believing I was awake. Now I was just where the fimbriated man had wanted me. And speaking of elephants, not since I had accidentally confused the words “chrism” and “jism” in a letter to the editor about Pope Joey Rats’ visit to my little town had I done something so elephantinely stupid.
I flailed. I writhed. I wriggled, not unlike a tentacle monster that just found itself a fresh new Japanese schoolgirl to befriend. I threw the bedsheets in my mind off of my muscular frame, and suddenly I was awake in a darkened room, doing the same thing—except in the stark nakedness of my bedroom, my frame was more akin to an overstuffed goat than it was muscular.
Was I awake now? I flailed to the left—I flailed to the right. I looked down at the floor beside the bed. Darkness spuriated by an eerie, green, dream-like light blazed in from the hallway. I peered out into the hallway, half expecting to see once again the fimbriated man astride his lion passant gardant, but all I saw was the harsh, almost blinding glow of the Klieg light illuminating my hallway and everything in a hundred-smoot radius.
I lay back and breathed a sigh of relief. I had once again succeeded in clawing my way out of at least two layers of recursive nightmarery, and I had not in fact suffered a single scratch, bite, or literal claw anywhere on my—I looked down to check—goaty frame. I bleated, goat-like, for good measure. I stopped, listening, and after a few moments heard the horrible, piping cry of “Te-ke-li-li!” echoing softly down the corridor. It was enough to chill the ordinary person (such as you, pointy!) to the bone, but it brought me nothing but comfort: My shuggoths were safe in their hatchery, and judging by the loud crunching noise occasionally punctuating their piping cries, they were almost assuredly munching contently on the sacks of albino penguins I had dumped in their tank right before hitting the sack.
I clambered out of bed and gave the sack hanging from my ceiling another good punch, then curled up like a cat on the floor and slowly dozed off once again. Happy images of my pair of kerfrumpts brilling and queeging in their cages filled my mind; these images soon gave way to even merrier visions of Alyssa Milano dancing barefoot up and down my solar panels and solar plexus. Alyssa’s twenty-seven toes were the last thing I saw before my alarm clock dragged me kicking and squealing back to the waking world.
I murped and uncurled myself (also like a cat), looking up at the alarm clock on the night stand towering above my curiously trapezoidal head. The clock, even at this otherworldly angle, displayed the time correctly: 9:02 a.m. “Time to make the donuts,” I mumbled to myself, rolling over (and over and over) and then dozing off again. Images of a lovely Ms. Milano wearing only three powdered donuts and riding a chariot entirely made of more donuts cascaded through my mind for precisely nine minutes—until the screeching cacophony of my alarming clock shattered my synapses once again. Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
I pounded the snooze button mightily, uttered epithets that would make my blog turn purple and wither if I committed them to writing, and wrapped my ubblabumptuous pillow around my (still) trapezoidal head. Nine minutes passed, and then again: Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
“Blargh and flargh! Will this gorgothine morning never cease!” I howled hoarsely as I groped around for the alarm clock once again, smacking nearly every button on it, several times, before finally giving the snooze button yet another swift whack. I rolled, dozed, but just as hazy images of a dreamy Alyssa Milano once again began forming in my addled little pate—
Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
“Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!”
Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
“Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!”
Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
“All right, you win! Call off your dogs!”
Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee! Squee!
In one smooth motion, I hurled myself at the alarm clock and grasped it firmly in my bony left paw, squeezing the snooze button and at the same time attempting to squeeze the life out of the shrieking little thing. I yanked its cord from the wall; its display went blank as I wrapped the cord around and around its middle in an effort to strangle the last bit of life out of it before I hurled it through my closed bedroom window in the general direction of Mr. Van der Woobie’s house.
My head hit the pillow before the shattering glass even hit my dirtwood floors. Three seconds later, a thump, yelp, and long string of outmoded curses announced that the alarm clock’s carcass had met its mark: The cranium of Mr. Van der Woobie, my delightfully crotchety old across-the-street neighbor.
But I didn’t care. I slept, and I dreamed: I dreamed of a thirty-six-toed Alyssa Milano dancing the Batusi barefoot and clad only in pepperoni-patterned lingerie.