When I was a kid, I had really bad nightmares. Now everyone has bad dreams, but not like this. I don’t remember much from that time in my life, but I remember I couldn’t sleep. And because I couldn’t sleep, everything felt like a dream. And because my dreams were nightmares…well, everywhere I looked, I saw Hell.

I was thirteen when my parents found Holliman and Graves. Or rather, the pair found us. They called themselves “trauma specialists”, and apparently they gave some vague story about having been contacted to offer help through one of the doctors or psychologists I’d seen. Their offer and service was strange but simple.

They could take my nightmares away.

In retrospect, it’s odd that my parents agreed to such a thing. Then again, I was in really bad shape at the time and I think my folks were desperate. And to be fair, I know better than most how compelling the short, fat little Mr. Holliman and the tall and gaunt Mrs. Graves can be. They’ll make the oddest requests, and they themselves are more than a little weird, but in the moment it all seems as reasonable as can be.

Either way, they cured me of my nightmares, and I was able to finally sleep and live again. That may sound melodramatic to some, but if you’ve ever been lost that far from the shores of slumber, you know that it isn’t. Shores of slumber. That’s something Mr. Holliman would sometimes say. Jesus, even now I guess they’re still in my brain. Still, the point is the same. I felt like they saved my life, and I was grateful.

I think that’s a big part of why I was so quick to agree when they visited me again my last year of college. I was in another state by then, but then I’d never had a true sense of where they had come from in the first place. From the client’s perspective, they would just appear, right when they or someone they loved was desperate and willing to agree to their help. Then after they were done, they were gone again, like strange but kind angels that didn’t want to overstay their welcome or had other others waiting in need.

So anyway, they found me at my apartment and asked if I’d be interested in a job working for them. And because of my gratitude, and because I wanted inside of the special mystery they’d represented since I was a kid, I said yes immediately. It wasn’t until they’d left with an agreement from me to come to an address the following day that I began to really wonder what kind of job they wanted me to do. And when I showed up at the address the next day, I found that instead of an office building or even a house, it was just an abandoned lot. Thinking I’d either gotten the wrong address or they were playing some odd kind of practical joke, I was about to leave when a dark car pulled up beside me and Mrs. Graves rolled down her window and told me to get in. That we had a client waiting. And heart pounding, I got in.

I spent the next four years working for them. My job was always the same—carry the bags, set everything up, and get the paperwork signed and filed. Necessary stuff I supposed, but nothing they couldn’t do themselves. Their reasoning was that they were getting older and less able to carry stuff and deal with some of the paperwork that needed to be maintained, and maybe that was true to an extent. Neither of them looked old or frail, but they had clearly aged from the way I pictured them in my memory, standing over my bed and…It didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was a relatively easy job that paid well and helped people.

And as bizarre as much of it was, I got used to it much like you do anything. I would listen patiently while the two of them made the initial introductions and sales pitch. I say sales pitch because we did charge, though Mr. Holliman told me early on that the money and paperwork were largely just ornamental and meaningless—they would happily do the work for free, but people were far more willing to agree to it if they had to pay something and there was some kind of agreement in place. So once they had them willing to sign, I took care of the “contract” being completed and then went to set up a suitable bedroom for the client.

This didn’t amount to too much usually. Basically I had to secure hand and leg restraints to the bed or mattress, make sure that all doors and windows were not only securely shut and locked or otherwise blocked but also well-sealed with tape along every crack. Same thing for any air vent or other meaningful gap that might lead out of the room. When I was finished, I’d call the pair in to check my work, we’d bring in the client, and then I’d seal up that door as well.

The client would lie down on the bed, I’d comfortably secure their wrists and ankles with padded cuffs, and then Mrs. Graves would come with her needle while Mr. Holliman prepared to begin telling the Story. Some people asked about the Story afterward, but almost everyone wanted to know what was in the small glass syringe she was injecting into their neck. She would tell them it was a mixture of sedative, mild paralytic, low-dose DMT, and a couple of normal anxiety-reducing medications.

That was the only time I ever saw them actually lie to the clients.

Mr. Holliman would usually be standing in a corner of the room, hands tightly clasped in front of him, the soft creaking of the brown leather gloves he usually wore sounding loud in the quiet of the room as he squeezed and released his hands like the beating of some unknown heart. Mrs. Graves would stand by patiently, waiting until he uttered the first word before bending down to slide the needle into the client’s neck. Sometimes a person would groan slightly as she gently covered their eyes and pushed in the amber liquid filling the syringe, but otherwise, everything was perfectly still and silent, perfectly removed from the world outside, until Mr. Holliman began to speak. His words flowed like dark honey as the Story spun out into the quiet of the room.

Once upon a time, there was a dream.

Now you may think your dreams are your own. That you make them from your own memories, your own imagination. But you would be mistaken. The dreams come before the dreamers. We may put our own faces and hopes and fears on the dreams we encounter, but that is simply an evolutionary mechanism we have developed to try and hide from a simple truth—we do not make the dreams.

The dreams make us.

And they are not ours, we are theirs. And what we glimpse of them? It is merely the fingertips or the edge of a shark’s fin, a half-glimpsed shadow pregnant with the inevitable reality that something much more grand and vast lives down in the unseen depths below. And we live and breathe and exist because, at least for a moment, they think it so.

So, once upon a time, there was a dream. And that dream imagined many things—other dreams, for one. Other worlds for another. Other worlds filled with new life that could see the dreams, if only a little, and in seeing the dreams, change the dreams and the dreamers alike and make them both more. And so it was for a long time.

But not all dreams are kind. And change, once begun, is neverending. Some dreams wanted more than being seen and breathing life into new worlds. They wanted to cross over. To push their way through the membranes of reality and be born anew in this world and others. And the thinnest places to invade are found in the darkest chambers of our minds.

You have such a being pressing against the walls of your mind right now. Scratching away at this reality’s edge and slowly killing you with every bite of its nail. It means to come through, and its bloody birth will be the end of you.

Unfortunately, we cannot stop the birth. By the time we know to look for you, the process is too far along. All we can do is choose when the birth happens. In a place of our choosing and early enough that you will likely survive and it will be too weak to fight. The solution we have given you will facilitate this process within the next half hour.

You may think this is all a fanciful tale. Or that this too, is a dream. Rest easy that what you believe does not matter. And before this hour is done, you will either be safe or you will be dead. And either way, we will be with you until it is done.

Sometimes people were trying to cry out or escape by the end of the Story. Whether they believed him or not, it’s an understandable reaction. A necessary reaction, Mr. Holliman explained to me soon after I went to work for them. Part of the process of stimulating the birth. Regardless, the “solution” did have some paralytic and sedative effects, and their noises and struggles were soft and fleeting. Usually there was some period of fresh silence as the client fell into a deep sleep, and then they would start twitching. It was a subtle thing at first—their sweaty cheek would jump, their eyes would roll under exhaustion-darkened lids. Then their hands would begin to curl like dying leaves. That’s when you knew it was finally coming.

Every time was different. Every nightmare is different. I’ve seen smoke pour out of people’s mouths, I’ve seen hundreds of rats pour bloodlessly from their chest, I’ve seen a white snake slither out of a man’s nethers and a purple strand of what looked like mucus or web push out from behind a woman’s eyes. So many things that should hurt or kill the client, but doesn’t hurt them at all, because in some ways, it’s not real. Mrs. Graves called it “the afterbirth of unreality becoming real”. I don’t fully understand what that means, but I know that every time it was terrifying.

When the nightmare was born, the pair were always quick to act. They had a large sack made of dark, pebbled skin, and while Mr. Holliman held it open, Mrs. Graves would begin to whistle. A soft, not unpleasant sound on the ear, though it made my stomach twist slightly every time. For the nightmares, however, it was something more. Wherever they were going, whatever crack they were trying to escape through, the whistle seemed to stop them in their tracks. Mist or bird or any other form they took, they would start drifting toward the sound as in a daze, and when Mrs. Graves somehow sent her whistle into the bag, they usually walked right in without complaint.

After the bag was closed, it was done. The client was allowed to sleep a few hours of peaceful rest, and when he or she woke up, they knew immediately that the thing that had been haunting them was gone now. We collected our payment and left, typically never hearing from the people again unless they referred someone to us. Most of those referrals went unanswered—Holliman and Graves did not cater to those with normal nightmares, after all.

Hearing all of this, you likely think I’m lying or just making up a story to entertain. Aside from sounding bizarre and fantastical, why would I stay in such a terrifying job for so long if it were true? I could say it was the money, which was decent. Or helping people, which was very nice. But the truth was that I did it because every time they called me to work, I was being invited into something special. Magical. Something that was real in a way that most things I or you experience are not.

There was a time that Holliman and Graves were like gods to me. I wanted their approval, wanted to be like them. They knew and could do so much, and so far as I could tell, they were still human, so what they were was still attainable. They were slow to tell me more than what I needed to do my work, but I could see a path forward to gaining their trust enough that the inner secrets of how and why they did what they did would be revealed to me. Maybe it was that worship, that idolization, that caused me to question things when I saw the first crack appear. And from that seed of doubt...I wound up digging a grave for a monster and crawling through the midnight caverns of a cave that should not exist. I wound up lost for a time in a house that wasn’t a house but a…No, I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to start with that first crack. The night that I learned that Mr. Holliman and Mrs. Graves were capable of making mistakes.

We were helping a young woman that had tried to hurt herself the week before. Part of it was sleep deprivation, but she was also laboring under the “delusion” that something was trying to get inside her. Control her or use her somehow. After a few days of observation at a hospital, she’d been sent home with parents that were all too willing to accept our help when we suddenly appeared at their door.

Everything went fine at first. I’d sealed up the room like normal, and it was a fairly new house without any warped floors or cracked walls that posed special concerns. Mrs. Graves had given the solution and Mr. Holliman had started the Story, but something was different this time. The girl wasn’t looking upset or falling asleep. Instead she was looking directly at Mr. Holliman.

And she was laughing.

By that point I’d already been working for them for over a year. Done dozens of these sessions. And yet despite all the obvious similarities to what you might see in a dime-a-dozen “devil possession” movie, I never had that thought until just then. Not because of the bedroom or the restraints or the ritual of it all. But because of the look on that woman’s face. The inhuman malice and intelligence and will that was there, none of which was coming from her.

There was an Other. And unlike the rest, it was ready to be born.

The room started flooding with black water. It probably started flowing from her, but it all happened so fast that I couldn’t tell the source before it was cold and thick around my calves and I was more focused on being terrified and looking for reassurance from Graves or Holliman. The look of fear I saw on their faces nearly made my heart stop.

“Break the window! We have to get out!” Mrs. Graves voice was higher and louder than I’d ever heard before, and I started sloshing toward the window leading out onto the side porch of the house immediately. Mr. Holliman grabbed my arm as I got close.

“No, you fool! If we break the barrier, it can escape.”

I heard Graves splashing up behind me, and her voice was softer and harder now. “And if we don’t, it will drown us in here. And once we’re gone, it’s just tape and wood and glass.”

Holliman met her eyes over my shoulder and then gave a grunting nod before letting go of my arm. “Do it. Be careful.”

Pulling off my jacket, I wrapped it around my arm and broke out the nearest window’s glass. I was turning to go get the girl off the bed when Mrs. Graves put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “There’s no helping her, I’m afraid. It’s coming from her. Just go. Go!”

I didn’t argue. Aside from trusting them, I was so scared that the passing idea of helping the client was all the bravery I could muster. I crawled clumsily through the window and then helped my two employers out as the water was reaching Holliman’s lower chest. We stumbled out into the cold night air of the yard and I had to fight the urge to strip off naked. I could still feel the residue of that liquid touching me, and it felt dirty and toxic in a way nothing else ever had. Shuddering, I settled on kicking off my shoes and socks and squeezing what I could from my pants as I looked back at the house.

The water was pouring out of the window now, except with each moment it seemed to grow thicker—first water, then sludge, then a black mud that slid down the exterior wall of the house for a moment before just fading away into the shadows on the porch. I looked over at Holliman. He still looked frightened and angry, but he didn’t look surprised.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to them.

He caught me looking and gave a slight frown. “Put your shoes back on. We need to be leaving.”

I stared at him openly now. “What’re you talking about? We have to go check on Julia.”

Mrs. Graves walked over, wringing out the ends of her black and silver hair. “There’s no point, I’m afraid. She’s already dead.”

“What? How do…”

Mr. Holliman cut in. “And we have more to do. Things will get worse now.”

And as was so often the case, they were right.

Part Two