The Drip
Three in the morning. The witching hour.
The film has just ended. Its images linger in my mind, projecting behind my eyelids as if someone had forgotten to turn off the projector.
I toss in bed, trying to shake off those shadows that insist on pursuing me with the stubbornness of a useless memory.
I try to sleep, but the coldness of the night conspires with the shadows — and like a snake — crawls up into my bed and slips beneath the sheets.
My feet are ice-cold.
I fall into a state of catalepsy. My consciousness plays hide and seek with my unconscious; they teeter, and in the interstice, sleep plays foul.
The malaise grows; time and space, these two impostors, lull me into a twilight where everything is promised and nothing is delivered, and where rest mocks me and anxiety festers in the dark.
Drip… drip… drip…
I hear the distant, relentless sound of my kitchen tap dripping,
Drip… drip… drip…, the tapping echoes into the night. My apartment walls bounce the rhythmic, metallic sound — a hundred-fold magnified by the silence — hollowing my skull and creeping into the emptiness inside it.
I suffocate.
I try to ignore it, but I fail.
I think — “I should call someone to fix the leak”.
— — —
No more than what seems to be a few seconds later, I hear the doorbell…
Ring… ring… ring…
In my lethargy, between trying to sleep and listening to the drip, I hear the untimely ringing as ultimately inevitable.
“You called me,” I hear the plumber’s voice say — faint, hollow, somewhat between ghostly and ghastly — while I looked at him, bewildered.
I see his image disappear into a haze… “He must have gone on to repair the leak,” I think to myself.
Distressed, cold, half asleep and puzzled, I hear a faceless voice asking me to put on the scuba gear.
I don’t understand. Yet, I obey.
I check the gauges and weights, and with a last look around, I strap on the equipment onto my body. I am tired, but the weight of the equipment feels abnormally light. I pose no questions, and dive.
The foul waters close over my head, but I no longer smell anything. A shiver threads along my spine. My feet feel ice-cold again.
As I immerse deeper into the dark and dense fluid, the diving path seems to narrow into a pipe-like form, coiling around us with the persistence of veins that branch, as arteries that vanish into the darkness but return, as if the body of some unknown creature had swallowed me.
Claustrophobia clamps down on me.
My chest closes.
I choke.
Yet, I go on.
In a way that defies common sense, as in dreams, even while sensing the ominous danger, one goes on.
— — —
“Here, I found the problem”, I signal to my team. A wall of debris, viscous and tar-dark, bars the passage.
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Armed with hammers and picks, with the realization embodied only by those who know that there is no other way out, we push forward into the murky mass.
The fluid in which we are submerged becomes unstable; it moves. A thin flow surges, and as the current rises and develops into a raging swell, it grips us, dragging us upward and forward, forcefully, until we are spat onto the open surface.
I gasp for air. I grasp it as if it were solid. I breathe.
I scream, suffocating, pushing away. And turning.
A hand touches mine, a familiar voice murmurs into my ear, calming me, reassuring me.
The grip becomes firmer, steadfast, somewhere between comforting and daunting. It grabs me, and in one movement, pulls me out of the water, into the air and onto the boat. Onto the boat that has always been there waiting for us, but I never saw.
Shadows move, agitated. In one gesture, a shadow pulls a cord and I hear a roar rising. The engine has come back to life.
And as the boat shudders forward, crossing nonexistent borders and timezones, I cling to my seat, — as one clings to life — crashing against imaginary swells and waves, for I feel we have smashed against them, crossed them, and gone beyond.
Beyond what? And where?
And there, on the other side, dreamlike figures in white coats — or are they scrubs? — await us, closing in on us, surrounding me, with the dread naturalness of them who are there to steal your life.
“Wake up, Dan, wake up,” I hear them say — or I believe they do.
Disoriented, I open my eyes, feeling the drip’s needle withdrawing from my vein.
“You may go now, and rest. You will be fine — for now” says one of the scrubs.
I thanks... it?. “Will I be fine without the drip?” I ask.
But I get no answers.
Instead, the figures turn, and all I see in the vapour around me, is the whiteness of what perhaps are their robes.
I run, feeling nothing, for nothing is there. I run in bliss, in anticipation, in fear, without knowing where.
I turn to look back, but they are no longer there.
— — —
“Still not done?” I ask.
But there was no need. I already knew the answer — the damn work was still not done.
Instead, there is the cold, the same cold that earlier seized my feet, now turns them to ice, immobilizing me.
And that sound. That rythmic, clockwork like drip in my head, hammering my brain, piercing my skull, penetrating me again and again like a knife that does not tire, like a needle, like a spear.
Restless, I scream.
— — —
“Dan, Dan, you are fine, I’m here,” says Mario as he sits in bed and turns to face me. “We’ll call the plumber in the morning.”
. . .
Alternative Ending:
And sleep and dreams seize me again without fully letting go, with the drip following me, faithful and eternal.
. . .
Echoing Borges and Cortázar, this short story lingers in the kingdom of the Fantastic — the uncanny — where realms intertwine and where dreams and reality dance their endless waltz every night of our lives.
Its author, Daniel G. During, is a writer, designer, and hospitality consultant whose work spans biographical narratives, essays on contemporary social issues and prejudice, and explorations of the thresholds between reason and the uncanny.
Founder of Thomas Klein International, he has spent over two decades creating hospitality concepts across four continents.
He lives between Berlin, Dubai, and Bruno (Italy).
