Nightmare Game
Copyright© 2025 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 5
Ethan knew he’d been paralyzed for twelve years. What he couldn’t recall was anything from before that day.
No faces of parents. No echoes of friends. Not even the accident—or whatever it was—that had stolen his body from him.
Modern medicine had poked and prodded every inch: scans of his frame, his brain, his organs, his blood, his nerves, his bones. Nothing turned up. All metrics pristine, as if his body mocked the very idea of illness. The doctors had even suspected malingering at first, a ploy for attention. But time wore that theory thin. No one could fake stillness like that, day in, day out, not even tilting their neck for a full twenty-four hours.
In the end, they chalked it up to psychosomatic—a mind convinced the body was broken, willing it into submission. Ethan didn’t buy it, not fully. The amnesia muddied everything; maybe some buried trauma had rewired him. Who knew?
His only tether to the world was his grandfather, the one soul who showed up without fail. Brandon Walker was a wiry figure, slightly hunched, his legs betraying the weight of years. Wrinkles carved deep paths across his face, and his voice carried the rasp of age, far from booming.
But he smiled often, a beacon of quiet optimism. For twelve straight years, he’d tended to Ethan without a single skipped day, never once letting the paralysis dim his resolve.
Ethan had pressed him once or twice about family—the gaps in his memory gnawing like an itch. Brandon’s answers came vague, evasive: Grandma gone too soon, parents tied up overseas with work, too buried to visit.
Ethan didn’t swallow it whole. What kind of parents ghosted their son for over a decade, through paralysis and all? Unless they simply didn’t care.
Whatever the truth, it stung. So Ethan let it lie, playing the dutiful grandson.
Now, piecing it together in this haze, darker questions stirred. What if the lost memories, the paralysis itself, stemmed from some unseen force? What if those eerie phenomena were the key to his endless dream-loop, night after unchanging night? What if it all funneled him here, to this warped corner of nowhere?
Then who—or what—pulled the strings from the shadows?
Ethan’s face tightened, a storm of doubt flickering across it. All speculation, for now. Nothing solid. Some pieces would only click after tonight. If this was truly a dream, ways to wake would surface. Sleep might even loop him back to reality.
But first, a few truths from the group.
“By the way,” Ethan said, casual as if musing over coffee, “has anyone here had dreams like this before?”
Heads shook around the circle. Dreams were slippery things anyway, half-forgotten wisps by morning; most folks couldn’t swear they’d even dreamed at all.
It made sense. These people had lives, jobs, anchors. Not like him, adrift in the unnatural.
Assuming, of course, they weren’t lying.
The group climbed to the second floor, where the Butler waited in the lounge, his ram’s head tilted in patient formality.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.