We all curate the narratives of our lives, don’t we? When asked about my path to writing and my particular choice of the horror genre, I tend to lean on the familiar milestones: a childhood steeped in music, the transition from writing song lyrics to crafting prose, a lifelong fascination with the unexplained, the “I Want to Believe” mantra. That story is true, in its way. It’s the one I shared for an upcoming episode of the Saved as Draft Podcast with Bradley Ramsey—comfortable, relatable.
But beneath that public account lies a private landscape, one shaped by experiences I rarely examine too closely. It involves my childhood, a period marked by frequent, intense fevers that seemed to warp perception itself. Doctors called the results hallucinations—waking dreams filled with sights and sounds that shouldn’t exist.
Perhaps that’s all they were.
Yet, one recurring sequence from that time has always felt… different. More resonant. More real, in its own terrifying way. Sharing it feels like unlocking a door I prefer to keep bolted. But maybe understanding where the shadows truly come from requires stepping into them. So, let me take you back to a small bedroom, decades ago, where the world dissolved into water and stars…
Your musical accompaniment:
It began with the heat, a climbing intensity behind my eyes that pressed outward against my skull. The world would swim, the edges blurring not just from fever but from… something else. A shift. Then, abruptly, I wasn’t hot anymore. I was submerged. Cool, heavy water filled my small bedroom, pressing gently against my skin through my thin pajamas. It made no logical sense. I was in my bed, dry, yet I felt the impossible weight of water all around. And above me, where the ceiling should have been, were stars. Not the familiar popcorn texture, but distant, cold points of light scattered across an inky blackness, viewed as if through a clear, deep ocean.
The air, thick and still moments before, now seemed to flow with slow currents, and drifting within them were… creatures. Vaguely piscine, they floated with languid grace, pale and shimmering slightly in the non-light filtering down from the stellar expanse above. I called them "fish" in my child mind, but even then, I knew that wasn’t quite right. Their shapes were too fluid, too changeable. Seeing them brought a bizarre duality of feelings: a cold, sharp terror that prickled my skin, simultaneous with a strange, unnerving calm, as if this impossible scene were somehow normal…expected even.
My small heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped underwater. I needed to get out, away from the nearest drifting shape. Slowly, deliberately, trying not to disturb the currents too much, I began to crawl out of bed. The floor felt solid beneath my feet, yet the sensation of water persisted, swirling around my limbs as I moved.
I reached my bedroom door and pushed it open wider, peering into the long hallway that stretched before me. It, too, was submerged in that same impossible, starlit water. More of the pale "fish" drifted here, slow and silent, obstacles to be navigated with careful, quiet movements. My gaze, however, was drawn inexorably towards the far end.
Down there, my parents’ bedroom door stood open, a rectangle of deeper darkness or perhaps faint light. Usually, my room and theirs felt worlds apart down that hallway, but tonight that distance seemed both infinite and instantly crossable. That room, usually a haven, now held a focal point that pulsed stronger than the diffuse terror of the floating creatures around me. The fish became peripheral, annoyances to be avoided on a path that led only one way. My focus was drawn to their doorway, to what lay within.
I crept onward, the cheap carpet rough beneath my footed pajamas even through the imagined water. I could see into their room more clearly now. And I could see the chair. The big one, old but not quite antique. It was upholstered in some faded fabric but framed by dark, carved wood, scrolled arms, and those distinct, claw-footed legs. I knew that chair intimately; it was my safe spot sometimes, a place for quiet moments, reading or coloring while my mom folded laundry, smelling faintly of her perfume and furniture polish. A welcoming embrace in the daylight world.
But tonight, it was undeniably a throne, and it was occupied. Something large sat there, still and commanding. Even from the hallway, I could feel it looking at me, though I saw no eyes. A silent, powerful summons flowed from it, more compelling than any word, drawing me closer. The fear of the drifting fish vanished, replaced entirely by the awful gravity of the figure in the chair.
I crept closer, compelled, until I was just outside the doorway, peering into my parents’ bedroom. The starlit water seemed denser here, the silence profound. My eyes fixed on the dark shape occupying the familiar chair, trying to make sense of it.
At first glance, absurdly, it looked like an octopus. A large one, somehow managing to sit upright in the chair. Its bulbous mantle formed a grotesque parody of a head, leaning back against the upholstery, while dark tentacles seemed to be draped over the scrolled wooden arms. Several shorter tentacles near the top writhed with slow, independent life, exploring the air or tasting the strange, underwater current. The sight was utterly bizarre, nonsensical—why would an octopus be sitting in my parents’ bedroom chair?
But as my eyes strained in the dim, watery light, a colder, deeper horror washed over me, eclipsing the mere strangeness. Below the pulsing mantle and the shifting tentacles, I began to trace the unmistakable outline of shoulders, a torso, the definite shape of a human body beneath. A body draped in heavy, dark robes that seemed to swallow the light and pooled around the chair’s familiar clawed feet. It wasn’t an octopus lounging; it was a man with the head of an octopus, sitting there like some impossible sovereign from a nightmare kingdom. The sheer wrongness of it, the unnatural fusion, made my breath catch, yet the silent command to approach only grew stronger, pulling me in.
Then, slowly, deliberately, an arm moved from within the dark folds of the robe. A hand emerged, extending towards me, palm open slightly. It was hideously elongated, the fingers thin and spectral, ending not in nails but in sharp, curving black claws. A witch-like hand, torn from the pages of the darkest fairy tale, yet attached to this impossible sovereign. It reached for me, an offering, an invitation into madness.
And I responded. I don’t know why. Perhaps the silent command was simply irresistible, perhaps some dreadful curiosity outweighed the fear, or maybe I accepted this as the inevitable conclusion. My hand, small and trembling, lifted from my side. Slowly, tentatively, mirroring the creature’s fluid motion, I reached forward. My fingers stretched across the inches separating us, aiming toward those claw-tipped digits.
Closer. The space between my fingertips and those dark claws dwindled. The air—or was it water?—seemed to hum with a silent, palpable energy. The moment stretched, suspended... almost touching...
Then, instantly, reality snapped back like a rubber band.
No water. No stars. No stygian robes or impossible creatures. The oppressive silence vanished, replaced by the gentle hum of the house at night. I was blinking against the familiar, soft glow of the hallway nightlight casting long shadows into my parents’ bedroom. The big chair stood massively in its usual spot, undeniably empty, its patterned upholstery innocuous in the dimness. The long hallway behind me was just a hallway, silent and still, the drifting “fish” were gone.
Strong arms scooped me up. Mom. I was suddenly pressed against the soft cotton of her nightgown, burying my face against her shoulder, a series of choked whimpers finally escaping me. Her hand was warm and solid on my back, stroking rhythmically. “Shhh, it’s okay,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep but instantly soothing. “You were dreaming. Just a bad dream, honey. It’s all over now.”
She carried me, a trembling bundle, back down the now-ordinary hallway to my room. No underwater currents resisted her steps. Tucked back into my bed, the sheets cool against my fever-warm skin, she smoothed my hair and whispered reassurances before slipping out.
Years pass. Fevers come and go. Fears fade. Life moves on. But the residue—that bizarre mix of terror and calm, the sheer impossibility of it—settled deep, an undigested lump in my psyche. It became part of the background noise of memory.
Now, examining it decades later, turning it over like a strange stone found on a beach, questions arise that the child couldn’t articulate. For instance, what strikes me as particularly odd is this: Despite the lingering imprint of terror, the episode never returned on the same night. Once broken, the connection stayed severed. Suppose it was purely a product of the fever, a simple hallucination tied directly to body temperature. Wouldn’t it have ebbed and flowed, perhaps returned as I drifted between waking and sleep? Wouldn’t the monstrous figure have lingered at the edges? That clean break always felt... significant. This small detail, among others from that recurring vision, lodged itself like a splinter in the back of my mind for years. The memory itself softened with time, as childhood nightmares often do, becoming just a bizarre, disturbing anecdote filed under “things that happened when I was a sickly kid.”
It wasn’t until my early twenties that the splinter worked its way under the skin, drawing blood. By then, my lifelong fascination with the unexplained had fully matured into a voracious appetite for horror fiction. I was inhaling it, constantly seeking out new authors, new nightmares, devouring paperbacks from dusty shelves, and haunting the wonderfully musty aisles of used bookstores. It was during one such expedition into a favorite haunt that my fingers brushed against a collection by a name I knew mostly by reputation: H.P. Lovecraft. The cover was pure pulp, maybe a bat-winged silhouette against a cyclopean city. Intrigued, I bought it. Later, I cracked open the collection. It wasn’t the first story, not even close to the beginning pages, but something drew my eye and pulled my focus insistently to one title: The Call of Cthulhu. As if beckoned by the name itself, I turned straight to it and began to read.
Paragraph by paragraph, my world began to tilt on its axis. The story spoke of ancient cults, whispered madness, impossible geometries, and a colossal entity sleeping in a sunken city beneath the waves. An entity pieced together from the frantic sculptures of a sensitive artist and the ravings of dying sailors, described chillingly as having a vaguely anthropoid outline, but crowned with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers.
An octopus head. On a man-like form.
A coldness unlike any fever I’d ever known washed through me. The paperback slipped from my suddenly numb fingers, landing pages-down on the worn rug. My breath hitched. The chair. The regal posture. The head. That impossible, terrifyingly specific image from my childhood sickbed wasn’t just a random fever-figment. It was him. Or something so horrifyingly close, it didn’t matter. Decades before I’d ever heard the name Lovecraft, years before encountering the concept of Cthulhu... had I somehow seen him?
The question hung there, heavy and cold in the stillness left by the dropped book. It branched out into implications that made my mind reel—had a four-year-old child, delirious with fever, somehow tuned into a frequency that allowed a glimpse of… that? Or was it the other way around? Had Lovecraft himself, the sensitive artist archetype from his own story, tapped into the same wavelength, perceiving something real that I, too, had stumbled upon in my vulnerable state? Could a fictional character, an archetype of cosmic dread, somehow achieve a form of reality, drawn to a fevered mind? Was I being visited? Is any of that even remotely possible without shattering the foundations of reality itself?
Honestly? Thinking about it, truly dwelling on it, still scares the shit out of me. It’s not just the primal fear recalled from the experience itself—the underwater room, the impossible figure, the near-touch. It’s the implications pulsing beneath it. The sheer terror of contemplating the ability, conscious or not, to conjure or perceive an image, a being, that I couldn't have known existed. It feels perilously close to the edge of sanity—a quick glance into an abyss I try very hard not to stare into.
So, what you’ve just read... what is it? Fact? Fiction? A fever dream stitched together from forgotten childhood inputs and embroidered by an adult imagination steeped in horror? Am I crazy? Am I simply projecting the Cthulhu I know now—and yes, perhaps even love, in that strange way horror fans do—onto a vague and malleable nightmare? Or is this entire narrative merely that, a narrative, a story spun from a creatively macabre brain, offered up for our mutual entertainment?
That, dear reader, is entirely for you to decide. But I offer a word of caution as you ponder: don’t think too hard about it. Madness, true madness, often lies patiently waiting just beyond the fragile edge of reason.
Wow, this was insanely good! The combination of the real-world context with your iconic style of immersive storytelling really brought this entire project to life in a way that only you could.
I also have to applaud the superb narration. Your cadence of speaking was perfect and the music you chose was haunting and atmospheric without ever being intrusive.
You should 10000% continue narrating! I loved everything about this.
You got right into Lovecraft country and pulled me in there with you. Congratulations for your spot on this week's Top In Fiction. I'm jealous. But you deserve it.