1 Jan 2024
Dream
A group of elite rich socialites in their 30s and early 40s meets in a restaurant once in a while; it is a uniquely built, circular, almost dome-like building away from the city center, on a dock, surrounded by water. Its walls are white loam, its floors carpeted red.
The group is led by a charismatic man — Rutger or ‘R’— and the other people are friends he has gathered over the years. A sharp-featured blonde woman named… Myra? A brown-haired man named Robert. An olive skinned man, unsure of name. Another woman, rounder, brunette. An ash-haired man, longer hair, balding, pensive.
They all share a big secret. Once in a while, they introduce a new person into their dinners, all very hush-hush, word of mouth. Rumors within rumors. Phones are not allowed at the restaurant. R knows the staff and chef personally.
This new person is usually young, easily impressed, easily… missed.
After the dinner is completed, they take them downstairs, a basement in the restaurant, and proceed to torture and murder them. They find it exciting, revel in it, their big awful secret. The restaurant takes care of the mess.
But of course these murders do not go unnoticed even if they try to find victims who will not be missed. So when the police catch wind of them, they stop. Time passes. R gets sick for a long time and the group does not meet again.
Many years later, R contacts them again via secret channels. Prompts them to come to the restaurant again. It has closed down a while ago, but R has summoned a chef, some staff.
For a few hours it’s almost like old times, but the carpet is stained in the blood of their memories.
Then R brings forward a new victim for them to kill. Most of them try to hide their shock. As if what they did was a bad dream, a fake life, a hallucination. They have told themselves it wasn’t real, there was no proof, and buried the secret inside their mind. They weren’t murderers, it was all him, after all…
R observes them, calmly, like a predator.
Robert eventually speaks up. Protests.
R invites him up. And without another warning slices his throat. Blood splatters over R’s immaculate, high fashion couture clothes.
Myra gasps.
Anyone else want to protest, R asks. We were all in this together. Do not be weak now.
He holds out the blade for someone to take. Tension, hesitancy… but he is pulling them in.
One of them steps forward and takes the knife to the victim.
It starts again. Nobody mentions Robert. The restaurant cleans up.
R holds them all in his grasp, but this time he cannot fool law enforcement long enough.
But it seems like he … feeds on the killing, the blood, the terror.
They plot against him. They will kill him instead, and end this terrible cycle.
But it’s too late. He’s become a monster, something with real dark power, and he pulls them and the entire restaurant into hell. A dimension of his own creation, where he kills them and feeds on them, and revives them, over and over. Eternal torture. He laughs; he is finally where he wants to be. At the center of it all, in complete control, never hungry for attention again, for he is all they can know.
Myra is the last one to hold on to her sanity. She knows this is what they deserve for what they have done. But he has to be stopped, somehow.
It takes her a long time. Centuries, perhaps, of dying infinitely. But she finds a way to poison the well. One by one they can no longer be revived, and R’s well runs dry. She is the last to go. And then he is alone, in darkness, forever, no longer having the power to escape. A hell of his own making.
