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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/venusfelix_ on 2024-11-03 22:05:22+00:00.

The street was lined with maples, their jagged leaves a violent, deep red against the brooding gray sky. Pale clouds swirled like the smoke from a just-extinguished candle. I pulled my coat around me as a brisk wind stirred. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of traffic and people; but the main streets were several blocks from the cafe where Geoffrey had asked to meet me.

Geoffrey and I had not spoken in some time. We had been close in university, but he had gone on to practice psychiatry in a hospital, while I had established my private practice on the other side of the city; and eventually it became so that we only saw one another at conferences or by coincidence. Nevertheless, I had heard about the incident with his patient from a colleague, and then again when it was published in the newspaper. Soon it seemed it was all that anyone was talking about. Poor Geoffrey, and his poor, delusional patient. Imagine having to do what Geoffrey did, they said in hushed tones. Horrific. And, Can you imagine? So when Geoffrey called me out of the blue and asked me to meet him, I already had an idea of what it was he wanted to discuss.

A bell jingled as I pushed open the door of the cafe, and the smell of coffee greeted me in the warm air. I rubbed my hands together briskly to warm them and scanned the cafe. Geoffrey was seated at a small, round table in the corner farthest from the door, his back to the wall. His eyes were round and darting, and his shoulders tensed up to his ears. I raised a hand in greeting, and he returned a sharp nod. 

I ordered a latte at the counter and approached the table. “Nice to see you,” I said as I slid into the seat across from him. He offered a tight-lipped smile. A cup of black coffee sat in front of him, seemingly untouched, looking still and cold. I removed my gloves. “How have you been?” I asked.

“I assume you’ve heard about my patient.” His brown eyes had a tired sheen and were rimmed with stinging pink, glassy against the dark circles beneath them. His face sagged with the gravity of exhaustion.

“Yes. I’m so sorry. What a horrific affair.”

Geoffrey nodded, lips pursed, eyes not leaving mine. “Right. But you don’t really know, do you? What happened. No one does.”

“I know the short of it.”

He shook his head. “You need to know what really happened that day.”

I wondered briefly if this would take longer than I had expected. I had a session at one o’clock; it was a quarter past twelve already. Book a session, I thought to suggest, but instead I leaned back in my chair and asked, “What happened that day?”

“Don’t do that.”

My eyebrows lifted slightly. “Do what?”

“Talk to me like I’m your patient.”

The waitress appeared and placed the latte on the table in front of me. I averted my eyes from Geoffrey’s and took a long sip. 

“I’m only telling you this because it pertains to you,” he added.

I placed the mug gently down on the saucer. “What do you mean?”

His lip trembled, almost imperceptibly, and he said, “I’ll tell you. But first, I need you to swear you’ll believe me.”

A hint of unease twisted in my stomach. “Alright.”

Geoffrey’s hands went to the table, flat against the wood, as if holding on for balance; and then he folded them and began. “The patient called me that day, in the morning. Six a.m. He was in great distress; I couldn’t understand him at first. He said he needed to speak to me. That it was an emergency. We made an appointment for that afternoon - I’d had a cancellation, luckily, so we were able to get him in.

“I’m no stranger to patient crises. Someone’s always in crisis; that’s the nature of working in a psychiatric hospital. But something about his voice…I was shaken.” He rubbed the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right, twisting his hands, and sighed heavily. “Anyway, by the time the appointment rolled around, I had all but forgotten it. Until I saw the patient.” He swallowed. “It had been two, maybe three months since he was discharged. I was hopeful for this one’s prognosis. Depression, anxiety, OCD, but no psychosis; and he had improved a great deal in my care. But the man sitting in my waiting room, he looked…” A brief shake of his head. “He looked like he’d been emptied out.”

“He’d lost weight?”

“Not that. Just…*deflated…*as if all the hope was gone from him.”

I took another thoughtful sip of the latte. 

“When he sat down in my office, he looked like a man on the run,” Geoffrey continued. “He looked – hunted. Haunted. So I asked him what had brought him in. ‘A dream,’ he told me. And I thought, What kind of dream would have a grown man in this state? This was a stable man, a healthy man, when I had discharged him. Yet he sat here before me now, a shadow of himself, because of a dream?

“He must have known what I was thinking. He was sitting on his hands, looking at me with trembling eyes. ‘It didn’t feel like a dream, Doctor,’ he said to me. ‘It felt like I was living it. I felt everything - everything. And when I woke up, it felt like it had happened - just not yet*.’* 

“‘Like a premonition?’ I asked him.

“He shook his head furiously. ‘Like a future I already lived,’ he said.

“I couldn’t understand what he meant,” Geoffrey said. His fingers went to his saucer, and he began to trace its edge absentmindedly. “But I asked him what the dream was about. He looked at me with fear in his eyes, and said, ‘You.’

“He went on to tell me that in this dream - this dream he was convinced was already reality, but a reality that had simply not unfolded yet - he had killed me.”

I frowned.

“He went on to describe it: he had approached my house sometime in the night. He had come up the front walkway, driven an elbow through the window beside the door, then reached his hand through and unlocked it from the inside. He entered and stood there in silence. He could hear the sound of his own breathing. The soft creak of the floorboard as he shifted his weight on his feet. ‘Part of me knew what I planned to do,’ he told me, ‘and was filled with hatred and rage. The other part was waiting in helpless horror to see it unfold. I knew what I planned to do was something bad. Something evil. But I couldn’t fully see it yet. And I couldn’t stop it. It was like this part of me had lost control of my body and mind. Had given it to the other part.’ He went on to describe what happened next. Perhaps you already know this part from the newspapers.” Geoffrey had been staring into his coffee cup while he spoke, but turned his gaze to meet mine. I felt a flutter of nerves.

“You mean to say…”

Geoffrey nodded. “Yes. What happened in the dream is exactly what happened later that night. With the exception of one thing: in the dream, it was I who had died.”

A shiver crept up my spine.

“When I told him it was just a dream, he begged me to put him away. Pleaded to lock him in a cell that night, so that he wouldn’t hurt me. ‘Do you have the intention of hurting me?’ I asked him. He said no. I told him I didn’t think he needed to be hospitalized. You see, I treated this patient for OCD - he frequently had disturbing intrusive thoughts about harming people. They caused him a great deal of distress. I believed the intrusive thoughts combined with the vividness of a realistic dream had been overwhelming to him, and that he needed to see he was in control of his actions, that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. That he wouldn’t act on his intrusive thoughts. Everything he had learned during his treatment in the hospital.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“But when I returned home that evening, I found myself ruminating on the patient’s dream. Things he had said - details. How had he known there were windows beside my front door?”

“Most houses have windows beside the front door.”

Geoffrey nodded. “Yes. But the walkway, the foyer, the location of the staircase - it was all exactly as the patient had described.”

“Nearly every home has these things in a similar configuration.”

“Ever a skeptic.” A flicker of a mirthless smile touched his face. “Yet you already know my patient forcefully entered my house that very night, and attempted to kill me.”

There was a charged silence. Geoffrey sighed. “I admit I thought the same. I tried to shake off the feeling I had about my patient’s dream.” He paused and wet his lips. “I was in bed reading when I heard the window shatter. I won’t burden you with the details. You already know there was a struggle, and that I wrested his knife from his hands and killed him.”

“It was self-defense.”

“Yes.” He nodded, very slowly. For a moment he appeared lost in thought. Then he looked at me again. “Do you remember that case study in university? The patient with locked-in syndrome.”

“I remember.”

“I’ll never forget how it felt to look into that patient’s eyes. It was like he was trapped, somewhere deep inside his body.” A brief shake of his head; another moment of reverie. “In my house that night, my patient loomed over me on the stairs, raising that knife, while I held him by the wrists and fought for my life. I looked into his eyes then, for a brief moment. And they looked just like the eyes of that LIS patient. Like he was there, somewhere - but not on the surface. Like he was trapped somewhere inside.”

I shifted in my seat uncomfortably, thinking. “Perhaps a sudden onset of psychosis?” I said at last. 

Geoffrey furrowed his brow.

“An acute episode - or perhaps a neurological condition,” I went on. …

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