Topic: Dreams

Author: Chris Dunn

I wake! Not to a sound, not to movement, just to a growing sense of presence in the room. Moments before I had slumbered soundly in the shadow of the upper bunk cast by the moonlight coming in from the window, now something else is here. Not my brother who sleeps above me, this is something dark and sinister. It’s power and malevolence flow through me paralyzing me in terror. And I know this because, though I am the perceiver in this place, I am also the perceived. Dual perspectives war with one another for dominance, and the beast hides in the space between, always just out of sight. I would strain harder to see, but fear the vision would be madness to behold. So instead, I cringe in fear choosing to watch the dread pull across my face using the monster’s eyes.

Finally a noise breaks the silence and my heart beats again. The rush of car tires on pavement announce the brief play of light across the room. Not a bright life, more simply a lighter-shaded shadow that flows across the blackness from right to left as a car passes outside in the night. In that moment my room is safe to view. The path of egress to the door is clearly outlined through the toys and laundry. There are only my eyes, only my perspective and no interstitial spaces for a nothing-beast to hide. I take the moment to breath before being plunged once again into a darkness somehow blacker than black.

With the return of the night comes the monster. More real now that it has shown it cannot exist in the light. The light switch is by the door. The door is on the far side of the room. And even to look for it, I have to risk seeing through my own eyes, and I have already done so. Though I look away back to that mirrored perspective where I see only me, it only serves to show the realization and horror spreads across my face as the knowledge blooms in my mind as to what I saw. There is more to the beast now, more than the shadow watching me from behind the universe, it has a friend. Somehow in the passing moments when the car’s light had decreed it did not exist, it had pushed something of itself into my reality, a piece which now stands vaguely humanoid in form against the far wall, its shadow in impossible contrast to the angle of the window’s light. It too observes, translating reality across the barrier to its master, together they hold me pinioned in their regard.

I confess, no thought occurred for the safety of my infant brother above. But in my defense – though I have no idea how I came to possess this understanding – I knew that he was safe, at least for the moment. The terrible focus was on me. If the beast had come for him, he would not be able to slumber so. This hostile glare would wake him like a sudden bucket of chilling water. This was my demon to face.

From the bed to switch, I count the steps in my mind, seven maybe eight, and that servant between me and salvation. I would not make it. I could cry out, cry for my mother just a room away. She would come, someone would come to reach the light from the other side. Outside the beast’s focus they could move and if they broke the night, then—

Another car breaks my dreams with its light. This time I am too transfixed to hear its approach and the brief salvation seizes my frozen form and pushes it to action. In the safe interlude of shadow, I rise in my footy pajamas. Abrasive soles against carpet? Just maybe I can make it to safety, but the interruption is far too brief. The room returns to darkness before I even fully rise, and now the servant is upon me, slipping forward in the space between. I cannot behold it directly. I know its features from interpreting the wrinkles vanishing across my stretched skin, limbs too long, a featureless skull, eyes only present as a deeper, hungry darkness that is horribly aware.

Paralyzed again, I can only force my eyes to shut, though still I can see through its perspective. See myself cringe and shrink as it reaches for me with needle like fingers and hook like hands. From a space behind my focus I hear the master’s dread command. “Bring that child’s face to me.” Fear almost tricks me into spinning on the voice, tearing back the blind to see what lies in wait, see what stalks us in the night, but the merest glimpse is too much to contain, and my “eyes” fall back on me. The light of the third car now shows the bereft state of my visage, as smooth and clean as the servant’s with even the eyes entombed in flesh.

I awake screaming, and my mother is there. “It’s just a dream she tells me.” And I feel a better, though I notice, as I relate this ‘just a dream’ to her,  she holds me a little tighter than before.