The Nightmare

365 Days of Creativity

day eighty five

The Nightmare

I was one in a group of one hundred. We all sat in a row, reclined and immobile in padded seats. Like asylum theater chairs. To my right, a lovely girl, frightened and downy soft, my closest friend. She stared straight above her, like we all did. Dozens of faces upturned, waiting for their moment of reckoning. And above us, gliding silently, an assembly line of faces parallel to our own, but these were eyeless and alabaster. Male mannequins without features. They faced downward, identical and blind, looking for one of us that was different.

From the left, the endless assembly approached. A single head, humming with omniscience, bore down on us. He seemed to see, to smell, to sense our souls. With each person he passed, he gained life, spirit energy, leaving behind a trail of downtrodden faces, suddenly aged and empty; leafless trees in the frost.

He was three spots-two spots-right next to me. His square jaw pushed into my vision. Time slowed. But no, it was the line that slowed as he came to a stop. But not above me. I was not pure, not unique. No desire for my individual sameness.

It was her, my soul mate. He, hovering above, she, nearly drowning in her own tears. His face aglow with the supernova hidden within her. From behind where his neck should have been, two silky, translucent obtrusions pushed forth. The amoeba-like apparitions moved through the air as if it were water. Floating and wavering, five probes formed on each tube. They stretched and squirmed and saturated the air with their coolness. Longer and longer, like hovering strings of saliva, they took the alien form of disjointed fingers.

The pointed tips yearned forward, and my love screamed with their closeness. Her lips trembled and eyes shook in their sockets, leaping around as though to escape her skull. Stretching, spreading, multiplying and morphing, the hands crept forward, swallowing the space by inches and inches and one inch more- I ripped the air open with a lung-burning NO. And stunned, the fingers hung over her skin, her lashes flung wide as she stared into sin.

Slowly, so slowly, like the turn of his head was stretching time itself, the head curved in my direction. His blank face uncannily echoed everyone I had ever known.

Though unmistakably an attempt at a human, he was just as clearly the child of science and hell. Made from something too white, and too stiff, movements too smooth and visage without definition except- When had that appeared? He had a mouth, a horizontal oval of red, with a rectangle of black in the center. And it was two-dimensional, so from the from it was wide and flat, but if he had turned sideways it might seem not to exist at all. 

The track glided backward, his face keeping a direct line with mine, turning as he came above me. He held his ghostly gelatinous arms out threateningly to the sides, long fingers quivering with excitement.

His rounded mouth split sideways. The top half moved right, and the bottom, left. The motion revealed new shapes, three connecting triangles, black, violet and orange. These too slid away to show the sharp corners of violent green and cancerous yellow squares. His skinny appendixes stretched forth, touching either side of my face. Long, knobbed and slick, the icicles slid down my cheeks and coolly caressed my neck. Colder and colder the creepers became, until I could barely feel them. So distracted was I by the design of colours above me that I almost didn't notice his hands were halfway down my back. My lungs seemed to crystallize, each shallow breathe sounding out with a crackle of ice.

The slithering nitrogen caressed and conquered my lower back, spreading flat around my kidneys. The face was a mess of geometric shapes, still spinning in a random trance. They slowed their movement as the ice spread around my spine, and snapped into a final position when the knives dug into my back. A face formed by dyes above me, two wholes left for no eyes. The tender flesh between my ribs and hips was pierced with heads of frost like daggers seared with the temperature of dark matter. Deeper and upwards the scepters where thrust, icing and cutting their way through my innards into my torso and up to my chest. The hands of the devil would be welcome candles compared to this nightmare. He hooked each crooked finger around my heart, and with one fatal snap, severed all of the veins, and sinew and life that connected my soul to my body. 

All that was left was a beast with a mask, clutching my heart in its hands.