-24- [nightmare]
It’s dark, everything dark dark black impossible to see through. It’s almost tangible, almost suffocating, this heavy blackness. It presses in, closes up your throat, stops your breath as sure as
- a knife, flashing in the dim light of the moon shining down into the alley. It catches a moonbeam and turns it sharp, makes it a weapon. And of course of course it’s a knife, it would have to be a knife and you’re not dead yet but you can feel the blade as if it is already pressed to your throat like -
fingers digging into your windpipe, choking. As sure as someone squeezing the life out.
There are worse ways to die.
If there was light, if there was even the tiniest shimmer, the flicker of a dying candle this dark wouldn’t be so horrible, so impossible, so terrifying. But there is no light. There is no moon and there are no stars and there is nothing nothing nothing all around. You reach your hands out and touch
- a brick wall. It provides an instant of support, of reassurance as you try to get your bearings. The moonlight shines equally on the knife, your gun, and the colored glass in the window above you. And that mask, that long-beaked white mask that makes him faceless, nameless, a malicious shadow that seems to take more sick joy than pain from the bullet you sent through his leg. He’s taller, heavier than you, but fast. So fast. He maneuvers, engages, knocks the gun from your hands and what is left for you to use to defend your life? All you have is -
nothing. Nothing but thick black, like swimming in deep water at midnight and with as much chance of rescue you’re drowning, can’t reach the air, can’t get out of the water because even when you do reach the surface you still can’t breathe. The air is as thick as the water, as thick as the fear, and there are heavy wingbeats that create eddies of your breath, tearing the screams from your throat before they can ever be heard and you know with absolute certainty that
- there is no one who can save you now. You fight knowing this. Your gun is out of reach, lying on the cobbles ten feet away and there is no way he will let up long enough for you to reach for it. Blood is loud in your ears, the thundering of your heartbeat fast, hard, frantic and afraid to die.
I have things to do, people who need me. Obligations, affections, jobs and guns and butterflies and housetraining and target practice and patrols and guilt and goals and dreams and fire and love oh no please I can’t, I can’t. I’m not ready.
I can’t even say goodbye.
Kick him, knock him off his feet. You catch him off guard and with a surge of adrenaline take his knife and for one moment you have the power.
Until he pulls out another. And that bird’s face seems to twist into a smirk, jagged and cruel and sick-joyous and he cuts. Blinds you so that image is burned into your mind and the sound of your own screaming is the accompanying chorus. He yanks the sound from you and you can feel cold steel in your flesh, shredding, destroying. Making a ruin of you. And all you can do is scream because -
you are about to die. And there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can save you. There is only the void. Horrible and endlessly deep, all you can do is fall forever through blackness and wingbeats and screaming. Screaming like you have never heard before, full of rage and despair and terror beyond what you have ever felt. It resonates through you and everything shakes apart, earthquakes of emotion destroying everything, tearing you to pieces unrecognizable. Upside down, bleeding out, growing cold and screaming in your head because you're choking on your own blood, suffocating, helpless, useless, slaughtered like an animal, like a sacrifice with red blood all around, painting it black. Everything black and falling forever.
Forever.
Because there is nothing else but death, perched like a carrion bird, white face splattered in blood looking on with dead black eyes and making it happen over and over, without end. Death and blackness and fear neverending, spiraling to a pinpoint which is all-consuming, every second swallowed up in eternities of this torture.
The worst.
The worst is that maybe I deserve it.
Surging, pitching like waves wakefulness comes screaming, fleeing. But the dark is inescapable and it follows like a heavy shade and blurs the lines between reality and nightmare, day and night, present and past and though your heart still beats, your lungs still breathe it feels like dying all over again.