Bad Games

68



Amy felt eyes on her in the middle of the night. Jim was at the foot of her bed, naked and aroused and leering at her. She attempted a scream, tried to slink away from her sheets, but an invisible force held her down and stole her tongue.

She turned to her right, praying her husband was awake. He was dead. His eyes open and unblinking, the white sheet covering his body soaked through in red.

Jim laughed when she saw her husband’s body. He laughed and then began to dance. His naked body hopped and twirled around the room, his skin giving off a pale glow in the dark room.

“Help,” Amy attempted to say. “Please help.” The words were there, her desire impossibly strong, but her lips could not move.

She managed to raise a hand to her mouth where it flopped against her face as though belonging to someone else. She fumbled and tried to separate her lips, to pry her mouth open so her cries could escape. The dexterity of the foreign hand on her mouth was poor; for each finger that probed successfully there was another that hung limp and useless.

Jim’s white body began to crawl up the bedroom wall directly in front of her, his arms and legs bent at odd angles and working in unison. He resembled a giant white crab scurrying up a dune in the moonlight.

Amy watched Jim’s body scale the wall in front of her, then continue its trek to the ceiling where it hung overhead, a few feet from where she lay. Jim would stop every few inches and twist his head in impossible directions, never forgetting to lock eyes and grin at Amy before resuming his scuttle.

He was directly above her, the anatomy on his backside now strangely altered, taking on a smooth appearance, devoid of muscle tone and structure. Even the split in his ass had come together into a solid white. His body was that of a parasite’s—the odd shape and deformities making this blatant to Amy within the bizarre truths of the dream world.

The parasite released its grip on the ceiling with its left hand and left foot, allowing the blood-red underside of its body to swing open like a door. From its neck down it was covered in an array of hungry erections, each one a thick pulsating blue, their heads small razor-toothed mouths dripping fluids as they opened and closed with desire, waiting to suck the essence from their host.

The parasite swung back towards the ceiling and re-attached itself, its backside to Amy once again. The head that still belonged to Jim rotated 180 degrees until it fixed on Amy. The wicked grin and glowing-yellow eyes encompassed the rest of his face, cartoon-like, an excessive caricature of the once-Jim Fannelli’s features.

The mouth opened, still grinning, but spoke no words. It clicked and popped a foreign communiqué that Amy knew belonged to its race of parasite. She also knew that it was laughing at her as it got ready to drop from above and attach itself to her frozen body, the hungry erections ready to probe and fasten themselves to her skin while they fed.

Jim’s head clicked a few more times, the body vibrating as it prepared to launch, and just as Amy found her voice, it dropped from the ceiling.



* * *



Amy’s scream woke up Patrick and the medical staff who happened to be just outside the room’s entrance. They rushed in and attended to her, wiping down her soaked brow.

Patrick was propped up in bed on both elbows as he looked helplessly to the medical staff assisting his wife.

“Just a bad dream,” the nurse said, smiling at Patrick. “She’ll be fine.”

Patrick nodded and slowly lowered himself back down onto his bed. He listened to his wife’s rapid breathing and the nurse’s soothing words. His wife had weathered the first of many nightmares to come. Patrick closed his eyes, breathed in deep, and waited for his inevitable turn.