I woke up with an extremely uneasy feeling and for a few seconds I couldn’t remember where I was. I wasn’t at home. The room was way too dark and windowless.
I slowly sat up and tried to get my eyes to adjust. There were a bunch of blinking lights in the corner coming from Dex’s computer and other gadgets.
It was the second night in the last week that I was dreaming about the past. I don’t know why. Normally if I dreamed about weird things, they had something to do with the spirits we were about to encounter. I had begun to rely on my dreams as being prophetic, or maybe a quick glimpse into the mind of a dead person (as lovely as that sounds). But I was dreaming about high school and things that I had pushed out of my mind with the help of medication, doctors and therapy sessions. I didn’t like how they were suddenly coming up now. I hope they didn’t mean anything. They couldn’t. It was all the drug use, that’s all it ever was.
Not that I could remember all that much about the dreams. I knew my friend Tara had been in it, maybe Dr. Freedman, my old shrink. Nothing scary had happened. Yet there was something so disturbingly realistic about the whole thing that my heart was pounding away and I was sweating profusely. I felt the sheets. They were a damp. Jenn would probably burn them by the time I left.
Earlier that evening, Dex had cooked Jenn and me dinner (his cooking skills were still surprising) and I had a bit too much wine with it. Just to calm the nerves. Actually, we all had imbibed a tad much, which made the conversation easier. Probably helped that we all ate in the living room, watching TV, and didn’t have to stare at each other. I had avoided looking at either of them, the conversation I had with Dex still fresh in my head. We were putting it all past us.
Now my head was spinning from the dream and I was thirsty from the night sweats and the wine. I didn’t want to get up for a glass of water; the black room was a bit creepy, and it was always weird being in someone else’s place in the middle of the night, but if I didn’t, I’d never go back to sleep. I carefully eased myself out of the single bed, unsure if I was going to walk into anything in the blackness. I made it to the door, opened it quietly, and poked my head out into the apartment. Their bedroom door was closed. The bathroom wasn’t. Fat Rabbit probably slept with them. I hope he messed up their sex life.
I tiptoed to the kitchen, my socks silent on the floor, careful not to wake them or the dog, and plucked a glass from a high cupboard and filled it up at the kitchen tap. The garish, yellow streetlights from outside came in through the balcony doors, filtered by a gauzy curtain that moved slowly, teased by a draft. Even though the apartment was small and beautiful, there was something so…strange about it. Strange and off-putting.
I finished my drink and filled the cup up again, mulling it over. There was no reason for me to be creeped out and yet I was. I listened hard; I could hear the comforting sound of someone’s light snoring in the bedroom, the occasional subdued rumble of a car outside, the tick of a clock on the wall. Everything was normal for a middle of the night Monday but that inkling of the unknown was undeniable. The hairs on my arms were rising with each second I stood there.
I gulped down the rest of the water and quietly placed the empty cup in the sink. If I hung around any longer I would just freak myself out.
I started to walk back to the room, wondering if perhaps I needed to go to the washroom, but something made me pause as I passed through the middle of the apartment.
It was that feeling.
That nauseating, lung-seizing feeling that someone, or something, was standing behind me. I could feel it, feel this solid presence at my back, watching me.
I wasn’t alone.
And I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. I felt frozen, my legs locked to the hardwood floors.
Then…
A dripping sound. My ears were so fine-tuned that the sound made my heart jump. A steady, slow drip. Had I turned off the tap properly?
But I knew it wasn’t the sink. The splatter didn’t echo, it fell in small, thick pats and from a greater distance. If it wasn’t the tap, what was dripping?
I looked at my door. It was so close. I could run into the room and lock it. I could prop the bed up against the door for security, pull the covers over my head and pray for sleep. Or I could swallow my pride and run into Dex and Jenn’s room like a child who has had a bad dream.
Or I could turn around. And see that there was nothing to be afraid of. Then my fears would be put to bed and I would follow.
I tensed up and very, very slowly, turned around on the spot.
I expected that if anyone was behind me, they would be way back in the kitchen.
This was not true.
There was someone…
Right behind me.
I was face to face with a…being…covered in graying skin that puckered in the shadows. Their chest had caved into a red abyss. Their neck looked like a piece of fraying string cheese and could barely hold up their head, which was gruesomely flattened, wider than it was long, like it was smashed in by something heavy, leaving part of it open and exposed, a mixture of brain matter, blood and bone. The blood flowed freely off this gaping wound and fell on to the ground in sticky, wet splotches. The sick source of that rhythmic pattering.
The eye closest to the wound was destroyed, only a hole of gray goo remained, and the other eye fixed itself on me sharply. It was a female eye, puffy, with running makeup underneath. She almost looked like she could be crying, but…
She smiled at me. And it sounded like wasps buzzing.
I finally screamed.
Despite taking self-defense classes, Karate, and boot camp, my instinct wasn’t to stay and fight. It was to get the fuck away from it. With nothing in my head but absolute horror, I turned and tried to run back to my room. My socks lost traction and slipped out from under me and I was down on the floor with a frightening thud, lying at the feet of a buzzing dead girl.
I scampered up just as Fat Rabbit’s barking form came shooting out from the bedroom, followed by Jenn, who was waving around a curling iron like a weapon.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, looking around in a total panic. I whirled around to see if the demented woman was there but she wasn’t. However, the blood on the floor still remained and trailed away toward the kitchen where it stopped.
“Perry!” Dex yelled. I looked to see him coming out of the room, practically naked and barely pulling on his pants in time. I was too freaked out to find that intriguing.
He stopped and grabbed my shoulders as Jenn flicked on the living room lights.
“What happened? What is it, are you OK?!” He looked over me frantically.
“Are you bleeding?” Jenn asked, eyeing the blood on the floor, which Fat Rabbit was sniffing distastefully.
I shook my head, trying to find my breath and my voice again. It felt like I lost most of it with that scream. It was still ringing in my own ears.
“It’s not my blood,” I finally got out between gulps of air.
Jenn and Dex exchanged a look.
“Whose blood is it?” Jenn asked. Her voice was laden with suspicion. She was not going to like my answer.