by Jade White
They were everywhere and they were coming for her. They were after her and she couldn’t run fast enough. She needed to hurry and hide somewhere. She needed to get to safety.
Their eyes watched her and no matter where she ran in the mists, they were there, around every corner of a faceless, nameless city, watching her and keeping their distance, but she knew that they were hostile. There was something dark and horrifying about them, something that screamed out to her to keep running from them.
Whenever she got close enough, she would watch their hands lift up from their sides from long, gaunt arms, reminding her of spider legs as they reached out and pointed at her with long fingernails from their gnarled, ancient fingertips.
In the distance, she could hear something that rang out loud, like a church bell, a gong that roared through the darkness and the mists. As she looked at the horde of faceless figures in the mist, they all turned their dark, smoky heads, craning them toward the sounds of the noise that was piercing in the distance. Something inside of Shawna’s chest began to seize and lock up, catching her breath in her lungs. It was something horrifying to her and made her feel like a cold trickle of sweat was running down her spine.
She could hear a baby crying.
Shawna didn’t know any children and she didn’t have any close friends who had children right now, but there was something horrifying about that sound. Everything seemed to pause and wait as the sound of the crying child rattled and rolled through every foggy alleyway and misty street of the dream. The figures, cloaked in shadow, all around her looked toward the sound and she knew that they were well aware of what the crying child meant. Shawna didn’t understand, but she knew that she couldn’t let them get to the child.
She couldn’t let these figures get the child.
Bolting toward the sound, she headed as quickly as she could in the direction of the screaming baby. There were snarling creatures in the distance, just out of arm’s reach from her and they were ravenous for the child, hissing and snapping their jaws as they ran. They were running with all of their speed, but there was something about Shawna that made her faster than them. She could see a church in the distance, atop a gloomy hill, surrounded by tombstones and dead trees, waiting for her to climb while more and more of the shadowy figures crawled and stalked closer and closer to the sounds of the wailing baby.
It was in the church. She could tell that it was in the church and the figures in the shadows could tell as well. They were coming after her now, knowing that she was the only person that was able to save the child. They wanted to stop her and make it so that she couldn’t get to the child. They wanted to get rid of the one good person in the world.
Throwing open the gate at the bottom of the hill, Shawna looked up at the spire of the church and the bell tower where the screaming baby was no doubt waiting for her. In front of her, clattering over crumbling tombstones and slinking out of the dead trees, the shadowy figures scuttled closer and closer to her, surrounding her and she started to scream.
They were almost on top of her, whispering and calling out to her, their eyes glimmering brightly, like stars in the dead of night. She was about to be overtaken by them, until she heard a loud hiss and the fog evaporated suddenly and the darkness was thrown back by the sun cresting over the vista of the hill, rising up behind the church in a fiery glow.
All around her, the creatures in the shadows shrieked and hissed, bursting into shadows and vanishing like dust in the wind as she stood there, shielding her eyes and rushing as quickly as she could toward the church as the baby ceased crying. All she could hear now was the wailing and hissing of the shadowy beings behind her.
She reached out and touched the handle of the door, throwing it wide open.
She bolted up and felt the sweat coming down from her face and covering her body. Her heart was pounding faster than it had been when she had had been on top of Victor. There was a cold shiver that ran over her body and she knew there was something wrong. She had never had a dream like that. She had never experienced something like that and it was terrifying to her. The panic was rushing through her and it was overwhelming.
Shawna couldn’t think of a time in her life when she was genuinely and truly terrified, but this was a moment where she knew that something was extremely wrong and completely off. She couldn’t handle this.
This was getting to her and she knew that she needed to just take a breath and get everything under control. Her whole body began to shiver and shake and she knew that the sweat was making her colder. She was naked underneath the blanket that she had been wrapped in with Victor. She should go put something on. She should get in the shower or she should go for a walk. There was something inside of her that kept her heart pounding, thumping so that she could hear it in her ears.
Never once had she experienced something so real and tangible like that when she was dreaming. This was something completely beyond her. She had never been in a dream where she thought it was so completely real. She wanted to touch something or pinch herself to make sure that everything was still real around her and that she wasn’t making up things. She wanted to know she was no longer inside of the dream and that she was going to be okay.
What had that been? What had been the purpose of that? Her mind had just conjured up the most terrifying experience of her life and she felt like she had just barely escaped execution. She didn’t know if she bought into the whole symbolism or the subconscious messages that the mind was trying to give the conscious mind through dreams, but right now, it felt like anything was possible.
She would be open to any kind of explanation as to what that had been. Placing her hand on her bare chest, she could still feel her heart pounding and thumping, slowly coming to the point where it calmed down completely.
She looked next to herself, wanting to tell Victor about it. She knew that it would be rude and cruel to wake him up and tell him about it, but she felt like she needed to. She wanted to talk to someone about what she had just been through. It was as if she’d just been mugged and she wanted to talk to the police about it. Her whole body felt like it had been through a trauma.
Looking next to her, she saw that the spot where Victor had been sleeping next to her when she had drifted off to sleep was empty. The pale figure was no longer there. She could see the impression of where his body had been in the faux fur rug and she felt confused by his absence.
She wondered if he’d had a bad dream too or if it had been something that they’d drank or eaten. No, they hadn’t eaten anything. She looked toward the source of light that was dimly illuminating the room and she saw that the door to the bathroom was closed, but the light was piercing the dark from the slit underneath the door.
She sat there on the floor of the apartment, taking a moment to get control of herself. Her hair felt strange, like it was full of sweat. She realized that she needed to shower and get into some pajamas.
He was probably going to think it was weird that she woke up in the middle of the night while he used the bathroom and wanted to have a shower, so she quietly waited for him.
After a while, she wondered if he was all right and didn’t want to waste any more time just sitting in the middle of the living room. She got up and walked into the bedroom, keeping the lights off as she navigated flawlessly in the darkness of the apartment. She found her pajamas, pulling her pants on after she pulled on her tank top, listening for a sound from inside the bathroom, worried that he had fallen asleep on the toilet or something. She was worried that he was doing something weird in there.
She thought about how incredible he had been and sat down on the edge of her bed, realizing that he hadn’t even gotten a good showing of her apartment. They had practically walked into her apartment and gotten down to business. She smiled at the memory of the previous hours that she had spent with him and she knew she had experienced something powerful and magical with him.
It had been fantastic. It had been something that she was going to remember for
the rest of her life. She knew that he was a guy she was going to be comparing a lot of men to when she met them. Of course, there was an optimistic part in her soul that hoped it would be a long time before there was another man in her life that she was going to need to talk to and compare sexual encounters.
Patiently waiting for him to get out of the bathroom, she realized that she needed to talk about what she had just been through. It was gnawing at her and digging into her like something she was possessed with, like there was a parasite inside of her and she needed to get rid of it.
She hoped that he wouldn’t think it was weird when he came out of the bathroom and she ambushed him with a story about the dream she’d just had that was bugging her.
Was that a weird thing to do?
She figured that it was probably one of the more strange things to do and she thought about holding back on ambushing him with it, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never really been a big dreamer. She’d never really experienced something that had been so real and so tangible.
She felt like she could have reached out and touched those shadowy figures and grabbed a hold of them in the middle of her wandering in terror. It was like she had been wandering around and they had been truly watching her, truly keeping their cold, dark eyes on her.
With a sudden clicking of facts, she realized that their dark eyes had reminded her of Victor’s, now that she thought about it. What had that meant? His eyes were as dark as chips of obsidian in the middle of a marble sea, but these eyes had been completely dark, solid onyx in the shadowy flickering of their smoky, featureless faces. This was something that unnerved her and she suddenly felt that the darkness wasn’t nearly as friendly as she remembered or had thought that it was. Everything was suddenly growing more and more vivid and deeper around her. She wanted company. She wanted light.
Standing up, she flicked on the light and looked around the room. She was alone. She walked into the living room and turned on the lamp, half expecting a figure to be illuminated in the corner, hissing with a feral shriek, but nothing happened. That was a relief. She couldn’t handle any more surprises or more terrifying experiences that came out of nowhere. She turned and looked at the bathroom door, walking over to knock on it.
As she rapped her knuckles on the exterior of the door, she felt something biting at her, like she was prying into something that she shouldn’t be prying into. Even if he had passed out on the toilet and was asleep, no one wanted to be woken up in that kind of sudden, awkward position, but she needed to make sure that he was alive.
As she knocked, she knew that she was just going to have to deal with the consequences of her decisions. She had crossed that threshold and there was no going back at this point. She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip, hoping that he wouldn’t be mad at her.
“Victor? Are you okay?” she called out softly, not wanting to startle him.
She listened for a response, but there was nothing. There was no shuffling, no heavy breathing, no soft snoring, and there was definitely no sudden jerking or startling. She began to wonder if he was even in there.
She looked down at the handle and she knew was about to do something dangerous, She was going to cross over the line and she knew that it was a risky game that she was playing right then.
Reaching down, she felt the door handle and prayed that he would respond to her so that she wouldn’t have to do this. She didn’t want to have to do this. She wanted to be able to walk away from it and be just fine and have a magical relationship without any boundaries that were broken. She knocked one more time, just in case. She prayed that it would work this time.
“Victor?” She called to him.
Nothing.
Gripping the handle, she knew that there was no going back. If she found him naked, passed out on the toilet, then that was her own fault, but she would deal with it when she discovered it. She slowly pushed open the door and looked into the bathroom.
There was nothing there.
She looked around the bathroom, wondering if she had left the bathroom light on when she had gone out earlier, or if there was anything else that she had forgotten, but there was one thing that she wasn’t questioning. Victor had left.
He had gone just like she knew he probably would when she had been flirting with the idea of asking him back to the apartment. It was the gamble that he had convinced her to take with him and she felt like she had just done the dumbest thing in the world. There was no one to blame but herself.
In the end, this was what she signed up for.
She looked into the bathroom, staring at the emptiness of it, knowing that there was no note, no strange, cryptic message that he might have left her, and there was probably no new contact in her phone that he might have stashed before leaving in the middle of the night like the bandit that he was.
She looked at the empty bathroom and she knew that there was nothing to fret over. She had let herself in for this and she had agreed to the possibility of this when he came over.
Strangely enough, even though she had no one to blame but herself, she just folded her arms and felt a little disappointed that he was gone. He had been so sexy and so mysterious to her, and the sex had been so fantastic that it was going to be hard missing him. It was going to be hard knowing that he was gone from her life.
“Damn,” she whispered.
CHAPTER TWO
The hospital was a busy place that she never wanted to come back to ever again. It was one of those places she tried to avoid at all costs and she knew that there was nothing impressive or alluring about it. She knew that there were a lot of people who thought hospitals were fascinating in a morbid sense, but dead bodies freaked out Shawna.
She wasn’t the kind of woman who liked to be trapped inside of the hospital and as the nurse rolled her through the hallways, all she could think about was freedom, like a prisoner waiting for parole.
Everything stank of sanitation, masking the illness that was lurking around every corner, and she knew that underneath all the illness and sanitation products, death was lurking in this place. She didn’t like being in the same place where people were dying or dead. It was the same reason why she didn’t like hanging out in graveyards.
By the time they reached the curb, the nurse was still talking to her about everything that she needed to know, but Shawna was well aware of what she needed. She had taken the last nine months to read about what she was going to require in the coming weeks, months, and years. It was something that she had prepared for with an eagerness that others in her life didn’t share with her.
The past twenty four hours had been something that had tormented her and made her feel like she was going to die, like the walls were coming in. She had clutched the precious new center of her life and she knew that she wasn’t going to let go or ever give up this little bundle that was now in her hands.
“You all set, sugar?” the nurse asked her and Shawna smiled at her with a soft grin.
“I’m good,” Shawna said, pointing to the blue van that was pulling up to the front of the hospital. “That’s my ride.”
“Well I wish you all the best,” the nurse said with a sweet and comforting smile that Shawna was grateful for, but she never wanted to see it again. She was not interested in the kindness of this woman. What she was interested in was getting out of there at the speed of sound. Inside of her mind, all she could think of was that she didn’t want to be here any longer.
In her arms, Blake was fast asleep, the happiest and healthiest little baby Shawna could ever ask for. She looked at his soft, creamy skin and his dark head of hair, like he was an angel sculpted out of marble. She ran her fingers over his soft cheeks and she knew that this was the baby she was going to dote upon for the rest of her days.
The birth had been flawless and there had been no complications whatsoever. She was grateful for all of that and she had cried for hours in happiness, joy, and gratitude when she was finally alone.
It was the most overwhelm
ing feeling; being a mother and having that little life in her hands was something that she hadn’t been expecting. It was everything that she never knew that she had wanted. Honestly, it had taken her seconds after finding out that she was pregnant to know that this was her destiny. Being a mother was written in her blood and she knew that now.
Her sister, Amanda, didn’t think so. In fact, most of her family was ruinously disappointed in their relation’s willingness to keep the child of a one-night-stand and they were even more ashamed that she was the kind of person who had one-night-stands. Amanda opened the door of the blue van and let Shawna put in the car seat all by herself and put her son into the seat with the loving gentleness of a woman who actually cared about the child that was in her protective custody.
“Are you done yet?” Amanda asked, sickened by the thought that she was the one who was here to help her sleazy sister. Shawna had gotten used to ignoring her family up to this point and she wasn’t going to let them get to her now. They were less than trash and she wasn’t going to stoop to their level.
