Into the nightmare—again

Maybe it was having someone near who was so close to Dag in a life that I knew nothing about. Maybe it was the crash from all the adrenalin rush that I’d been through in the past month. Maybe because I was sleeping with Maizie in Dag’s apartment. Maybe it’s because I’m just a bad person and they are just reward for my sins. Whatever. The nightmares were back.

4:00 a.m.

I was sitting in my chair. I knew if I opened my eyes I would see them. The ghosts of my mother and father, the taunting children in my school, the refrigerator-like Oksama and his sidekick Bradley. Maybe Ray Hawkins would join them this time. They would laugh at me. Call me freak, Bozo, baldy. They would tear out my hair by the fistful and laugh as I cried out to stop. If I opened my eyes, it would all be there.

I forced them shut. I screamed into my pillow that I wouldn’t look, but inevitably my eyes were pried open of their own accord and I looked around me in the dreamworld I had created. It was worse. The dead were all there—even Dag. But they were silent. The stared at me and waited.

“What? What!” I wailed. “What do you want? Just do your worst. Stop staring at me!” I looked pleadingly at Dag, but his image changed and his cousin Teresia was there instead. Instead of Bradley, Simon was looking at me. Instead of my mother and father, Angel and Lars. And they were joined by everyone I knew. Mrs. Prior, Silas, Cinnamon, Goeff and Teri, even Davy. The dead had all been replaced by the living—all except Dag. He still stood there among the people I see all the time and they all just stared at me in silence.

“What? What!” I screamed. “What do you want?”

“You’ve got it all,” Dag said. “Friends, money, trust, power. You’ve got it all. Now what kind of person are you going to be?”

They all just stood there looking at me. All asking. What kind of person am I going to be? I was awake now, rigid in my bed. Even awake with the dim light of Dag’s apartment I could see them. When I closed my eyes the just became more real. The tears flowed. It was worse.

It was so much worse.