the Nightmare

The girl awoke slightly disoriented to the sound of a light rain falling outside. It was pitch black and not even the glow from the street lamp outside made it's mark inside the room where she sat upright on the rumpled bed. "Damn", she thought, "The electricity must have gone out sometime during the last few hours." Not even the clock beside her bed which usually cast a sickly green pall over everything seemed to be working, though it was supposed to have a built-in safety factor to keep the time showing correctly,even when a loss of electricity occurred. She wondered what had caused her to wake her up? She moved her feet gingerly, moving the blankets now tangled around her feet. "Where was Sparky? The little terrier never left her side. Not only was it a thick, inky-black and the middle of the night, but the damn dog was wandering around somewhere in the house too." She was cozy and warm under the covers and didn't want to move.

The young woman fought her way towards total consciousness and wondered if the autumn storm had caused the power outage, or if someone had the misfortune of crashing into a power pole nearby? Her senses began to sharpen and she could almost seem to hear herself breathing. She heard what might possibly be the whimper of the tiny dog that usually shared her bed with her, off in some obscure part of the now quiet house. She moved her lips to call out to the dog, but some sense seemed to warn her to be as quiet as she could be. The half formed words stalled in her throat and she swallowed them quickly. Sparky let out a sharp yowl and then the deep, heavy silence seemed to choke even that noise away. Though the girl was still wrapped in her blanket she suddenly felt chilled. The rain that had been falling gently now came with a pounding furor. She wished more than anything for the comforting presence of her dog snuggled in her arms, but he was missing,somewhere in the entrails of her surroundings. Silence lurked inside the house as a storm began to rage outside.

A tinkle of glass breaking, shattered the silence and caused the girl to jump from her bed. Hand over her mouth and shivering, she moved towards the dresser and into the drawer, where she kept a flashlight for just such emergencies. Her cold fingers clutched the hard shape of the flashlight and she slipped her fingers down the cold shaft to the button on the side which would give her some light and hopefully lend to her some semblance of safety and reality in the black nightmare in which she had awoken. As if following a badly written script, she realized that the batteries of the flashlight were dead. Dead did not seem to be a word that she wanted in her vocabulary that night. She wanted to wake up and have it be morning with the sun lighting up the world and Sparky lying safely by her side. Hearing something fall heavily to the floor downstairs, she somehow doubted that she would awaken and find that she had been only dreaming. Whoever or whatever was in her house in the middle of the night, was slowly heading in her direction. She tried to quickly form a plan, but she couldn't seem to pull her swirling thoughts together. She began to shake and a whimper began to form deep in her throat and became lodged there.

Suddenly from somewhere in the dark room, a lilting song filled the air. As the sound of the music increased the room became filled with the glow of the cell phone's pulsing light. The girl had forgotten the phone she kept on the table at the side of the bed. She turned back toward the table and scooped the phone up in her shaking hand. She felt somehow strangely reconnected with the world and felt as though whatever was going on in her house must be less serious than she had thought. She almost smiled as she answered with a whispered, "Hello?" She at first heard no response then soon realized that what she was listening to was a series of deep rumbles and almost inaudible thumps. The phone felt alive and hot in her hand. She dropped the phone to the floor. Her heart already dancing in her chest now began what felt like a death march. For a brief moment she had felt as though her salvation had been at hand and then realized that whatever now lurched through the dark house had only been toying with her. The tinkling ring cut once again through the night. The song sounding inappropriately obscene. The light that came from the phone illuminated the room, once again creating distorted shadows over the walls. She started to scream, but her throat felt as though it were stuffed with cotton. The noises grew closer, now coming from the stairs leading up to the room in which she stood trembling and numb with fear. The roaring that the girl heard in her ears was in her head, induced by her fear and not audible to anyone or anything other than herself. The knob on the door to the girl's room began to turn and the girl knew she would soon know what had searched her out in the dark night. The hair on the back of her neck began to rise as did the fine hairs on the girl's arms. She prayed that whatever was coming in would do it's work swiftly and somewhat painlessly.

She felt an electric-like jolt, shoot through her body. The girl's legs seemed painful and to still be asleep. Her blue eyes fringed with heavy black lashes opened widely in an instant. Her mouth formed a almost perfectly round circle as she saw what stood over her. It was only her dog! Confusion took over her senses as she realized that it was no longer dark. The sun poured through the window near the foot of her bed. There was no trace of the rain from the night before. Something wet dripped down her face and she felt stiff course hair against her cheek. Sparky licked her face once again, as though demanding her to wake up and pay attention to him. She realized that the dog's fur felt damp and sticky. She glanced downward towards her hand that had been unconciously stroking the dog and wiped her hand quickly on the blanket as though she had touched somethng dirty and obscene. She glanced to where the time had been frozen on the unresponsive clock, just seconds ago. It had been seconds ago hadn't it? She quickly realized that she must have been dreaming after all. She muttered a brief prayer of 'thanksgiving' and sat up in her bed, smiling just a bit at her own silliness.She kicked back the blankets and started to get out of bed. It had all seemed so real though. She remembered the nightmare in complete detail, including the wierdcell phone call and the strange, horrible noises that had come from it when she had answered. It was always so strange to her, that dreams or nightmares as the case may be could seem so real. She reached out to the table where her cell phone usually lay and realized that it wasn't there. In the quiet of the morning a lilting melody began to fill the air, as the cell phone that still lay on the bedroom floor began to ring. The dog at her side began to whimper and fear began it's familiar trek, slithering and tightening, along her spine. She knew that if she answered all that she would hear would be the sound of herself screaming.