"Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them" - Poe

She shielded her eyes from the sunlight that filtered in through the canopy above and relaxed back onto the dry moss beneath. The tension in the forest carpet relieved her stress, drawing it away from her weary body like roots gently pulling water from the soil. She could feel the slices of sunlight warming her bare legs, creeping from calf to thigh to soothe her troubled spirit. As she lay, drifting lightly between the waking and dream worlds, her problems seemed to ebb away, carried by the warm breeze that teased the trees as it whispered through the clearing.

The darkness bit into her, memories like poison flowed through her. She fought against them, but as sleep won out she was dragged back to the past. No longer could she feel the springy moss acting as a mattress, instead she lay on the cold concrete of his kitchen. It always started like this, with her awaking in the dimly lit, ruined kitchen, stretched out on the cold flagstones. Tiredly she climbed to her feet, she knew she was dreaming. Lucid dreaming they called it. She'd seen her doctor about it; he'd tried to guide her to literature to teach her on how to control the dreams, but she knew that as much as she couldn't control what happened in the past, she couldn't control her dreams. She just had to re-live them and hope against hope that she made it out alive.

She'd been here a thousand times. It never changed, not at the start at least. As she stood supporting herself on the broken sink, she could hear him. Like a bull in a china shop, he flung himself around the rest of the house, smashing whatever came to hand. Sighing, she counted the seconds as he crashed into the bathroom, listened for the sound of shattering glass before she took off at a sprint out the back door of the kitchen into the yard. Behind her, she could hear him falling into the kitchen, his leg going through a floorboard in his rush to get her, too late, too late.

The yard in her dreams was one thing that wasn't a constant. It warped and changed, a maze of corrugated iron buildings, old cars and machinery. A junkyard from hell, a place that stank of death as the rotting corpses of previous girlfriends fought to gain notice through the only way they could, their stench. Over the course of her dreams, she'd found the girls. In reality, she'd never seen them. She'd known that they were there, but only her in dreamscape did she stumble over their bodies, slipping in the rotting flesh as she desperately sought escape.

As she turned away from the building, away from the light into the beckoning oblivion she stumbled, her legs flying out from under her as she slid furiously down the slope. The undergrowth grasped at her like hidden horrors, tearing the flesh from her limbs with razor edge thorns. The mud coated her like a second skin and she fell for what seemed like an eternity, head over heels, tumbling away into the depths of her own hell, while above, she could still hear him.

Her heart started to pound faster as she tried to gain vision in the pitch black that she had descended into. Her body felt like it had been mauled, and still the real horrors had not begun. Dependent on hearing as her only working sense, she could hear his approach. His curses screamed of anger at her evasion, his threats called out like promises, nurturing the fear that grew from her stomach and blossomed out like a flower grown in a garden of torture. She scrambled blindly and the darkness was suffocating, drowning her world with the knowledge of what he would do to her if he caught her.

Her world grew cold, the darkness a maze of dangers that lay in wait to harm her, cold, twisted metal that tore into her like daggers, dancing across her skin, drawing blood in a tide of crimson that stained the shadows and ebbed across her vision. Gradually her world changed, the point of dawn treaded on the darkness, calling the daylight and her safety closer. And as she laboured on, adrenalin pulsing through her system, muscles tight and reactions sharpened, she broke through into the final room of her nightmare.

She fell onto the floorboards, her whole body ached as it recoiled from being slammed off the rotting wood and after a second of regaining composure, she opened her eyes and glanced around. The silence was the first thing that hit her, not a sound to be heard. Not even the scrape of her feet on the floor. Standing unsteadily, her balance affected by her deafness, she managed to fully take in where she was.

She remembered this room. It had been where they found her. Gagged and bound, her wounds sending her slowly in the dusk of death - her hope in humanity gone as she awaited his return. Waited for him to finish the job he had started. As she stood in this room, her gaze moving to the whitewash walls, which were splashed with her blood, the memories flooded back. The sound of him as he forced torture after torture on her, the sound of him as he violated her body time and again, while she lay there, the tears biting at her eyes with acid.

In this room, his voice started to speak to her. It told her how bad she had been, but as it gained momentum it began to slip away, the room began to spin and suddenly she felt light and at peace. The darkness cradled her gently, the fear dripping away as her body relaxed into a steady rhythm and he lost his power over her, the memories faded with the dreamscape and were forgotten as she roused from her sleep.

Stretching languidly on the warm, dew soaked grass a shiver reverberated down her spine and a flash of horror blinded her vision momentarily. She sat up, confusion filling her as she tried to remember her dream, images kept hidden for years yearned to break free but her subconscious refused to let her see them. She sighed, she'd been dreaming a lot lately. Nightmares that she could never remember when she woke up, they seemed familiar but she could never recall what happened; yet she knew that when she dreamed, she was aware that she was dreaming. It scared her; she feared the unknown monsters that hid in the depths of her mind, only coming out when sleep stole her from the earth.

She stood up, stretching again. Her limbs ached, but she relished where she was. It was a paradise lost for her to lose herself in, an area untouched by all. Innocent as far as she could tell, that meant a lot to her. She liked innocence, purity. It was good for the soul. She craved it and as she left by the narrow deer track, she glanced back once to check it was still the same, a verdant, gentle beauty that was hers alone.

And as she crept back out into the dead woodland, which concealed her hideaway she felt a tug of fear in her heart, her eyes closed briefly and in that second she saw him. Standing over her, his clothes red from her blood, his eyes bright with anger, coming in for the kill… her throat tightened and her eyes burst open, the blood draining from her face. For that moment, she remembered, she remembered everything. Everything she had fought so hard to forget.

Back to Short Stories 2002-2003 Listing