I don’t usually start dream threads, though I sometimes participate them. However, we’re heading into spooky season, and I had quite the creepy dream last night. The dreams I remember tend to be on the cinematic side, so it’s a bit of a read, but I wanted to relate the whole experience.
If you feel like sharing a dream, there’s no need to stick to scary, fall-themed, or pumpkin-spiced ones. Everybody’s welcome.
In the dream:
I was a boy of about 10 or 11, but the boy was not my child-self, and his Dad bore no resemblance to my real father. We were traveling on foot down a dirt road. I’m sure I knew where we were going, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was focused, child-like, on the things making me miserable. Rain was pelting down, being driven every which way by gusts of wind, getting under my poncho and starting to freeze on the brim of my hat. Water had seeped into my right boot, and the straps of my knapsack were chafing my shoulders. I was aching with cold. I interpreted Dad’s backward glances as impatience, though it was more likely worry, and stumbled as I tried to hurry. He must have been looking for shelter, because he led us off the road, down a path I hadn’t noticed, to a farmhouse.
The house was cold and dark, and it stank, cloying sweet and metallic, like the reminder of a long-dead rat in the walls, only a thousand times stronger. A detached part of me knew what it meant, but as the boy, I didn’t know why Dad was cursing under his breath as he went off to explore the back of the house. I just wanted a fire, and there was wood and a bucket of kindling by the fireplace. I laid a fire, but when I dug in my pack for matches, I found that they’d gotten too damp to light. Dad still had his pack on, so I went looking for him.
The house seemed large and sprawling, but probably only to a young boy. The first room I looked into was just a moldy-smelling pantry, but the second was a bedroom. I know that it had two small beds in it, but my eyes were locked on the doorway, and the withered little figure lying in it, half-wrapped in a blanket. I made a choking little sound and turned away. I think I was going to run, but I saw Dad coming out of the door across the hall. Before he grabbed my shoulder and hustled me back toward the front of the house, I saw another bed through the open doorway, with a still shape covered by the blankets.
There was nothing wrong with my imagination. It was only too easy to imagine a sick little boy dragging himself out of bed to look for his mama, then running out of strength before he could get out of the room. Huddling in his blanket, shivering (like I was?), calling for a mother who would never come back. I did not want to stay in the house. Neither did Dad, though probably for different reasons. The storm had closed in, though. We could hear sleet rattling off the shutters, and the daylight was almost gone. We couldn’t go back out into that to try to find other shelter. All we could do was get the fire going, wrap ourselves in our damp blankets, and try to sleep.
In the middle of the night, I woke, curled up tightly on a lumpy pile of blankets. The copper-sweet stink was back, stronger, even though I thought I’d become numb to it.The fire was burning low, leaving most of the room in darkness. I lay still, trying to figure out what woke me, and after a moment, I heard it again–a soft scraping noise, like something sharp rasping on wood. And something else, a breathless little sound almost lost in the hiss of the fire.
I wanted to get up, to stir up the fire. To light a shuck from it, so I could see. Maybe just to run out into the night, away from that reeking house. I couldn’t make myself move, not even to scoot closer to the hearth. All I could do was lie there, staring into the darkened hallway, listening. The scraping would go on for a little while, then pause, maybe for minutes. Long enough for me to hope it was gone. But it always started again. Always just a little louder, a little more distinct. I tried to tell myself that the hints of movement I saw in the darkened hall were just shadows from the dying embers behind me. I almost convinced myself of it when both sound and shadows went still for a long time. Then a lighter patch of shadow near the hall floor stirred, perhaps rising a bit, and that little thread of sound returned. It said, “Mama?”
The lumpy shape I was lying on stirred.
I woke up, shaking, heart racing. Lying on the smooth planks of the floor in front of the hearth. The firelight fitfully lit an empty hallway. I lay there, watching it, waiting for the scrape of tiny fingerbones on the floorboards, until the fading light from the fire gave way to dawn.
Then I woke up for real.