By Zary Fekete
(inspired by the creepypasta ‘The Bad Dream’)
GONE ARE THE times when my wife could share in the evening duties of caring for our daughter, laid up as she is with fever these many weeks. Thus it fell to me to manage the little child with an encouraging word, playfully coaxing our daughter toward her evening ablutions and reading her the evening story, as is our chosen way of easing her toward sleep. I do these things with care and understanding, choosing to remind myself that when I was her age, I, too, looked upon the dark hours between twilight and morning as though I were fitting myself for battle. The night hours are long and are filled with shadowy places. I am not so old to have forgotten childhood nights in dark rooms.
These past weeks have been especially difficult with an increasing degradation of my wife’s condition. After putting my daughter to sleep I have become accustomed to sitting in my study and staring out the window at the darkened slough behind the property. As I would gaze at the lengthening evening shadows I laboured to lift a prayer of healing in my wife’s name, but the past days have begun to wring from me most drops of resilience as her body and mind have slowly broken down. Yet I attempted each night afresh to will myself toward fresh hope. It is during those quiet moments when the house is easing itself toward slumber that a man may feel he is at one with the world in a tender way, and, indeed, sometimes it is, I fancy, the times in my study which prepare me for my own journey into the darkness of sleep, troubled as I have been recently in wondering whether the cure of my wife might be terribly long in coming.
She began to go wrong perhaps two months ago. Her custom was to take an evening walk up into the hills behind our house, walking between the trees and deep into the forest as her fancy would direct her. There is an old church a few hills over, one no longer in use now that the congregation has shifted to town. Although I find the old building terrifying, my wife takes comfort in the crumbling crosses which dot the tiny cemetery behind the sacred plot. One evening she returned with a hand on her right side and a complaint of short windedness and a sort of twisting discomfort in her bowels. When I asked after whether she had encountered anything on her walk which might have over exerted her, she said that when she was passing the cemetery plots she tripped on a root and fell against a crumbling tombstone.
It was at that moment she said she glimpsed the cat. It was in the dead centre of the cemetery, its black body framed by two of the larger stones. She said that before she could raise herself back to her feet, the cat began a slow approach toward her. My wife has had a fondness for cats since her younger years, but she told me this cat was wrong. As it came on toward her it had a shambling gait, as though something in its mind were pulling itself toward the one side and then the other.
Knowing graveyard cats can be of a feral nature, my wife hastened to pull herself back to her feet, but by then the cat seemed to have her on its mind. Its wobbling righted itself in the last few yards and before my wife could stand it lunged and caught the skin of her hand with one of its extended claws. My wife was upright by now and fetched the beast an angry cry. She scared it with a jerk of her shoe and the thing raced off into the woods. My wife examined her hand and saw what was nothing but a small scratch. She shook the matter off and came on back home.
She was mildly shaken when she arrived home but soon seemed restored to herself. She passed off the incident as merely a symptom of what both of us have felt more of as our years edged us closer toward the end of a long life’s journey than when we began it as young children over fifty years ago. Those of us who are elderly sometimes catch our feet and find ourselves falling more than we once did. It made some of the growing times with our little girl more difficult than it might have been for the younger parents. We couldn’t scamper after the child like some might.
We had our daughter late in our lives, later certainly than many of our friends, but we treasured the little girl when she finally arrived, as though our empty lives up until then had merely been a preparation ground for the delight we would feel when her laughter lay a carpet over every sunny day and every snowy night.
The scratch on my wife’s hand healed, but something deeper seemed to take hold of her in the next weeks. It was therefore with a sense of nervous worry that I felt compelled to inquire to my wife whether she might take a visit to Doctor Lira the next county over, a man who had been our family practitioner for the past twenty years. My wife shook her head and waved me off, however, and together we sat down that evening for a regular dinner and a typical night, never suspecting that would be the last night when she would lead our daughter’s nighttime story.
My wife’s pain only increased in the next days and she waked each morning with pressed lips and a nervous twitch in her eye as she gingerly touched her side and stepped cautiously toward the bath. I took on the majority of the work of day and night care for our daughter when my wife finally did see the doctor after many days of worry and painful breaths. I hoped for the best, but alarmingly Doctor Lira was mystified by what ailment it could be and sent my wife home with a parchment satchel of powders and pills designed to mollify the pain but not able to treat the root cause.
It was last week when the illness crested a new hill and my wife could no longer mount over it. She lay with quiet moanings, and a new fear rose in my heart when I chanced to walk near her to tidy her side of the bed. I was caught so off guard by what I saw that I dropped the half glass of water and felt the guilty splash soak my socks quite through. I leaned closer to my wife and saw with utter mortification that what seemed to be a passing play of shadow was instead something real moving beneath her white, thin skin. I reached over to grasp the nightstand lamp and, with shaking hands, held the light closer to see what appeared to be small rises slowly moving to and fro under her skin. It seemed to my untrained eye as though her skin was merely a fragile covering over something lurking below.
I hurried to the telephone and called for the doctor, chancing what would certainly be an expensive home visit, but determined to call whatever aid might be needed. Unfortunately, the distant ring merely sang and sang with no one to answer its plaintive call. I tried calling again repeatedly throughout the day to no avail, and I struggled all the while to contain the mounting fear within me.
I determined my daughter should not see what I saw beneath my wife’s skin and thus began to lock our bedroom door at daybreak so that the young eyes of the child might not be terrified by the ceaseless movement which only increased beneath my wife’s skin in the coming days. Indeed, not only movement but, if I held my ear close to the skin, I believed I could hear a tiny chattering which sounded like teeth. I heard it with my own ears else I might not have believed it. The last few nights the chattering has risen at times and I have begun to place cotton in my ears so as to ward off the chilling noise.
Today is the fifth evening of such movement and sound. I am determined in the morning to move her myself, with the aid of our neighbour, finally across the county line to the hospital itself in hopes of finding the doctor in person and placing the writhing skin condition in his care.
It was, therefore, with a determined air of cheerfulness that I read the evening stories to my daughter this evening and put her into her bed with a resolute determination that tomorrow must finally bring with it a cure. While spending the accustomed time in the study I dared to pray the prayer I had yet not ventured toward, calling out to God with the voice of a loving husband but also a caring father.
‘Father,’ I said, as the evening shadows darkened around me and the slough outside breathed out its misty breath. ‘If she cannot find herself a cure, please take her. Bring her to your side and allow the pain to cease.’
As I finished my prayer I suddenly started. There was the sound of a deadening thud from the direction of our room. I hurriedly stood and ran to our bed chamber with the light held aloft. The bed came into view and the figure of my wife’s body lay as it usually did beneath the blankets, but there was a change. One arm was extended from her body, off to the side, and held in a rictus of tension toward the side table. My mouth dropped open when I walked to her side. Laying on the floor next to the bed was her Bible, ungainly collapsed in a pile of pages where her thrust arm had sent it. Initially I felt a sense of hope. I could see she was breathing, but I saw and heard nothing from below her skin.
I bent and picked up the treasured volume and glanced at the page which lay most open to the floor. When I did my hope vanished as I read the verse which appeared to be singled out by the crumbled pages, creased in a horrible way by the fall. The scripture said: ‘ …there, a man with an unclean spirit lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones…’ I stared with open fear at the words and my eyes drifted from the page to the body of my wife. With trembling hand I reached forward and pulled back the cover. My eyes widened. There was no movement beneath the skin. But the skin was, instead, hot and mottled, red as though it was touched by the summer sun. And directly below her nightshirt there was a protrusion. With trembling hand I pulled back the shirt and saw what could only be described as a finger below the skin, reaching up, pointed and sharp, as though it meant to breathe itself free of the clinging sheath of my wife’s body.
I fetched a damp cloth and plied her with it for a spell. She did not move, but I fancied myself hoping perhaps her breathing seemed more tempered and even. I kept my eyes on her face and away from the nightshirt, not believing I could contain a cry if I were to see the rictus of raised horror again. With grim determination I finally lay myself down beside her in my usual place, fortified in thought that tomorrow she would be in the hospital’s hands, and after a steady drumbeat of prayers in the darkness, I finally drifted into sleep.
I woke and the hour must have been close to 3. At first, I could not tell what had wakened me. But then I heard the small movements of my daughter at my side. I pulled the cotton from my ears and turned my head toward her.
‘Child, what is it?’ I said. ‘Are you frighted?’
She made no move to do so. Instead she stood stiffly, with her eyes fixed, not on me but on my wife’s side of the bed.
‘Come here, child,’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Why will you not?’ I said.
She leaned closer to me and whispered. ‘I dare not, father. For just now I had a dream. And in the dream I came to you just as I have. And when I made to tell you my dream, the thing wearing mother’s skin sat up.’
The room went cold. My daughter’s breath turned frosty. And the blanket beside me shifted as I felt the thing in bed beside me stand. |
