It began with a dream.
I walked through a dark forest veiled with mist. I had the distinct feeling the woods didn’t want me there, but I didn’t know how to escape. I whirled in search of a path, but found only trees and underbrush. With no recollection of how I arrived here, I had no clue how to get back.
And then my feet began to sink.
The mud beneath my shoes began to swallow me one inch at a time. I charged forth in the hope I would reach dry land, but it seemed now I was in an inescapable bog. My shoes squelched with every footstep until I could no longer lift my legs. I looked down and saw my shins embedded in the earth.
And in the mud surrounding me, something moved.
I tried to scream, but the sound caught in my throat. Everything was silent except the soft gurgle of the mud as I gradually disappeared into it.
I made the mistake of reaching down in an attempt to hoist my legs out, but only succeeded in burying my arms. Shortly, I was only a head above the mudline, its cold muck teasing the underside of my chin.
The thing in the mud swam around me, running circles until I felt its spindly limbs latch onto my body. No amount of twisting would dissuade it. The tiny creature began to crawl upward. I gazed down at the surface of the mud, awaiting its arrival, gripped with terror, unable to do anything but watch.
A bubble formed a brown dome inches from my face, which grew and grew and grew until at last, it popped to reveal the body of a curious insect, like a black shrimp with a slimy obsidian carapace, beady eyes, and a dozen needle-thin legs it used to quickly scurry onto my face.
I tried blowing it off, but it was unaffected by the puffs of breath, racing around from cheek to cheek, forehead to chin, marching across my face like I was nothing more than a boulder in the bog.
It came to rest on my nose. I felt two legs reach inside my nostrils to use as footholds while the others inspected my eyes. It was then I realized how unexpectedly strong the bug was, as its arms held my eyelids open despite my best effort to shut them. I was forced to stare into the tiny monster’s black eyes, two glossy, soulless orbs gazing back at me.
With a swift tug, it pulled back the bottom eyelid, exposing the underside of my right eye. I had a sense then of its intention, and felt the stillborn cries dying in my dry throat. The creature tucked its head in under my eyeball and burrowed, forcing its slick body into my head.
The last thing I saw before I awoke was the final bit of its tail disappearing into my orbit. I shot up in bed, finally able to scream as I clawed fruitlessly at my face. Several minutes passed before I calmed down. My bedroom replaced the bog and the red digits of my bedside clock informed me that it was nearly time to get ready for work.
Rather than rest my head a few minutes longer and risk returning to that awful place, I dragged myself into the bathroom and set about my morning routine. While brushing my teeth, I noticed a pronounced red line drawn across the white of my right eye. Leaning closer to inspect, it looked like a burst vessel leaking red tint.
An initial wave of panic gave way to laughter when I realized the dream had probably just been my subconscious mind misinterpreting an irritation. Something benign got in my eye, maybe I rubbed it too hard, and my imagination, unbounded in sleep, ran with it.
Sufficed with this explanation, I went to work, all but forgetting the dream as the week carried on as usual.
Then, on Wednesday, my eye got worse.
Patrick, one of my co-workers, pointed it out to me. “Sam, what’s up with your eye?”
I sat up in my chair and looked over my computer monitors at him. “What do you mean?”
“Looks pretty gnarly.”
I grabbed my phone and opened the front-facing camera to inspect. Sure enough, what began as a single red line, like lightning traced in blood, had expanded into a network of vessels criss-crossing the white. I shot up from my desk and rushed to the bathroom where I leaned over the sink for a better look in the mirror.
It was more than just bloodshot. My normally hazel iris turned ruddy, as if rusted. What the fuck? Suddenly, flashes of the dream returned, the bog, the bug, the pain of its wriggling body just beneath my eyeball. While staring in the mirror, I felt a twinge at the corner of my eye, a sudden pressure that preceded the arrival of a slender bug-limb reaching out from beneath the lid.
Gasping, I stumbled away from the mirror. “This can’t be happening,” I told myself. A toilet flushed and my boss strode out from the stall. As he washed his hands, he looked into my discolored eye. His brow furrowed as he said, “You might want to get that looked at.” Then, after a moment observing my anxious state, he asked, “Are you feeling alright?”
“Actually, no,” I replied. “I think I might take the rest of the day, if that’s alright.”
He nodded. “Maybe see a doctor about that.” He pointed to his own right eye.
“Yeah,” I said, and quickly dismissed myself.
I went home and looked up ophthalmologists in my area. After making some calls, I set an appointment for the following morning — the earliest I could get in. The rest of the day I spent trying to tamp down my panic, ignoring the occasional pang emanating from my right eye.
“It’s just an infection,” I told myself. But it was difficult to square away the black leg I spied reaching around my eyeball in the work bathroom. I tried telling myself it was just an anxiety hallucination, but it didn’t take hold. “I know what I saw,” I told myself.
Near dusk, I marched into my bathroom to scrutinize the eye. I flicked on the light and planted my hands on the porcelain sink. Before looking into the mirror, I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Alright,” I said, and lifted my head.
The Terminator was staring back at me. My left eye looked perfectly normal, clear white, concentric rings of blue, green, gold around the black dot of my pupil.
My right eye was completely red and freakishly dilated. “No, no, no…” I whispered, bringing my face closer to its reflection. I gazed through the window of my dime-sized pupil at the back of my eyeball, its veins swollen and throbbing. Then something moved through the aqueous humor.
Instead of withdrawing, I stood frozen in place, just as I had in the bog of my nightmare. There, inside the hollow orb of my eyeball, swam the black shrimp. Pressing its limbs against the rim of my pupil, it widened the hole until it could shove its body through. My jaw dropped in a silent scream as my good eye watched the creature lodge itself in the stretched exit. The shiny black body began to gyrate, wiggling until it slipped out of my eye into the sink.
I turned down in time to watch it scurry away, up out of the porcelain to flop onto the floor tiles. It raced from the bathroom, disappearing into my apartment.
When I looked back into the mirror, I caught my right eye healing rapidly, the pupil constricting, the redness dissipating, the whites and iris returning to their healthy colors.
I skipped my doctor’s appointment the next morning. I’ve not dreamed of the bog since. But every moment I spend in my apartment, I feel the presence of the nightmare bug, watching me from the corners where the cockroaches hide.