I barely remember my mother from before she died. What I do remember is the first time I dreamt about her.
It felt very real, my mother walking with me down a narrow, cobbled city street in some place I’d never been or even seen. She was silent, but would periodically look my way with a smile as she guided me deeper into that place. It wasn’t until I woke up to my father yelling that I realized something had happened.
She had come back to us. She seemed quiet and strange, but it was undeniably her—I remembered her well-enough to have a sense of it, and my father was totally convinced. He was crying and laughing and babbling as he led her into the kitchen and sat her down. Turning to me with tears in his eyes, he said that through some miracle, she’d been returned to us.
The next day, she was gone again.
This absence was worse on my father. He thought he was going crazy, and even me reassuring him that I’d seen her too didn’t seem to help. After a few days of being sad and worried and scared, I had another dream of her. We were traveling deeper into the old city, but this time when my mother looked down at me, her face was hard, as though she was angry or frustrated about something. Something I had done, maybe, or failed to do.
My father’s loud voice, wounded and excited in equal measure, woke me as he greeted my mother’s latest return.
We figured out over time that it was my dreams that were bringing her back, and once we knew that, we started working on getting me to dream about her every night. He would talk to me about her every night she wasn’t there, going into details about her as a person and their life together when she was alive.
Part of that was just the ritual we developed to get my mind on her before I fell into dreaming. But the other part…He knew something wasn’t right about her either. This wasn’t really her, though she got more and more where she acted like a real person. And by me being told more about who she had been, my dream version kept getting closer to the real her.
And that’s the way we lived for seven years. You might think we got captivated by the miracle of it, but we rarely spoke of it at all, as though disturbing the air might cause our magic bubble to pop. But I got very good at resurrecting her every morning, and my anxiety about failing her and my father made sure her memory was never far from my mind.
Then one night, all cuddled on the couch, we watched a terrifying show about parasitic wasps.
My dream that night found us gazing up at a shuddering black heart somewhere near the city’s center. The heart was dead but still moving, and as the thing that looked like my mother grabbed me and forced me closer, I saw why. It was worms, millions of long, thin red worms were writhing in and out of that heart making it tremble with their endless, restless hunger. I began to scream, and I thought that woke me until I realized I was hearing my father down on the living room floor.
It was over him, a long tendril snaking out from between the legs of its nightgown and digging into his bare back repeatedly, shivering white egg sacs left behind in each bloody furrow it tilled in his flesh. When I started to scream again, it turned to me with an insane leer, my mother’s face drawn down impossibly long, her unhinged jaw spreading her lips to splitting as red worms began to crawl free from that inner darkness. Absently laying another egg on my father, she took a step toward me, her arms spread wide in some cruel parody of a maternal hug.
I looked beneath her and met my father’s eyes for a second, just a second, and in that moment I felt his fear and pain and desperate desire to ask me for help. But when he spoke, his voice was still surprisingly steady and strong.
“Run.”
I did as he told me for the final time, and by the next morning I was at the sheriff’s office. I was fourteen by then, and I knew enough to not tell the unbelievable parts of what happened. Instead I told them my parents were fighting, that my mother attacked my father and I ran away scared. One of the deputies knew our family well enough to question wasn’t my mother long dead, but I was ready for that. I told them this was my new mother. That she looked much like old one, but she wasn’t the same at all.
They went to the house and found no sign of either of them. Just a few spots of blood and overturned furniture in the living room, a few marks that could have come from someone being dragged away. They kept looking, of course, but I never heard they found anything else, and before long I was living hundreds of miles away with my grandparents. Now that I’m grown, I’d like to say I’ve put it all behind me, but that would be a lie. My memories of my mother don’t come from the woman she actually was, but the thing I let into our lives to replace her. And my memories of it are still very much alive.
Because now every night I dream of that dead city. I run and hide and try to find away out, but it is a maze inside a maze inside a maze, and I wasn’t paying attention when the thing that looked like my mother led me to that decaying, worm-infested heart at its core. So every night I try to escape or find help, and every morning I wake up more exhausted and terrified. Not because I’m trapped in that dream place.
But because I’m not alone.
My dream mother stalks me there. I hear her sometimes call out to me, or hear her footsteps as she grows closer. Early on, I made the mistake of looking out for her. She rounded the corner on the far side of a street and she froze when she spotted me. Just stood there smiling, looking at me and letting me look at her. At first I didn’t understand what she was doing. Why not just come get me? She was certainly faster and stronger than I was, and the distance between us was less than fifty yards.
Then it hit me. I closed my eyes tightly and turned away, running back the way I had came as I heard her scream behind me as she moved to follow. She wanted me to see her, to carry her with me back into the waking world. Carry her on my back until she could reach me there.
I knew she was gaining behind me, I could hear or feel her presence drawing closer, and I forced myself to not focus on her, but instead on the next turn, the next step, the next lungful of trembling, dead air. When I sat up in bed, I saw the shadow of something fall across me, a clawing hand raking down onto the mattress next to my foot hard enough to rips the sheets and send a tuft of pillowtop stuffing flying into the air before it dissolved back into nothingness.
Hands shaking, I turned on the light and sat staring out the window. I do that most nights now, as soon as I can pull myself free from that place. It sometimes feels like hours or days of running and hiding from her, always on guard that I don’t see her or think about her too much while being terrified of letting her get too close. When I wake up, I’m relieved, but also terrified that maybe she made it back this time. I turn on my lights and sit up in bed, fighting the urge to sleep but too scared to move from the safe island of my bed.
So I sit still and listen. And watch. And stare out the window as I wait for the sun to come, all the time muttering to myself a single fervent prayer.