The day it all started, I was sleeping in my bed with my wife. I was dreaming of beautiful women who turned into demonic creatures and killed the men they were having sex with. In the dream, I escaped by calling in one of the nerdiest kids from my high school, someone I hadn’t seen in over twenty years. He came to the party where the beautiful women were assembled, saying, “All these wonderful girls really want to have sex with me?” I nodded and pointed him deeper into the party. As I ran away, I heard his screams of horror and pain follow me out.
Sometimes my dreams are bizarre, but this wasn’t too unusual. What was unusual was that I was suddenly awoken with a bright penlight shining directly in my eyes. I was awake instantly.
“Wake up motherfucker!” a high-pitched insane voice started yelling in my face. The light was blinding me. I heard my wife gasping and hyperventilating on my side. I turned and saw her throat was already slashed. She was staring directly at me, arterial sprays of bright red blood soaking the pillow and white sheets of our bed.
My eyes adjusted rapidly to the presence of light, and behind it, I saw a tan-looking man with long stringy black hair. His eyes looked pure black, and his teeth were covered in metal and sharpened to points. I felt a pistol pushed into the side of my temple, the metal crunching into bone so hard that I saw stars for a moment.
“Where’s your fucking jewelry? Where’s your money? Give me all of your valuables, now,” the insane voice of the man said. I put my hands up.
“There’s a safe under the bed,” I said, feeling dissociated. Part of me wondered if I was still dreaming. The man pulled the pistol up and brought it down on my nose. I heard a crunching sound, felt the breaking of the cartilage within my skin, and a sense of fiery pain rushed through my face. It was like being hit by electricity zipping directly into the center of my head.
“Then how about you hurry the fuck up and open it!” he said, laughing. My wife was choking on her own blood by this point, her breaths coming slower and slower as she died only a few inches away from me. She would stop breathing for five or ten seconds, then take in another heaving, gurgling gasp. I thought each would be her last, but she struggled on for nearly half a minute before her suffering mercifully came to an end.
I got out of bed slowly, blood streaming down my face. Pulling the comforter up, I punched in the code for the safe. The man stayed inches behind me, the smell of body odor, rancid breath and old leather emanating off of him. I thought of my daughter in the next room.
“Please, take it,” I said. “Just take it and leave.” He laughed.
At that moment, my daughter walked into the room. She was bleary-eyed, looking small and helpless in her little PJs. She carried her stuffed puppy with her in one arm.
“Daddy?” she said in a tiny voice, sounding scared and uncertain.
“No, Lillian!” I shrieked. “Get out of here!” But it was too late. The psycho raised his gun and shot her. As if in slow motion, I saw a blossom of blood explode across her chest, and she fell, coughing up blood and rolling onto her side. She flailed her arms uselessly, trying to scream for help.
I stood up, turning abruptly as the intruder pulled out a dagger from his belt. He shoved it into the side of my throat. An agony like I had never imagined took over my consciousness. I ran at him, spraying blood everywhere as I fought. But the blood loss and pain was too much. I was slow. I tried punching him in the face, tried breaking his nose or tearing out his eyes, but I knew the blood loss would soon end me.
Without a second thought, I wrapped my hand around the dagger, pulled it out and stabbed the serial killer in the stomach.
The blade slid in smooth and easy. But no blood came out. Instead, some black, vile fluid rushed out. It smelled like a rotten body, tones of rotting fruit and spoiled meat mixing with sickness and rancid blood.
The man laughed, but after a few seconds, he looked affected. His eyes widened in surprise. He slumped over and kept giving off a weak chuckle as he landed on the floor. I fell next to him, the squirting, bright-red blood from my neck wound staining the walls.
My vision started to go black as I died, and the pain faded away. Darkness consumed me.
And that was the first time I met the man who would haunt my life. I died fighting, my throat nearly slit by the huge dagger he had shoved inside it.
***
I awoke, covered in sweat and yelling at the top of my lungs. Next to me, my wife jumped up, her eyes wide, her skin pale.
“Jesus Christ, Mike!” she said. “What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack?” I looked around. The man was gone, but it was still the middle of the night.
“Oh my God, what is that smell?” Tia asked. She looked at me, getting out of bed quickly. “And what happened to your neck?”
“What do you mean, what happened to my neck?” I said. The spot where I had been stabbed still felt raw and sore. I rubbed a hand over it and felt the smooth skin of scar tissue. Looking down, I realized the black fluid that had spurted out of the home intruder still covered my body and had, by now, seeped into the bed as well.
“What are you, sleepwalking?” she asked, a strong note of concern in her voice. I shook my head rapidly.
“Tia, we have to get out of here,” I said, getting out of bed quickly and going to the closet for a suitcase. “We have to go, right fucking now. Something is coming. I mean, someone is coming. Go get Lillian up.” She looked at me as if I had gone crazy.
“It is the middle of the night,” she said. “Lillian has school in the morning, and you have work…”
“I don’t give a shit about work!” I said, exploding. “Someone is coming here to kill us, all of us. Trust me. I know it sounds crazy, but I saw it happen. We have to go.” Lillian walked into the room, bleary-eyed, looking small and helpless, carrying her stuffed puppy in one arm.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” she said in a barely audible voice. “Are you sick? What’s that goop all over you?”
“I am fine, sweetie,” I said, going over to her and stroking her smooth cheek. I was so happy to see her alive and healthy that tears started falling down my face. “But we have an emergency. Go pack your things, enough for a couple of days. We’re leaving here in ten minutes.” My wife sighed, getting out of bed. She grabbed a suitcase from the closet and started throwing clothes and toiletries into it. A sense of relief washed over me when I saw her packing.
Ten minutes later, we were all dressed and in the car, our suitcases in back. I peeled out of the driveway. We drove in silence for a minute, before my wife coughed gently and asked the question that I knew I couldn’t answer in any sane way.
“So, what’s going on right now?” she asked. I looked in the rearview mirror. I saw Lillian’s eyes wide and scared in the backseat. I looked over at my wife. She had a look of concern and worry on her face as well.
“OK, this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but I saw all of us die. I experienced it. Some serial killer broke into our house and cut your throat, then he shot Lillian, and finally he stabbed me and I died trying to fight him off.” The silence in the car was palpable and thick.
“Honey, that was probably just a vivid nightmare,” my wife said. I shook my head.
“This was no nightmare. This was real. You don’t feel your nose getting broken and yourself getting stabbed to death in your dreams. You don’t feel agony like I felt. And the agony of watching you two die was even worse,” I tried to explain. “We need to get as far away from here as possible, at least until I figure out what to do.” I turned left at the end of my road to drive towards the forest roads at the edge of our town. They would take me to the next state over, and then I could figure out where I was going.
The place looked deserted and eerie. My headlights shone on the trees and tobacco fields on both sides of us. There were barely any houses out here.
I saw a glint of metal with shining spikes up ahead, my lights glinting off of the steel. Before I could slow down, all of my tires blew out. I tried steering, but I had been going too fast, trying to escape the nightmare that I thought had been behind me. The car fishtailed and then flipped. The crunching of metal and the shattering of glass combined into a cacophony. I smashed my head on the steering wheel, feeling my nose break for the second time in the past hour.
And then, there was silence. I was stunned, still held in place by my seatbelt, sitting upside down. Shards of safety glass glittered like broken stars all over the road and all around me.
Out of the silence, I heard it. Soft, even footsteps approaching from the field. I tried to spit blood out of my mouth, to unbuckle my seatbelt and get out of there, but I was stuck.
“So you think you can run?” the high-pitched voice of the murderer said from outside my broken window. “You can’t run anywhere that I won’t find you.” I smelled his rancid stench, but underlying it was another acrid smell: gasoline.
Whistling to himself, the insane man took the cap off of a gallon of gas, pouring it all around my car, sending a few splashes inside for good measure. I heard my wife and daughter waking up, their heaving sobs and stuttering questions sending waves of remorse through my mind. If only I had done something differently, I thought to myself.
“Goodbye, motherfucker,” the man said, chuckling. He lit a Zippo, dropping it down on the puddle of gasoline.
The pain of burning alive and suffocating was beyond anything that I could ever communicate. And, combined with my own screams, I heard the shrieking of tortured agony from my wife and daughter. That was, if possible, just as bad.
This went on for what felt like weeks. I would awake in bed, and each time I died, a new scar or series of scars would show up from the encounter. Soon my entire body was just a patchwork of old, healed scars, from my face down to my legs.
I would always try to run, and the man would find me. He would kill me along with my family. We would be shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, drowned or burned alive. He always found me, no matter what direction I went or how far away I made it. He was not human- I knew that much. He could somehow appear ahead of me, as if he either read my mind or was capable of teleporting.
I thought I was in Hell.
But on the twenty-seventh death, something changed. I didn’t wake up in my bed this time.
***
I awoke, strapped down to a gurney, screaming and thrashing. A doctor from the hallway came into the room.
“Mr. Dumas,” he said to me, looking down. “Are you OK?” I looked at the leather straps holding my arms and legs in place. The doctor’s eyes widened. “What is that black substance all over your body?” I saw that I was indeed soaked in the serial killer’s blood, yet again. I had grabbed a butcher knife when I left the kitchen. We had gone camping a five-hour drive away in the northern mountains, and he had, of course, shown up. But I had gotten him good as well- I had stabbed him directly in the heart.
“This…” I said, indicating with my chin, “is the blood of the demon who has been haunting me.” The doctor sighed.
“And what are all those scars all over your body? You didn’t have those when you came in, did you?” he asked, concerned. I shook my head.
“I don’t remember coming in this place,” I said. “These scars are from the same man. Check my whole body- they’re all over. He won’t leave me in peace.” The doctor looked away.
“Well, you’ve been in this place for 27 days,” he responded.
“What… what is this place? Where is my family?” He shook his head sadly.
“Mr. Dumas, we have had this conversation already many times. I am sorry to say, but your family has passed away. You are in the Whiting Hospital for the Criminally Insane. You killed your wife and daughter nearly four weeks ago, and you have been here ever since the police brought you in,” he said, his dark eyes boring into mine. I knew none of this could be real.
“I would never hurt my family,” I whispered. “What kind of sick joke is this? It was the man with the black eyes and metal teeth who did it.” The doctor shook his head sadly, turning to leave the room.
“You were in a psychotic fugue when you did it, and you have been ranting about this man ever since. The police and crime scene technicians did a full check of your home. There was no other man,” he said. “Until you realize that, you will never be able to start the road to recovery.” As he walked out of the room, he turned to look back at me one last time. “I’ll send someone to clean you up.”
His eyes were pure black, and his teeth metal. He smiled broadly at me, showing the shining points, and then left. I didn’t think he was a doctor anymore.
I’m writing you this letter from Whiting with some vague hope that the truth can be known. Whatever that thing was, man or demon, it will not leave me alone.
I can only stay here, waiting for it to kill me again.