It all started with a dream. I was in a house, it wasn’t my own, but it felt… familiar somehow. It was late at night but I didn’t know how late as the clocks appeared blurry. Then the hair on my neck stood up, like I was being watched, and my heart started racing. I looked around to find the source of my fear, and only saw a couch and a TV playing late night talk shows. But wait, what was that dark shadow rushing past the window. I started running upstairs, as I ran I saw photos on the wall that looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t tell why. I ran into a bathroom and closed the door and locked it behind me. Out of breath I started gasping for air, then I saw a dark shape out the window, a dark shape that seemed to be writhing and pulsing down it’s entire body. I screamed and just as soon as I could blink it burst through the bathroom window and stood in front of me. It looked at me with it’s beady eyes and I saw why it was pulsing. It was made out of thousands, maybe millions, of bugs and spiders all crawling along a general humanoid shape. It opened its mouth and hundreds of cockroaches came rushing out like opening a floodgate, they ran down it’s body, across the floor, and up my body into my mouth and nose. I could feel all of the thin legs walking across my tongue and down my throat until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I suffocated and right as I was losing consciousness, I saw the creature bring up it’s hand and clench it into a fist and all the cockroaches came back out of my body and scurried underneath the long black cloak the monster was wearing.
I woke up shortly after, terrified yet intrigued. The creature reminded me of an old tale that my late grandmother had told me when I was younger. I could still hear her cold, shrill voice as it was those many years ago.
“Now young boy let me tell you a story from ze fatherland, a story zat has frightened me since I vas a little girl. It is ze story of ze Nachtpirscher. Zey say it is a tall beastie, seven feet in size, a creature made of only bugs and creepie-crawlies. Zey say it is a sign of bad zings to happen to any of zose to dream of it’s image. If one is to dream of ze Nachtpirscher, zer lives will be destroyed forever.”
My grandmother was a German immigrant who had recently died. Maybe that’s why I had dreamed the creature, my subconscious associating bad things happening with the Nachtpirscher. I didn’t think much of the dream. I turned on the TV in my living room and saw a news update, Tony Sherwood, who was a good friend of mine, had died last night. I was devastated and called into my job and explained the situation and they let me have a day off to cope. I went to his family’s house to offer my condolences and I spent the rest of the day with his family telling stories about Tony, trying to remember him the best we could so we all had a good idea of what kind of person he was.
The next night I had a dream much like the previous one, however now I was in a different home. I could still feel the presence of something evil and ran but this time the creature was faster. It was in front of me before I made it out of the room, as if it learned from a previous encounter. I fell to the floor in terror and watched as it opened it’s mouth. Except this time instead of cockroaches, it was Black Widow spiders crawling out towards me. I felt as they bit my throat and and crawled into my lungs, I could barely breathe, and then they crawled out of my mouth and back into the creatures robes. I watched in horror as it stretched it’s fingers out and touched my face. I thought I even saw a tear run down it’s face as I slipped into death deprived of oxygen. Before the darkness started, I willed myself to wake up, disgusted and horrified with my own imagination. But when I woke up I saw my own mother laying at my feet, unconscious. I looked around and I was in my mothers home. I thought back to my past dream and realized that I had been in Tony’s house. I had been seeing two disgusting, terrifying, and truly horrible murders from the perspectives of the victims. And I was the killer, I was the Nachtpirscher.