If you were to ask me when this started, I couldn’t tell you. I remember telling my mother about her but she’d always tell me that I’d just:
“Had a bad dream and to remember that dreams can’t hurt you.”
A comforting sentiment from a loving and overworked mother. The last thing she wants to do at night as she fights for her own refuge in slumber is to entertain the lurid dreams of a pre adolescent child.
Christ knows I’ve told my children those white lies about “nothing” being in their closets knowing full well that the woman in my doorway was no dream…
Now, as a grown man, in my restless nights and in the darkest parts of my being it feels like she always been there…
Watching.
Waiting.
Smiling.
Oh Christ, that smile….
There’s no life behind it. Her lips draw back to reveal black and broken teeth yet she smiles with intention.
The charcoal sockets she has for eyes amid that face void of all vitality yet it gleams with an unspeakable and repulsive joy.
Her hair… wet with the dampness of some misplaced grave in unhallowed ground clings to her face in patterns of rage and infinite sadness yet full of vibrant, merciless vengeance and injustice.
Her hands with the thin and recessed famine of decay grip the tattered rope around her neck in frantic, ceaseless and convulsive spasms trying to prevent a secret violence of the past from bleeding into her infinite present.
I want to scream… but as I muster the courage, she brings a solitary finger to her smile painted with malice and contempt and the scream dies in my throat…
With a suffocating and confounding horror I realize that I can’t move and within the abysmal blackness of her eyes… I can see that she knows I can’t move.
The eyes… they’re blacker than darkness. They speak of a void so dark and suffocating that the very thought of hope is a laughable impossibility. The color of true and absolute damnation.
With a creak she takes her first step… and another… and another.
Her head swiveling as if her neck is full of ball bearings but smiling the entire way.
Step by horrid step she comes closer to my bed…
She stops… and as she does the smell of the putrid dirt that she was placed in permeates the air with a deliberate suffocation.
She reaches for me… I feel those boney, hate filled fingers crawl across my neck and shoulders… Her lifeless voids have met my eyes. There’s a smile in that blackness filled with the malice and collapsed density of a thousand blackened and cursed suns.
Her cold and ethereal hands wrap around my neck and compress…
I feel her rage.
Her injustice and infinite sorrow coarse through me as she squeezes my throat and I descend into the void. Into the abyss… into the infinite blackness that she came from.
She drags me down. Inch by hopeless inch into what I know will be her own Hell.
Then I wake up…
Soaked in the cold sweat shared only by those who have found themselves enveloped in a perceivably abysmal terror so real yet ethereal. I look over to my wife who is sound asleep and sit with profound relief and boiling jealousy. She can never know of this burden I’ve carried my entire life.
I’ve never mentioned this to her and don’t have the heart to either.
A part of me feels like if I do…
The woman in the doorway would find her in her dreams also.
I love my wife and she has trouble sleeping as it is.
I suppose it’s my job as her husband to hold whatever or whoever the woman in my doorway is at bay as long as I can.
I can’t bear to think of what will happen if one horrible night…
When she grips my neck so tight that I can’t wake up.
That she’ll finally drag me all the way down into her eternal horror and…
I’ll never stop screaming.