I bolted upright in bed, my whole body shaking. The sheet, damp with nervous sweat, stuck to my chest which was throbbing. After a few moments of wrangling my heart back to a slight pound, I gathered my thoughts.
That same damn dream. The afterimages of the nightmare fluttered around like thin newspaper scattered by an unfelt breeze.
Hands still shaky, I peeled sweat-drenched hair from my face and laid back down on my side. I shuddered, pulling the blankets up to my chin. It had been too hot for a shirt earlier, it only figured by the middle of the night it would be freezing.
A thick silence permeated the room, the A/C having kicked off. The only sounds were from my pulse pounding through my head and my shallow breathing. The empty spaces create an environment for one to effortlessly inject something that is not there. Where there was not a single squeak, I could conjure up the wail from my dream, blasting it on repeat if I weren’t careful.
I closed my eyes, tight, gripping the ends of my pillow and bringing them around my ears. Anything to muffle the silence. I didn’t want to hear her voice anymore.
A breeze came in through the window.
My eyes snapped over to catch the flutter of curtains. Ah. Distaste settled in my stomach as I remembered that I’d left it open. Having been cold for the last half an hour, I sat up with a mumbled curse. Rubbing my arms in an attempt to generate heat, I kicked off the blankets and stood up. Just needed to close it and go back to sleep.
Crrrrnch… Schnaaap… Pop!
The silence was ripped from the room in an instant. Unsettling noises were left in the bare room where it once hung.
Slowly, my pupils rolled over to the window, where the noise had crept in from.
What the hell was that…? It sounded like… chewing…?
My brow tightened and my teeth locked around the tip of my tongue. I stood up, the bed creaking underneath me as I shifted my weight. The heaviness in my resolve had me moving slowly. My apartment was three stories up, tucked away in an urban corner of Chicago. I’d only been here for six months, but I’d already seen plenty of shit I hadn’t wanted to. For a brief moment, my eyes shot over to the cellphone I’d left on the bedside table. 911’s a pretty easy number to remember, eh?
The noise continued; the splintering and cracking of something hollow, the sound of peeling and snapping – like tearing chicken skin off while the meat is still raw. All of it had me nauseous.
I stood before the window, lifting my hand to the cool glass, and stared down. To my right, air still rushed in through the mesh screen. I could have closed the window then and been done with it, but the gnawing dread in the pit of my stomach kept me glued to the sound.
Light filtered out from the open stairwell to the left of my apartment. It leaked out in the sidewalk and the grass beyond it, swelling in a half-circle that, beyond that boundary, was quickly diluted into darkness. In the pool of yellowed light, a shadow… writhed.
Squinting my eyes, I pressed my forehead to the glass.
Yes, writhed. There was no other way to describe it. It was like watching an orgy of worms as they spastically flailed about, twisting with each other, diving into the center before ripping themselves back out.
The more I watched, the more disgusted I felt. Though it was hard to make out at first, as the worm-like creatures danced, I caught the glimpse of a shaded shape in the middle of their frenzy. My sight focused harder, and it became obvious that whatever was at the end of those tubes was pulling from the mass in the middle, tearing pieces of it away, and then discarding them outside the mosh.
What… was it tearing at…?
I swallowed, the taste in my mouth sour like stomach bile. I pressed against the window, trying to steady myself. This all felt so surreal, like I’d never really woken up.
It must just be another dream…
One of the worm-like appendages came jutting out from the stairwell.
I doubled back, my heart leaping into my throat. Had it… sensed me? My hand fought its way to my mouth, mashing against my lips to muffle the panic in my breath. Cautiously, I drew near to the window again.
As it twisted in the light that was spilling out from the stairwell, I could be certain of two things; it was colored and shaped like an arm, complete with a hand and all five fingers; it had too many joints and elbows for an arm and bent in all of the wrong places as it moved. It dove back into the entry, once again becoming nothing more than a silhouette. Burying itself in what I assumed to be similar arms, it tore into the mass in the middle, ripping something with a jerk and a seize, the sound splitting through the silence once more, before appearing again outside the stairwell, this time with a closed fist.
I dropped my hand to the sill, my labored breath fogging up the glass.
The fingers of the hand slowly splayed open as it lifted its palm closer to the light.
Was it… trying to show me? The nausea returned. If it knew I was watching… would it…
No. I pressed my brow against the windowpane again. It’s a bad dream. Just because something feels real doesn’t mean that it is.
The lump in the hand looked like a bloated chunk of clay, textured like chewed bubble gum, but beyond that was too draped in shade to make out. The hand then slowly turned over, discarding its prize in the grass just beyond the halo of the light. It pulled back into the stairwell, rejoined the cluster of shadows.
I expected what I’d seen to become some sort of pattern, repeated over and over until nothing was left of the mass in the center, but I was mistaken.
As soon as the hand had come back together with the pack, they all dove in and latched onto whatever they were tearing apart, and slowly receded from sight. Scrapes and wet steps followed their exit. Before long, all was silent again.
I continued to stare down at the spot where they’d dropped that chunk of their victim, numb to the bone. I couldn’t bring myself to tear away from the window until the liquid, black as ink, began leaking out to the sidewalk outside of the stairwell.
Shaking and confused, I turned away and trudged back to my bed. The sheets were still damp, but I climbed into them all the same.
“A… dream…” I mumbled, turning onto my side. “Just a… hallucination…”
Silence poured back into the room. I didn’t fill it this time, just stared at the wall as the breeze continued to whirl in. It carried in it an odor that wafted through the empty spaces. At some point, my eyes closed on their own. I sank into sleep with that foul smell in my nostrils, thinking of only one thing.
I didn’t close the window.