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Dream 04
10 years ago
☾✩ Something shifted that day. I cant exactly describe what it was, but it was the day that I met eyes with that man in the street. Something inside me churned and before I understood why I was running home. I just wanted to be home. And yet, from that moment on, nothing ever felt safe or secure ever again.
There was a girl in town who was acting strangely too. She suddenly became more aggressive, and would leave cryptic notes that always had drawings of the moon on them. People were scared. I was scared; she was my friend and now it was as if I didn’t know who she was. But she wanted me. She looked at me just like that man had.
The dream shifts to a boy’s point of view. He’s running up a snowy hill on an icy sidewalk, freezing without his winter coat. His hands are burning intensely; if he doesn’t get shelter soon he’ll probably get frostbite. But he doesn’t care. He just keeps running, and she just keeps chasing him. He reaches the street that his home is on and collapses in the snow, slipping on some ice. Still, he crawls towards his home, only to stop as he hears footsteps beside him.
“No.. please…” He looks up at his friend, the girl who I was also friends with. She’s so different now; its as if the only thing that is the same about her is her flesh. As if someone else had taken over her mind, you could see it in her eyes.
He didn’t show up at school the next day. I felt strange. I felt as if I had lost time. Things were happening around me and I was confused, and people were staying back from me and keeping secrets. I know I had lost time, I wasn’t remembering something important somehow. Why was this happening?
Suddenly I’m sitting at home with my mother and my sister. It’s a regular sort of day (they don’t treat me any differently, thank god). We’re simply talking and the TV is running in the background. That’s when I look down and I see a paper on the ground. As I stare at it, the same cryptic scrawling appears before me, showering the paper with inky black moon flecks and words that I couldn’t understand. And then, suddenly, my mother looks up and goes pale. She’s staring out the window into the front yard. Her eyes fall to me and she mouths something, but I can’t understand what it is. I watch in terror as her very flesh melts from her body, and slithers out the window, leaving a still funny animated skull behind. And that was only the beginning of my horrors.
A small child shows up in the window now. She’s grinning wide and she has that same evil look in her eyes that I recognize. I’m standing up already, starting to run. Suddenly the wall to my right bursts into flames, and out from the wreckage comes… my mother?? No, someone wears my mother’s skin. I scream and run, abandoning my home and my sibling as I do. I don’t look back. I just keep running; part of me feels that if I turn around it will seal my fate. I can’t stop.
As I am running, memories filter back to me. Time that I lost during those few days. That man had found me, and he’d taken me to a secluded place where he placed me down with another girl. It was that girl, the one with the scary eyes. But she didn’t have them at this time, she was still my friend. Untainted. What was happening? He begins to speak to me about something I can’t even begin to comprehend. Something about a species that’s been around for years; about how great of an honor it is for us to become part of it. It wasn’t making any sense.
I suddenly look up, and I see these strange pods hanging from the ceiling. They open, and this cobweb like substance slithers down, wrapping me up in its tendrils. Its got ahold of the other girl as well, and she’s screaming. I’m screaming. Before I can even begin to fight, I’m completely wrapped up in it, and the man approaches me. He gives me a sad smile; I feel as though he isn’t enjoying our fear. That is a relief, somehow. But then my body is filled with pain and his eyes flash brilliantly, damaging me with a power I couldn’t comprehend. It felt as though my insides were twisting and re-arranging. It hurts.. it hurts!!
I snap back from my sudden bursts of memories, and slowly come to a stop. Everything made sense but was still horribly confusing all at once. Whatever that man was had become low in numbers; he didn’t enjoy having to change people but he must. The same thing claimed my mother, and that child that had been in the window was a child produced from the creation of a new monster. (I don’t know how I knew this, but in the dream I was given this information in flashbacks). And me… what was my fate? The process wasn’t complete with me; I hadn’t killed like the other girl who had been with me. I continued to walk, no longer able to run. My mind felt strange; I couldn’t comprehend any of it. I felt suddenly and horribly alone. It was then that I came to the garage. There was a woman waiting for me, as if she knew I would have somehow wandered there. I didn’t question it. I simply went in when she beckoned me.
My friend was there too. She was the only one in this world who was in the same boat as me, and I felt an alliance with her because of that. Her eyes no longer looked scary to me; I could see the sorrow and confusion and fear in them. I could also see, even now, her slowly losing a hold of her human morals. Perhaps that was part of the transformation; perhaps at the end of it we wouldn’t even be ourselves anymore. I closed my eyes, and let myself think of our days when we were untainted by this madness. My eyes welled up; this was horrible. Her existence deserved to carry on untainted. But there was little I could do now…
The man appeared beside the woman now. He smiled at us sadly and asked me if I understood that from today on I was no longer going to be able to live a human existence. I gave a soft nod; I felt that if I tried to protest or escape, I would never be able to, and even if I got out of his grasp today I’d be hunted down until ended up right back here. He began to explain a few things. Apparently the final transformation would hurt worse than the initial one; me and my friend’s skin would slip off and tangle with each other, and in the end we would have totally different appearances. For some reason, this species we were being changed into could only be made in pairs. She started crying, and I felt strangely numb to all of this. He continued to explain that the two of us would be bonded together forever due to this; if we ever strayed too far from one another, our bodies would burn and ache and begin to deteriorate. If the other died, we would both perish. However, the thing that intrigued me the most was what he said next.
“A human child is also created from this process; consider it a fast pregnancy of sorts. It shares your genetics in every way; it will even look like you. One day, when she grows older, you will change her just like I’m changing you. That’s the way it must be…”
How strange. We were going to be mothers, but in the weirdest, most horrible way possible. My friend was still sobbing, but I was ready to undergo this change. Perhaps I had been more attached to the genetics my ‘mother’ passed down for me than I had realized. Slowly, I wrapped my arms around her, and hugged her tight in the most comforting way that I could muster. She stopped crying, and hugged me back. That’s when the webs appeared again, and wrapped us tight against each other.
The next minutes were agony. It felt like years. I lost track of what was my own body and what was hers and could only feel a firey burning sensation. My eyesight left me, but it didn’t save me from feeling the pull and tug of my flesh to hers. I couldn’t even scream. But after a while I didn’t want to. After a while, it started to feel… nice. The moment I stopped fighting against this ghastly ‘right of passage’ was the moment it ended, and I floated down to the ground in my new body. I could feel power pulsing through me, and I turned to see my friend, though her body was entirely different now, passed out on the floor. The man seemed surprised by how quickly I had taken to my new body. I would even say he was fighting not to bow down before me. My eyes turned towards the small infant that had been created from us. It looked exactly like my friend. I scooped her up and smiled, running a hand through her hair. I promised in that moment that her fate would be different. I would allow her to live a human life, and no one was going to stop me.
It took a while for my partner to wake up. And when she did, she had a strange request; she wanted to go back to school. Just one more time. I tried to reason with her; I told her she wasn’t even who she was before; she couldn’t speak to any of her friends or say goodbye. She was alright with that; she just wanted to see everyone one last time before she left. I admired that in her, somehow. She still wanted to hold on to her human life. I felt surprisingly numb to my change; I wanted to be the creature I was now. But I accepted her request.
Standing at the entrance of the school had me feeling insecure. No, that wasn’t the correct word. It made me feel nervous for my weaker partner. Her body was having a hard time staying formed; I was told this was normal, but seeing her bandaged body and her cast made me very upset and I felt it wasn’t very smart to take her around people in this weak state. But she insisted, and so all I could do was grip her hand tightly as we walked through the schools.
It was then I realized that I hated all of these people. Every person that turned to look at me sent a shot of anger through my body. They had no right to look at me. They were horrible when I was human. Catty creatures who didn’t care about anything but themselves. My impulse to scream and strike out at them grew with each moment we wandered through, and then suddenly, and very calmly, I could hear the man’s voice echo through my head.
“You may take one. But only one.”
I smiled softly as I felt my mind latch on immediately to the human I would target. He was the worst by far, and he treated me so cruelly during my time alive, even though I had given him everything. He was the one I wanted to exact my rage upon. But I had to behave normally until then.
We sat down in the stands and waited. It was an assembly day, so the gym was slowly being filled more and more by my classmates. My keen eyes watched and waited, trying to find the man I sought out. But he didn’t come through those doors, and I felt myself becoming frustrated. Was this really going to be the day that he called off…? I groaned in annoyance, stood to leave, and then felt a shiver run through me.
Sitting directly behind me was Remy. How had he gotten there? How had I not noticed him? In my new body, I noticed everything, heard every sound. And yet he had snuck past all of that to be sitting there behind me like he’d been there the entire time. Today he was wearing his leather jacket, and I felt an odd fondness towards it. Perhaps I was still a little bit of the girl I had been before all of this. But when I met his eyes, I felt… scared. I saw the recognition in them. Somehow, he knew who I was, even with my entirely new body. He knew everything. How was that possible…?
“I was hoping I could have saved you,” he murmured, shaking his head. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to hunt you down…”
Hunt me? What was he talking about? I didn’t like the way he looked at me, and to my surprise I felt tears well up in my eyes. His expression softened immediately and for a moment I saw his hand raise up to comfort me before stopping himself. He then took this time to explain everything. It turns out he wasn’t human either. He was a different category from me, sort of like an arch nemesis species. Even more so, he was part of a group that specifically hunted my kind down and killed us. He continued on that since I hadn’t yet killed a human, he could grant me mercy, but that he was sticking around to make sure I behaved. I knew somehow that he could kill me if he wanted to. I hated him and loved him in that moment; he was someone I could connect to, even if we were on opposite sides. I squeezed my friends hand tight and sighed.
This new life was going to be very complicated.