satisfied her hunger while sitting in bed. She was so tired that she
felt numb.
All of her senses were dulled by exhaustion, including her sense of
taste.
She might as well have been eating Styrofoam and washing it down with
mule sweat.
As if the contact of head and pillow tripped a switch, she fell
instantly asleep.
During the night, she began to dream. It was an odd dream, for it took
place in absolute darkness, with no images, just sounds and smells and
tactile sensations, perhaps the way people dreamed when they had been
blind since birth. She was in a dank cool place that smelled vaguely of
lime. At first she was not afraid, just confused, carefully feeling her
way along the walls of the chamber, They were constructed from blocks of
stone with tight mortar joints. After a little exploration she realized
there was actually just one wall, a single continuous sweep of stone,
because the room was circular. The only sounds were those she made-and
the background hiss and tick of rain drumming on a slate roof overhead.
In the dream, she moved away from the wall, across a solid wood floor,
hands held out in front of her. Although she encountered nothing, her
curiosity suddenly began to turn to fear. She stopped moving, stood
perfectly still, certain that she had heard something sinister.
A subtle sound. Masked by the soft but insistent rattle of the rain. It
came again. A squeak.
For an instant she thought of a rat, fat and sleek, but the sound was
too protracted and of too odd a character to have been made by a rat.
More a creak than a squeak, but not the creak of a floorboard underfoot,
either.
It faded. . . came again a few seconds later. . . faded. . .
came again. . . rhythmically.
When Holly realized that she was listening to the protest of an unoiled
mechanism of some kind, she should have been relieved. Instead,
standing in that tenebrous room, straining to imagine what machine it
might be, felt her heartbeat accelerate. The creaking grew only
slightly louder, but speeded up a lot; instead of one creak every five
or six seconds, the sound came every three or four seconds, then every
two or three, then once a second.
Suddenly a strange rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh struck up, as if in
syncopation with the creaking. It was the sound of a wide flat object
cutting the air.
Whoosh.
It was close. Yet she felt no draft.
Whoosh.
She had the crazy idea that it was a blade.
Whoosh.
A large blade. Sharp. Cutting the air. Enormous.
Whoosh.
She sensed that something terrible was approaching, an entity so strange
that even light-and the full sight of the thing-would not provide under
standing. Although she was aware that she was dreaming, she knew she
had to get out of that dark and stony place quickly-or die. A nightmare
couldn’t be escaped just by running from it, so she had to wake up, but
could not, she was too tired, unable to break the bonds of sleep. the
lightless room seemed to be spinning, she had a sense of some great
structure turning around and around (creak, whoosh), thrusting up into
the rainy night (creak, whoosh) and turning (creak, whoosh), cutting
there (creak, whoosh), she was trying to scream (creak, whoosh), but she
couldn’t force a sound from herself (whoosh, whoosh, whoosh), couldn’t
awaken couldn’t scream for help. WHOOSH!
“No!”
Jim sat up in bed as he shouted the one-word denial. He was clammy and
trembling violently.
He had fallen fast asleep with the lamp on, which he frequently did,
usually not by accident but by design. For more than a year, his sleep
had been troubled by nightmares with a variety of plots and a panoply of
boogeymen, only some of which he could recall when he woke.
The nameless, formless creature that he called “the enemy,” and of which
he had dreamed while recuperating at Our Lady of the Desert rectory, was
the most frightening figure in his dreamscapes, though not the only
monster.
This time, however, the focus of the terror had not been a person or