What do Nightmares Dream of

1.

It was raining—which was nothing unusual, only slightly distracting—when the ear-shattering scream exploded all around Sanja. Instinctively, her hands flew to cover her ears, but the wailing was so loud it resonated inside her head. This can’t be happening, she thought, and yet, unfathomably, it was.

Sanja was in the middle of grading papers—descriptions of family members by her sixth graders—tired of everything, but mostly of the latest gibberish that had gotten under her hands. She had troubles staying awake with the constant flow of rain doing its very best to lull her into sleep.

Then, without warning, the question marks written in red ink started screaming at her from the page as if she were somehow torturing the paper with her pen. The inky letters describing blue and green and brown eyes of various family members started crawling across the page like a hundred ants. What the fuck, what’s happening? Sanja rubbed her eyes, confused as to why words would try to run away. If they’d managed to do that, they would have infested this world with their lazy writing, sucking out all creativity and the will to live from children.

She closed the child’s notebook before it could happen, only to see it start rapidly inflating, as if drying out after being left in the rain. Slowly, Sanja stood up and started moving away from the desk, not sure what she should even do in this sort of situation. Burn the notebooks? Grade them, bound them in chains—where would she get the chains—or run away, quit her job and become a nun? Just like one of those recluse ones, who are forbidden to interact with the world, so that everyone would leave her alone?

Her skin was prickling. The view outside her window had been replaced with pitch black darkness. Which didn’t make much sense because it was still early in the day. But she couldn’t really be sure, unable to think with all the screaming which was getting louder and louder. What will her neighbours think? It sounded like she was torturing someone, and the last thing she needed were cops at the door because her papers didn’t want to be read and graded. How could she explain that?

While she was just standing there, doing nothing at all, the puffy notebook exploded on the desk surface. Tiny bits of shredded paper floated in the air like gutted insides of a fish, ending up all over Sanja’s head, shoulders and toes. They crawled all over her, these tiny ants made of ink, burrowing inside her skin, even going inside her mouth, clogging her throat before she could start screaming. Her legs felt stuck to the floor, and no matter how much she flailed with her arms, she couldn’t get rid of the words attacking her.

Finally, she could feel them settling in her lungs. She was coughing out ink now, like a cat would a furball, but a big lump had gotten stuck in her trachea. Desperately, she started clawing at the skin of her throat with her short nails, trying to make way for the air with her own fingers, even though part of her knew it was a futile work. It hurt like hell and she could feel the words in her lungs, walking all over her organ tissue on sharp legs, puncturing holes wherever they went. She couldn’t die so young, not over something as stupid as a school assignment, over an utterly boring description of a family member!

A light bulb turned on in her head and she jerked awake as if she’d been dropped down from thin air into a chair. She snapped in front of a very silent, still-looking piece of paper spotted with ink and saliva—because, apparently, she had been drooling on top of it while she was sleeping.

Goddamnit! I’m trying to work! Sanja shouted out into the air around her. You know that, if I don’t finish this soon, the kids will eat me alive. They hate writing assignments, they hate my subject, they halfass everything I give them because they don’t care. But still, if I don’t grade the papers, like, at this same minute, they absolutely will crucify me. So. Leave. Me. The. Fuck. Alone.

She was shaking but she didn’t care. There was still a bunch of work to be done and she’ll probably squint over it late into the night, so there was no room for fear, only anger brought on by being tricked into falling asleep and making her live through some cheap nightmare, worthy of a B-rated horror movie.

You know, your nightmares are as lazy as the writing my students do. And they are kids! What is your excuse? Sanja was still arguing with the air around her—not expecting her unwelcome roommate to give her any sort of answer—because she needed to get it off her chest. Also, she probably shouldn’t be taunting evil entities, but fuck it if she wasn’t simmering with rage. They’d made her drool all over a student’s paper—so unprofessional!

Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? she as good as screamed. It’s just that, if you don’t have anything smart to terrorise me with, at least be decent enough to wait for nighttime and after I’ve fallen asleep in my bed, okay?

There was no answer, of course. Only a small, but certain feeling of a presence looming behind her back. And, possibly, glaring daggers at her head.

You know what, I think this kind of behavior warrants punishment. Don’t you agree?

She couldn’t ignore this thing. It wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to encourage with her lack of counteraction. It made her wonder if a certain cousin of hers had time to visit with her this weekend.

I think it’s time for Shimun to drop by, she said out loud and smiled when she heard a loud, incorporeal hiss right by her ear.

* * *

At first she’d thought the only thing that plagued her were the nightmares.

It started a few nights after she’d moved into the new apartment. Nothing special, in the beginning; she would just wake up in the middle of the night after an unsettling dream, its content fading away with every passing moment. And it wasn’t like it happened every night. But then the intensity started to increase. Nightmares became more vivid, and with their monstruos clarity came a deep sense of dread which would follow her into consciousness. Sanja would startle awake, only to find out she couldn’t move an inch of her body. Completely paralysed, she would freak out until, ever so slightly, the pressure on her body would finally pass away and she would reclaim her movement. Sometimes it felt like her dreams had tried to choke her to death and she would rouse with a hoarse throat, like she’d screamed all night.

Nevertheless, it didn’t concern her too much. She had too much emotional baggage to be in any way surprised that some of it found a way to burst out during the night. Sanja didn’t really spare much thought for her night terrors, not until the night she woke up from her nightmare—her oldest uncle trying to bury her alive—to the shape of a person standing by her bed. Watching her. Scrambling for her nightlight, her heart almost lept from her chest, but when light finally flooded the room there was no one there. And yet she felt like she was watched. And it didn’t stop.

Some would blame it on sleep paralysis. Some would book an appointment with a therapist. But not her. Sanja came to an easy conclusion that there was something supernatural at play. Easy, for her, because she was raised to believe in things most people wouldn’t—ghosts that visited their beloveds, demon possessions, werewolves (but not vampires, she had to draw a line somewhere). With her childhood in mind, she learned how to recognise the signs of her invisible roommate. She was also sure that it—whatever it was supposed to be—was behind her nightmares.

She just had to learn what exactly was tormenting her. It was the first step in finding a way of dealing with it. Googling her symptoms without any starting theories ended with so many possibilities, including but not limited to PTSP, sleep paralysis and, of course, some type of cancer. And after that it was demons. But she wasn’t overtly sold on that, even with a lot of hints pointing in that direction. In the meantime, while she was trying to find a more credible source, she learned that one thing could be very helpful.

And it revolved around her cousin, who very much leaned to the demonic possession explanation.

* * *

Please, for the love of all that is holy, just move out. Shimun, Sanja’s first cousin on her mother’s side, was sitting on the edge of the couch, visibly upset.

He wore what he called his ‘civilian clothes’; a warm-looking brown sweater over a white button down and a pair of hipster, plaid pants in wool—instead of an all black wardrobe which made him look like a Night’s Watchman—and sans his clerical collar.

Sanja was just pouring them both some of the altar wine that her cousin had so generously brought. Almost double the dose for herself, even though it was starting to look like her cousin might need it more.

Why? I have the best view in the city, Sanja handed him the glass and pointed at the tall windows. It was hard to see through the heavy rain bathing her view in a washed up industrial grey, but, below her apartment on the seventh floor, you could see a line of old, decaying houses with wet red roofs. In the distance, the rusty blue and dark yellow wagons of a cargo train lay on the railway track. Beyond them, the port warehouses stood with their prized jewel, the Metropolis building in all its towering theatrical glory. Nowadays, all it served for was to remind everyone that, once upon a time, this town had style.

Even further, behind the Metropolis and port’s garbage disposal, was the stirred up sea, the colour of dark ash, connecting to the sky. During the storms, or rainy days like these, it was impossible to say where the sea ended or the sky started.

Sanja, this place is cursed. Forget about the view, you are living with the damned, Shimun’s voice was high pitched, sounding scratchy to her ears. She shrugged and dragged her eyes away from the view. No matter how beautiful it was, she was actually lying through her teeth about how much it enticed her. Her flat was too high in the building. That was the problem. She was on the seventh floor, and watching outside made her taste the bile.

But she couldn’t afford to be too picky when buying her own place, so she just had to learn to live with this vast emptiness outside her windows, and the fact that the windowsill started just below the line of her hips, which would made it so easy to just slip and fall to her death outside.

It wouldn’t be my first time to live with demons. Remember growing up with Grandma? Sanja knew he wouldn’t appreciate the joke but she had to tell it anyway.

That was horrible, don’t talk like that. Her cousin really didn’t have a sense of humour. It was probably why he’d become a catholic priest