Nightmare?

(Flash Fiction)

When I was younger, I used to suffer from nightmares often. Several times a week, I’d wake up in a cold sweat with goosebumps up and down my entire body. For the most part, I would wake up knowing it was a nightmare, but there was one I wasn’t so sure about.

I lived in a room with my sister, we had our beds pressed up against the walls. Our room has our names on the wall in an attempt to give ourselves our own space in the tiny room - despite being only a few feet away from each other.

From my side of the room, my bed was positioned in a way that if the door was cracked, you could see the guest room down the hall. At this point, I was only 8 years old, and we lived in our house for several years. Yet anytime I could see the shadow of the guest room at night I got chills, similar to the chills I would get from the nightmare.

In the first nightmare she appeared in, she stayed in the guestroom, unmoving. She wore a long, tattered dress with no sleeves that kind of looked like a nightgown. She had crazy, white curly hair that went in every direction that resembled when you would go to bed with your hair wet. And she would stare at me with her mouth slightly open for hours.

I woke up just thinking it was creepy more than anything- until it kept happening. The next night, she stepped out of the guest room and into the hallway. Each night, she’d creep more and more down the hallway until she reached the door of the room. She would never say anything, but she would just hover off the ground, yet I somehow could still hear her footsteps as she ventured closer.

Eventually, she was brave enough to actually come into the room and would just either lay in bed with me or stare at me with her black eyes. After this, I would wake up in a panic, thrashing around in my bed trying to shake her off of it, but when I would open my eyes, she wasn’t there.

This was before she would possess me. Sometimes, she would have her face pressed up against mine, her breath oddly freezing which chilled my body completely. It was then that I felt possessed. In my mind I would be kicking and screaming, begging for my sister to wake up and pull me out of this nightmare, instead, I would remain unmoving, my limbs felt physically chained to the bed as I lay there helpless.

Since my sister shared the room, there were a few nights when she would take turns going back and forth between us. I would turn over and see her hanging over my sister, her long white hair dangling in her face as my sister lay there. But the woman mostly bothered me. Once this started happening to my sister too, we decided to start sleeping in the same bed. We figured that if there was no space in the bed then the woman couldn’t do anything, which we were right about. But she would occupy the empty bed, not uttering a word with a soulless stare. While we were happy that she would leave us alone it felt like you couldn’t sleep with her there. She wouldn’t get any closer, but it was unsettling in the sense that you never knew if she would venture over.

I think one of the worst things about the nightmare was that when she possessed you, it was difficult to tell if you were being possessed or if someone was simply lying in bed with you or sitting on you. When I’d wake up with what felt like a weight on my chest but didn’t see anyone, it made me question if my sister and I were just scaring each other when we’d tell each out about our nightmares. But I do know that when it got closer to morning, she would just sway away with a toothless grin as she closed the door back to the guest room.