Nightmares

The door was closed. June opened her mouth in a silent scream, felt it fill with thick, billowing smoke, her fingers groping frantically for a handle she knew wouldn’t turn. Every movement was like swimming through honey. The door handle didn’t budge. She slammed herself against the strong wood, her hands burning from the heat of the metal knob, her eyes filled with smoke, her lungs unable to stop coughing. The wall of fire roared closer every second. June, crying, dying, throwing herself frantically against the exit, stuck in honey, coughed, cried, choked, and suddenly crumpled, just as the rushing tongues of flame whirled around the sleeve of her pajama shirt and she felt a terrible pain in her hand-

June sat up, panting, soaked in sweat. She clawed the thick down comforter off of her face and stared into the darkness, blinking the burning orange and blue fire from her hazel eyes. Trembling, she rubbed her face, her hands leaving cool streaks down her flaming cheeks.

Always the same dream. Always the fire, always the slow-motion movement, always the jammed door. She traced the pale, unmarked skin of her palms, remembering the burn marks on them so vividly that she could feel her hands tingle with a hint of unimaginable heat. She kicked off the comforter all the way, sighed, opened the little pocket notebook beside her bed, and entered

2/9 dream: same  

She flipped back a page in her dream journal. And another page. The dream had started September 30 of last year. Her birthday. Every day after that, it was the same. In the dream, the door of her room wouldn’t open, even though she never, ever closed it. In the dream, there was a fire.

And she always died.

Every night, June Brandt had to die, and every night, she dreaded sleep. She blasted music so loudly that her earbuds made her ears vibrate, sat in bed reading or paced around her room. But she would always fall asleep, in the end.

June got up, went sleepily into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, and daubed some concealing cream over the dark, puffy circles under her eyes. Her parents had been unpleasantly shocked when, precisely as she turned thirteen, she became a grumpy and short-tempered demon of a child. It had really been lack of sleep, but they vowed never to scoff at ‘traumatized teen parents’, as they put it, again. To them, she had turned into the typical teen monster in the space of a day- her thirteenth birthday. It bugged her, but it was better than the truth. The last thing she wanted was to be forced to take sleeping pills, because she knew the dream would just repeat itself as long as she was asleep. Sleeping longer meant dying more.

Shuddering at the thought, she padded back to her room and took her math homework out of her disheveled messenger bag. She’d done the assignment already, but being ahead had never hurt anyone.

The numbers whirled around her head in a calming current, shaping themselves into answers and reasons that she penned carefully onto frayed notebook paper. She loved math. It gave her a solid base to stand on, the complete opposite of the swaying, burning, cracking floor in her dream. June closed her eyes and imagined a glassy sea of numbers, ankle deep. Every touch to the surface sent ripples that went out for miles, the only visible movement in the still, calm, yet imperceptibly swirling waters. She could feel the cool water swishing around her ankles, even a little nibble on her toe from a curious yellow fish-

 

The door was closed. June’s mouth filled with smoke- she was choking, coughing. She tried to get down to the ground, gasped for fresh air, but the smoke was everywhere, acrid and terrible. A wall of roaring, terrible fire consumed her room, which was so familiar, yet somehow not, and the flames licked her toes and sent a searing pain up her legs-

 

June, gasping for breath, lifted her head from the messy pile of papers on the unorganized desk. She knew she was overreacting, being wimpy even, by making such an effort not to sleep. She knew it was hurting her grades, her social life, her family; her life was crumbling just because she couldn’t face a nightmare.

And yet… every time she woke up, tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes still stinging from the smoke that she could still smell, heart thudding, sweating, panicking, she knew that she never, ever, ever wanted to have that dream again.

June put her face in her hands, dizzy. She couldn’t go on like this. The dream had to stop.

She switched on her computer, opened the web browser, and typed ‘recurring nightmare’ into the search bar.  It loaded like lightning, and that alone gave her a satisfying feeling. She loved fast computers, and her new one never stopped surprising her with its incredible speed. The results, however, were far from satisfying, and June’s face fell, in sync with the scrollbar. The top result, to her disgust, was a Yu-Gi-Oh card. A Yu-Gi-Oh card! She scowled at the monitor. There was a Dr. Phil page, but it was all about how to reform your life in order to stop the nightmare, because it was really symbolizing stresses and troubles that you had in your life. Blah, blah, blah. All crap. She knew, just had a strong sense, that it wasn’t about stress or troubles. The only troubles she had were the nightmare, and the lack of sleep resulting. She clicked Back, and scrolled some more. Nada, nothing, zip. All the articles were either about how horrible someone’s recurring dream had been or how to stop them by either changing your lifestyle or praying to dream gods and doing little rituals.

None of which she had any interest in.

Sighing, she went through a couple more pages of useless articles. 

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She switched off her computer. What was wrong with her?

¦ ¦ ¦

4 weeks later, 3:12 AM

The door was closed. June opened her mouth in a silent scream, felt it fill with thick, billowing smoke, her fingers groping frantically for a handle she knew wouldn’t turn. Every movement was like swimming through honey. The door handle didn’t budge. She slammed herself against the strong wood, her hands burning from the heat of the metal knob, her eyes filled with smoke, her lungs unable to stop coughing. The wall of fire roared closer every second. June, crying, dying, throwing herself frantically against the only exit, stuck in honey, coughed, cried, choked, and suddenly crumpled, just as the rushing tongues of flame whirled around the sleeve of her pajama shirt and she felt a terrible pain in her hand, screamed as she saw the skin curl away from the flesh, charred and black, and wished she could move, put the hand in water, extinguish the fiery pain-

June tore the covers off of her face and sat up, managing to get her ponytail entangled in the navy blue beaded strings hanging down from her new dream catcher. She reached up and tore the thing down angrily, breaking the flimsy thread that held it to the hook in the ceiling. Throwing it next to the bottle of sleeping pills with a trembling hand, she took a deep breath and listened to the pills rattle against each other.

None of it worked. The sedative, the dream catcher, the stupid ‘calming music’ that was supposed to soothe her troubled mind: it was all completely useless. Every night, she was assaulted by the same dream until she managed to pull herself out of it. She glanced at the alarm clock that never got the chance to ring - it was 3:14 AM on March 13. Blearily, she checked her email and updated her status. Someone had commented “why do u always post @ 3:15”. June typed back “IDK”, and then paused. Why did she always post at 3:15?

She’d woken up at 3:14 this morning, following an everyday routine; wake up, check Facebook.

Scrolling down through her status updates with a strange sense of unease, she saw that every single one of her posts was marked 3:15 AM. Huh. Weird.

The clock moved with the speed of a sleeping sloth, setting her on edge. She hated waiting around for seven o’clock to come, so she could move around the house without causing suspicion. Too much noise awoke her parents, and when awoken at 3:30 AM to the sound of a hair dryer, parents are fairly unpleasant. The four hours before the start of her day were the longest, dragging by so that minutes became hours, hours became days, and staying awake became the ultimate struggle for survival.

She opened her window a crack, the bitter cool snap with a hint of spring warmth caressing her drowsy countenance and stilling her trembling shoulders. The air smelled faintly of rain, and faintly of snow. There was a loud rustle near her window and a squirrel went flying across her line of vision, landing shakily on a branch that nearly touched the ground at impact. A single bird trilled its lonely call over the faraway roar from the highway. Down the road, a streetlamp shone dimly through a haze of thin fog, flickering now and then.

The alarm clock read 3:20. June left the window with a sigh. Why did it have to take so long for seven to come? At this rate, the dream would come two more times before she could get ready for school.

The blinds swayed as the heater came on, and she realized that a cold draft was wafting through the crack she’d left open. Standing to shut the window before curling up in a dejected ball on her bed, she eyed the bottle of sleeping pills and the dream catcher with a bitter taste in her mouth. They hadn’t helped at all, and their presence was only a reminder of the inescapable dream. She threw the dream catcher in the trash. The pills she spared, but only because sometimes an untroubled mind had to be sacrificed for a good night’s sleep.

She’d tried everything. Talking it over with her parents, even seeing a shrink, she’d done everything she could think of.

Nothing helped.

She tucked her head into her knees and wished, for one moment, that the dream would just happen for real and just be over.

“No,” she said suddenly, her voice loud in the darkness. I don’t want to die.

But then would she be stuck in a nightmare for the rest of her life?

June paced around her little room for a while, glancing at the clock again. 3:37. She groaned and sat down again on the bed, head in hands. A sleepy dimness wrapped itself around her, and she struggled wildly to keep her lead-lined eyelids open-

The door was closed. June opened her mouth in a silent scream, felt it fill with thick, billowing smoke, her fingers groping frantically for a handle she knew wouldn’t turn. Every movement was like swimming through honey. The door handle didn’t budge. She slammed herself against the wood, hands burning from the heat of the metal knob, her eyes filled with smoke, her lungs unable to stop coughing. The wall of fire roared closer every second. June, crying, dying, throwing herself frantically against the only exit, stuck in honey, coughed, cried, choked, and suddenly crumpled, just as the rushing tongues of flame whirled around the sleeve of her pajama shirt and she felt a terrible pain in her hand, screamed as she saw the skin curl away from the flesh, charred and black, and wished she could move, but just as she wished it her honey movements ceased altogether and she was trapped, frozen and burning-

She woke in a cold sweat, blankets twisted around her face. Take deep breaths, she commanded her lungs. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, she calmed. Swallowed. Wiped the sweat from her face with a feverish hand.

¦ ¦ ¦

That night

June finished her homework and climbed determinedly into bed. She was fed up with the nightmare, and had decided that if it didn't end tonight, she would see a physician about it. Surely there was something for dreamless sleep, something prescription and fancy-named.

She felt she had to face the horror one last time. Not hide from it, not shirk sleep until she was at her wit’s end. It was 11:45, early for her. She needed the sleep though, badly. Apparently there was a test the next day, an important one, and she didn’t want to fail just because she was too afraid to sleep.

Her eyes closed almost instantly.

She smelled smoke. Heard a piercing scream from the other room. Frantically, she tried to open the door to her parent’s bedroom, snatched back her hand from the burning hot handle. Bangs and crashes and angry yells came from the other room. Her brain went into panic " she couldn’t think. Smoke billowed through the cracks around the doorway and she saw a red glow, like a horrible eye, under the door. She screamed and ran to the other door, the one leading to the hallway. The knob wouldn’t budge; it slipped from her sweating fingers. She grabbed her phone and dialed 9-1-1 with trembling thumbs. Someone said something " the door to the master bedroom was suddenly being devoured by flame. She choked ‘fire’ into the phone, throat clogged with fear and smoke. The person rattled off something and hung up. The fire was spreading. She slammed herself against the door, twisted the handle until it suddenly popped off in her panic-stricken hand, cried harder. Saw a cup of water and poured it on a tongue of fire. It hissed, and the flame flickered, but the water evaporated and the fire spread. “Help!” she choked. Someone was on the other side of the door now, screaming her name " June thought vaguely that it sounded nothing like her name " the door trembled. Someone had thrown something at it. She grabbed a lamp and hurled it at the door, tears streaming down her face as the smoke filled her lungs and she coughed horribly. Was that blood from her lungs? No, she’d cut her finger on the broken light bulb of the lamp, which was shattered into a million pieces all around the impregnable door. All of a sudden her bed was an inferno, and she watched her favorite teddy bear, the one she’d taken everywhere with her until she turned eight, burst up in a puff of flames through the thick, thick smoke. Dimly, she heard sirens. Her vision was obscured - she reached blindly for the exit. The door was closed. It wouldn’t open. She couldn’t breathe. Backing into the door, sliding down, pressing her face desperately against the crack, trying to escape the smoke. Suddenly, she looked up and saw herself, June, staring in horror. She reached for her phone and dialed her own number, desperately taking gulps of air through the crack, wondering what the heck she was doing, why she was calling anyone when she was about to die, sobbing as the phone rang three times and nobody answered. The shadows of feet on the other side of the door suddenly retreated and someone screamed and cried outside as the shadows were replaced by a horrible red-orange blaze.

June woke with a jolt. Her phone was vibrating, sliding across the nightstand every ring. She answered it, still shaking and feverish.

“H-hello?”

The dial tone beeped loudly in her ear.

June was frozen.

A horrible feeling trickled down her spine and made her want to be sick.

She slowly, slowly lowered the phone from her ear, which flashed cheerfully, “call with Ella Stinson ended”.

Numb horror coursed through her blood. She remembered the phone in her dream. Not hers. Ella’s.

June stared with wide eyes at her turquoise phone as the screen dimmed and went black.

She dreaded the morning news.

 

Author's Note

thanks for the reviews! you're right, it's better without the yahoo answers! :D

Reviews

[A.J.]

OK. The whole setup to the story was good enough to keep me reading till the end. But like 99% of all other mystery stories, the end kind of disappointed, though. But keep in mind that I actually bothered to FINISH the story, so that's good. If you want to know what's wrong with the ending, it's this: you tried to foreshadow what was going to happen w/ the Yahoo thing. It was a way too obvious. It was basically outright TELLING you what was going to happen in the end. still an alright story though. (it's funny how every dream in a book or movie ends with the dreamer sitting up gasping and sweating)

[Holly-Marie]

I really really liked this.
The only thing I would do different is take out the part about the Yahoo answer page. I only say it because that part took you away from her situation for a second and showed there were other people out there too. I think without that part the story would seem slightly scarier because it would have that added feeling of isolation. I loved it though. Great read, I loved the ending too, very clever.

[GuineaPig]

Thanks for the advice- im a beginner at this, so i really appreciate constructive criticism. you have a good point!