Four

“Dan?”

“Dan, darling, can you hear me?” The voice was the first pleasing echo he heard that night, and the only that he had felt since he had fallen into this nightmare. He knew its tender chorus, for she had used it many times when he needed comfort or reassurance. It was the voice of the Butterfly.

“Dan, I need you to open your eyes, Sweetie, OK?”

           A gentle touch was placed on his lips, and he could smell the sweet musk of her perfume as she leaned into his dream. “Come on, baby, just one more time, show me those pretty eyes. Let me see you watch me.” Like a child awakened by a mother, Dan slowly lifted his lids and gazed into the most beautiful face he had ever known. Stacey was smiling a radiance that filled him with warmth, pushing away the cold that he felt in his bones.  She then kissed him like a butterfly, her lashes beating softly against his. “There’s my Darling,” she whispered. She kissed his lips again, but he felt too drained to move. “Now just relax and let me finish taking care of you.”

          Dan tried to speak, to tell her about this crazy nightmare he was having. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, missed her, and how he had thought he had lost her forever. But when he opened his lips to let these words out, an intense flash of pain whitened his mind as if lighting had just struck inside his mouth.  He tried to scream out from the pain, but this time an even thicker echelon of pain traced his nerves to his brain inflicting a magnified severity of agony that silenced him. Once the agony in his lips subsided, he traced the inside of his lips with his tongue, feeling bumps that were not there before. No, not quite lumps, more like strands because he could slip the very tip of his tongue in between the fibers. He tried to speak again, and a tearing sound was heard that didn’t come from outside his body, but from inside his mouth. He ran his tongue again along the back of his lips. “Strands. Wait, no…no, no, no…” It wasn’t strands- it was string, threaded through his lips. He tried to move his hands to his mouth, but it took his mind several seconds to realize that it was taking too long for him to see it. In horror, he discovered that he could not move anything but his eyelids.

“Oh my God what is this? What the hell is happening?” Again he sent signals to his body to move something- a toe; a finger; a butt cheek, anything- but nothing responded.

          “Don’t try to move, honey, you’ve been drugged. You’ve been sleeping for almost four hours, Babe. Moving around will only hurt,” she said through heaving breaths, “it paralyzes you.”  She wiped a gardening gloved hand across her face, leaving a smear of dirt that Dan suddenly felt aroused by, and let the words she spoke float through his head, unheard.

            He watched her turn away and crawl out of the pit, and it was then that Dan realized that he could see the moon had moved to be right in front of him, eye level, and in his face. “I am laying down,” he thought. “I am laying down in a grave. Oh my God, I am laying in a grave!”

         Thwump. Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.

         “What the hell is that sound?!” He tried to scream, but the tearing of the stitches through his lips caused him to black out again.