The Stuff of Nightmares

A Story by Opal Fox

A short story about a series of nightmares from when I was a teenager.

At the age of 13, I had a series of vivid, detailed nightmares that have haunted me to this day. These three nightmares all happened in the same night, one after the other. This collection will be written exactly as I remember them, in sequential order. I will not start any of these stories off with an introduction or context, aside from this opening paragraph.

I was walking through the desert, surrounded by tall dunes of pale golden sand. It was warm, but not hot. I looked up into the cerulean sky to orient myself. It was bright, impossibly bright, but no sun could be seen. I still felt its warmth upon my shoulders. I continued forward with the quiet crunching of sand beneath my feet until I approached a sand dune at least a hundred feet high. With nowhere else to go, I began to scramble up it. My feet slid and I stumbled, but I soldiered to the very top. I looked down into the valley below.

There was a building there, a low concrete rectangle jutting out of the sand. It had a thin strip of window facing my direction. I felt a sense of relief. Finally, somewhere to rest. Somewhere to maybe find help. I slid down the dune, kicking up clouds of sand behind me as I descended. The ground was flat in the valley. I walked forward, my eyes fixed on the concrete structure. As I approached, a door on the side of the building opened. It was heavy and metal, I could hear the screeching of its hinges as I neared. I was still many yards away. A man dressed in what looked like a flight suit shouted through his hands at me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I continued to come closer. The man was now waving his arms frantically. My eyes narrowed. What was he trying to tell me?

Another man, this one in a grey suit, dashed out from inside the building. He began to shout alongside the flight suit man, waving their arms in tandem. I was now in the center of the valley, the building was only about a thousand feet away. I was about to start waving back, to hail for help, but I could now hear the desperate, pleading words of the man in the flight suit:

“STOP! BOMB!”

I barely had time to react before the massive ‘BOOM’. All I saw was white.

I was on the beach. There was sand, unnaturally yellow like a cartoon sand pit, beneath my feet. I looked to my left to see what I believed to be the ocean, although much about it was wrong. It was the exact same color as the sky and seemed to meld with it on the horizon. The water was placid save for gentle ripples that lapped onto the shore. Like the desert, there was no sun in the sky, though it was bright and warm like a spring day. To my right was a single blue folding chair, and a cardboard stand shaped like a surfboard that displayed various types of sunscreen. The labels were unreadable.

Like a fine piece of wire was pulling me forward, I began to walk along the shoreline, keeping the ocean to the left of me. I walked, and walked, and walked, for what felt like miles. Suddenly, I stopped and turned towards the ocean. I took one step forward. I could feel the water breaking against my feet. It wasn’t cold, nor was it warm. It felt exactly like the air outside, the same temperature as my skin. I waded onward, deeper and deeper into the ocean and away from the shore, until my feet no longer touched the bottom. I began to swim in the direction of the horizon. The water made sloshing noises as I moved my arms and legs, but it felt like I was swimming through air. I swam for what felt like even longer than I walked. The shore had disappeared long ago, and the water stretched out like a blue sheet in every direction. I kept swimming, further into the deep ocean. There were ice sheets in the water, though the temperature was no colder than the shore.

The ice turned into icebergs, signaling my arrival to a great ice wall that stretched far into the sky. As I approached the glacial wall, I saw something in the water- heads. Heads that looked up to the sky and barely broke above the surface. It was my family. My mother and father were to the left, my brother and sister on the right. They were pale, open-mouthed, unmoving. Between them, directly in the center, was a young boy. He had golden hair like the sand and blue eyes like the ocean. I stared at him, my stomach hit with a sinking feeling that this was not right at all. I opened my mouth to speak to the boy, but nothing came out. Instead, he smiled.

From below the water, I felt a hand grab my ankle. It yanked me down into the water before I had the chance to scream. I flailed, reaching up for the surface, and I saw him. The boy was right above me, his expression one of satisfaction. He gave a little wave as the water grew darker and darker, then a little voice echoed in my mind:

“Bye-bye.”

I stood on a gravel path that led to a massive abandoned warehouse in an empty field. It was a starless night. The moon was full and bathed the field in a silvery glow. A sodium vapor lamp casting the long shadow of the warehouse onto the ground. I walked towards the building and up to the rusty metal doors. Trying the handle, I was surprised to find it unlocked. I turned the handle. I felt resistance, and pushed against them with my shoulder. The doors squealed and clanged as they scraped the concrete floor. I kicked up dust as I entered, creating a fine cloud across the floor. There was no light inside, except for the small shimmer of the moon through the frosted plastic windows across the top of the warehouse. There were rows and rows of metal shelving, bare and coated in a thick layer of dust. There was a faint fluorescent glow from the back of the building.

I carefully made my way through the maze of shelves and found an immaculate white door, like the ones in hospitals or doctor’s offices, spilling white light from a gap at the bottom. I opened the door and stepped into a short, narrow hallway that contained four uniform doors like the one I had just entered. In one corner was a white plastic chair. The fluorescent light in the low ceiling buzzed monotonously. I walked up to the first door and tried the handle. Locked. I opened the second door and walked through it, only to find no solid ground. I began to fall. I didn’t have time to scream before something I couldn’t perceive seemed to grab me by the collar, dangling me in the void. I had just enough time to take in my surroundings. I was in space, staring at the green and blue landscape of Earth from countless miles above it. My stomach dropped. Whatever was holding me then let go, not just releasing me, but flinging me towards Earth. I fell impossibly far, impossibly fast, down, down, down, I felt the sting of the air as I careened towards Earth’s surface, I prayed for a soft landing, there was water just below me, if I aimed, maybe I could-

My view cut from the sky to the ground like a camera sitting just above it. I saw myself falling. I saw my limbs flailing as I just missed the water and hit my skull on a rock on the shoreline. There was blood. My body was still.

Suddenly, I was back in the hallway. I had no choice but to continue.

I opened the second door. Everything was orange with the haze of fire and ash. People were running and screaming. A building crumbled in the distance. From the smoke, a woman emerged, clutching a baby and sprinting for her life. She ran straight for me, her free arm stretched towards me as she screamed desperately. I looked behind me to notice the door I came in through was gone. As I turned back around to attempt to help the woman and her baby, a gunshot rang out and I crumpled to the ground.

I was back in the hallway once more. I looked to the last door, the furthest one. There were claw marks across its surface that formed deep gouges. Holding my breath, I opened the door.

I was in the dining room of my house. All was dark except for the sodium lamp from the cul-de-sac seeping light through the front windows. I checked my iPod for the time. It was 12:34am. I took a right from the dining room into the living room and tried the light switch on the wall. Nothing. I carefully tread back through the dining room and turned to the north into the foyer. I looked through the blinds. The grass outside was tall, reaching almost to the sill of the windows. Every neighboring house was dark. Only the street lamps were lit. I stepped back and tried the knob to the front door. It was unlocked, but blocked off by something I couldn’t see or push out of the way. Trapped. I walked to the left of the foyer to my parents’ room. The bed was made, its sheets taut and the blanket folded crisply on top of it. The nightstands were bare. I called out for my parents, but was drowned in silence. Suddenly, there was a noise. A small “thump”, something that would have never been audible had it not been so oppressively quiet. It came from the kitchen. I turned back out of the bedroom, through the foyer, and took a sharp left into the kitchen.

My eyes locked onto the cabinet below the sink. It was there. I slowly took each step, carefully padding towards it. I grabbed the handles and gently opened the cabinet. Inside was a little girl, younger than ten, draped in a dirty white nightgown. Her skin was clammy and sallow, pale like candle wax. Her hair was long and dark and draped over her shoulders in greasy tendrils. She was curled up, sitting in a sort of fetal position with her arms hugging her knees and her chin down. I took half a step away. Suddenly, her neck snapped up and creaked as she turned her head towards me. Her lips were black and her eyes were a stark, unnatural yellow. She screamed, not in terror, but a scream of demonic rage. She continued screaming as I slammed shut the doors and sprinted towards the foyer. I pounded my shoulder against the door over and over, hoping to break out and run as far as I could. I stopped when I realized the little girl was no longer screaming. I waited with my hand on the door, my heart pounding in my chest and shaking my whole body. Another sound came from the kitchen. It was the creak of a cabinet opening.

I awoke in a cold sweat, panting and shaking with fear. I looked at my alarm clock for the time. It was 12:34am. Feeling a sinking in my chest, I dashed out of bed and flipped the light switch in my room, bathing it in yellow light. I was free.