AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

A bit scary this is, .at least, it is to me.

It couldn’t be a dream.

Or if t was, Sandra had never experienced a dream like it before and she didn’t want to visit that dreamland again, though she rather expected she couldn’t/. It was the way the old man slithered into her bedroom and wriggled into her bed until he was comfortable. And not just any old man but her husband, Philip.

Her lithe and physically fit husband, the man who could, if he wished, run a marathon or do a hundred press-ups without pausing for breath. That man. Philip.

And there was no way Philip was an old man with wrinkles on his wrinkles, pee-stains on his underpants and all the attributes of the geriatric lump of human flotsam that had just squeezed into her bed and was lying there next to her, close, too close, mouth open and stinking of s**t. Why, when he made love to her, and he had lots of times, he was a physical master. She remembered it so well.

She could even feel the cold numbness of his flesh where it touched her. I mean, actually touched her! In the way that a serpent might touch her if it accidentally found itself lying next to her in her bed.

Her heart almost stopped when he opened his mouth and hacked. Yes, hacked, as if it was perfectly all right to do that in bed, next to her, into her face, cold stinking breath all over her.

There was only one thing that she could do and that was go into the spare room where, thankfully, there was a bed already made up because her sister was due any day, the sister she hadn’t seen since they’d shared their teenage years together an age ago, they’d been so young and it really was so long ago, before the beautiful Phoebe, had taken herself to the far end of the world to a life down under. But Phoebe was on her way back and so the bed had been prepared for her.

The spare room, then, and glorious sleep, but she didn’t want Philip if it was indeed Philip mysteriously grown old who had found his way into her bed, to follow her. That flesh, to start with, was rank, and the smell, the old man who pisses his pants smell. So she’d better be ghostly. An invisible shadow moving through the night, out of one bedroom and into another.

So she gently slid out of her bed. Yes, her bed, and taking unbelievable care bearing in mind it was the middle of the night, she almost oozed round the bed and out of the door before relaxing and making her way across the landing into the spare room.

A suggestion of moonlight found its way past the undrawn curtains, only a suggestion, but it was enough for her to see the bed she’d prepared for Phoebe, and there was somebody in it. Or maybe not somebody but something. Oh, it might have been a person once upon a time, but at that moment in time it was fleshless and a glaring skull, sans eyes, stared up at her from where it lay on the pillow.

“Phoebe?” she whispered.

It winked at her. That skull did that!

There was only one thing for her to do, and that was scream, and she screamed loud enough to waken the dead. And because her scream was that loud the dead did waken. The skull on Phoebe’s pillow became animated, its various parts, the jaws, rubbed together creating a mockery of whispered speech and slowly, jerkily, it emerged from the bed complete with the skeletal remains of the rest of its body.

Those ribs rattling together made a sound that would stay with her for the rest of her life, and she knew that.

“What on Earth’s the matter?” demanded Philip, a Philip she didn’t want to look at because the fit and desirable Philip might still be the geriatric lump of leaking flotsam she had sneaked away from moments ago.

“Don’t come near me… don’t touch me…” she begged.

He was going to reply to that, maybe suggest that she needed to see a psychiatrist because wasn’t one of her favourite things being touched by him? But she didn’t because there was a loud knocking at the door.

“Phoebe…” she whispered, but in her head she knew that Phoebe wasn’t really coming.

“Of all the times…” grated Philip, “wait here, love, and I’ll see who it is at this time of night.”

He sounded like the young and vibrant man she’d married, but he walked, back bent and holding on to a walking cane. She could tell, from the shadow the moonlight cast of him on the wall, that he probably had one foot in the grave.

The skeleton rattled and the merest suggestion of a whispered cackle was emitted between teeth that looked as if they ight fall out at nay moment, and it was all too much for her

Screaming, she ran back into her bedroom and pulled herself under her duvet. It was still warm where she’d been lying earlier, but next to it, under where the ancient Philip had pulled himself, it was like ice.

The ice of death…

She screamed again, just in time for Philip to hobble into the room.

“It’s not for us, probably somebody lost, didn’t make much sense to me, a baby in nappies roaming the streets at this time of night...” he said, and then, as if his legs were unable to support him any longer he fell to the floor, collapsing into a fetid heap of near death.

When he spoke again it was with a faint and creaking croak like it had come down an endless tunnel, from nowhere and going nowhere.

“I’m fed up with this and I’m returning to bed with my wife,” he managed to force out through suddenly leathery lips, “will you be all right?”

“How could I?” she whispered.

“That’s all right, then…” and he crawled like an infant who’s just learned to crawl out of the bedroom door and into the spare room.

“I wish I was awake…” thought Sandra, “I really do.”

“Not yet,” grinned the Priest who appeared from nowhere, “I need to pray you into Heaven first…”

And Sandra’s dream was over, mostly because the dead can’t dream.

© Peter Rogerson 16.09.22

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