My Nightmare

I was trapped with him. No where to go. Nothing to do. You think it would be a dream to be trapped with a boy, but not this time. This one was different. He was six feet tall with blonde hair and a muscular build. Everything about him was normal except his eyes. His eyes were white, glowing white. The place where I was trapped was also strange. I seemed to be behind a glass frame with humanity on the other side. No matter how much I screamed and slammed my fist into it, no one on the other side seemed to notice.



It occurred to me that this was a place in between life and death and the boy was the curator of this limbo. Nothing seemed to add up though, a dark empty room with only a ghoul as it's protector, until the first cadaver appeared. I say it was a cadaver, but it was animated, living. It was a man seemingly in his 40's. He was dressed in a business suit, but something about him was wrong. He was incredibly pale. At second glance, I realized his neck was sliced open. The wound seemed to have dried up but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was dead. He sat up and looked around confused. Not once did his hand go to the gaping wound in his neck. The man managed to get himself standing so he could walk around. I was terrified to go near him though I don't think he noticed me. Out of no where, the mysterious boy re-materialized in front of the man. Without a change in his expression, the boy watched as the man became enveloped in darkness. It didn't take me long to notice that the darkness began with the strange boy. The tendrils of darkness that were suffocating the defenseless man came from the back of the boy. This made him even more terrifying. The man's hands were now grasping at the nasty gash on his neck as if it were fresh. A few more seconds of this misery, and the man was on the ground as though he were dead once more. I watched in utter disbelief and horror as his body slowly sank into the floor, his soul mostly likely following in the same direction. The boy with the glowing eyes disappeared. I was horrified that he might come back or that I might have to witness something of that atrocious nature again.



It was then that the next body came into view. It was a girl around 16. She had long brown hair and fair skin. Nothing seemed to be wrong with her. The same thing began to occur. The boy appeared as she began to stand up and his tendrils lashed out and surrounded her small frame. Unlike the man, she screamed and doubled over as though she had a knife shoved deep in her abdomen. I wondered what he was doing to her to cause her so much pain. This was my mistake.



As soon as my curiosity arose, the boy snapped his glowing eyes towards me. His blazing stare didn't leave me until the girl was sunken into the ground just like the man before her. I tried to back as far as I could into the corner I had found as he approached me. His tendrils began to wrap around me. I began to feel pain in my abdomen. Suddenly, images began to flood my mind of the girl. Along with the images came the pain. It felt as though I was melting from the inside out. The images were of the girl eating and all of a sudden doubling over. The thought occurred to me that she was poisoned. That explained the searing pain, but why was I feeling it if it was how she died? And why would someone come here just to die again in the same agonizing way? As I thought these questions, they were answered in the back of my mind by a voice I didn't recognize. It told me that the people that deserved death while in life, deserved to die twice. The first man was the CEO of a company that was part of an underground human-trafficking ring. The girl had murdered her mother years ago and had gotten away with it. The people that came here were horrible in life therefore were forces to die the same horrible way twice. It also told me that my curiosity would have me punished because it's curiosity that leads people to immoral things in life. Then I was released from the trance and placed back on the ground with the boy gone once more. My throat was in pain. I soon realized that, just like the brown-haired girl, I had been screaming. I looked out to the sea of humanity that still existed cluelessly and wanted so desperately to be back to my life.



I knew that I hadn't died so I had no reason to be here. Regardless, I remained in this 'no man's land' for what seemed an eternity; watching time and time again as bodies appeared, animated, and were taken down once again by the mysterious stranger, my occasional curiosity earning me the painful consequence of reliving the death of the person I wondered about.