Nightmare Resurgent

(Photo credit: monkeyatlarge)

The plain stretches out around me, boundless and bare. There's a strange mewling sound coming from the box lying a few feet away from me. I'm not sure how I got here, or where I'm going. Every direction leads into endless emptiness, there's nothing beyond that box.

It's like a shoe box. Small and incongruous in that vast emptiness. It's green. I know the only thing for me to do is go to it and open it. My only other option is to turn away from it and walk into the infinity around me. For all I know it might be flat, it might stretch upwards like a crucible around me.

Panic rises in my throat, a quickening that threatens to be emetic until I force my mouth open to breathe the clean air. There is no breeze.

The mewling starts to nag at me. It's like an injured leveret, that animal sound so close to the call of a baby's cry. I walk to the box reluctantly, the squealing is louder. Sickened by inevitability, I bend to open the lid of the box. I recoil in horror from the thing inside, flinging the lid aside reflexively

It's sightless, green-skinned, those awful sounds coming from a small open mouth glistening with streamers of the slime it is threshing about in, semi-formed linbs paddling at the ooze. As the air rushes into the box, it stiffens. The noises become stronger, deeper. In front of my eyes it starts to thrash an urgent rhythm. It unpeels its eyelids painfully, casts around and focuses on me with its shining black orbs. It's growing in front of my horrified eyes, faster than I thought imaginable. It breaks out of the box, pushing itself to stand. it staggers, streamers of gleet anchoring it to the floor. It struggles against them, breaking the slimy bonds as its cries become roars, hair sprouting all over it. The mouth widens, great teeth snarl as me as I try to step back but I can't move. I'm trapped, immobile and helpless. Even if I could move, where would I run?

It's towering over me now, flexing scimitar claws at the end of its rippling arms, its savage animal face bisected by the roaring toothy maw. It lumbers towards me and the roaring forms into speech, indistinct to begin with but as it repeats its refrain it becomes horribly understandable.

"Millenium Estates - A Thoroughbred Lifestyle"*

I will myself awake, but it's no good. I realise this is no nightmare. This is reality.

* Gulf News saw a double page tabloid real estate ad running today with this very tagline. Dare to Dream! Live to Love! We're BACK, babies!