So, this post is going to be a tad dark... However, it's already been written and while I am greatly disturbed at how it practically screams to be psychoanalyzed, I am not ashamed. Thus, without further ado, I give you my awaken-drenched-in-a-cold-sweat-with-unsteady-pulse nightmare from last week. Enjoy.
Last night, I dreamt I killed my father.
Twice.
Or was it three times? The killings rather seemed to run together after a while…
I was living with my family in the house in Lehi my mother currently resides in. I had 3 younger siblings, all with varying oddities, and none of whom bore any resemblance to me whatsoever. All three had pale blond hair and blue eyes, and ranged between the ages of 5 and 2. The oldest girl was chubby and awkward. She looked the least abnormal of the three, but she had the most difficulty moving around due to her unfortunate obesity at such a young age. One phrase seemed to spring immediately to mind when gazing upon this child.
“White trash.”
The second youngest was a little boy, who looked physically healthy and perfectly normal. His oddity came in the form of his attire, for he was dressed in girls’ clothing that were far too small for him. The clothing seemed somewhat jumbled, as though he had rifled through a chest of dress-up costumes and had picked whatever items caught his eye, paying little to no attention to matching or style. His toddler belly poked out from between the top of a ruffled skirt and the bottom of a striped tube top. He sported a necklace of purple beads that swung low to his waist, and he tottered around in tiny plastic heels, like the kind that come with the purchase of a Disney princess costume. To complete his ensemble, he wore bright, garish makeup that clashed gaudily with his pristine blue eyes. I somehow sensed that the boy had been the one to dress himself, although this was never actually made clear.
The youngest girl was most freakish of them all. She had been born with a deformity in which her left hand had fused with her head, and her facial features and formed in her palm. It was as though her hand was glued to the front of where her face should be, palm facing out, but this did not hide her facial features for they were located symmetrically in the center of that palm. Two blue eyes, a nose, a tiny mouth… All while five digits wiggled distractingly above them.
Although none of these children bore any sort of familial resemblance to me, I still felt responsible for them. I knew they were my siblings. I knew I had to protect them.
Protect them?
Oh, right. The killing.
Throughout the dream, numerous attempts to take my life were made. It was not clear who was trying to kill me, but it was obvious that someone certainly was. So far I had been lucky, managing to narrowly escape every trap and mishap that had happened to befall me. Around the time of each attack I started to catch glimpses of this girl. She looked about my age, perhaps a little younger. She was a few inches taller than I, thin, with brown hair a few shades darker than my own. She looked fast. Athletic. Like someone who had done track and field in high school. She was dressed in summer clothes. Simple tan shorts and a tank top, her brown hair held back in a single ponytail.
The first thing I really noticed about her was that she was watching me. Always. But when I tried to reach her she would disappear like an apparition. Since I kept seeing her around after very clear attempts on my life, I started to assume that it was her. The problem was I just couldn’t catch her. She was always just barely out of my reach…
Until, suddenly, she wasn’t.
She was there. Right in front of me.
And she was bleeding.
She had what appeared to be a stab wound in her stomach, and she was losing blood at a fairly rapid pace. She told me we didn’t have a lot of time. She told me she had come to warn me.
She managed to tell me that the person who was trying to kill me was my father, just before swaying and blacking out from blood loss. I caught her before she fell, pulling one of her arms across my shoulders and started to take her back to the house where I could try and call for help. I remember thinking of my mother, but only fleetingly. I knew my mother was there. That is, I knew my mother was in my life…. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t present. I knew, no matter what I tried to do to contact her, she wouldn’t come.
I knew I was alone.
We made it inside the house, and I lay the girl down on the floor while I searched for a weapon of some kind. I found a kitchen knife. A large, sharp, kitchen knife, the kind one always brandishes when one is trapped in a horror film against an invisible enemy. Only I didn’t want to use this knife. It was too large, too lethal. When I held it, I knew how easy it would be slide it into someone’s gut, how the skin would give way and the blood would lubricate the blade as it pierced flesh and organs. I didn’t like knowing how easy it would be, so rather than use the knife, I hid it instead.
For my weapon, I chose a spoon.
I went back to where I had left the girl, and found my father standing there, looking down at her. I started to move slowly toward him, spoon pointed forward in a warning. I remember he said something, but I didn’t hear it. I saw his mouth move and form words, but I couldn’t hear above the roaring in my ears as I advanced upon him. I don’t know if he was pleading for mercy. I didn’t want to hear it if he was. I just knew I had to kill him.
Suddenly the spoon didn’t seem like such a good idea.
Then I thrust forward, expecting extreme resistance against such a pitiful weapon, but the item in my hand slid easily through the flesh, and I realized that instead of the spoon, I was somehow wielding the kitchen knife instead. I pulled back in shock, staring blankly at the blood that ran down the blade to drip rhythmically onto my hand. I looked up and saw the mild surprise on my father’s face. And then I thrust again. And again.
And again.
Five. That’s how many times I stabbed him. Excessive to say the least, but he was still standing, still staring at me, so just kept going. I felt each sickening slide of the knife into his body, felt each easy penetration. The sensation is difficult to describe. It was rather like being on a roller coaster. It was disorienting, I felt queasy and anxious. I wanted to close my eyes until it was over.
But it was also indescribably thrilling.
There’s a reason people wait in lines for roller coasters.
After the fifth wound, he finally fell to the floor, a pool of blood already waiting to greet him. I dropped the knife and went to check on the girl, shaking her awake and telling her that we were going to get her help. That it was over. That I’d killed him. She blinked dazedly for a moment and I watched as terror and despair seeped into her expression. I didn’t understand, she said. The man I had just killed, the man who was my father, had had hundreds of families before mine. He would marry a woman, start a family, and eventually he would destroy them, one by one, before moving on to another town. Another woman. To start again. Leaving a trail of dead children in his wake.
She told me that she was the only one who had ever managed to escape with her life. That at one time, he had been her father as well. I ached for all of the innocents he’d already murdered, but I tried to console the girl and tell her that at least now it was truly over. He couldn’t hurt anyone else. She sobbed and told me again that I didn’t understand, that she had tried, that others had tried, to achieve what I thought I had. He’s impossible to kill, she said. He never dies.
I turned and looked back to where I’d left my father’s body. The pool of blood remained, motionless proof of the scene that had transpired, but my father was gone.
I had never felt terror as I did in that moment. I bolted into action, hoisting the girl to her feet and dragging her outside. He must have gone out the door adjacent to where he’d fallen. It was a moonless night outside, pitch-black and difficult to see. The girl and I were chasing at shadows, trying desperately to find him before he could find us.
I found a new weapon near the garage. An ax. I’d never held one before this, but I’d forgotten my knife in my haste to get outside, and although the weight of the ax was unfamiliar, at least it beat using a spoon.
The girl was starting to babble about nonsense, the severe loss of blood appeared to finally be taking it’s toll. I grabbed hold of her and told her we had to go back inside, that my siblings were still inside and that I had to keep them safe. As we opened the door and stepped over the threshold, I saw a shadowy figure moving into the living room and I sprinted after it, leaving the girl to follow me on her own if she had the strength to do so. I skid to a stop at the entrance to the unlit living room and flipped the light switch. The scene that greeted me was unnervingly gruesome, for there was blood drenched everywhere. Blood was spattered across the furniture, dripping from the walls and ceilings and seeping into the carpet. The most unnerving thing about it was that I couldn’t tell where it was from. Was it my father’s? It wasn’t my siblings’, I knew they were safe because I saw all three of them, gazing up at me, seemingly unaware of the carnage that was around them.
Then I saw my father. He was injured, but standing, and clearly alive. He looked different though. Clean shaven. He was missing the dark, bristly moustache he had sported through my entire childhood. It altered his features so drastically that for one heart-stopping moment I thought it couldn’t have been him. The reason it was heart-stopping was because my body had already taken action, lifting the heavy ax and swinging it towards his head.
Just as the blade made contact, I knew that despite his changed appearance, he was definitely still my father. He opened his mouth to say something, or perhaps to scream, but although I didn’t hear him, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t a scream at all.
It was a laugh.
The ax sliced through his open mouth, severing the top of the jaw neatly from the bottom. He crumpled to the floor, the majority of his skull thumping heavily to the side. I exhaled in relief that I had killed him before he had hurt my siblings, and the ax slipped from my hands as I drank in the sight of my abnormal but blessedly alive brother and sisters. I then remembered what the girl had said, about my father being impossible to kill, but surely severing his head would have done the trick? I glanced away from my siblings to look again that the body, to assure myself that he was well and truly dead.
The body was gone, as was the head.
No sooner had I registered this when I heard a sudden noise immediately behind me.
And then I woke up.
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