“Tom?” Jeanie called from the hallway outside my bedroom. “Is everything alright?”
The bedroom door opened and my wife stood there, concern etched into her face, her body leaning against the door. I wanted to lie and tell her everything was fine, that I just fell out of bed, but it just wasn’t true. When I stood, her eyes widened in fear. I thought her reaction must be from the look on my face or something she saw in my eyes. I didn’t know I had brought something with me from my dreams.
I took a step toward her and she backed away. I felt a strange sensation in my face, and when I looked down I saw a dark snout wrinkled on top, heard a bestial snarl filling the room as I tried to say, “Don’t run.” My heart thudded in my chest but not from fear—far from it. It was the rush of the predator, but it was more than that: it was the enticing lure of pure evil and wanton desire combined with the knowledge that I could kill her easily and without remorse. These feelings weren’t mine. They belonged to the beasts inside me, inside my dreams and clawing through my mind. They wanted out, just as they clawed through the border of my dream.
I had gone to sleep a loving husband and good daddy, but I had awoken a monster. A monster that hungered.
She dropped to her knees and screamed as I reached for her face, my fingernails having elongated into black claws, and I watched in fascination as my hands turned into paws. I tried to say, “I’m sorry, Jeanie,” but I merely growled, and when I realized I wasn’t sorry I forgot about the foolishness of speech.
I was about to kill Jeanie, for-better-or-worse Jeanie, the woman I sometimes loved and often hated. I knew I could do it easily with one swipe of my claws, or cut off her air with a slow bite to her neck. Or with a twist of my head—my fangs still on her soft meat—I knew I could tear out her throat. The savage power to main, destroy and kill in gleeful rage beckoned—the beasts had me in their clutches.
And then Samantha’s voice rang out.
“Daddy?” my little girl cried from her bedroom. “I had a bad dream.”
I tried to say, “Sammy?” But the sound came out a garbled choke. I panicked. Jeanie fainted at my feet, but my little girl walked to her bedroom door. I heard her little feet on the cold hardwood floor, smelled the drool on her chin with my enhanced senses, felt the pulse of her quick beating heart.
I couldn’t let her see me like this.
I summoned every ounce of willpower I had as she turned the doorknob, and as her door began to open I fought back the beasts I had brought with me into the waking world. It was a desperate struggle between the savage evil of the dark things controlling me within and the love I held in my heart for my daughter; my desire to free myself from the darkness within fueled by the panic of Sammy seeing her daddy as a monster.
“No,” I yelled. Her door stopped moving, but I wasn’t talking to Sammy. “Get back.”
The dream I had before waking opened within me like an inner-universe, and I saw both reality and the dream surrounding me. I saw my bedroom and Jeanie still on the floor, the dark hallway and Sammy’s door wobbling back and forth, but I also saw the graveyard and the full moon, the gash in the night sky through which the dark things had come. I looked into that abyss and saw monsters on the other side coming closer, unimaginably worse, peering in, gazing at me with black-fanged smiles and grunts of desire.
“Get away,” I screamed.
“Daddy,” Sammy yelled. “You’re scaring me.”
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