Crow

03. Nightmare

____Art by Melissa Houpert

Philip woke up to a bitter taste in the back of his mouth, and his head felt like hundreds of needles had been nailed to his brain, like a needle case. When he finally opened his eyes he was lying on the floor, staring at his room ceiling. The large glass windows were wide open and cold, the rainy wind passed through them with hate. The trees from the yard were trembling and whaling under a vacant sky where nothing but blackness could be seen. The room was darkened too. Philip had no idea what time it was, but many hours had passed, a whole day actually.

He felt nauseous and dizzy, and as he tried to sit up, whatever substance was left in his stomach climbed up through his throat and ended up sown over the greyish carpet. He dragged himself to the door, still unable to stand up.

"MUUUUM!", he tried, but the house felt lonelier than ever. "MUUUM, I NEED HELP!"

It was like a bad tasted deja vu. He had caught up himself aking for help and surrounded by that feared blackness, and as he listened to his own echo resounding amidst the walls, a flash of the nightmare made its way into reality, and now the floor was turned into coal mud, and the walls were crumbling down about to bury him. He rushed to cross the door which colour had changed to a rotten black and kept dragging himself all along the hallway. His heart was beating erratically and once again, the feeling of a shade about to catch and swallow him was there.

The stairs encountered him, and in the rush to escape he could only fall down, rolling like a rock down a hill, feeling his bones complaining about the painful falling. As his body finally reached the bottom, he could see his mother being dragged to an immense dark pool that floated in the middle of the room. Her eyes were red and her knuckles too, bloody and bruised, as she tried to hold on to whatever she could, to keep herself from being dragged by the black.

"Philip!! Philip!!", she begged, but her boy was too weak to move and too petrified to even answer. He wanted to hold her hand but he couldn't move. The floor seemed to curl up and bend under him, everything was swirling too fast for him to be able to move. He watched her mum struggling to hold on to the floor. Her nails scratched the wood of the ground as she finally disappeared in the dark, leaving only a deaf scaream behind.

Philip couldn't move yet, and it was hard to understand what was happening.

"It's a nightmare!", he told himself. But this nightmare was even more real than anytime before. "It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare."

He closed his eyes so hard it hurt, and everything turned white.