The Beautiful Dead

4

His dreams were not pleasant. In them there was darkness, an unnatural darkness, sinking, sinister, where monsters lurk in hiding. There was a man in his dreams. He couldn't see his face, only piercing yellow eyes and a wide, crooked smile against a shadow, but he knew evil hung close around him. There was an odd, skeletal appearance about him, like the cold, dead look of trees in the winter. When he moved he made a wooden, creaking sound, the sound of an old rocking chair. Menace radiated off him like the stench of rot on a corpse. In the dream the man was searching for Richard, following him, waiting. He tried to escape him, riding into the dark with no sense of direction, cold and alone, but he never could.
He had been seeing him more frequently in his dreams. It started slowly, his disturbing image only appearing in the corners of his consciousness in the way a shadow crosses someone's vision from the corner of their eye. It unnerved him, sent a cold chill over his flesh leaving goosebumps, but what he felt was more of a sense of danger than fear. Now, every time he fell asleep the chill of death overwhelmed him, and that sensation of danger had evolved into outright terror, for the glowing yellow eyes of the faceless, smiling man appeared to him wherever he turned. Often, he found himself in a wood, light the color of the moon guiding his way, running from the man. All around, people emerged from the trees, their faces clear to him in the grey-blue light, ghostly in appearance, the faces of those he had hurt throughout his life. They didn't speak, only watched him, a thousand condemning eyes leering in the brush, as he tried to outrun the faceless man for one more night. Blood seeped from the earth as an upside-down rain, cast out from the depths of the underworld, and the ground glistened red under the light as Richard ran. No matter how hard he tried to run, the dream always ended with him stuck in the bloody mud, the faceless man closing in, his maniacal smile never wavering.
He jolted awake, bolting upright in the chair. Cold sweat ran down his face, and his lungs burned as he panted, trying to catch pace with his heart. Shadows danced across his vision, moving in the corners of the room and along the walls. The man in the dream lurking there. Waiting.
It wasn't until his heart pacified that he took notice of Pete. He was sitting by the fireplace still, the chair turned around now, faced towards him. He was watching him, fiddling with something in his hands. There was a strangeness in his eyes, an eeriness in the way he watched, as though there were a different man sitting with Richard than there was earlier. Light glinted off the surface of the object, silhouetting a curved blade in white glimmer. He rotated it around his forefinger, pressing the tip to the top of the finger. It spun around and around, the shimmer undulating down its length with each motion. Richard felt the sensation of a cold wave washing over his body, hair standing on end, and a peculiar yet overwhelming knowledge of something being wrong.
Hours passed. The fire appeared to have died a while ago, leaving crumbled chars glowing red in the pit. Most of the light in the room came from the candle aglow on the table in the middle of the room. The little flame wavered in the near-imperceptible breeze, the only movement in the place but outside the wind howled, swirling flakes violently across the window glass, and Richard figured there would be another few feet of snow by morning. It would be slow travel back.
The men sat in silence for the rest of the night, sleepless, red-eyed. Richard had traveled much in his life, and more than once had been betrayed by his companions, which had whetted his wits and senses to such things, and though he had grown to like the boy, he would not let Pete catch him off guard. Tomorrow, fates permitting, the pair of them would leave for the fort with the bodies in tow. He hoped to himself that that would be the end of it.