I have terrible nightmares 5/7 days of the week.  Here’s my most recent one.

I was in a house. The halls were washed with ghastly bluish-purple light, the color of a fresh bruise.  The kind of bruise where the blood is mere millimeters from leaking out of the damaged skin.  The walls were covered with photographs in dull black frames. Photographs, with dusty, cracked glass laying spider webs over sallow, sagging faces. All other manner of macabre things hung alongside the photographs. Things… I can’t even describe. Not a centimeter of the walls was visible.  They bulged, distended like sick a stomach, breathing in and out with slow, rasping breaths stirring the musky air.  The decorations breathed with them, watching, waiting, and smiling.

I realized the things on the walls were half eaten, disintegrated beyond the point recognition.  They were shells to an anemone, digested and pushed back out as to create armor for the soft-bodied mouth-stomach.

I found myself, against my will, walking into a room.  The door locked.  And the floor beneath me, the bed beside me everything was inhaling, feverishly trying to pull me in, to get closer.

And then the dolls came.

They marched and crawled and slid and rolled out of the walls with their button eyes dangling, ogling, bouncing madly from their heads on invisible tethers.  Their red, smiling mouths dripped with viscous blackness, filth bubbling forth from lips like rotting sausages.

They reached for me, groaning and laughing with their hollow, putrid, sweet voices echoing terribly around the room.

All the while the house tried to suck me down, somewhere dank and foul, into its roiling stomach.

It wanted to me…  To devour me and digest, to make me part of the decorated walls.  To use my bones as armor and garnish its halls with my skin until it decayed into a mass of putrescence too fetid and melting to drape across the picture frames.

I don’t believe in God. But when they first emerged and started toward me I fell to my knees and begged God or something -anything to save me.

And of course, nothing came.  As I knew it wouldn’t.  There is no God.  And nothing will ever save me but myself.

I burst through the door, the wood of the door frame too weak to hold the rusting lock. The dolls chased me, coming slowly, but steadily with their jerking, broken movements, and the floor rolling and pitching and trying to throw me back into their rotting fabric arms.

Now they were corpses and dolls at together. Flesh melting off their stuffed fabric bones, the smell of rot and mothballs and decaying silk filling the air, their stringy hair writing and hissing like snakes.

The bruise-light made their white, white skin look monstrous… Thickened, oxygen-less blood sloughed like pig slop behind their papery skin.  There was a gruesome, delighted gleam in their black button eyes.  One that promised a gristly embrace when they caught me.  And there was no doubt that they would… No doubt at all…