The Sleep

When I woke up from my drug-induced haze, fighting consciousness and struggling desperately to return to my twilight sleep, I noticed a pile of empty clothes that I think Shauna had been wearing the last time we were awake.  Syringes still scattered over the floor.  Burn marks.

I blinked, looking around.  No one was there.  I hurriedly checked my pockets.

The little bag was still there, nearly empty of course, but if Shauna was going to take off she would’ve cut off my leg to get at the traces left at the bottom of that bag.  So she must still be here.  Somewhere.

I stood up, catching my balance on the wall behind me, feeling the peeling yellowed wallpaper slide off under my hand.  I looked around the dim, dusty room.  No signs of Shauna.  I then glanced up, right into the reflection of a cracked mirror across the room.

My heart stopped. My blood turned to ice.  My breath, already labored, stuck in my throat.

It’s hair was white, cascading in thin cobwebs down it’s back.  A beard nearly as long, growing from a gaunt, skeletal face.  A thing, a creature, at least a century old, stared back at me.  It’s face stretched into a horrified grin and I saw what was left of the thing’s teeth was blackened, rotted.

I looked down at the pile of Shauna’s clothes again.  They weren’t actually just clothes.

A skull.  Bones.  Skinless, dry.  They’d been there for a long time in their grave of clothing on the floor.

I looked back up at the thing in the mirror.  Shaking, I raised my hand.  In the mirror a twisted yellow-clawed hand did the same.  I looked at my own hand.

Twisted.  Yellow clawed.  With wisps of a white cobweb beard tangled among the petrified fingers.

I stood there, silently, with the thing in the mirror also standing silently with me.

We stood there together.  And we knew.  We knew that one of us was a reflection of the other.  I wondered vaguely which one of us was real.

And, staring into the creature’s ancient eyes, wondered how long I’d been sleeping.