Short Nightmare

I stepped out of my car and into the darkness, and I immediately knew that something was wrong. My head was swimming. My feet were dragging. I looked to my left, and noticed that the lights of my neighbors’ houses were distorted, yellowing, dying under the weight of the night that surrounded them. I took a few faltering steps forward, but it was getting harder to move. I could feel tingling in my extremities as invisible weight clung to my limbs. I was hunched under it as I passed below the motion-activated light above my garage, which flickered, and died. I opened the gate of my fence and collapsed into the grass on the other side. The grass was prickly and wet against my naked skin. The smell of black dirt filled my nose. I lost all sense of direction, blindly fumbling and squelching and rolling in that grass and dirt like an animal. I could only open my eyes halfway, the yellowed lights pinpricks, like stars, against the ever-thickening darkness around me. Choked sounds came from my throat, and my hands beat senselessly at my sides as I began to seize and convulse. I could feel the hot vomit working its way up my throat, burning through my esophagus. I was dying.
And then I woke up. With a shivering hand, I turned on the lamp beside my bed. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
I remembered Will, then. Will, of the cross face tattoos, of the cheek-borne tear, of the long blonde hair. He’d just been a kid when I knew him. We had both been kids. We had both  been over our heads, and made bad decisions, but his were somewhat more visible than mine. We had nothing in common otherwise and he had been my friend. I had come downstairs once, the ants still crawling under my skin after a similar nightmare, and found him sitting alone. It was the middle of the night. I stared at him, horrified, transfixed, sat a few feet away, his teeth unnaturally white, his eyes crystalline, as he explained to me with a smile that I was not like the other kids at the halfway house. I was like him, you see. And the two of us were different, different in such a way that our souls were made of purer stuff. He believed that we were descended from angels. He believed that I was unconsciously practicing astral projection, a practice that he himself had mastered. He believed that something was attacking me in my sleep and that it wanted nothing less than my angelic soul. He said the same happened to him. I said nothing, and returned to bed, and less than six hours later I found him slumped over cold in the bathroom, the burnt spoon still coated in the liquid Xanax he shot into his carotid artery, a blood-tinged needle in his hand.
And I knew then that I had to go look in my front yard.
I stepped out of my room and into the darkness, and I knew immediately that something was wrong. The shadows were crawling with life. Wherever I looked, there was something lurking in the corner of my eye. I took a few faltering steps into the hallway. I looked left through the doorway of my bathroom, and saw the mirror, a flat pool of ink. A hunched, pale, shivering thing grimaced back at me. It was getting harder to move. My extremities tingled as my heart hammered at its cage, my feet dragged across the carpet. I made it to the light switch at the end of the hall, and flipped it, but the light above sputtered, and died. I opened my front door and looked out and I saw,
And I saw,
Out there
In the grass
Just visible in the yellowed light
That the gate was open
That there was a dent
In the grass past the gate
Where someone had
Fallen
And I could tell
That that person
Had been dragged back out
The same way they came in
I slammed my front door shut and I walked back to my room and I slammed that door too, and I locked it, and I will be god damned if I ever go back to sleep again.