Until this hellish bout of terror my worst nightmares were occasional out of body experiences that left me disoriented but relatively unscathed.
Writing in the wee hours of the morning before dawn even considers brightening the new day is commonplace for me. Inspiration often comes to interrupt my slumber, and I fire up my computer or latch on to the notebook kept on the nightstand. I jot it down before the brilliant revelation escapes.
Many of my works have a paranormal twist woven into the plot, but I don't write horror. I woke in a cold sweat and realized the room was like a deep freeze as well as black as pitch. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. So I reached out in the direction of the nightstand to flick on the small lamp.
"What the hell?" I scrambled to my feet from where I assumed I had toppled from my bed. Must be a power outage, flitted through my still foggy mind. My bare toes were getting numb, and then I realized I wasn't standing on the plush warm carpet of my bedchamber. The surface beneath my feet felt like frozen cobblestones.
"Tom?" I called out to my husband. No response.
"Kaila!" My large black German Shepherd slept at the foot of my bed and should have been at my side once I fell out of bed. Or Did I?
My heart was bruising the inside of my ribcage and I was beginning to feel lightheaded. The thought occurred to me that I was still asleep and suffering a heart attack. I pinched myself, hard. "Shit!" that hurt, but didn't alter my reality.
The air was getting foul. It was the odor of urine; I vividly remember that smell gagging me when I would walk the halls to my mom's room in the nursing home. Was I in one of those places, and if so how did I get here? Perhaps the fright had caused me to lose control of my bladder and the odor was coming from me.
I began to hope that I was dead and residing in purgatory. That scenario was definitely more appealing than being blind and confined in a nursing home, or locked away in a cold dark prison by a maniac.
"Okay. God, where the hell am I?"
I heard a door slam and the reverberations traveled across the floor and up my legs, similar to aftershocks from a major earthquake. I heard my mother's voice tell me "I thought you were smarter than to cuss when you're talking to God."
"Mom, are you here too?" No answer. It was probably my subconscious merely tapping into my memory of her voice. Then a heavy breathing filled the room. I covered my ears to block out the sound which brought to mind the heavy breathing of a phone stalker, but amplified a thousand times. Again the huge metal sounding door slammed and the awful breathing stopped.
"Hello, is anyone there?" Nada! Zilch!
I decided to pray, a bit more respectfully, that I would once more see the sun rise and not be trapped here until I died, or if I had already left the earthly plain that I wouldn't be stuck here for eternity. "Lord, I mean, I wasn't that bad. Was I?"
