DREAM DOUBLE

J.E.Deegan                                                                                        ©Cop right 1994                   6303 Elmgrove                                                                                 Approx. 2,040 words                    Spring, TX 77389

(281) 251-9850

 jdeegan536@yahoo.com 

DREAM DOUBLE

“Hey, pig breath. I had a dream about you last night.”

           Clayton Gill felt his heart shrivel. Amelia rarely entered the kitchen this early in the morning. Normally, he had enough time to gulp down a bowl of shredded wheat and vacate the house before she came downstairs. And on those rare occasions when contact with her couldn’t be avoided, she didn’t speak to him - except for spitting out one of the thousand-or-more disgusting names she kept stored in her warped mind. That she would say anything that sounded even remotely decent, preceded though it was by her favorite nickname for him, caused the shredded wheat to grab like barbed wire in his throat.

           He looked warily up from his bowl to Amelia, who stared scornfully back with her perpetually narrowed, hate-filled eyes from the far end of the table. Amelia, age twelve and three years Clayton’s senior, hated him, a fact he knew well before he moved in with his Uncle Curtis and Aunt Sandra nearly eight months ago. When Grandma Gill told him he’d have to live with them, he had thrown the worst tantrum of his life. Far worse than the one he threw a few days earlier when she told him that his parents had been killed in an automobile accident. That one took place because he couldn’t understand why his parents had to die - because he had felt alone and afraid and didn’t have the strength to fight all the strange, threatening feelings swirling around inside him. But he did understand that living with Uncle Curtis and Aunt Sandra meant that he would have to face his brutal witch of a cousin Amelia every day for God only knew how long. Forever, maybe. Pure unbridled dread had brought that tantrum on.

           Grandma Gill didn’t tell him that she was paying his aunt and uncle two-hundred dollars a month to keep him. He learned that just a few weeks ago when his aunt left his grandmother’s check on the kitchen table while she went to answer the phone.

He didn’t have the foggiest idea why Amelia hated him. As far as he could remember, he had never done anything to warrant the sadistic treatment he received from her. In fact, before moving in with his aunt and uncle he had only seen Amelia five or six times in his entire life - at occasional holiday get-togethers at Grandma Gill’s. Yet clear as a bell was the fact that this wretched ruffian of a cousin had grown to loathe him with a constant and consummate passion. And in the eight months they had lived in the same house, he had found little comfort in learning that Amelia seemed to hate every breathing creature on the planet with equal intensity.

                                                                      ***

“Hey, toad face! Did you hear me? I said I had a dream about you last night!”

           Clayton didn’t know what to say. He felt his eyes creep up toward his wrinkled brow and move side-to-side in search of his aunt, who, if she were within earshot, might tell Amelia to shut up. She did that sometimes when she’d had a bellyful of her daughter and wasn’t up to listening to her foul mouth.

           But this morning Aunt Sandra wasn’t nearby.

           Amelia began to move and Clayton felt a familiar clammy claw of fear hook into his stomach. She never came near him unless she intended to beat the crap out of him. Reaching him, she grabbed his hair and yanked his head back until he felt a series of sharp little cracks from the bones grinding in his neck. Amelia was big - built like a wrecking ball and nearly as heavy. The kids at school laughed behind her back and had about as many gross names for her as she had for him. Not one of them dared to use any of those names to her face, though. Not even the sixth-grade boys. Not since last spring when Greg Hott, the toughest of the lot, called her “blubber ass” and was rewarded with twenty-seven stitches in his face and a cast around his left arm.

           “I’m talking to you, maggot brain! Are you listening!? Don’t you want to know about my dream?”

           Clayton couldn’t control the sharp shriek that squeezed out of his mouth when Amelia’s hand knotted itself into his hair and set the roots on fire.

           “Shut up, you miserable worm, or I’ll rip your scalp off! Understand!?”

           Clayton clamped his eyes shut and turned limp, a tactic that sometimes worked if Amelia wasn’t in too foul a mood. At such times he’d get off with nothing worse than a solid smack to an ear or a sharp cuff to the back of his neck. No such luck this time - Amelia’s hand twisted deeper into his hair, a sure sign that the worst was yet to come.

           “It was night in my dream,” Amelia whispered gruffly into his ear. “It was raining, and you were crawling around in the mud. Only the rain wasn’t water and the mud wasn’t dirt. The rain was blood and the mud was guts and brains! And you were crawling around in that oozing slop like a stinking hog! And you were laughing like crazy…like you were having the time of your life! What do you think of that, you little maggot?!”

           She gave a quick, violent tug to his hair then viciously smacked the side of his face. Her fingers closed around his ear and twisted. Pain flooded through his cheek and he instinctively reached for his throbbing ear. Though he tried desperately not to, he began to cry.

           Cackling madly, Amelia tore his hand from his cheek and continued twisting his tortured ear. “Why are you crying, pig breath? Huh? Why all the big, wet tears? You weren’t crying in my dream. You were laughing! Laughing and grunting and having a grand old time while you were slopping around in that stinking mess of guts and brains. Why, little-baby-pig-breath Clayton? Why were you enjoying yourself so much? Was it because you like chewing on guts? Or is there another reason? Huh? Tell me, you slimy worm! Why were you laughing in my dream?”

           “For Christ’s sake, you two brats shut up down there! Knock it off now or so help me I’ll come down and beat the hell out of the both of you! You hear me?!”

For the moment, Aunt Sandra’s voice boomed liberation down the stairwell and into the kitchen. Amelia grabbed Clayton’s hair again, twisted his head upward, and growled into his burning ear. “This isn’t over yet, wart face! I’m going to have the same dream tonight. I just know I am. And I’ll find out what you thought was so funny. And if you’re a good little toad the rest of the day, maybe I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.” The heel of Amelia’s hand thudded like a brick into the back of Clayton’s head.

Amelia backed away, followed by her cold jeering laugh. And Clayton, his face pressed into his hands and his bruised ear burning like something infected, felt a brief wave of rage billow inside him before it collapsed under a stronger wave of pain and humiliation.

But the roiling anger remained in his gut, a small fiery coal that refused to go out.

***

That night Clayton had a dream…the same dream Amelia had told him about that morning. It was night in the dream, just as she had said, and there was a strange reddish glow all around. It was raining too, but the rain was thick and lumpy. It looked like blood and splattered down into a steaming, churning mass of grayish-yellow ooze that did look like brains and guts, just as Amelia had told him.

           A witness to this odd, gruesome dream from someplace detached, Clayton felt his stomach turn and rise toward his throat. Then something caught his eye…something that stirred within the viscid pool of squirming gore then moved like some huge zigzagging burrowing animal. He watched horrified as a head broke the surface, and his eyes nearly popped from their sockets when he recognized a grotesque, dream-created version of himself staring crazily back at him. Its eyes were wide and frenzied, and its mouth was furiously chomping on a blood-filled piece of intestine. Its hair was matted and covered with puss-colored splotches of jagged flesh that leaked twisting streams of dark gloppy blood down its face.

           Oddly calm, Clayton watched from a numbed state of wonder as his nightmare twin threw back its head, swallowed the wriggling length of intestine then lunged face-first into the turbid, steaming slime. A moment later it surfaced with dripping entrails and what looked to be gnarled clumps of brain tissue clamped between its bloodied teeth. And it was laughing, in a series of hoarse, throaty grunts that bubbled through the offal crammed in its mouth.

           Then another sound…a sharp, fright-filled squeal that came from above, off to the left. To Clayton, the sound carried everything that was sheer and Godless terror. The Clayton-thing’s wild eyes snapped around and the dream suddenly shifted to a small round table, the legs of which were rooted in the bubbling pool of viscera.

           Amelia stood upon the table…a hugely fat, quivering Amelia standing with her back arched against a black wall and her head raised as far above the swirling pit of flesh and blood as she could hold it. Her swollen mouth, opened as wide as a dinner plate, trembled, and her rounded eyes gleamed with the sick, silky look of raw and fathomless fear. One hand was pressed just to the side of her right eye, her chubby fingers partially covering a ragged hole in her temple that spurted gray, greasy lumps of brain which tumbled down upon her arm to splat in the churning muck beneath her. Her other hand clutched at a jagged gash in her stomach, but it couldn’t hold back the streams of thick blood or the ropy coils of intestines that sprayed out and down upon the Clayton-thing.

           The Clayton-thing grunted, spit out the remnant of guts and brains then pushed itself to its knees. Its crimson tongue crawled greedily around the black, dripping hole of its mouth. Its hands rose slowly upward, each finger tipped with a long, black, razor-sharp nail. The dream-made Clayton moved slowly toward the table, and Amelia stiffened and screamed like all the demons of Hell. The Clayton-thing’s mouth spread hugely open…thick, barbed, bloodied teeth smiled. The black, sharpened nails reached upward…

                                                                       ***

Clayton awoke with a start. Sweat streamed down his face; his breath roared like fire in his lungs.

           Amelia was still screaming.

           The lights in the hallway snapped on and Clayton heard his aunt and uncle bumping and cursing their way toward Amelia’s room.

           It seemed hours before she stopped screaming.

***

Clayton sat anxiously at the kitchen table, eyes glued to the doorway which led to the stairwell, ears primed for footfalls. A full bowl of shredded wheat sat before him. But this morning he had no appetite for shredded wheat, which he normally craved. He had tried a spoonful but found it utterly without flavor, as dully uninteresting as soggy cardboard. Besides, he felt oddly full. And there was a peculiar but satisfying taste in his mouth.

           He thought Amelia would never come down, but he finally heard her heavy footsteps moving slowly and clumsily down the stairs. The footsteps stopped abruptly just beyond the door to the kitchen, and Clayton swore he heard the sound of deep, frightened breathing. Then, looking pale as a ghost, Amelia crept warily into the kitchen. One hand was pressed to the side of her head; the other clutched at her stomach.

           Clayton grinned and let his thickening tongue glide over his narrowing, sharpening teeth. He dug his lengthening fingernails into the palms of his hands and looked briefly at them. They were turning black. Then he looked back to Amelia.

           “Hey, pig breath,” he snarled. “I had a dream about you last night.”

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