HE Wakes the Dead

Grandma had taken Nikki to the best little shops and boutiques before she’d passed away. 

Sometimes, when she was too little to handle owning a delicate, handcrafted piece herself. It was their secret that she’d keep Nikki’s collection safe until she had the mind to come collect it.

Maybe… she did feel a little guilty for how that promise had faded from her memory.

It was months of excruciating waiting before the adults figured everything out so Nikki could finally receive the spanning collection across Grandma’s downsize of an apartment, that was her due in the Last Will and Testament.

Nikki could make her awful mistake right.

Grandma’s last birthday present for her now teenage granddaughter had been a lacy nightgown of silk-like fabric and magic in how it contrasted her dark hair and glinting dark eyes.

Each night since, in the silence of a closed window keeping the irritating noise of other people out, Nikki would lay the nightgown like a treasure ready for her out of the shower. 

She put on the piece with care. 

Atop her dresser was a music box. The very first piece a small Nikki had mooned over as a girl and was compelled to become the spitting image of the beautiful ballerina done in blush pink glass.

Grandma hadn’t smiled at Nikki so intent on such a grandiose dream. Maybe for what its thorny underbelly would do to her precious grandchild. 

Nikki held it deep in her chest, that she knew the frustrated, sharp sighing conversations grandma had had with her mother over the subject.

The ballerina was bound to a single spinning rod. Or spring? All the pink princess could do was pirouette. And she wasn’t allowed to put her leg down or loosen her tight, elegant bun.

Tick tock.

Tick tock.

Spinning abounds did the little ballerina twirl, forever like a clock.

Nikki brushed her hair to the elegant turn of a waltz played in piano from the box.

Gears turning and turning, slowly clicking at a pace for the ballerina to sleep.

Sometimes Nikki managed fifty strokes per side, sometimes even seventy before the tune ended. 

Since she had nothing to daydream to, she could brush her teeth without rushing.

Falling into bed for school or the weekend. If she wasn’t harangued by a mountain of homework on a Friday night Nikki would welcome when the sun would tease her awake.

_____________________________________________________________

Somewhere, somewhen very far away…

Dreams are a life all their own.

There are the spaces between each individual’s paradise. Where the watchers watch and temper the power of the dreamers.

The hand who held one of ad infinitum pink spheres was slender. “She” could be called feminine. 

“We shall start simply Little Darkness,” said the timbre of a peaceful voice that numbed the chill of the chasm. 

Slowly the sphere began to burn. And then take root.

Black crawled up its surface in fissures slow and aching as moss.

And the dreamer?

_____________________________________________________________

Nikki was almost sure she had a life before this.

A life beside dancing to the silvery mists and soft floors in bare feet.

Her body moved in a way that sang. Each turn of her head, picking and sometimes hawing like a slow, grieving bird. For an idea that a bird’s head should not comprehend, but whose body was much better suited than that clunky one.

Whatever creature it was. 

No, Nikki finds herself quite satisfied with this body and this bliss.

Her hair in a tight, elegant bun and a leotard like silk worm bands pressed to her skin like a tender kiss.

The only voice she’d heard had been the wind. It was the voice that helped guide her movements. It danced and she gave it credit and its amusement with her.

Only the words of a human could have stopped her…

She was reminded that she was very human.

“Yes, I suppose she does look fairly nice…”

“Gently. Handle her gently.”

Her arm first.

Turned to stone at a taxing arch over her head.

Then her right leg.

“Now how long have I had her for? Cheap too.”

Pieces of her coming together in their twisting and their ache.

Nikki couldn’t move. And she couldn’t see what now trapped and held her with arms pinned to her sides and without the grace to flail her feet.

Heart hammering she looked up at the rush of a grand exhale stealing her own breath away.

A face. A face of a child whose eyes gleamed for each and every thing that shone, clear with no thought to tomorrow in the way.

Nikki tried to speak. 

She tried to call out to that other human voice.

A human voice this thing with a little girl’s face didn’t seem to have.

Her gullet echoed like a church bell as it opened, teeth the size of office buildings but looking like the ivory keys of a piano.

Darkness consumed her. 

A slimy serpent probed her, suffocated her, only inside it could she scream.

Crickets chirp-chirp-chirped and junebugs buzzed.

Nikki shot up from bed, gasping and shivering.

Her glance shot like a dart to the right. To the left. Her dresser. Her door and how it led to the hallway, the restroom that just had to be at the very end, her bed’s own white comforter and how her legs made a singular hill seated on the bed.

She could breathe.

She took one big gulp of air and let it slowly slink out of her.

Nikki laid back down.

She’d forgotten. Had she been a bird in the dream? Had there been a floor or was it the ground? By happenstance some light passed by her window so she caught a glint of the ballerina’s pale pink shade. 

Had she been made of glass in… whatever that was supposed to be?

Then again, older siblings constantly mocked their little sisters and brothers at school. Dreams don’t mean a thing.

She vaguely remembered in the morning that something gave her a fright last night and kept creeping her out of her skin for awhile.

Not fair.

She was nervous about the big test next week.

Her form in the new set the dance club teacher was showing wouldn’t come together. And she couldn’t go to the community center barre until the weekends.

Nikki nudged (read: bullied) her mind to pipe down and settle to sleep eventually.

It was ten past one am.

Her head had decided to play a song on loop.

Nikki wasn’t in a dancing mood it seemed. 

She just swayed her head to its rhythm. 

It's a very fast rhythm.

The name of the song escaped her. Where the song was from escaped her.

Ponies. 

Nikki eventually realized ponies, technicolored and jewel beamed (she was borrowing that, she thinks) ponies sang and danced the song. 

She thinks one of them said hi.

That’s when her back snapped.

The sudden violation left her too harried to scream. 

And that might have been the one nice thing this horrific place did for her as it tortured her neck to stretch past what could be natural or human.

Her arms swelled, She felt her toes breaking and twisting, pushing inwards.

She fell to her face, her legs suddenly weak as paper to hold her up.

Squelch went her eyes.

Funnily enough just POP went her ears. 

But they were her ears. She didn’t realize just how attached she was to her ears until they took them from her.

She grasped. She gasped and reached, crawling for someone to reach her… 

HA HA HA

And what?

Help her? Just hold her?

Their awful mouths just stretched on too taut skin. Laughing at her.

HA HA HA

Her hands weren’t hands.

And they hurt. Did she just punch herself?

Her mouth refused to close.

She pulled and struggled, grunted and gritted her teeth. 

The laughter drowned her.

Nikki tried, she swears she tried with all she had. She couldn’t stop this mouth, that wasn’t even on loan, from smiling.

Laughing.

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

______________________________________________________________

Darkness was nothing.

Not skin, not muscle tissue.

However it knew it was young despite the pale pallor of his body, the rasp of a voice, the crack of jaw.

The feminine hand took the little one’s five fingers.

From the white and its pink orbs the pair went sideways.

To a Hub more akin to a night sky.

There was an out of place customer service-like desk there too.

Her face cracked a smile, seeing the tilt of the Little Nightma– Night one’s head. Confused and a bit uneasy of the things Dreamers can imagine.

They whom dictate what the world as they know it should be.

“There are many places. Beyond this, beyond every Dream, Little Darkness,” her soothing voice murmured. 

Smiling down at the one whose heart beat a curse.

“You watch over one Dreamer, one dreamscape…”

“All alone?” Little Darkness asked in the terror of the littlest Dreamers. The most powerful.

“Never truly. Eternity has eyes. And Watchers have hearts that beat in time…”

The Little Darkness wondered if they’d like his heart. 

Like a human’s was it red or was it black?

Was it made of Stardust like Fema’s?

_____________________________________________________________

Too much My Little Pony.

She’d gone too deep back into My Little Pony.

Besides, she had tests to think about. Ballet. The showcase. Homework threatening that she’d miss the showcase because homework was a nightmare like that.

Nikki hugged herself very tight as long as she could manage. 

Even if it took longer than the last one to fall asleep.

This time Nikki made too much noise when the dream melted into a horror show.

Acting like her mind was all twisted up from horror movies she was too weak to handle.

–WAS She weA–

She wanted to lie to her parents.

She didn’t lie.

They made her chamomile and whispered stories of grandma to her until she slipped back– into the dan– drop of sleep.

Sometimes two nights, sometimes one, sometimes even five nights if the Nightmare grows bold.

It grew very, very bold.

Nikki wanted to crack that it was as clingy and draining as a toxic ex in Mom’s soap operas. The kind that made her just gag. She thinks some parts are supposed to be scary, it all just looks like the hot actors were embarrassing themselves.

But if she said it aloud would this toxic pain in her neck get back at her for the thought?

It already liked turning the things she loved– secretly– against her.

She wasn’t allowed to be Nikki next time.

She had to watch the four year old her, hold her grandma’s hand.

Look up at her as she told Nikki a story of lovelorn girlhood and crack of the whip of how pampered and adored Nikki was.

Grandma walked uphill BOTH ways to school!

Nikki tried to hide her giggles! She swears!

– Maybe she’s lying just a little –

She had to watch little Nikki cry and sob after her grandma.

She had to feel how much that hurt. So much she breathed hard waking up. 

She was such a baby that she cried remembering grandma really had left her.

And on top of grandma dying, the reaper who had taken her had shown his face.

Taking little Nikki too, tricking her into a cloak that in its silken, breathing black looked unbearably cold and silent like a pillow pressed to your face.

_____________________________________________________________

Many, many bad dreams. The Nightmares. One and two and even five.

Many dreams ran black. Lined in fractures and its image blotted out in black roses.

“You will have Watch of this Dreamer from now on Little Darkness,” the Mother said. 

He gasped, eyes boring upon the hand which plucked the dream from his fingers holding it to the infinite so it could flutter back up. Hung by fate or physics.

“A grand undertaking I agree Little One,” the Mother continued, “your Dreamer is in grave peril, and so too is the world.”

And Little Darkness knew that peril’s name.

He bowed his head.

“The most important rule; much like the Night itself Little One, is to not be seen.”

“But I have to save her…”

Slender fingers ran down his cheek, lifting his head to gaze in the depths of galaxies, “for all their capacity to imagine, for all their power, a Dreamer’s mind… can only comprehend one world at a time.”

“Fema, what do we call that place? Where we the Guardians, cannot reach?”

–And Dreams turn to abstract; twisted and detached from prying eyes.--

_____________________________________________________________

Grandma never did think JUST a ballerina was good enough for her granddaughter.

She’d click her tongue about the money it cost to dress her like that. Whatever plague it meant for Nikki to wear the second skin of a leotard, a floofy tutu and hair in a tight, elegant bun.

But… she didn’t mean to.

Didn’t mean to do this. All the glass and delicate painted ceramic and China. 

Grandma was going to be so mad.

Nikki dropped to her knees, the rest of the house save for the cabinet holding her collection and a square of floor disappeared.

The pieces scuttled away from her, having a way out that she couldn’t find.

Almost hitting the cabinet something soft and ticklish fell. A single rose petal. 

In the black of a funeral dress.

Then another. And another.

Falling as something moaned at her from all sides.

“I loved you, I gave you all that you wanted…”

“Why would you do this, my darling?”

Grandma wasn’t angry. Nikki wished she was, her sorrow was much worse.

The rose petals swept across her face like a storm, funneling together into a terrible, mourning mouth. Crying and crying at Nikki who didn’t– at least she thinks she didn’t do this.

Nikki dropped her books, startled by the first bell of the school day.

Sadie was helping pick them up before Nikki fully realized what had happened. Sadie had taken her shoulders in a one-armed hug. 

“Come on let’s get to class, then you can choose a seat in the back and I’ll make sure Mr. Cooper doesn’t see you asleep in his DUMB Physics class.”

Nikki could only smile.

After all, she had the city showcase today in the evening.

One night, two nights, and even five.

Sometimes she’d woken only half awake and there was a stranger in that state, standing in a corner of her room where it was darkest. Watching. Just watching.

She was reprimanded quite harshly by Mr. Cooper. Nikki knew the man practically didn’t have a heart but, the blistering venom, being scolded in the DAY, made her want to cry instead of seethe like she’d normally do.

At 6:30 that evening…

Nikki tried not to shake too much, she’d known for awhile, hers was a tragic character in the story, she shouldn’t be shaking about wearing so much black and a headdress of weeping flowers. Black zircon pearls trailing serpentine from her thigh and stomach, to her neck.

Her heart was pounding, the stage lighting that rendered it in dreamy gold allowed too many shadows. She would be trapped on that stage, the audience’s faces were vague, she wouldn’t see –whe– if they turned against her, the stranger could pop backstage, on the wings, or from the railing work above the stage.

Her performance was sloppy.

She knew it, her turns and steps from one beat to the next faltered, they broke from the lines the script set. 

Her spirit was a downy chick, cowering inside itself terrified of the whole world.

Nikki didn’t pretend to be happy. Third place, just barely making it to the county-wide showcase. And then a state exhibition. 

That’s as far as her imagination once dared go.

She knew her parents had hoped the late night and keeping the grace and discipline to shine on stage so long would carry her away to a point where she didn’t have to think.

Nikki’s smile strained as bedtime edged closer. 

She decided her hair needed some extra care, a second wash and then two hundred strokes per side. And she couldn’t go to bed with wet hair.

She’d already collected the homework she’d miss for the performance. She may as well get started on it…

It was four thirty before she braved burying herself under her covers, each heartbeat pounded in her head, in fact it felt like it would burst, but she was shaking so much.

She knew what was waiting for her when she slept, Mom and Dad didn’t. None of her friends did. Not even grandma watching from Heaven because that monster locked itself inside her head. 

Nikki… Nikki missed the days before when the sunlight didn’t mock her as it crept across her face where she’d settled to stare at the ceiling.