Page 20 of The Nightmare King

A second life

In my closet

Under my bed

Voices, moths

In my head

Please don’t leave.

Oh, Lilac

Mare

Don’t.

Fall asleep and wait for me. Fall asleep and wait for me. Fall asleep and wait for me. I don’t think what I’d been doing could be considered sleep. Monitors beeped, nurses filtered in and out, so many white coats and big words.

The smell of bleach.

The color beige.

The one-size-fits-all grippy socks.

Hospitals were a drag, but the drugs were nice, I guessed. I felt gloriously empty, hydrated, and medicated by an IV drip, drip, dripping. Beep, beep, beeping.

Sam curled up in a squeaky recliner next to me. I never felt like speaking, watching TV, or eating the wobbly green jello. I wasn’t even sure why I was there. Had Brandon really drugged me that badly?

The nurse forgot to close my sterile, striped curtains, letting the full moonlight flood over the pale tile beneath me and the stiff waffled blanket draped over my legs. Nurses ruffled chip bags and laughed somewhere outside my room. My heavy door began to ease shut, which I attributed to the heat vent clicking on, but then as it clicked closed, I noticed a dark, looming figure in the corner of the room.

He held something long and hooked.

A scythe.

The hooded grim reaper stood in the corner of my hospital room, and I was stunned in fear. I tried to move my arms, but couldn’t. Tried to scream, but it scratched like a small whimper through my throat. My feet wouldn’t budge. I was trapped in the cage of my hospital bed as death floated closer. He loomed next to my monitors and lowered his scythe in a gentle, cold caress over my cheek.

“Suppose we’ll try something new, Lilac. What a state you’re in, just look at you,” Mare murmured darkly beneath his hood.

I wanted to speak, tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t form. He was scary and menacing. Anyone’s worst fear personified. Death, the grim reaper, visiting me in a frigid hospital room. I learned in that moment that when you didn’t speak to the Grim Reaper, he filled the silence.

“I’m getting stronger, you know. That’s good, excellent, in fact. But you…” He lowered the hooked object over my chin, down my neck, and between my breasts. “You’ve been bad, naughty, even.”

My limbs were like lead, and I was rendered immobile. In dreams I could move, I could speak, but this was like a nightmare while awake and helpless. Horror settled into my blood as I looked into the eyes of death, of Mare, of the grim reaper.

“Don’t try to speak, you can’t. It’s for the best. I think it’s time you listen.” His rough voice purred next to my ear, the warmth of it sending tingles down my spine. The tip of the scythe pricked at my hard nipple through my thin hospital gown, and I let out a huff of fear and need. The sharp edge scraped round and round my breast, enough to tingle, enough to make me afraid and wet with want all at the same time.

“You have the answers, Lilac. We can’t keep playing this same game… though being your sleep paralysis demon, being your death omen, I must say these are quite fun roles to play.”

Roles to play? He made these nightmares sound like some grand theater performance.

The scythe eased down my ribs, hooking over the blanket and pulling it down on its descent. My lips parted in a gasp as the large curve of the blade pushed under my hospital gown. With a twist of the reapers wrist, he parted my bare knees and came to a stand between them. “Look at these useful things,” he mused, placing my heels in the stirrups on either side of the hospital bed. “These should be attached to every bed, I think.”

His form of speech was changing. Loosening from his current casting of the dark and grim death and into something different. Something familiar, something I felt I knew…

Mare’s voice sounded like home, no matter what costume he wore, no matter the part he played. Why was that realization more frightening than death standing over me with a scythe in a hospital room?

He tilted his head and pulled up his dark garbs, palming himself between my thighs. How I wished for mobility again so I could reach down and feel him. All I wanted to do was guide him inside me and let him fill me up. But I couldn’t move. I was asleep, but I was awake, it was a horrible sensation and one I was trapped in. My body useless, floppy, and completely at his mercy.

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