The Shadow wears a hat

The shadow wears a hat
(Old prose I revamped and retitled. Original post is called The Thing of nightmares.)


I dreamt in a series of dreams the other night like never before
I discovered new levels of the subconscious
And place between being awake and asleep, being asleep, and then there's that lucid state of dreaming that we all know about but few experience
  
I've know of the sandman but this wasn't his work
Do you know about the shadow people?
Whatever it was it didn't help or make me fall asleep, it was more like it wouldn't let me wake up
Staring at me from the corner of my bedroom as a shadow
It fed me nightmares, or was I feeding it?
  
I swear I was having night terrors before I was even asleep
Hyperventilation and panic caused me to wake up from a certain “layer” of dreaming
This happened several times that night

When I finally woke up, the corner of my room seemed darker than usual
I sat up and the person next to me asked if I was ok
I told her I was fine but she reassured me we were still sleeping

I looked out the window
Everything seemed normal to me
Then the thing from the corner flew passed my head like a bullet of smoke slamming into the glass, I heard it thump and the pane shook
I grabbed whatever was in my reach and tried to end the nightmare by breaking the glass but it wouldn't break
The window, was unbreakable
Indestructible
The thing, was in the window
The thing, was eternal
The thing, was now showing me what it wanted me to see

In this vividly lucid state of dreaming I knew, through logic that would only make sense in a dream, I could escape through the wall
I pressed my hands and forehead against the cold surface
Then, as if the wall was a semisolid liquid, I passed through it emerging on the other side
But where I arrived wasn't my house
I was somewhere else
In an unfamiliar living room
There was blood running down the walls
It dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the floor
It was obvious that whatever happened here the outcome was unpleasant

The thing followed me here
I ran through the house trying to hide from it
But it continued to follow
From window to window, it followed
Stalking me like a shadow in the desert at high noon
Faceless, shapeless, and nameless
Always just beyond reach
I could not escape its scrutinizing gaze

I found myself in an endless hallway
The walls were lined with countless doors
The floor was one enormous mirror which reflected the odd placed windows in the ceiling
I couldn't escape this way, there were no walls to sink into
Only doors
The only thing I could do was enter one of the rooms and hope for a way out
But when I did I was inside somebody else's room
Somebody else’s dream
Somebody else’s nightmare

It was a girl in her early twenties recovering from a beating she had recently received
Mascara ran down her swolen face in rivers of black tears over the bruises
My presence went unnoticed as she drew a straight razor from her purse
We weren't alone in that room
There was a man in the corner wearing all black with a wide brimmed hat and a long black trench coat that was moving like a wispy cloud of smoke in the wind
It was The Thing
Feeding her a nightmare and in return she was feeding it pain and fear
It looked at me through the shadow cast upon its face by the hat
All I could see in the black were two tiny white eyes and a row of rotten, carnivorous yellow teeth as it smiled
The girl screamed as she began to slit her wrist
A yellowish puss oozed from the wound filling the room with the smell of infection

I left the room as fast as I could and entered another
The same girl sat in the same spot but was wearing different clothes and bore different bruises
This time she was sucking on the barrel of a shotgun like a suicidal prostitute earning a quick dollar
The thing wasn't in the corner this time though
I scanned the room looking, half expecting it to be watching from a shadow
It was nowhere
But when I looked down
The floor was a black fog
And there it was, staring at me again from all directions as I stood in the center of its incorporeal essence
I tried to run but the air was thick and smelled sweet
It reminded me of a spider and I was trapped in its web as the long slender arachnid legs reached out to prep me for it's next meal
I felt like an insect in a bowl of cake batter
My arms and legs were too weak to break free and I began to drown in the overly viscous atmosphere
My body started to heat up
Like the batter was being cooked in an oven
  
Is this what fear is like to a predator?
Sweet, thick and warm?
Ready to be consumed and cherished
  
I woke up looking out the window
Everything looked as it did when I fell asleep
The neighbors house looked as it did every night
Box fan in the window
Dim light bleeding through the red curtains giving an orange glow to the trees
Looking at the glass without looking through, I could see my reflection
I stared hard at it as the familiarity in myself started to fade
Two tiny white eyes manifested themselves into mine
And came the rotten toothed smile
Like a Cheshire Cat it just smiled at me
I heard a calming voice in my head, presumably from The Thing, it said "Alarming, am I?"
I woke up to my alarm going off

After silencing the noise I looked at the corner of my room
It was black and wispy again
The vaporous tendrils reached out at me
And the spindly cloud grew, consuming my bed with ease
Then my alarm went off again
Waking me from the dream within the dream I had already awoke fom

I was cold and goose bumps crawled across my skin
I was finally awake and all I could mumble to myself was "Holy shit. Am I really awake?"
The corner of my room was lit with the early morning sun
No excess darkness
No feeling of a voyeuristic shadow
The Thing was gone, at least for today, and I was awake
My heart was pounding a war dum inside my chest reminding me that I am also alive

Submitted to ControversialState's Dark Fictitional Prose Competition