The Night Terror

Holy crap.

I think I need to up my medication. I just woke up and remembered what I was thinking about. Not dreaming, that would have been a nightmare. I’m positive I was awake... only 3 hours has gone by since I crashed for the evening. Odd.

I got up and wrote down what I was thinking about...


You look down at the desk and notice a nick in the desk that you’ve never noticed before. You feel an overwhelming urge to touch the nick, to feel it with the tip of your finger, to see if it’s real. “Touch it!” something whispers, “Touch it”. The quiet whisper is now a demand.

Slowly you lower the index finger of your right hand towards the desk. You think to yourself that perhaps you should just tap it, touch it quickly and pull back, just in case. Just at the moment when you are about to touch the nick, a black hole opens up just larger than the width of your clenched fist. With the momentum of the tap, your whole hand, finger extended, passes down into the queer black space. Terrified, you try to pull your hand back. You can feel the impulses race from your brain down your arm to the muscles, relaying the message to turn back the course. A split second turns into an echoing eternity. You have the feeling that you only have so long before... Ever so slowly, the momentum halts, the return trip back out of the black space started...

The hole snaps closed with a sickening “Snick!” and cuts off your hand at the wrist. The pressurized blood in your now-open veins is about to begin spraying all over the desktop. A horrified scream erupts from your lips and seems to go on forever.

You realize your eyes are closed. “Look”, something tugs at your mind. “Look and see what you’ve done. Your eyes snap open and you see...

Your hand, finger extended, about to poke a nick in your desktop...



Sergeant McClusky was lying shivering in a ditch in an all-night exercise. “Exercise, my ass!” she whispered. “Bloody torture!” (I originally typed Exorcist instead of Exercise. Freudian slip, perhaps?)

Bloody torture was right. She could feel the light trickle of blood running down her leg, probably caused by her slide into position. It was difficult to feel the fairy touch of the trickle as the massive, throbbing pain radiated upwards from the partially sprained ankle she had endured earlier. They say that sometimes a scrape is worse than a cut. She wondered if that little ditty held true with ligaments. Was the pain from a partial sprain worse than full one?

All night the stupid joke about the two Mexicans lost in the desert kept running through her mind. The previous afternoon, after they were given their orders, one of the men had been telling it to his buddies. It was one of those mindless, racist jokes that the enlisted tell repeatedly as if it was the first ever telling. The two amigos had been lost in the desert for weeks. At death's door, they see a tree in the distance. As they get nearer, they see that rasher upon rasher of bacon drapes the tree: smoked bacon, crispy bacon, life-giving nearly raw juicy bacon, all sorts of bacon.
"Hey, Pepe" says the first Mexican, "Ees a bacon tree! We're saved!"
Pepe sprints up to the tree. As he gets to within five feet, a hail of bullets guns him down.
His friend drops down on the sand and calls across to the dying Pepe. "Pepe! Pepe! Que pasa hombre?"
With his last breath Pepe calls out,"Ugh, run, amigo, run. Run! Ees not bacon tree... Ees a ham bush!"

Suddenly the rest of her unit shot to their feet, moving as one down the road. She opened her mouth to order them back. The exercise wasn’t over and they had orders to remain here in ambush of another unit. She painfully stumbled to her feet, wincing at the shot of agony arcing up her leg.

The soldiers moved together, quietly, silent. Suddenly the soldiers around her began shooting in the air, trying to shoot what they couldn’t see... but they could all feel... As a unit, without an officer barking orders, weapons firing at unseen targets, they moved towards a green light on the horizon.

She feels something reach into her head and begin speaking with her. “Try” the voice says. She struggles to reach out, her consciousness stretching towards something, stretching like the taffy she used to make with her grandma those Christmas’ so long ago, stretching, pulling... “Stretch”, her Grandma’s voice coaxes. “Streeetch.”

She connects with something, with a gentle brush, not a hard plug in, more a gentle touch like silk sliding on the fingertips. It was a... computer maybe? No, too inorganic. It was definitely living. It was something so different, so... so alien in design that she couldn’t quite make out the shape... No, shape wasn’t the right word. Texture? Something similar to texture. It was as if as if her brain was crispy and brittle, like bacon cooked too long. (Was that morning’s breakfast mess or that stupid ham bush joke that kept popping into her brain?) The other thing out there was creamy and impossibly light, like the Crème brûlée that she had ordered at that fancy French Bistro on her last R&R with Roger... Silky smooth, it had dissolved on her tongue, each creamy piece sliding down her throat...

She awoke with her arms restrained at her sides. Her eyes whipped around the room in panic as she struggled against the tightly-fastened straps. She was in a field hospital tent, nurses rushing about with medical supplies, the painful cries of wounded men ripping through her foggy brain. Several orderlies and a doctor were holding down the man in the bed next to her, trying to administer something to him, a sedative, perhaps?



There’s a bunch just after the Crème brûlée that’s fading with time. She could communicate with whatever it was out there. I just couldn't write it down fast enough. It was important to the story but I just can’t remember it. It’s like on the tip of my tongue, it’s just there out of sight.

It's 3 AM and like my nephew Jerom who's terrified of a thunderstorms, I’m afraid to go back to bed.

I might sleep.

Maybe I'll watch another episode of Fallen Skies. Yeah, like that and the previous stuff won't give me more nightmares...