Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who has appeared in your nightmares, and has a message for you
The dream starts the way it always does. Everything is normal. You’re at home.
(Waking, you know it’s nowhere you’ve ever lived in your life. But such are dream-certainties.)
Not only is everything normal, everything feels normal. Fine. The vibes, as they say — the vibes are perfectly innocuous. Pleasant, even.
And then you discover some innocuous, everyday need for — something, something that’s vague in the way that dream-needs are sometimes vague. You need to go Downstairs, for Something. And it’s all still fine, at that point. You go past the windowsill of succulents (which memory has pilfered from the student flat of your first real relationship), and along the narrow corridor with the funny step halfway along it (the kind of thing you get in really old houses, without standard architecture), and down the spiral staircase that has windows out over the sea, and through the banqueting hall — all of which, in the way of dreams, seems perfectly normal. You don’t notice it, you don’t think to think about it. It’s simply home. Of course there’s the banqueting hall — and the long gallery of mannequins, and the little courtyard with the zen garden, and the room that’s full of fire, which your dreaming mind snags on only enough to immediately shrug it away with the approving thought that it saves so much on the winter heating bills.
But the vibes are off, by now. The vibes are off, and deteriorating, because you have the growing dread and dream-certainty that Downstairs is a bad place, that there’s something there you don’t want to see.
But there’s Something from Downstairs that you Need.
The worse the vibes get, the more the dream-home reflects it. Darker. Grimy. Colder. Less welcoming, less comfortable, less like a place to live. Great grim stone rooms with no furniture, only draughts and shadows, that feel hostile — as if they’re alive, and telepathically pressing down on you with their animosity.
Down and down and down, by echoing iron staircases over cold and bottomless pits.
Downstairs, you know, the awareness that you always knew it coming to you, in the way of dreams — Downstairs goes down for ever.
But first, you reach Something. Something there, though you don’t see it. Something sinister and alive and watching, something slithering around behind your back in the dark, something with teeth. Not hungry, but willing to hunt you anyway, like a cat abruptly twitching to beat something to death with paw-strikes, just because something in its vision went scuttle.
You freeze. You want to move; you want to go back, or failing that, forward. Your limbs don’t move. Your feet are rooted. Sick fear runs its hands along you. The light contracts around you, and fades out. It’s just you and the dark, the inhabited dark, and at the last second, as always, you suddenly know that this is a dream, but also: the thing in it, the stalking thing, that’s real. The slow distortion of your dream around it, the souring, the gathering dark — that was in response to its intrusion. The vibes were wrong, indeed; it brought them with it, and it also brought a message.
Grave-chill breath, carrying the scent of ancient desolation, washes over you.
CALL YOUR MOTHERRRRRRRR, the thing in the dark breathes from its deep, devouring throat.
