Waking from hibernation
驚蟄 [20] / [20]
His surroundings were already dark. Fear overwhelmed him. There was no notice of any kind to indicated where the exit was. He knew all this was a dream. He wanted to wake up, but he couldn't.
He didn't have any choice but to keep moving. He could hear panting sounds from somewhere not very far away. He hurriedly moved toward the place where the sounds were coming from. When he turned the crooked road, he could see two figures were moving violently. He approached them. And he saw a boy who was naked on the ground, and there was a grown woman on top of his belly, completely naked, too.
The boy panted very painfully. He seemed only 15 years old, or just a little bit older than that. He was bleeding from his mouth, and it even looked as if some of his teeth were missing. Alexander could see the drops of blood on the ground nearby where the boy lied. The boy's swollen eyes were severely bruised, black and blue, even red with blood.
The woman on top of him intermittently punching him with fists very hard while moving her waist very fast. Alexander should have stopped the woman, and saved the boy. When she held up her fist to punch the boy again, he grabbed the woman's upper arm. The woman turned around with a jerk. Her face wore an impossibly wide grin. It was Sarah's face.
He released her, and drew back panting, his eyes resting on the boy. The boy was familiar to Alexander. In dreams, we often wade through them in a fog, and that which often makes sense in slumber is seldom coherent upon waking. But the fog was lifting, and realization dawned on him. The boy was . . .
The boy is me, thought Alexander, with horror and revulsion. As if reading his mind, Sarah's impossibly wide grin grew even wider, splitting the sides of her face into slits that bled and revealed rows of fangs and putrefying gums caked with blood and bits of flesh. Her arms grew wraithlike, her eyes, once a gentle blue, glowed a sickening yellowish-red, and her skin visibly grayed before him, with boiles, lesions, and rotten lacerations erupting forth. She smelled of death.
"You may yet have breath in you, but your soul is mine. Here in the darkness, it is kept with me. No matter how far you run, to the ends of the earth, to the world between worlds, you can't escape,"
she advanced towards him.
Alexander couldn't speak, and the darkness around him engulfed him. All he could see were her eyes. Those horrid, glowing eyes, moving closer and closer, until he felt cold, clawed hands grip, tear, and bind his arms like a steel vice, then he woke with a start.
