Soothing Nightmares
A terrible malignancy coalesced into a ball at the door. It grew like a grudge in the middle of the night, like seething resentment when ruminations occupy the space where sleep should be. It solidified into a rigid and unyielding hammerhead of malice, and slammed into the stained and cracked door, like waves crushing the ruined and splintered hull of a capsized ship against the cruel rocks of a headland. Once, it pounded. Twice. Thrice and again, beating a steady rhythm of hatred, a heartbeat of despair and calculated harm. Under the force of each strike the door flexed and bowed, rattling in its frame, shedding broken pieces and flaking paint onto the rain-slick floor. The inky nightmare didn't knock to ask permission, but to demand attention. More than just attention; to demand reverence. To demand obeisance. To demand fear. Smoky tendrils of primal anguish curled around the doorframe and probed at the handle, searching for a way to let themselves in. They licked at the wall and left charred, scarred stains and wounds where they touched.
The lingering nightmare knew the occupant was home. It could feel their heart beating and hear their blood rushing from ventricle to artery. It could taste the life in such sore need of being extinguished in all the worst ways. They were moving inside the flat, as they had been ever since the first boom against the door, like the deafening blast of a landslide obliterating a home. They were approaching like a fly approaches the salivating maw of a sickly sweet carnivorous plant. It crunched a corporeal ball of emergent horror into the door one last time, as it saw the tarnished handle twist. A crack of dull yellow light appeared where the door started to swing, trying in pathetic futility to penetrate the infinite shadow of the terror. Its face contorted into a smirk for the briefest of intervals, on its way to becoming a bestial snarl.
Watery, swimming yellowed vision saw the occupant unveiled, so tiny and helpless against the enormity of its own ethereal bulk and titanic spite. It bared row after row of vindictive, curved teeth at the small woman.
"What do you wan-" started the occupant, before recognition cut off her speech. Her irritated frown turned to weary disappointment. "Oh. It's you."
"I demand a sacrifice of blood and bone." hissed the shadow, its voice the grinding and buckling of a collapsing building.
"For God's sake, not this again." she snapped. Something deep within the shadow watched the sinews and tendons around her throat flex as they spoke.
"There will be sacrifice and suffering in my name, and I will-"
"No there bloody well won't. And stop doing that my doorframe!"
A smoky tendril lashed backwards, away from the building, leaving a burned impression of itself.
"Great, thanks. You know those are git to clean off, right?" she said, rubbing at the mark with her fingers. "Are you planning to help with it this time?"
Intractable cords of rebellion within the nightmare pulled themselves tight, ready to unleash a torrent of bilious persecution on the mortal.
"I will have my dues in viscera." it hissed. The woman crossed her arms.
"If you're thinking of letting rip with the bilious persecution again then you can cut it out right now."
The cords released immediately, instinctively, reflexively. Pent up bad intentions from generations of pointless bloodshed swirled in unseen torrents. They reared back to strike, like a blacksmith's hammer coming down on a thief's head. The woman sighed.
"Come on. You'd better come in for a cup of tea."
The hammer stopped mid-way.
"And be careful to keep your tendrils to yourself in here. I don't want to spend ages scrubbing at the walls and the carpet. Doesn't do my knees any favours." she added.
Through the nightmare's awful consciousness flashed images of the manifold thousands of ways in which it could rend the woman, known well to it as Edith Winchester, asunder. Flesh could be torn, bones wrenched free, organs burned in place without the blinking of a lidless eye. More than once in the passage of time beyond reckoning, in the epochs of the primordial when humanity looked fearfully up at night sky, mystics, shamans and witches had made attempts to command and control the ash-choked shadow. They had spoken their useless incantations and performed their pathetic rituals borne of superstition and delusion, and they had all failed. They had all been subdued. They had all been consumed. Who was this Edith Winchester to presume to give it orders.
Looking down at itself, at its own terrible form of abysmal agony made manifest, it paused like the silence before a guttural wail, and then tucked its tendrils in neatly to keep them off the walls as it drifted into the flat.
In the cradle of humanity the nightmare had lurked, moving the shadows on cave walls and haunting sleep and wakefulness alike. It had torn branches from the trees and roots from the ground, ripping great wounds through the infant earth to demonstrate its power over the cowering mammals. Volcanic eruptions had shaded the sky at its command, and the ground had quaked in accordance with its terrible whims. As it billowed and seeped across the welcome mat, wiping the elements of its intractable shape that passed for feet to avoid drawing Edith Winchester's ire, the same harrowing strength which had thrown boulders from mountaintops reached out backwards. It grasped the weakened and bowing door at every exposed surface, stopping short of pushing foul vapours into the splits and cracks, and very gently clicked it shut.
"Thank you. I'm glad you remembered how much I hate a draught." said Edith. She thought for a moment. "Also, how much I hate being robbed because the front door is open. You can be very considerate when you put your mind to it."
Bones buried in the deep woods, never to be found by human hands, would have disagreed with that statement, if only they'd not been irretrievably buried in the deep woods.
"I have considered a great many misdeeds."
"Not regarding my front door, I hope. Come in properly, Ben; you'll not be drinking tea on the doormat like a stranger." Edith Winchester said. She started to walk towards the kitchen, and the shadow introspected.
It had gone by more names than it cared to remember, but remember them all it did. Each one had felt like a new testament to its terrible prowess; with each new name it could claim a new victim, or a new community of victims, or a new civilisation of fearful pawns. When it heard an old name, uttered as a warning or shrieked as an exclamation, it knew that news of its spiteful works had spread wide. When it heard a new name, it knew that it had earned the terror of strangers with another horrible work, and it could feel proud.
Sweeping through tangled and vine-choked jungles, where no light could pierce the canopy, it had been known as Qu'al Kohr. Fearful whispers from behind feathered masks had confirmed as much. Flowing over parched dunes and stirring up a sandstorm like razors, it had been cursed as Ammiset. Cloistered monks in the mountains had decried it as Berghast and deserter soldiers by profaned altars had called it the Bastard of the Valley. It had many more names given to it by many more tortured souls, but Edith Winchester was the only one to call it Ben.
"I am a stranger to all. It is only my torment that breeds familiarity." said the nightmare, losing some of its melodramatic edge by questioning whether it had shoes to remove. It concluded that it didn't.
"You're a friend to me." said Edith, from the kitchen. A tap was running. "You don't take milk or sugar, do you?"
"No. I take it as black as-"
"As the eternal night I usher in? We're on that again, are we? Grow up, Ben. Bitter things taste bitter, and they taste better with the edge taken off by a splash of milk. But I'll give it a light steep and hold the dairy and sugar anyway.” she said, being sure to both respect the nightmare’s requests and cheek it about them. “And I think you forgot part of your answer."
"You finished for me, with mockery." rumbled the nightmare, like the approaching footsteps of an invading army.
"Pl..." Edith Winchester led, rolling an encouraging hand.
"Oh." said the nightmare, like the door slamming on a tomb. "Please." it added, the wind blowing through old bones.
"Certainly. I'll give you the big mug because I think you need a lot of settling down, today." Edith Winchester replied. The nightmare could hear the kettle boil, followed by the pouring of scalding water. Normally the nightmare would have been directing scalding water onto a hapless victim, perhaps via an intermediary who could then, themselves, be subjected to some kind of vicious retribution. In this instance, it knew that the water was falling onto a name brand tea bag, one of the few concessions Edith Winchester made to consumerism.
The hallway into Edith Winchester's flat was, to put it plainly, drab. The nightmare had lived through countless eons of human cultural shifts, and therefore knew that the style of decor it was seeing had been outdated for many decades. It was also the same as it had been during its last visit here, its previous pilgrimage for the offal of human decadence. Some of the wallpaper was peeling, and there was a yellowing around the light fittings which looked old and tired. Briefly, the nightmare wondered why it knew terms like that about home furnishings, but it got distracted by the tarnished and perished colour of the plug sockets by the door. The flat looked like those who spent their lives fleeing the nightmare's cruellest intentions felt.
"I already told you that you don't have to just stand there by the door. Or float there, or malinger, or whatever it is you do. Go through to the living room and take a careful seat, no burning. I'll bring your tea in." instructed Edith Winchester. Her movements in the kitchen cast indeterminate shadows. They reminded the nightmare of torments it had inflicted upon Edith Winchester's distant ancestors, when they'd barely thought to name each other but already had a term for the nightmare that stalked them. It was a pleasant memory, insofar as it recognised what it meant for something to be pleasant.
Feeling compelled not so much to obey Edith Winchester as to avoid disappointing her without due justification, the diffuse, pulsing horror drifted its way through the door it knew to lead to the living room. The hinges creaked at irregular intervals with the ravaging of time, and the handle was loose and worn. The living room beyond had not fared much better at the hands of the ever-ticking clock. A three-piece-suite that had round and about enough upholstery left to cover a half-piece at most was sitting, sunken and threadbare, on a carpet that threatened to pre-date the nightmare itself. All seats were focused towards a coffee table which had long since forgotten the courteous touch of a coaster, and found itself smothered by magazines, wrappers and empty tissue boxes. Plastic blinds, which had presumably been white at some stage in their tortured life, were pulled down and closed, covering the window that faced onto the main road. There was something comforting to the nightmare, on a primal level, to be somewhere so steeped in hopelessness and nihilism. However, there was also a peculiar edge to it, like a silver lining being forced over a beautifully grey cloud, when it thought about Edith Winchester in particular living here.
Metallic stirring sounds from the kitchen came to a stop, as did the nightmare's inspection of the living room. There were more instructions still to follow if Edith Winchester's wishes were to be honoured fully. It lowered its considerable, tainted form onto one end of the sofa and, despite carrying no mass of its own, per se, it sank deeply into cushions with nothing left to give.
"Good choice, Ben. Now I can sit next to you and we can have a bit of a vent about what's on your mind." said Edith Winchester, shuffling into the room with two cups, each brimming with tea. She sidled between the coffee table and the sofa, dropping down alongside the nightmare. "Here's your one."
A gargantuan mug, shaped like the Arc de Triomphe and desperately trying to match it for scale, came to rest on the table with a sound like an out of tune xylophone. Eyes like a flaming arrowhead rushing towards the face of the medic pierced into the swirling, tannin-saturated miasma of tea within the facsimile monument to war.
"Th..." led Edith Winchester again, sitting beside the nightmare and setting her own mug, a plain white item, onto an old crisp packet. It crackled like the fire of a burning homestead, it's occupants still locked inside. The nightmare was tempted to rustle it again. "Ben?" Edith Winchester persisted.
"Yes... yes... I forget myself. Thank you." it said, with the gratitude of an assassin finding their target asleep. Wispy, investigative curls of spiteful smoke fished involuntarily underneath the sofa for any weakness they might exploit. Perhaps they could find a crack in the floor and suffocate Edith Winchester's downstairs neighbour. Maybe they could put pressure on some aging joists and collapse the building. Neither came to pass; they reeled away from something squashy and furry which had no business existing beneath the furniture of a respectable person.
In the more usual portion of the room, which is to say the region between the seat of the sofa and a foot or so below the ceiling, the nightmare had looped a larger, prehensile tendril through the handle of its Arc mug and raised it mouthwards. The maw which was more accustomed to spitting bile and hexes, curses and promises of suffering, false paths to salvation and evil whispers, instead opened itself just enough to let a small stream of cool air puff across the surface of the tea. It rippled like a lake of blood, spreading from those who sought to stand against it.
"Yes, it'll be very hot." Edith Winchester observed, opening a packet of biscuits she'd ensconced somewhere unseen. Something chocolatey was proffered to the nightmare. "Biscuit, Ben?"
The internal, swivelling eye within the morass of smoke pivoted towards the outstretched hand, picturing the manifold ways in which it might be severed. Grimly clawed hands made no attempt to bring those pictures into reality, instead plucking the biscuit gingerly from Edith Winchester's fingers.
"Why do you call me Ben? I have been called a great many things, most of them accusations and curses. None before have called me Ben." spoke the nightmare, its voice the burning wind blowing across a parched desert.
Edith Winchester patted her hand onto her thigh and cleared her throat.
"It's what I would have called my Katie if she'd been a boy." she said. "I've always liked the name."
"You address me as your hypothetical son?"
"I address you by a name I like hearing, instead of some insult or cuss word that an old man called you a few centuries ago." corrected Edith Winchester. "But... I admit that I do feel a certain parental protectiveness over you. My children come to me with their problems, and so do you. My children sometimes leave burn-marks on my walls, and so do you. My children don't demand sacrifices or tributes of flesh and sinew though; that's very much a 'Ben' kind of thing."
Under the extreme pressure and prejudice of the nightmare's barbed and venomous teeth, the biscuit stood no chance of remaining intact. Like so many good men and women over the millennia, it crumbled and fractured.
"I see. They make demands of you, though? Demands that involve the spilling of no blood, the severing of no limbs, the evisceration of-"
"Yeah, yeah I get the point and no. They demand things like attention and assistance. The sort of thing I'm always pleased to provide. I can't rightly provide what you've demanded, but I wonder if you really just need a bit of attention as well? A bit of help?" Edith Winchester suggested, leaning back into the sofa. Thanks to the gaps in the upholstery, this was a surprisingly literal move.
"Help?” it asked. The word felt strange in its mouth. “I suppose so, since I do not need to source own sacrifices. Attention? Worship is nothing else, ultimately." surmised the nightmare.
"You know exactly what I mean. We got you out of this nonsense before, didn't we? When you came here asking for ligaments or organs or something at some ridiculous hour of the night, threatening all manner of horrid things to me and mine if I didn't do even worse things to other people? We can do it again."
It was physically, metaphysically, emotionally and hypothetically impossible for the nightmare to blush. It didn't have a face, for starters, not in the strict sense, and it didn't have blood vessels or skin for them to rise towards. While it did have blood, technically, that blood wasn't its own and didn't flow through it meaningfully. Regardless, it felt as if it was experiencing a physiological response to poor behaviour being pointed out.
"We did. But the time for the cracking of spines and the letting of blood is upon us once again." it said, with rather less conviction than usual. It sipped its tea and tried to avoid Edith Winchester's eye.
"Is it, indeed? And who told you this? Who put those notions in your head again? Was it those Johnson boys?" Edith Winchester asked severely. Her tone informed the nightmare that she was in no mood to be ignored.
"No, they've been excommunicated and exorcised. They’re not trying to summon me anymore." said the nightmare, kicking at the carpet with a lower tendril.
"Little Derek Spaniel?"
The nightmare shook the part of it that Edith Winchester would most readily associate with being a head.
"Who then? Not those St. Huskin's girls?"
"They're not really girls, Edith Winchester. They're an ancient order of demon worshipping priestesses. They've members in their nineties, and initiates are all at least eighteen." replied the nightmare, wondering to itself why it cared about terminology so much. Maybe it was something in the biscuit.
"Hm. So it is them, then? Whether they're women, girls, priestesses or bus conductors, and whether their order has been doing it for years or minutes, it's still not right to give you these ideas, is it?" she said. The nightmare took another sip of tea, feeling the dark fluid flow in and then dissipate to places unknown. "Is it, Ben?"
"No, Edith Winchester. I wasn't following their orders, though. They seek to control me, to bend my unimaginable hatred and vitriol to their will and wield me like some blunt instrument. I've crushed better than them with worse rituals."
"They're trying to manipulate you? That's not what friends do to one another, Ben."
"They would have failed. All their rites and ceremonies did was remind me of my terrible purposes, and that I could obliterate their bodies with the scything of a dread claw through space and time." An involuntary claw swept sympathetically across the living room, taking the back clean off the armchair. "Oh, whoops."
A cloud of grey particulates erupted from the nightmare's bulk, enveloping the armchair in an unbreathable cloud. Within moments the back had been restored to its original state of decay.
"Thank you." Edith Winchester said, an edge of sarcasm to her voice. It made the nightmare unwilling to confess any side effects of its reanimation efforts. She'd find them out at the next full moon anyway. "But anyway, you don't need to prove anything to these priestesses, nor do you need to sink down to their level. Let them worry about shouting into the night or whatever they do, and you focus on your drawings."
A lorry carrying tainted meats for sale in the local butcher rumbled past, shaking the flat and sending a pattern of waves across both mugs of tea.
"You have still been doing your drawings, haven't you?"
"Yes. I have rendered into reality the images of many facets of my imagination.” answered the nightmare. “From the flaming fields of ruined farmland to the poisoned rivers that spread their ichor and disease. They have been immortalised on page and wall."
"That's great, Ben. I would have preferred to hear about some landscapes, or still life pieces maybe, emphasis on the life part, but whatever takes your creative interest is alright with me. You're very good at drawing, you know. I would like to see some of your work."
In the creaking, concave hollow of the sofa the nightmare shifted, its fluid bulk pouring from one side to the other.
"I can grant you visions of them." it said, a little sheepishly. "If you really want to see them, that is."
"Yes, of course! What do these visions entail?"
"For many millennia I have injected the dreadful sights that I might make manifest into the minds of those with whom I see fit to toy. I can turn their conscious minds into a waking nightmare, showing them the ravaged and devastated lands that their home will become. I can use this same terrible power to show you a drawing I did of a nearby bird." explained the harrowing miasma of hate. "It was a very pleasing bird, with the way it pecked for seed, and went about its solemn business with whistles and chirps." A few of the more wildly thrashing whiskers and fronds of shadow began to retract into the core of the nightmare.
"It sounds like a much better use of your power than frightening people, Ben. Please show me this bird drawing."
The whole room swelled and relaxed, as if it was being viewed through a stretching and contracting lens. Black fires roared from every part of the nightmare's surface as its consciousness extended, serpentine and determined, towards Edith Winchester's mind. Finding it to be open and inviting, there was no struggle begin injecting uncharacteristically horror-free visions of a nice pencil drawing of a bird.
"Oh, well that's very good indeed! Look at all the detail around the beak, where the feathers stop! This must have taken a long time and a lot of care."
"It was the concerted craft of a few hours, a pittance of time compared to my eternal longevity." it replied. A ragged edge of its hulking, impenetrable body softened down into a smoother and gentler line.
"There are lovely patterns on the wing and the face. Is this a goldfinch, by any chance?"
Unfamiliar with the finer points of ornithology, the nightmare sent a searching tendril outwards to a local bird reserve, and tore the knowledge of goldfinches from the mind of a dedicated volunteer, who was performing maintenance on a gate. The knowledge was replaced with fears about a landslide.
"Yes. Yes I believe it was a goldfinch." the nightmare said. "I liked its hopping, and it had a wonderful little face."
"It looks like your paper is on a nice desk, too. Had you visited the big library in the city to do this?"
"I had invited myself into the cavernous halls of accumulated knowledge. Many secrets are laid bare if one knows where to scour and scry through musty pages, and secrets are so enriching."
"So that you can experience the joy of learning, and not so that you can torment people?" asked Edith Winchester, although it sounded more like a warning than a question.
"Yes. For that reason." accepted the nightmare. The darkness in its face began to shift, almost imperceptibly, from the pitch blackness of a collapsed cave to the comforting calm of a well-curtained bedroom.
"Brilliant. You see, you know how to go through life without all this killing and torturing and maiming nonsense. It's just a matter of applying yourself to better goals and pastimes. Those priestesses can say what they want, but you don't need to listen to them."
"No. I don't need to listen to them or any other mortal who seeks to harness my fury." agreed the nightmare, as tendrils retreated into its bulk, and its teeth blunted down slightly.
"That's right. I'm so proud of you, especially for coming to see me, instead of going out and hunting down a delivery driver or eating a waitress. You really did have something against people paid to take things to others, didn't you?"
"The twin prong of a murder and a disappointed customer was very satisfying." explained the nightmare, proud of itself for using the past tense. "But that behaviour is behind me. It is beneath me. I am, therefore, moving forwards and upwards in relation to those applications of my might."
"You are. Would you like another biscuit?"
"Please."
There was a crunching. Not like a crunching of bone under hooves, but of confectionery inside a mouth.
Edith Winchester sighed, contentedly at a job well done, and the nightmare pondered its surroundings again.
"You know, Edith Winchester, you should really be taking better care of yourself and you rhome." it said. Its companion looked up into the infinite inkiness of its sun-blotting form.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Look at the state of this place. There's rubbish everywhere, the fittings are wearing out, your sofa is dissolving like a ship, wrecked at sea and lost forever to humankind, along with its crew and precious cargo."
"It's a little bit messy, I grant you, but it's fine."
"Is it? There's a rotting orange underneath your sofa, and I can feel the life inside your fridge from the mouldy milk. Just pour it away. It can't be good for your health."
Edith Winchester crossed her arms.
"So i've forgotten to clean out a couple of bits for a week."
"A month." corrected the nightmare. “And it looks like no-one is performing any maintenance on anything. I’ve massacred a vast number of artisans who could have fixed these things.”
"Whatever. It's all under control. I'll get to it." Edith Winchester defied.
"Will you? When you haven't already?"
"Yes! I just need to find the time and inclination." she said. There was a pause. Edith Winchester waited for a rebuttal against which to argue, but the nightmare provided none. It simply held the silence. "Alright. You're right. I suppose I haven't been looking after myself as I should. It's just hard when you're on your own and no-one's there to judge you. Katie doesn’t have time to pop round much anymore, and it’s fine because I’m going to hers instead, but I don’t have much incentive to tidy up the flat. You can get away with a wrapper here and dirty clothes there to begin with, and then suddenly you're living in a hovel."
"I have been on my own ever since the emergence of other people to make the concept meaningful. Never have I seen fit to sit above carelessly discarded fruit in a state of decay."
"Oh, come on. You're seriously telling me that you, a demonic source of hatred and despoilment, have never sat over a rotting orange."
"Not one that rots from disinterest. Only food that rotted by my hand, or by my slaughter of those who would have eaten it."
"That hardly gives you the moral high ground."
"I care not for morals and their altitude. But self-care is different and you are displaying none. This is the virtue you would have me learn, Edith Winchester. You must do the same." lectured the nightmare.
They both cast an eye around the room. Then the nightmare cast a tendril rushing outwards, and collated the coffee table's impressive display of rubbish into a neat bouquet. A single crushing motion reduced the bouquet from detritus, to dust, to nothing.
"I have begun the scouring of the flat." said the nightmare. "I believe that this constitutes a constructive use of my cataclysmic capabilities."
Edith Winchester chuckled, in the bashful manner of one who is more accustomed to giving help than receiving it, and finds the reversal difficult to comprehend. It gave a dark part of the nightmare a little solace that it was still making someone uncomfortable, at least. "Let us purge the floor of its dusty civilisations, and slam a jagged rock of fear into the heart of the mould-caked citrus."
"You know, I think that would be for the best." smiled Edith Winchester, whose own capacity for purgation relied more heavily on a vacuum and a mop than ancient and unknowable powers.
Like an oncoming storm-front of agony, the nightmare's smoky body migrated forwards through the living room, capturing anything which did not belong and annihilating it in the crucible of antediluvian calamity. It sent a half-eaten sandwich into a spiral of self-doubt that ended in the kitchen's compost bin. Several old newspapers, lurking behind seating or crumpled in the corner, were hoisted into the air by otherworldly forces and combusted like a bird struck by lightning. Edith Winchester picked up a dirty plate and carried it to sideboard, ready for washing up. If the mess had been able to experience panic, despair or despondency then the nightmare would have felt it. An elation deepened by the fright would have infused it with further awful ideas and hypothetical misdeeds. As it was, it could only take solace that Edith Winchester would not be breathing in spores from long-abandoned mugs of hot drinks.
In its countless generations of atrocities, across an existence-long campaign of spite, the nightmare had never left anything spotless. It had stolen loved ones without a trace, despoiled communities so thoroughly that one might question if they had ever existed at all, and acted with sufficient subtlety that its victims would blame themselves for its cruel actions, but spotlessness was not on the cards. Even in Edith Winchester's living room, although it had left the space much improved, there were still tiny scorch marks and runic carvings to mark its foul presence. But everything was tidy, and everything was clean.
"Thank you, Ben. Thank you dearly. I know this sort of thing must be hard for you, cleaning up and caring about someone, I mean, but I'm grateful you did it. I knew you had it in you, and I know I should have had it in me." she said, treating herself to another mug of tea and a second packet of biscuits. The Arc de Triomphe was also full once again.
"It goes against my nature." said the nightmare, blowing once more on the boiling beverage, “But my nature can, apparently, be unlearned.”
For a few minutes more, over their drinks and a rapidly shrinking stock of snacks, Edith Winchester and the nightmare chatted about their recent activities, both with a little bit of embarrassment. When both mugs ran empty, a black cloud puffed up to fill the living room, and then the hallway and the kitchen too, before resettling into its familiar shape by the door.
“Thank you, Edith Winchester, for helping me through this moment of impropriety. I will take my leave and show the priestesses that they will not command my actions, directly or otherwise."
"Good for you. I'm glad to have helped and I hope you'll visit me again soon. Thank you for reminding me that I should care for myself, too. Goodnight, Ben." said Edith Winchester, the little woman standing at the doorway to the living room. A nightmare the shape of a fluctuating shadow, cast by a fire in the mouth of a cave when prehistoric beasts stalk in for their prey, faced her from the front door.
"Goodnight, Edith Winchester." said Ben.
The lingering nightmare knew the occupant was home. It could feel their heart beating and hear their blood rushing from ventricle to artery. It could taste the life in such sore need of being extinguished in all the worst ways. They were moving inside the flat, as they had been ever since the first boom against the door, like the deafening blast of a landslide obliterating a home. They were approaching like a fly approaches the salivating maw of a sickly sweet carnivorous plant. It crunched a corporeal ball of emergent horror into the door one last time, as it saw the tarnished handle twist. A crack of dull yellow light appeared where the door started to swing, trying in pathetic futility to penetrate the infinite shadow of the terror. Its face contorted into a smirk for the briefest of intervals, on its way to becoming a bestial snarl.
Watery, swimming yellowed vision saw the occupant unveiled, so tiny and helpless against the enormity of its own ethereal bulk and titanic spite. It bared row after row of vindictive, curved teeth at the small woman.
"What do you wan-" started the occupant, before recognition cut off her speech. Her irritated frown turned to weary disappointment. "Oh. It's you."
"I demand a sacrifice of blood and bone." hissed the shadow, its voice the grinding and buckling of a collapsing building.
"For God's sake, not this again." she snapped. Something deep within the shadow watched the sinews and tendons around her throat flex as they spoke.
"There will be sacrifice and suffering in my name, and I will-"
"No there bloody well won't. And stop doing that my doorframe!"
A smoky tendril lashed backwards, away from the building, leaving a burned impression of itself.
"Great, thanks. You know those are git to clean off, right?" she said, rubbing at the mark with her fingers. "Are you planning to help with it this time?"
Intractable cords of rebellion within the nightmare pulled themselves tight, ready to unleash a torrent of bilious persecution on the mortal.
"I will have my dues in viscera." it hissed. The woman crossed her arms.
"If you're thinking of letting rip with the bilious persecution again then you can cut it out right now."
The cords released immediately, instinctively, reflexively. Pent up bad intentions from generations of pointless bloodshed swirled in unseen torrents. They reared back to strike, like a blacksmith's hammer coming down on a thief's head. The woman sighed.
"Come on. You'd better come in for a cup of tea."
The hammer stopped mid-way.
"And be careful to keep your tendrils to yourself in here. I don't want to spend ages scrubbing at the walls and the carpet. Doesn't do my knees any favours." she added.
Through the nightmare's awful consciousness flashed images of the manifold thousands of ways in which it could rend the woman, known well to it as Edith Winchester, asunder. Flesh could be torn, bones wrenched free, organs burned in place without the blinking of a lidless eye. More than once in the passage of time beyond reckoning, in the epochs of the primordial when humanity looked fearfully up at night sky, mystics, shamans and witches had made attempts to command and control the ash-choked shadow. They had spoken their useless incantations and performed their pathetic rituals borne of superstition and delusion, and they had all failed. They had all been subdued. They had all been consumed. Who was this Edith Winchester to presume to give it orders.
Looking down at itself, at its own terrible form of abysmal agony made manifest, it paused like the silence before a guttural wail, and then tucked its tendrils in neatly to keep them off the walls as it drifted into the flat.
In the cradle of humanity the nightmare had lurked, moving the shadows on cave walls and haunting sleep and wakefulness alike. It had torn branches from the trees and roots from the ground, ripping great wounds through the infant earth to demonstrate its power over the cowering mammals. Volcanic eruptions had shaded the sky at its command, and the ground had quaked in accordance with its terrible whims. As it billowed and seeped across the welcome mat, wiping the elements of its intractable shape that passed for feet to avoid drawing Edith Winchester's ire, the same harrowing strength which had thrown boulders from mountaintops reached out backwards. It grasped the weakened and bowing door at every exposed surface, stopping short of pushing foul vapours into the splits and cracks, and very gently clicked it shut.
"Thank you. I'm glad you remembered how much I hate a draught." said Edith. She thought for a moment. "Also, how much I hate being robbed because the front door is open. You can be very considerate when you put your mind to it."
Bones buried in the deep woods, never to be found by human hands, would have disagreed with that statement, if only they'd not been irretrievably buried in the deep woods.
"I have considered a great many misdeeds."
"Not regarding my front door, I hope. Come in properly, Ben; you'll not be drinking tea on the doormat like a stranger." Edith Winchester said. She started to walk towards the kitchen, and the shadow introspected.
It had gone by more names than it cared to remember, but remember them all it did. Each one had felt like a new testament to its terrible prowess; with each new name it could claim a new victim, or a new community of victims, or a new civilisation of fearful pawns. When it heard an old name, uttered as a warning or shrieked as an exclamation, it knew that news of its spiteful works had spread wide. When it heard a new name, it knew that it had earned the terror of strangers with another horrible work, and it could feel proud.
Sweeping through tangled and vine-choked jungles, where no light could pierce the canopy, it had been known as Qu'al Kohr. Fearful whispers from behind feathered masks had confirmed as much. Flowing over parched dunes and stirring up a sandstorm like razors, it had been cursed as Ammiset. Cloistered monks in the mountains had decried it as Berghast and deserter soldiers by profaned altars had called it the Bastard of the Valley. It had many more names given to it by many more tortured souls, but Edith Winchester was the only one to call it Ben.
"I am a stranger to all. It is only my torment that breeds familiarity." said the nightmare, losing some of its melodramatic edge by questioning whether it had shoes to remove. It concluded that it didn't.
"You're a friend to me." said Edith, from the kitchen. A tap was running. "You don't take milk or sugar, do you?"
"No. I take it as black as-"
"As the eternal night I usher in? We're on that again, are we? Grow up, Ben. Bitter things taste bitter, and they taste better with the edge taken off by a splash of milk. But I'll give it a light steep and hold the dairy and sugar anyway.” she said, being sure to both respect the nightmare’s requests and cheek it about them. “And I think you forgot part of your answer."
"You finished for me, with mockery." rumbled the nightmare, like the approaching footsteps of an invading army.
"Pl..." Edith Winchester led, rolling an encouraging hand.
"Oh." said the nightmare, like the door slamming on a tomb. "Please." it added, the wind blowing through old bones.
"Certainly. I'll give you the big mug because I think you need a lot of settling down, today." Edith Winchester replied. The nightmare could hear the kettle boil, followed by the pouring of scalding water. Normally the nightmare would have been directing scalding water onto a hapless victim, perhaps via an intermediary who could then, themselves, be subjected to some kind of vicious retribution. In this instance, it knew that the water was falling onto a name brand tea bag, one of the few concessions Edith Winchester made to consumerism.
The hallway into Edith Winchester's flat was, to put it plainly, drab. The nightmare had lived through countless eons of human cultural shifts, and therefore knew that the style of decor it was seeing had been outdated for many decades. It was also the same as it had been during its last visit here, its previous pilgrimage for the offal of human decadence. Some of the wallpaper was peeling, and there was a yellowing around the light fittings which looked old and tired. Briefly, the nightmare wondered why it knew terms like that about home furnishings, but it got distracted by the tarnished and perished colour of the plug sockets by the door. The flat looked like those who spent their lives fleeing the nightmare's cruellest intentions felt.
"I already told you that you don't have to just stand there by the door. Or float there, or malinger, or whatever it is you do. Go through to the living room and take a careful seat, no burning. I'll bring your tea in." instructed Edith Winchester. Her movements in the kitchen cast indeterminate shadows. They reminded the nightmare of torments it had inflicted upon Edith Winchester's distant ancestors, when they'd barely thought to name each other but already had a term for the nightmare that stalked them. It was a pleasant memory, insofar as it recognised what it meant for something to be pleasant.
Feeling compelled not so much to obey Edith Winchester as to avoid disappointing her without due justification, the diffuse, pulsing horror drifted its way through the door it knew to lead to the living room. The hinges creaked at irregular intervals with the ravaging of time, and the handle was loose and worn. The living room beyond had not fared much better at the hands of the ever-ticking clock. A three-piece-suite that had round and about enough upholstery left to cover a half-piece at most was sitting, sunken and threadbare, on a carpet that threatened to pre-date the nightmare itself. All seats were focused towards a coffee table which had long since forgotten the courteous touch of a coaster, and found itself smothered by magazines, wrappers and empty tissue boxes. Plastic blinds, which had presumably been white at some stage in their tortured life, were pulled down and closed, covering the window that faced onto the main road. There was something comforting to the nightmare, on a primal level, to be somewhere so steeped in hopelessness and nihilism. However, there was also a peculiar edge to it, like a silver lining being forced over a beautifully grey cloud, when it thought about Edith Winchester in particular living here.
Metallic stirring sounds from the kitchen came to a stop, as did the nightmare's inspection of the living room. There were more instructions still to follow if Edith Winchester's wishes were to be honoured fully. It lowered its considerable, tainted form onto one end of the sofa and, despite carrying no mass of its own, per se, it sank deeply into cushions with nothing left to give.
"Good choice, Ben. Now I can sit next to you and we can have a bit of a vent about what's on your mind." said Edith Winchester, shuffling into the room with two cups, each brimming with tea. She sidled between the coffee table and the sofa, dropping down alongside the nightmare. "Here's your one."
A gargantuan mug, shaped like the Arc de Triomphe and desperately trying to match it for scale, came to rest on the table with a sound like an out of tune xylophone. Eyes like a flaming arrowhead rushing towards the face of the medic pierced into the swirling, tannin-saturated miasma of tea within the facsimile monument to war.
"Th..." led Edith Winchester again, sitting beside the nightmare and setting her own mug, a plain white item, onto an old crisp packet. It crackled like the fire of a burning homestead, it's occupants still locked inside. The nightmare was tempted to rustle it again. "Ben?" Edith Winchester persisted.
"Yes... yes... I forget myself. Thank you." it said, with the gratitude of an assassin finding their target asleep. Wispy, investigative curls of spiteful smoke fished involuntarily underneath the sofa for any weakness they might exploit. Perhaps they could find a crack in the floor and suffocate Edith Winchester's downstairs neighbour. Maybe they could put pressure on some aging joists and collapse the building. Neither came to pass; they reeled away from something squashy and furry which had no business existing beneath the furniture of a respectable person.
In the more usual portion of the room, which is to say the region between the seat of the sofa and a foot or so below the ceiling, the nightmare had looped a larger, prehensile tendril through the handle of its Arc mug and raised it mouthwards. The maw which was more accustomed to spitting bile and hexes, curses and promises of suffering, false paths to salvation and evil whispers, instead opened itself just enough to let a small stream of cool air puff across the surface of the tea. It rippled like a lake of blood, spreading from those who sought to stand against it.
"Yes, it'll be very hot." Edith Winchester observed, opening a packet of biscuits she'd ensconced somewhere unseen. Something chocolatey was proffered to the nightmare. "Biscuit, Ben?"
The internal, swivelling eye within the morass of smoke pivoted towards the outstretched hand, picturing the manifold ways in which it might be severed. Grimly clawed hands made no attempt to bring those pictures into reality, instead plucking the biscuit gingerly from Edith Winchester's fingers.
"Why do you call me Ben? I have been called a great many things, most of them accusations and curses. None before have called me Ben." spoke the nightmare, its voice the burning wind blowing across a parched desert.
Edith Winchester patted her hand onto her thigh and cleared her throat.
"It's what I would have called my Katie if she'd been a boy." she said. "I've always liked the name."
"You address me as your hypothetical son?"
"I address you by a name I like hearing, instead of some insult or cuss word that an old man called you a few centuries ago." corrected Edith Winchester. "But... I admit that I do feel a certain parental protectiveness over you. My children come to me with their problems, and so do you. My children sometimes leave burn-marks on my walls, and so do you. My children don't demand sacrifices or tributes of flesh and sinew though; that's very much a 'Ben' kind of thing."
Under the extreme pressure and prejudice of the nightmare's barbed and venomous teeth, the biscuit stood no chance of remaining intact. Like so many good men and women over the millennia, it crumbled and fractured.
"I see. They make demands of you, though? Demands that involve the spilling of no blood, the severing of no limbs, the evisceration of-"
"Yeah, yeah I get the point and no. They demand things like attention and assistance. The sort of thing I'm always pleased to provide. I can't rightly provide what you've demanded, but I wonder if you really just need a bit of attention as well? A bit of help?" Edith Winchester suggested, leaning back into the sofa. Thanks to the gaps in the upholstery, this was a surprisingly literal move.
"Help?” it asked. The word felt strange in its mouth. “I suppose so, since I do not need to source own sacrifices. Attention? Worship is nothing else, ultimately." surmised the nightmare.
"You know exactly what I mean. We got you out of this nonsense before, didn't we? When you came here asking for ligaments or organs or something at some ridiculous hour of the night, threatening all manner of horrid things to me and mine if I didn't do even worse things to other people? We can do it again."
It was physically, metaphysically, emotionally and hypothetically impossible for the nightmare to blush. It didn't have a face, for starters, not in the strict sense, and it didn't have blood vessels or skin for them to rise towards. While it did have blood, technically, that blood wasn't its own and didn't flow through it meaningfully. Regardless, it felt as if it was experiencing a physiological response to poor behaviour being pointed out.
"We did. But the time for the cracking of spines and the letting of blood is upon us once again." it said, with rather less conviction than usual. It sipped its tea and tried to avoid Edith Winchester's eye.
"Is it, indeed? And who told you this? Who put those notions in your head again? Was it those Johnson boys?" Edith Winchester asked severely. Her tone informed the nightmare that she was in no mood to be ignored.
"No, they've been excommunicated and exorcised. They’re not trying to summon me anymore." said the nightmare, kicking at the carpet with a lower tendril.
"Little Derek Spaniel?"
The nightmare shook the part of it that Edith Winchester would most readily associate with being a head.
"Who then? Not those St. Huskin's girls?"
"They're not really girls, Edith Winchester. They're an ancient order of demon worshipping priestesses. They've members in their nineties, and initiates are all at least eighteen." replied the nightmare, wondering to itself why it cared about terminology so much. Maybe it was something in the biscuit.
"Hm. So it is them, then? Whether they're women, girls, priestesses or bus conductors, and whether their order has been doing it for years or minutes, it's still not right to give you these ideas, is it?" she said. The nightmare took another sip of tea, feeling the dark fluid flow in and then dissipate to places unknown. "Is it, Ben?"
"No, Edith Winchester. I wasn't following their orders, though. They seek to control me, to bend my unimaginable hatred and vitriol to their will and wield me like some blunt instrument. I've crushed better than them with worse rituals."
"They're trying to manipulate you? That's not what friends do to one another, Ben."
"They would have failed. All their rites and ceremonies did was remind me of my terrible purposes, and that I could obliterate their bodies with the scything of a dread claw through space and time." An involuntary claw swept sympathetically across the living room, taking the back clean off the armchair. "Oh, whoops."
A cloud of grey particulates erupted from the nightmare's bulk, enveloping the armchair in an unbreathable cloud. Within moments the back had been restored to its original state of decay.
"Thank you." Edith Winchester said, an edge of sarcasm to her voice. It made the nightmare unwilling to confess any side effects of its reanimation efforts. She'd find them out at the next full moon anyway. "But anyway, you don't need to prove anything to these priestesses, nor do you need to sink down to their level. Let them worry about shouting into the night or whatever they do, and you focus on your drawings."
A lorry carrying tainted meats for sale in the local butcher rumbled past, shaking the flat and sending a pattern of waves across both mugs of tea.
"You have still been doing your drawings, haven't you?"
"Yes. I have rendered into reality the images of many facets of my imagination.” answered the nightmare. “From the flaming fields of ruined farmland to the poisoned rivers that spread their ichor and disease. They have been immortalised on page and wall."
"That's great, Ben. I would have preferred to hear about some landscapes, or still life pieces maybe, emphasis on the life part, but whatever takes your creative interest is alright with me. You're very good at drawing, you know. I would like to see some of your work."
In the creaking, concave hollow of the sofa the nightmare shifted, its fluid bulk pouring from one side to the other.
"I can grant you visions of them." it said, a little sheepishly. "If you really want to see them, that is."
"Yes, of course! What do these visions entail?"
"For many millennia I have injected the dreadful sights that I might make manifest into the minds of those with whom I see fit to toy. I can turn their conscious minds into a waking nightmare, showing them the ravaged and devastated lands that their home will become. I can use this same terrible power to show you a drawing I did of a nearby bird." explained the harrowing miasma of hate. "It was a very pleasing bird, with the way it pecked for seed, and went about its solemn business with whistles and chirps." A few of the more wildly thrashing whiskers and fronds of shadow began to retract into the core of the nightmare.
"It sounds like a much better use of your power than frightening people, Ben. Please show me this bird drawing."
The whole room swelled and relaxed, as if it was being viewed through a stretching and contracting lens. Black fires roared from every part of the nightmare's surface as its consciousness extended, serpentine and determined, towards Edith Winchester's mind. Finding it to be open and inviting, there was no struggle begin injecting uncharacteristically horror-free visions of a nice pencil drawing of a bird.
"Oh, well that's very good indeed! Look at all the detail around the beak, where the feathers stop! This must have taken a long time and a lot of care."
"It was the concerted craft of a few hours, a pittance of time compared to my eternal longevity." it replied. A ragged edge of its hulking, impenetrable body softened down into a smoother and gentler line.
"There are lovely patterns on the wing and the face. Is this a goldfinch, by any chance?"
Unfamiliar with the finer points of ornithology, the nightmare sent a searching tendril outwards to a local bird reserve, and tore the knowledge of goldfinches from the mind of a dedicated volunteer, who was performing maintenance on a gate. The knowledge was replaced with fears about a landslide.
"Yes. Yes I believe it was a goldfinch." the nightmare said. "I liked its hopping, and it had a wonderful little face."
"It looks like your paper is on a nice desk, too. Had you visited the big library in the city to do this?"
"I had invited myself into the cavernous halls of accumulated knowledge. Many secrets are laid bare if one knows where to scour and scry through musty pages, and secrets are so enriching."
"So that you can experience the joy of learning, and not so that you can torment people?" asked Edith Winchester, although it sounded more like a warning than a question.
"Yes. For that reason." accepted the nightmare. The darkness in its face began to shift, almost imperceptibly, from the pitch blackness of a collapsed cave to the comforting calm of a well-curtained bedroom.
"Brilliant. You see, you know how to go through life without all this killing and torturing and maiming nonsense. It's just a matter of applying yourself to better goals and pastimes. Those priestesses can say what they want, but you don't need to listen to them."
"No. I don't need to listen to them or any other mortal who seeks to harness my fury." agreed the nightmare, as tendrils retreated into its bulk, and its teeth blunted down slightly.
"That's right. I'm so proud of you, especially for coming to see me, instead of going out and hunting down a delivery driver or eating a waitress. You really did have something against people paid to take things to others, didn't you?"
"The twin prong of a murder and a disappointed customer was very satisfying." explained the nightmare, proud of itself for using the past tense. "But that behaviour is behind me. It is beneath me. I am, therefore, moving forwards and upwards in relation to those applications of my might."
"You are. Would you like another biscuit?"
"Please."
There was a crunching. Not like a crunching of bone under hooves, but of confectionery inside a mouth.
Edith Winchester sighed, contentedly at a job well done, and the nightmare pondered its surroundings again.
"You know, Edith Winchester, you should really be taking better care of yourself and you rhome." it said. Its companion looked up into the infinite inkiness of its sun-blotting form.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Look at the state of this place. There's rubbish everywhere, the fittings are wearing out, your sofa is dissolving like a ship, wrecked at sea and lost forever to humankind, along with its crew and precious cargo."
"It's a little bit messy, I grant you, but it's fine."
"Is it? There's a rotting orange underneath your sofa, and I can feel the life inside your fridge from the mouldy milk. Just pour it away. It can't be good for your health."
Edith Winchester crossed her arms.
"So i've forgotten to clean out a couple of bits for a week."
"A month." corrected the nightmare. “And it looks like no-one is performing any maintenance on anything. I’ve massacred a vast number of artisans who could have fixed these things.”
"Whatever. It's all under control. I'll get to it." Edith Winchester defied.
"Will you? When you haven't already?"
"Yes! I just need to find the time and inclination." she said. There was a pause. Edith Winchester waited for a rebuttal against which to argue, but the nightmare provided none. It simply held the silence. "Alright. You're right. I suppose I haven't been looking after myself as I should. It's just hard when you're on your own and no-one's there to judge you. Katie doesn’t have time to pop round much anymore, and it’s fine because I’m going to hers instead, but I don’t have much incentive to tidy up the flat. You can get away with a wrapper here and dirty clothes there to begin with, and then suddenly you're living in a hovel."
"I have been on my own ever since the emergence of other people to make the concept meaningful. Never have I seen fit to sit above carelessly discarded fruit in a state of decay."
"Oh, come on. You're seriously telling me that you, a demonic source of hatred and despoilment, have never sat over a rotting orange."
"Not one that rots from disinterest. Only food that rotted by my hand, or by my slaughter of those who would have eaten it."
"That hardly gives you the moral high ground."
"I care not for morals and their altitude. But self-care is different and you are displaying none. This is the virtue you would have me learn, Edith Winchester. You must do the same." lectured the nightmare.
They both cast an eye around the room. Then the nightmare cast a tendril rushing outwards, and collated the coffee table's impressive display of rubbish into a neat bouquet. A single crushing motion reduced the bouquet from detritus, to dust, to nothing.
"I have begun the scouring of the flat." said the nightmare. "I believe that this constitutes a constructive use of my cataclysmic capabilities."
Edith Winchester chuckled, in the bashful manner of one who is more accustomed to giving help than receiving it, and finds the reversal difficult to comprehend. It gave a dark part of the nightmare a little solace that it was still making someone uncomfortable, at least. "Let us purge the floor of its dusty civilisations, and slam a jagged rock of fear into the heart of the mould-caked citrus."
"You know, I think that would be for the best." smiled Edith Winchester, whose own capacity for purgation relied more heavily on a vacuum and a mop than ancient and unknowable powers.
Like an oncoming storm-front of agony, the nightmare's smoky body migrated forwards through the living room, capturing anything which did not belong and annihilating it in the crucible of antediluvian calamity. It sent a half-eaten sandwich into a spiral of self-doubt that ended in the kitchen's compost bin. Several old newspapers, lurking behind seating or crumpled in the corner, were hoisted into the air by otherworldly forces and combusted like a bird struck by lightning. Edith Winchester picked up a dirty plate and carried it to sideboard, ready for washing up. If the mess had been able to experience panic, despair or despondency then the nightmare would have felt it. An elation deepened by the fright would have infused it with further awful ideas and hypothetical misdeeds. As it was, it could only take solace that Edith Winchester would not be breathing in spores from long-abandoned mugs of hot drinks.
In its countless generations of atrocities, across an existence-long campaign of spite, the nightmare had never left anything spotless. It had stolen loved ones without a trace, despoiled communities so thoroughly that one might question if they had ever existed at all, and acted with sufficient subtlety that its victims would blame themselves for its cruel actions, but spotlessness was not on the cards. Even in Edith Winchester's living room, although it had left the space much improved, there were still tiny scorch marks and runic carvings to mark its foul presence. But everything was tidy, and everything was clean.
"Thank you, Ben. Thank you dearly. I know this sort of thing must be hard for you, cleaning up and caring about someone, I mean, but I'm grateful you did it. I knew you had it in you, and I know I should have had it in me." she said, treating herself to another mug of tea and a second packet of biscuits. The Arc de Triomphe was also full once again.
"It goes against my nature." said the nightmare, blowing once more on the boiling beverage, “But my nature can, apparently, be unlearned.”
For a few minutes more, over their drinks and a rapidly shrinking stock of snacks, Edith Winchester and the nightmare chatted about their recent activities, both with a little bit of embarrassment. When both mugs ran empty, a black cloud puffed up to fill the living room, and then the hallway and the kitchen too, before resettling into its familiar shape by the door.
“Thank you, Edith Winchester, for helping me through this moment of impropriety. I will take my leave and show the priestesses that they will not command my actions, directly or otherwise."
"Good for you. I'm glad to have helped and I hope you'll visit me again soon. Thank you for reminding me that I should care for myself, too. Goodnight, Ben." said Edith Winchester, the little woman standing at the doorway to the living room. A nightmare the shape of a fluctuating shadow, cast by a fire in the mouth of a cave when prehistoric beasts stalk in for their prey, faced her from the front door.
"Goodnight, Edith Winchester." said Ben.