# Some Brief Waking Terrors



## Dr Midnight (Sep 28, 2002)

This isn't an account of an RPG session, but a telling of some things that happened in my head this evening.

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Here on Pontiac Avenue, what's left of Isidore is shaking the trees outside. There's no rain and no real danger to it- it's just windy and unusually warm air. Nice night for a walk. I grab the discman and head out. 

The atmosphere outside is something eerie. For one, I didn't really see people. I saw people inside their buildings or driving by in their cars, but I felt very alone. The sky is lighter than the horizon, due to the low clouds and mist of the storm catching light from Cranston (and nearby Providence), making everything a little hazy and light. The treeline and everything beneath it is much darker than the gray-purplish wash in the sky. The streetlamps are casting an odd orange tinge over everything. Warm lights against cool shadows. Everything looks a bit like an oil painting.

Walking in a night like this, my imagination starts doing things to me. Some of them I like. The side effect is that my mind is a treacherous beast and can turn on me at any time. 

Three things terrified me.

The last, and least frightening, was when I got to the end point of my walk, before I turned around to come back. I walked into a parking lot and looked around at all the darkness and trees. The wind is turning the trees' branches into thousands of desperate grasping claws. I turn and face the building I've walked to the back of. The windows are all dark on the three-story structure, save for one- the main door. The double doors into the atrium are lit by an EXIT light. Everything inside is cast in dull bloody red. Nothing's moving, of course- it's an empty room. There was something very very unsettling about it. I enjoyed it for a moment, and turned back. 

Just five minutes before that, the second thing scared me. This was when I was walking near the local Burger King. On the right hand side of the road, there's nothing but unmowed suburban nature. Tall grass and weeds, some small saplings, thorns... You know the type. There was a large patch of waving grass under a streetlamp. There's a tall plant of some kind growing out of it. It's the kind with gnarled curled stalks that look like rope stretching out from a leafy mass. It's all waving in the wind. I catch this out of the corner of my eye and look up. It struck me as a great nighttime ocean scene: the grass was a roiling sea, lit by the moon, and from it was sprouting an enormous kraken, with arms slowly writhing over the waves. It frightened me, but it was magnificent. On the way back, I stood and watched it for a while more, imagining. 

The first thing I saw was not the good kind of scare. It was a moment of real terror. This was walking by a small abandoned schoolhouse. Its windows and doors are boarded up, and it's a fairly eerie sight even in daylight. To its side is a playground that's overrun with weeds and broken beer bottles. The playground is surrounded by chainlink fence. I'm walking by on the left, not paying any attention to it. On my right, two feet away, on the other side of the chainlink fence, a child leapt from the shadows and clutched at the fence. I gasp and turn my head to look at it. As I'm turning my head, it grabs the fence with puffy white fingers. The child is naked and dead. It's grinning with teeth at me. It's all white, and its flesh is bloated and wet around it like bread dough, or marshmallow. Its face is swollen and horrible. Bright white. The skin around the eyes has puffed out so that the eyes look like black buttons sewn into pillows. It clutches the fence and grins at me, swinging forward and back with some kind of excitement. When my head turns it's made of leaves. Just big fat leaves that were waving in the wind and blown forward to me by a gust. The "face" was an enormous leaf that had caught the glare of the nearby streetlamp as it rushed at me. 

I caught my breath and eventually began walking again.

Most of the walk was spent deciding if I would write this up as a brief story hour when I got back. My choice is based on that I want something left behind after tonight. I don't want to forget it. Something this horrible needs to be written down while it's fresh. I hope I can read it again sometime and get the same shiver from the little dead child that seemed so happy to see me.


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