The Sandman and Slinky

I woke with a start at 6 a.m., an hour before the alarm was due to go off. I'm not ashamed to say I could not sleep again until I left the light on. It was not as bad as the one with the scissors, but it was still a great big fuck-you to the dreamcatchers that hang above my bed.

This is why I don't always get along with the Sandman.

I dreamt I was at a vet clinic. The faint copper smell of blood, the strong, comforting smell of fur and animals. And you were there, in a different form, and you were showing me around. You worked there, even though in real life it's unimaginable that you would have. And I should have known something was wrong because of the flayed dog which lay on the concrete floor, its skin puddled around its limp body like a thrown-off coat. But in the way of dreams, it seemed normal. I was the universal heroine in every bad horror movie, when she walks into a dingy little basement with one flickering bare bulb and there's blood on the walls and you're holding onto the seat and screaming "Run, bitch, run!" and she doesn't but wanders in deeper and says something idiotic like "Why are you carrying around a filleting knife?"

Then I saw, in a large cage in the middle of the floor, a small bag, like the kind of cooler bags you use to sore beer in. There was a tiny ventilation fan built into the bag and a switch. The bag sat in the middle of the cage, and the sides bulged occasionally, like something was moving inside it. Of course.

"What's that?" I ask you (idiotic heroine question number one).
"Oh, he's just resting," you say. "Post- surgical recuperation." And naturally you are very shifty as you say this. Naturally I don't notice. I might as well be blonde in this dream.

Then a light clicks on and the inside of the bag lights up like a fluorescent tube just lit up. And the bag bulges alarmingly.

You lead me away, and I look back, but the light has gone off and the bag is dark and still.

One nightmare surgery later (blood everywhere, perfectly normal in that strange dream logic) we're back at the bag. And suddenly there's this sound in the air that makes my hair stand. It starts off soft, almost inaudible. But it rises in volume. It's a growl, in the same way that an aircraft carrier is a ship.

And then something bursts out of the bag and melts like smoke through the bars.

The eyes blaze, and it looks like it skipped right over the last few evolutionary processes which gave rise to Lassie. The words 'slavering beast' comes to mind. Gray fur with a reddish cast rises in a crest along its shoulders in a hellish ruff of fur and the head is slung low between the haunches like a bull's. All this in an eyeblink, before it springs, the powerful legs with the hooked dewclaws flexing in a frightening display of musculature. Then you've run, climbing up the gates which I suddenly realize bar us in, and you're screaming. I have time to see the silver chain which wraps around the hellhound's neck before I'm running too, my mind's eye fixated on the image burned in my mind - the bag. It's bigger than the bars, and firm. If the chain's short enough, maybe it will get caught in the bars and stop the beast.

I'm running through corridors, turning blindly and desperately, until I slam into a grill door at the end of a dead-end corridor where nowhere to go. I'm screaming, and that thing is right there, running down the corridor. And somehow I can see the cage even though I'm far away from it, and I see the bag catch in the bars....

and squeeze through.

Then I realize that you're weren't screaming, but singing in a terrible ululating chant. And I realize that it's to cover the sounds of my screaming as it eats me.

Somehow that was the single most horrifying thing about the dream. More than anything, that was what required the light.

The floor shakes as it advances. I don't close my eyes.

A last-minute reflex causes me to lash out desperately, catching it between the eyes. I hear something snap with a sound like a muffled gunshot. And it roars, then stops its advance, watching me. I watch it. Nothing moves.

I never turn on my back on it as I hug the wall and inch away.

In the way of dreams, I am suddenly walking down the driveway, leaving you alone in the house. The hellhound is there on the driveway too, but it was morphed form one beast to three, with human heads, strangely deformed and painful to the eye. They are the heads of old men, but something is terribly wrong with them. Bizarrely, they wear gold-rimmed spectacles. Their heads swing around to track me as I walk a mere arms-length away from them down the driveway, the bleeding, empty sockets watching me. They are not afraid of me, although there is a certain wariness apparent in the tension in their bloody haunches and bristled hackles.

I don't turn my back until I am through the main gate of the long, long driveway.

And when I start to run, I think I can hear you begin to scream.