Nightmare Girl

by Terry Volkirch

A young teenage boy is troubled by a strange recurring nightmare and he's willing to do almost anything to try to end it.

Note: I want to thank Angela Rasch for her help with this story. She's been very kind and patient with me.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR THOSE WHO ARE SENSITIVE TO HORROR: This story has some elements of horror but it has a happy ending. I hope you give it a chance. Thanks.

Nightmare Girl
by Terry Volkirch

Part 1 of 3

I was plagued by a dream -- a recurring nightmare, actually -- and after suffering with it for a year, it continued to shake me up. I thought I'd get used to it after all that time, but it was slowly killing me.

The dream starts with me standing at the edge of a dance floor in a place called the Seaside Inn. The warm glow of candles and oil lanterns reflects off the shiny new hardwood floor, casting eerie shadows that move on every wall and stretch to the far corners of the large room.

I listen to two young men strumming acoustic guitars while watching young couples embrace and move as one to the rhythm. The music flows into me, and I gently sway side-to-side.

The more I watch, the more confused I get. Something bothers me about the clothes, especially the women's clothes. They seem old, like something my grandmother might wear. If everyone wasn't so preoccupied with dancing -- and if I had any control over the dream -- I would ask if they were having some kind of lame costume party.

As I slowly move to the music, I feel something strange yet familiar brushing my legs. I look down and smile, admiring my long pleated skirt, swinging like a large bell to toll the midnight hour.

My face shows pleasure but my thoughts are in turmoil. I feel like two different people at the same time. The dream is impossible.

I'd never been to the Seaside Inn before -- until my current trip -- and except for in that dream, I'd never been a girl!

***

It was Halloween night when I first had the dream. I woke up after seeing the skirt I wore, and I didn't tell anyone. Shame already ruled my lonely little world. A small, feminine boy attracted ridicule like a magnet. There was no way I'd reveal my dream, not until it haunted me again and again, slowly driving me crazy.

As the months passed, I got used to wearing girls clothes in my dream, and more of it played out.

I notice that my normally short black hair tickles my shoulders, and I somehow know that my face looks very similar, just slightly more feminine. I purse my full lips and my dark, brooding eyes take in the scene with the happy couples, dancing and smiling and laughing the night away. I yearn to join in, but I'm too young, and I don't have a partner.

Swaying to the music helps a little, but it isn't satisfying, so I find myself moving my feet. Then my arms start swinging. I watch the women dance and try copying their movements, and I dance by myself. It still isn't good enough.

As long as I can see everything, see that no one dances with me, I can't be happy. Nothing satisfies me until I lose myself in the dance. I close my eyes and toss my head around with reckless abandon, diverging from the normal dance of the time and morphing into a silly, spastic puppet. I'm wild and free and love every second of it.

All too soon, the sound of loud, heavy footsteps cuts short my happy little dance. I open my eyes to see a large angry figure glaring down at me. A meaty hand reaches out to grab my wrist and roughly pull me back away from the dance floor.

***

The first time I got that far, the man's hand yanked me right out of the dream. I woke up trembling with excitement and fear, and just like with my swaying skirt, the scary man seemed both familiar and unrecognizable at the same time. I didn't know what to think of that, but I refused to ask anyone for help. About twice a week, I just kept suffering through that same dream sequence.

The rest of my life was extremely dull by comparison. When I wasn't forced to go to school, I holed up in my bedroom, reading books about far away places.

"Get a life, bookworm!" my crazy older sister often called through my closed door. I could always count on her to remind me of my boring ways.

"Get bent, wonder goth!" I'd usually shout back.

She wasn't really into gothic clothing, and we didn't exactly insult each other to be cruel. I could hear the love and concern behind her words. I think she just did it to try to force me out of my rut. It was a last resort.

She stopped taking me places after we both started getting teased. She no longer wanted to be seen with me. No one did. She hung out with her friends and I had nothing but my books, my only friends.

The fictional places in my books made me wonder whether the Seaside Inn was real. At the time, I didn't know that the place actually existed, but everything about my dream seemed so consistent and real. It made me believe that the inn actually did exist, and I wish I would've confided in someone about my dream much earlier. It might have saved me some anguish.

***

After being yanked awake by the scary dream man for several months, I grew numb to the rough treatment and felt resigned to my impending punishment. I had to be punished.

It was very late in my dream and I should've been in bed. I also knew it was wrong to dance so wildly. I knew it would lead men on and make them lose all control. I was a naughty girl. I was always naughty. I had memories of the scary man telling me so.

No longer fearing my fate, I jumped past the yanking scene to extend my nightmare once again.

The man drags me out a back door and makes a sharp right turn along a wooden deck that hugs the back of the building. I get whipped around the corner and hear myself yelp.

From the unsteady gait and smell of his breath, I can tell he had quite a lot to drink. It isn't enough to loosen his grip though.

A stiff breeze rustles leaves, masking the sound of my footsteps as I skid down a short flight of stairs. My feet hit sand and we turn left. With a gibbous moon to light our way, we head away from the back of the inn towards the ocean.

How I loathe the ocean. I have disjointed memories of standing with him on a private beach at night, where he likes to lecture me. He lectures for what seems like hours, and when he sees that it doesn't do any good, he beats me. He says it hurts him more than it does me. He tells me that he does it for my own good. No one ever interrupts. My mother is nowhere to be seen. The police and Child Protection Service don't save me. No one does.

As he hurries through the tall grass, dragging me behind, I have trouble keeping my footing. My long skirt restricts my stride. It's only his strong grip that keeps me from falling. I stumble behind him on autopilot and feel myself drifting away. I detach myself from the reality of the moment to save my sanity, and I daydream about running through a sunny meadow.

I get about halfway across my imaginary meadow -- a dream within a dream -- when he abruptly stops and startles me. Apparently, he forgot about the cliff behind the inn.

Being kept from his goal makes him angry enough, but a sudden question from me really fuels his anger.

"Are you through yet?" I hear myself ask in a loud, bored voice.

He turns on me and grabs both of my shoulders, shaking me like a rag doll ... and shaking me awake.

***

The nightmare got worse, and I tried locking it all away, deep inside.

My sister, Lisa, stopped insulting me. I think she sensed me slipping away and gave up.

I sometimes caught her and my mother exchanging odd looks when they thought I wasn't looking. I also noticed a sudden awkward silence on those rare occasions when I walked in on one of their conversations. My sister usually shook her head and walked out of the room soon after I arrived, leaving my mother to busy herself in her sanctum sanctorum, the kitchen.

"What's to eat?" I'd parrot, following after my mom.

That always amused her.

After school, she left me on my own to forage through the fridge while she prepared dinner, and on the weekend, she often made me a grilled cheese sandwich. After downing my favored meal and politely thanking her, I'd wander back to my room and resume my bland existence.

At least I wasn't exactly depressed. I had a normal teenage appetite, and that kept my mom at bay.

***

My extended dream recurred for several weeks, with me being unable to make it past the shaking part. It was too easy to wake up at that point, especially since I had a strong feeling of dread about how the dream would end.

I think morbid curiosity finally got the better of me though. One night, as usual, I slipped into the dream, and it extended again.

I enjoy the music and endure the scary man's rough treatment. We end up at the cliff, and he shakes me, but I don't wake up. Instead, yet another strange thing happens. I laugh. I tilt my head back and laugh hysterically. I laugh because that poor, frustrated man can't drag me down to the beach and punish me like he so desperately wants. There's no way down to the water and there's no beach. There are only large, jagged rocks, pounded by the sea at the base of the cliff.

I wished I could control the dream at that point. I didn't want to laugh at the scary man. I wanted to threaten to call the police, but that's not the way the dream played out.

My high-pitched laughter pierces the roar of the crashing surf and seriously enrages him. He completely loses control, and when slapping my face doesn't stop me from laughing, he tries a foolproof method. He throws me backwards off the cliff.

Getting thrown off the cliff surprises me, and in the bright moonlight, I can see that it surprises him too since we briefly face each other. Our eyes are both wide as I fall away from him.

***

I woke up in a cold sweat almost immediately after the scary man let go of me in the dream, and I made it up to that same point countless times after that, afraid to see the dream to the bitter end. It wasn't until early October of the current year -- a little over three weeks ago - that I woke up screaming.

The nightmare extended a final time, and I fell, waking just as I hit bottom. I screamed as I fell in the dream and I screamed as I woke up. It was the first of many screams.

***

Even after the first several nights of screaming, I stubbornly kept my dream a secret. I said that I couldn't remember anything but vague shadows.

My parents threatened me with therapy. My sister avoided me.

Naturally, I didn't sleep well, and what's worse, my recurring nightmare occurred more and more frequently. It always woke me in the middle of the night and it took ages to drop off again. It's hard to sleep with your heart pounding in your chest and the cold sweat of fear soaking your bed sheets. That nightmare scared me half to death -- literally.

I read somewhere that if you die in your dream, you die in real life, and I came very close to dying in my nightmare every single time. I could almost feel the touch of cold, wet rock on my back at the end of every fall.

One morning, while I sat at the table eating a bowl of cold cereal, I wondered what it must have felt like to actually hit the rocks. I shivered with dread and couldn't break free of the gruesome images until my mother saved me.

"Marty," she said in her best motherly tone. "You can't keep this up."

"I'm fine," I maintained.

"Those bags under your eyes say different, young man."

I flinched violently when she called me a young man, surprising both of us.

I'd barely started puberty and I never really thought about my gender before, but recently, I felt like I started merging with the girl in my dream. I liked wearing the skirt and I liked being her, in spite of what happened to her -- to me -- in the dream. I suddenly realized that I identified more as a girl than a boy, and it hit me hard.

"Mom!" I suddenly shouted and started crying.

I sprung from my chair and ran to her. I wrapped my arms tightly around her, quietly saying the same thing over and over.

"I don't want to die."

I don't know exactly why I said that. It could be because I thought I'd eventually hit the rocks and the nightmare itself would kill me, or it could be that I thought the scary man would show up one day for real and drag me off to the Seaside Inn to throw me off the cliff. I even wondered if some small part of me feared the loss of my manhood. Whatever the reason, my little breakdown saved me. It didn't stop my nightmare but it got me to talk about it in excruciating detail. I told my family everything, and it started the ball rolling for some much needed research.

***

My mother took charge and after a week of intense searching found out everything she could. She identified a Seaside Inn that matched my dream perfectly in every respect except one. Only the age of the building seemed out of place. The inn in my dream seemed fairly new, but the place that our family showed up at two days before Halloween looked a bit worse for wear.

The peeling gray paint on the three story Gothic style building showed signs of once being white, and the wood underneath showed through in many places. Weeds and ratty looking shrubs invaded nearly every square inch of the grounds.

I should've been upset about not being told we were coming, but I wasn't. I got out of the car and slowly moved forward, like I was being pulled or pushed. I chalked it up to curiosity but I don't think that's what kept me going.

I pushed through a creaky wrought iron gate and stopped on a path that consisted of broken concrete slabs with dandelions straining through every crack. The place reeked of sadness and neglect.

My father and sister went in ahead to see about getting a room. They walked carefully over creaking floorboards on the front porch, leaving my mother and me to have a little talk.

"It makes sense," my mother assured me. "It's old now but it matches the age of the clothes that you said everyone wore."

"You mean I've been dreaming of the past?"

"I think so," she said, looking at the inn instead of me. "There's something else you should know too."

I froze.

My mother turned to look at me and smiled.

"It's okay, Marty. We'll get through this. I'll tell you later, after we get settled here."

***

The inn turned out to be closed for the season, leaving only a solitary old man to watch over it. The old caretaker found it hard to believe anyone would want to stay in late October but my father persisted, explaining that he was doing research for a book he wanted to write. The Seaside Inn made the perfect setting for his next novel.

When the caretaker thought about what that might mean for future business, he was all smiles and fawned over us like we were royalty or something. It was a little annoying, but I was easily annoyed. The place gave me the creeps.

As I stepped up onto the porch and made my way to the entrance, I heard the old man give some background information to my father.

Many decades ago, the inn had been a hot spot for informal gatherings and dances, but the last twenty odd years had been unkind. Only bird watching tourists came to stay, and they kept to the warmer months. The inn normally closed from early October through March, and it barely made enough money to survive.

Bored, I drifted away from the group once we got inside, my feet moving with a will of their own. I didn't care. The creepy old place didn't exactly feel comfortable but it felt familiar. I'd seen it dozens of times ... in my dreams.

In stark contrast to the Gothic architecture, the furnishings looked modern and cheap, differing greatly from my dream. Yet somehow, the interior didn't diminish the charm of the place. It only seemed to reinforce the adage, "Beauty is only skin deep." The beauty was in its façade.

I scuffed my feet until I found myself near what had once been the hardwood dance floor. Chairs and tables spread out over the floor now, their surfaces covered by white linen for the next several months while they waited for the tourists to return.

As I stood there, I felt a presence, calming and directing me from within. I closed my eyes and I heard music. The place came alive. Men played guitars and couples danced. I was captivated.

"Marty? Where are you?" Lisa called.

Her voice barely registered over the music that I heard in my mind. I ignored her and slowly swayed to the music.

"Marty! Snap out of it!"

My sister caught up to me and roughly shook me by the shoulder. She meant well but I'd had enough shaking by the scary man in my nightmare. It scared the heck out of me, and I screamed, and the light slowly faded as I slumped to the floor.

***

I woke up lying on a small twin bed in a small room with a tiny window and slanted roof. The unfamiliar sight confused me so I propped myself up on my elbows to get a better look.

"Marty?" my mother asked. "What happened? Are you feeling okay?"

She sat in a chair at the foot of the bed and looked up from the newspaper she had opened on her lap. Her reading glasses perched on the edge of her nose, as she herself perched on the edge of a sturdy high-backed chair. Everything seemed poised on the edge of something, and it made me uneasy.

"I'm fine!" I blurted out. "Really."

I tried to distract myself from thoughts of edges and cliffs ... and falling.

"I heard music ...," I said. "I heard it in my mind and I started reliving the dream. If Lisa didn't shake me, I'm afraid I would've kept going. I ... I don't want to die!"

I did it again. I broke down, except this time my mother came to me. She hugged me tightly as I cried, and she calmed me with a few soothing words.

"It's okay, Marty. I'm here. I won't let you die."

After a good, short cry, I took a deep, shuddering breath and gently pushed away to talk. I wanted to know more about that place. I didn't want any more surprises.

"So?" I asked, wiping tears from my eyes. "Is there a cliff overlooking the ocean?"

"Oh ... that." My mother looked away. "Yes. Yes, there is. It's not hundreds of feet tall like you estimated but I suppose it's high enough."

"Then it's all here," I said to myself. "Everything I need to live the dream for real is here."

I flopped back down on the bed and had a sudden flashback of falling in my dream. I flinched and my eyes went wide but I stopped short of screaming. The soft bed reassured me well enough.

"Marty?" Mom didn't add any more words but her eyes spoke volumes, radiating concern.

"Everything keeps reminding me of my dream. I guess it's freaking me out a little."

"Hmmm." She smiled. "Maybe you just need something to eat. Since there are no staff here except for the caretaker, we've got full run of most of the place, including the kitchen. How about one of my famous grilled cheese sandwiches?"

My stomach gurgled to answer for me, causing more than a few giggles as the two of us got up to leave the room.

***

My family sat at a large rectangular dining table, half again more than we needed. My mother insisted we use it so it could hold everything. She didn't want to have to make a lot of long trips between the kitchen and dining room.

Lisa and I set the table and then helped my mother carry the food out for lunch while Father sat at the table scribbling notes. He really did plan to write a book about the experience. Writing was only a hobby for him but he dedicated himself to it.

With the table set and full of food, we all sat down for a light meal and a hearty discussion, started off by a single, simple question.

"Why are we here?" I finally thought to ask between bites.

I didn't mind the time off from school. I wasn't doing well anyway. With my lack of sleep, it was hard to concentrate in class. I thought the break might actually do me some good, or at least I thought it would until we arrived at the inn. I wasn't too pleased about the destination. I thought we were going somewhere nice.

As I said before, my parents neglected to tell me where we were going. My mother did a lot of research but doled out little of what she learned. Before we left on our trip, all she told me was that there was a Seaside inn that seemed to match the one in my dream.

"First off," my mother began. "I wanted to be sure this was the right place."

"Oh, it's the right place," I assured her.

"Right. I also hoped to find more answers here. I hoped to find a way to end your nightmare. I can't stand to see you suffer like you have."

"I'm not happy about it either, but what can we do?"

"Well ...," she looked away, a little guilty. "We have a plan."

I looked around at the faces of my sister and father and noticed they shared my mother's guilty look.

"And you were going to share this plan with me when?" I huffed.

"I wanted to make sure this was the same inn before telling you the plan. It wouldn't make sense to go through with it if it didn't match the inn in your dream."

"Right ...." I scowled a little but kept stuffing my face with food. I loved grilled cheese sandwiches too much to stop.

My mother stared intensely at my face, and seeing that I seemed to be under control for the moment, she dished out another important fact. She must have felt that I needed more softening up before divulging the plan.

"Remember when I was going to tell you something outside when we first got here?"

I froze again. Not even the lure of the last bite of my grilled cheese sandwich could thaw me. Something in my mother's eyes and voice made me really nervous.

"Marty?"

I slowly nodded and she revealed more of her research.

She told me about a girl, my great, great Aunt Sophie, who died when she was only a few months older than my current age. According to the research, Sophie had committed suicide, jumping from the cliff. She didn't leave a note so no one understood why she did it. It didn't make sense at the time, but after my dream and my experiences at the inn, her death took on a darker meaning.

"Finish your sandwich, Marty, and your milk. I have something to show you."

I quickly did as she asked and she pulled up a folder that she had lying on her lap. Mothers could be so sneaky!

From the folder, she pulled out a sheet of paper with something on it. She moved my empty plate and glass and set the paper on the table in front of me.

I had a lot of trouble looking down at it. I gripped the edges of my chair first and slowly tilted my head to face it, and what I saw made me gasp.

I saw a black-and-white photograph of a girl who looked very much like me. Her lips were slightly fuller and her straight black hair reached down to her shoulders but I felt as though I was looking in a mirror.

"Yes," my mother confirmed. "There's a strong family resemblance."

"Ewwww, Marty," Lisa suddenly added. "Trying to catch flies again?"

My sister referred to the fact that my mouth hung open in amazement. It was an old phrase but we shared a taste for old movies and had both giggled when we first heard it. That was years ago, back when I was innocent and happy, before the really cruel teasing started, and well before my nightmare.

My mother snatched the paper back and frowned.

"This is so odd," she said, looking down and speaking more to herself than anyone else. Then she looked up and stared deep into my eyes. "I'm still not sure I believe in ghosts," she continued. "But it looks like Sophie has been trying to tell you something."

*** to be continued ***

 © 2009 by Terry Volkirch. This work may not be replicated in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise without the express consent of the Author (copyright holder). All Rights Reserved. This is a work of Fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents past, present or future is purely coincidental.