All Hallows Eve

It’s midnight on All Hallows Eve and I am already in bed - alone.

It had been a disaster of a Halloween party. Chase had turned up already very drunk and proceeded to projectile vomit over the finger buffet that I had spent ages preparing and had spent a fair chunky of spare cash on.

Drunken Apology

This kind of killed the party mood in one fell swoop.

I was so mad! Chase kept apologising,  but then he'd fall into the furniture and knock stuff over, catching people's legs with his clumsy feet causing more and more mess! I was losing whatever patience I had. 

I threw Chase out and Jake offered to take him home to keep him out of trouble. Chase shouting back to me as I slammed the door ‘Sorry Ginny, really sorry Ginny.- GINNY!‘

No-one wanted to stay after that display, but Stephanie stayed for a while to help me clear up - both of us gagging at the smell and the technicolour mess Chase had left behind in his wrecking wake.

What a waste!

Left alone

The others sloped off to Murphy’s Bar for a ‘lock in’, but I really didn’t feel like going. So I released Stephanie from her being a ‘Best Friend’ bond and told her to go with the others while I cleared up the remaining mess (swearing under my breath ‘Chase you will pay for this, you jerk’) and went to bed early and alone.

Red Neon

The red neon numbers of the digital clock showed -11.59- then ‘blinked’ and changed to -00.00- . Midnight.

Sleepily, I registered the change – the zeros on the clock looking like two pairs of red hollow eyes staring at me from the black clock face for exactly a minute and then they ‘blinked’ to show -00.01-. I rolled over onto my side and closed my eyes.

Wild Weather

The weather outside had taken a turn for the worst. I could hear the rain as it battered the windows with its hundreds of tiny fists, demanding entry to the house and out of the cold outside.

The wind kicked over the pumpkin lanterns and trashed the plastic bat decorations that I'd set up on and around the front door, hurling them onto the porch floor. 

A great gust grabbed huge handfuls of the larger icy raindrops and lashed them against the sides and roof of the house, making them sound like hailstones rattling across the tiles.

Moans and Shrieks

Again the gales hammered down the rain on to the house. Its clattering sounding like a shovel full of gravel or shale thrown against a wooden shack time and time again. 

The wind growled down the chimney like a disgruntled ex- boyfriend – demanding entry to the house and trying to hold my attention with screeching of ‘LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO MEEEEEEEE!’ as the house moaned and shrieked in defiance!

I cling to my covers tighter, using the top pillow to swathe my ears from the noise.

Twisted Willow

The wind, angry at being unable to rouse me from my bed, turned on the lonely Weeping Willow that stands in the garden at the front of the house, whipping him around and twisting his branches like a pretzel before allowing him to uncoil and return back to his normal hunched state - still heaving around as if trying to get his breath back.

The Willow threw his wind-beaten arms downwards as if trying to grab the earth to hold himself to the ground. 

Bed Haven

I lay, folded up inside the duvet of my bed, like the lemon filling in a meringue pie. To my sleepy eyes, the shadows of the room billowed and waved like dark muslin voiles in a breeze.

Trick of the Shadows

I suddenly realise in my semiconscious state that a dark shape is emerging on my right - someone is leaning over me – looming in the darkness.

After a few seconds panic, it flits through my befuddled mind not to be silly - that no-one is here.

I close my eyes and say to myself - ‘I’m in my bed, cosy and warm. It’s the trick of the shadows and my imagination is running wild because it's Halloween and I've had a few drinks’.

I chuckle half-heartedly and whisper ‘Stupid’ to myself and pull the duvet further up and over my nose.

Detached Interest

Again, I feel a presence loom over me - leaning to stare? No, it feels like it’s studying me.

It has an aloofness about it – a bug collector pinning their new find to the pegboard for the curious to look at in more detail.

Where Am I?

The room suddenly brightens around me and I realise I am NOT in my bed!

A thick box-shaped glass case surrounds me on all sides and above me as well. A soft glowing spotlight shines down and to the right - straight into my face, as if to highlight my facial features.

A Dream

‘Is this a dream?’ I think to myself. ‘Is it one of those dreams where you are someone else?’ No - I am still me - at least I think I'm still me….

I am curled up in my usual foetal sleeping position. 

But no longer snuggled up in my enveloping squishy duvet, but lying on a large round beanbag-type cushion which is draped in candy-stripe blankets. I also appear to be surrounded by paraphernalia from across the decades of the 20^th Century - like the settings and layouts of mummified bodies and grave offerings you see in museums.

Realisation

For some reason, my hair has been pulled into a high ponytail and I appear to be dressed in a pink jogging suit and matching sneakers that I wouldn’t be seen dead in normally!

Be seen dead in… That phrase bounces around my consciousness like a tennis ball in a wind tunnel.

I find that I can’t move any part of my body.  My head is resting on the crook of my right arm – my face positioned so it’s looking up through the right hand side of the glass case.

Another figure looms over me again, then fades.

Suddenly, my senses return to me and in my shock and complete creeping, skin crawling horror, I realise that I am the exhibit in a local museum!

My body on display like a gassed butterfly or formaldehyde-soaked fish.

Panic takes over my mind, I try again to move, but I can’t - not a single centimetre.

Panic

I try to shout, but I can feel years of dust coating the back of my desiccated throat and not even a death rattle can be raised.

I try to move my fingers, but see that they are withered and the colour of old leather. The tips of the finger bones, fingernails still intact, showing through the shrivelled-back skin and disintegrated nail cuticles.

I want to cry, but there is nothing there, apart from maybe a residue of salt in the tear ducts.

I'm Here! I'm Alive!

Trapped – my spirit alive and well, but residing in my seemingly very long-dead carcass. The panic rolls into despair and grinding horror. 

Is this a room in Hell perhaps?

A punishment to be left as a pile of dusty bones and skin, preserved like beef jerky and dressed as people of the future might think ‘we’ in the ‘past’ dressed.

To be put on display, gawped at and prodded in the name of science from ‘9 to 5’ every weekday except weekends and high holidays.

I want to scream and scream and SCREEEEAAAAAM!

A Kind Soul

Another shadowy figure materializes in my short field of vision and finally comes into focus.

She is a beautiful middle aged woman with long, straight silver-grey hair, parted in the middle. A proud face with sympathetic eyes, full of character and grace - of First People descent maybe?

She is wearing a plain straight-line buckskin coloured dress with a black beaded belt which has little flecks of Lapis Lazuli dotted around it. 

A large black owl pendant hung around her neck on a strip of black buckskin with a white moonstone toggle on each end to stop the owl falling to the floor, which rested on her chest.

Help!

She looks me straight in the eyes with such pity and ‘knowing’ as if she can see that I am still here, even in this mummified state.

She is holding a large, hard-backed book which has faded, red leather triangular corners and spine, with a mottled cowhide front and back. 

It looks like books from centuries ago, but oddly - it has no ‘title’ or author’s name anywhere on it that I can see.

She opens the book and is trying to show me some of the pages, trying to communicate something to me – a way back for me perhaps, an escape from this dried meat and fabric prison. A way to release my soul from this entrapment and purgatory.

Come Back!

But she is suddenly and unceremoniously shoved aside by a large meat fisted troglodyte and his arrogant brood – who really should be under this glass instead of me.

She tries again to position herself next to me, still holding the book open, trying to mouth words to me - but I don't understand! I can't tell her I this, I only hope she knows.

I am using what little there is of my sight to claw any information from the open page as I can, frustratingly, it’s not in a language I can understand but the illustrations look like depictions from the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ I had studied whilst at college.

Move on, Please!

To my total and utter soul crushing shock, she is moved on by a museum official and advised that her ‘time is up’ and to move along to the next exhibit room. She fades away from my sight, her sorrow-filled face blending back into the darkness of the next room - outside the scope of my poor vision.

The Troglodyte 

The troglodyte takes a quick glance at the flotsam and jetsam in the case with me, not even glancing in my direction and then moves on, shouting ‘Yeah, yeah, int’restin' dead guy! Let's move! - Gotta get to the Diner before we head home' and shouts for his brood to follow him.

They start to follow him out like a string of oil-slicked baby-chicks - already contaminated by his dismissive attitude in a place of treasures.

Observer - Observed

But one of his charges, a young girl about 9 years old, stops to take a closer look at the ‘funny mummy’

 She stares into my face – she, the ‘observer’, expecting me to be the ‘observed’.

A moment flits by – she frowns in disbelief at what she sees as we stare straight into each other’s eyes.

She sees the ‘observed’ is now the ‘observer’ and she stands, silently agog for a moment.

Comprehension dawns across her face - she becomes wide eyed with terror and dreadful surprise.

Backing away from the glass case, she puts one hand over her mouth, the other hand pointing towards me. The rest of the brood crowds around her wondering what the problem is.

Their faces follow to where her outstretched hand is pointing and turn towards me - quickly moving from denial to open mouthed horror of the fact that they can all see two very much alive eyes staring out and looking directly at them from the dried-out cadaver in front of them.

I see their ‘about to scream’ faces as they all point towards me ‘AAARRRGGHHH…………….GGGHHHH’!!!

The Awakening

And that’s when I found myself sitting bolt upright and shivering in my bed. The meringue duvet in lumpy submission beaten on the bedroom floor where I had wrestled it from the bed during my nightmare. 

I grab it back and swathe myself in it like a life jacket. My ears catching the last remnant of a scream and with shock I realise - that it’s me screaming.

God knows what they saw – For I feel they were real people, and that it wasn’t a dream, but a vision maybe? Or even some sort of ‘time slip’? #I'm left wondering - Did they see a mummified skull screaming back at them, eyes bulging out in abject horror?

Or just the skin shredding terror of realising they were being observed by a preserved corpse at a local museum.

Who was the grey-haired lady and what was she trying to tell me?

The Future?

Is this a glimpse of a possible future for me?

To end up as dusty bones in a glass cabinet, kept in a gloomy annex of some obscure provincial museum?

No ‘Dust to dust, Ashes to ashes’ for me - but an end as an unnamed relic with just a sticker on the side of a glass box stating:

‘White, Female, Homo Sapien Sapien – 21st Century’

A mouldy exhibit, never allowed to finally rest.

Screaming silently again and again and again….

For all eternity?