Meine Worte haben sich versteckt
in Räumen leer und still.
Liegen dort auf kalter Erde
müde von der Last der Jahre
und hoffen doch
dass man sie erweckt.
Das Grün vor den Fenstern
ahnt Hoffnung und gibt Licht.
I woke up from my sleep with a start and a headache. I had had trouble falling asleep to begin with, so I decided to get up and have a glass of something, probably milk, maybe gin. The moon shone through the half open curtains as I looked over to the lovely silhouette of my girlfriend. I tried to get out of bed with as little movement and noise as possible, and I managed to get out the door without her stirring.
After I had quietly closed the bedroom door, I started to walk down the hallway. Suddenly, I felt a violent pain piercing through my skull. I grabbed my head tightly with both hands and leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. I could have sworn I had briefly heard sirens when that violent pain attacked. They had sounded like a dull, metallic howl that still echoed through my head. I groped for the light switch in the dark, found it somehow, and turned it on. The light wasn’t very bright and not even fluorescent white but blood red instead. Something was certainly wrong. “I must be dreaming.” I blinked several times, pressed my palms against my eyes, lowered my hands, and opened my eyes again. The light was normal. Maybe it was my headache. Migraines did all kind of strange things to your vision, although usually, I saw bright halos around people and objects. It had been a while since my last attack, it was probably time for a new one.
I pushed myself off the wall and started for the kitchen again, walking down the quiet hallway. As I let my right hand sweep across the coarse wallpaper, a hand suddenly grabbed mine. I smiled and turned around, ready to kiss my beloved. But to my absolute horror, I looked into the fleshy eye sockets of a grotesque abomination. A whole group of eyeless, hairless torsos with sickish pale skin were sticking out the wall, trying to pull me towards them, grabbing me with all their might. The sirens screamed louder than before, the light flashed red, and the humanoid freaks grabbed my clothes, my hair, my everything, and pulled me closer and closer to their moaning, rotten mouths. Frozen with terror, I stared at them just long enough to get a good impression of their ugly mugs, when my body finally caught up with my brain. I started wailing my arms around while simultaneously writhing my torso violently, so they would lose their grip on me. I also pressed my feet against the wall beneath them and pushed myself away with all my strength, leaning backwards as much as I could. It worked almost too well, so that I fell to the floor with a thump, and a sharp pain shot up my spine, starting from my coccyx. I lifted my aching butt and awkwardly crawled backwards on my hands and feet until I hit the hallway’s opposing wall. Still looking up at them, I got farther out of their grabbing range.
As I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall and still breathing heavily, I shook my head and pressed my eyes shut once more. “There’s no way this can be real, I must be dreaming.” When I opened my eyes, everything was normal again.
I slowly got up, staring at the spot from where the monsters had just tried to emerge. After I got to my feet, I walked over there and touched the wall. It was cool, it was coarse, it was exactly as it had always been. I took a deep breath, unglued my gaze from the very normal spot, and turned around to walk away.
By the time I arrived in the kitchen, my heartbeat had slowed down to normal, and I had almost convinced myself that nothing had happened. “I must have been sleep walking. But that’s not how sleep walking works, right?” No matter. It was over and done with. I filled a cup with milk, put its contents in a pot, put the pot on the stove, warmed the milk up to an agreeable temperature, turned the burner off, and put the now warm milk back into its cup. I even succeeded in fighting the urge to Irish it up, and instead added a spoonful of honey. After putting the pot in the sink, I took my cup to the living room to try to relax on the couch.
When I entered the room, I saw that the old gaming console was still running. After I took a sip of my warm milk, I put the cup down on a coaster on the coffee table and took a seat on the comfy beige linen fabric love seat. I had just grabbed the controller to turn off the game when my girlfriend entered the room, giving me a slight startle as she said, “Don’t take Walter’s doll. It will only lead to trouble later in the game.” She paused and rearranged her facial features into a worried look. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good, honey.” I smiled at her and said, “I’m okay. I just feel a headache coming on. That’s all, babe. And now that you’re here, I’m already feeling better.” Her presence actually did have a calming if not healing effect, as it always did. I certainly felt like the luckiest woman in the world for having such an awesome girlfriend who cared enough about me to get up in the middle of the night just to check whether I was doing alright.
And with those happy thoughts, I heard sirens getting louder.
“Why are you suddenly so pale? Because of the sirens? I’m sure they can manage without you tonight, you’re not even on call this week. Speaking of which, how about you answer my call instead. Let’s go back to the bedroom, so you can give me an intense physical, Doctor Golden Touch.”
