I always had an overactive imagination as a kid. While the other seven-year-old’s at the playground were playing house and hide-and-seek, I was concocting intricate plotlines, with pirates and werewolves and super spies, to be acted out on the swing set. Mama always said that was why my dreams were so weird.
They weren’t nightmares, exactly. Just strange, and occasionally unsettling. Nearly every night I awoke, sweating and in a panic, before realizing I was safe and sound in my bed. My feet would pull me out from under the covers and patter quietly into the living room.
“Bad dreams again?” Mama would say.
“Yep.”
“Well, go back to bed. I’ll come tuck you in.”
And this became our routine.
Some dreams were more memorable than others. A lot of them were no more than a feeling by the time I woke up and found Mama in her recliner. A few, though, stuck with me.
The road was long and dusty, and the sky glowed strangely tan. Mama, my sister E, and I walked, side by side by side, for what could have been minutes or hours. An eerie quiet seemed to swallow us whole. There were no birds. There were always birds at home.
“There it is.” E broke the humid silence, pointing a finger toward the horizon. I could just make out the shadows of a town in the distance. And then suddenly, we were there. The “town,” if it could be called that, consisted of an abandoned church, an abandoned general store, and an abandoned inn. Mama and E didn’t seem bothered by its apparent emptiness, so I grabbed Mama’s hand and followed her to the general store.
Inside, the shelves sat almost motionless, stacked with Mason jars filled with everything from pickled green beans to peach pie filling. Dust coated every surface like heavy snow. E was focused on a rather dilapidated grand piano in the corner, and Mama began her slow, methodical walk down each aisle. I followed closely behind, careful not to touch anything. The jars were just jars, I told myself, but they gave off a menacing aura, and I swore I saw an eyeball floating in with the olives. I shivered, despite the hot stickiness of the air.
Finally, I managed to drag Mama from the store to the equally unsettling center of the town. The air was so thick and so still, we could’ve been in one of those Mason jars.
“Let’s see if the Inn is open.”
“There’s nobody here,” I deadpanned. Mama didn’t notice. Instead, she scooped up my hand again and half-dragged me to the wooden porch at the front of the Inn. The wood was weathered and rotted, and the Inn itself had bare spots where siding had been torn off or worn through. Cobwebs covered the doors and broken windows. Still, something about it felt eerily familiar. I tried to place it while we walked up the decrepit steps. In front of the door sat a human skull. Its teeth were black and rotted, and the bone was not much better. It seemed strangely alive, and the eye sockets oozed with some sort of yellow slime. Mama didn’t notice; she was looking for a doorbell. But I couldn’t peel my eyes away.
“Mama,” I squeaked out. She didn’t answer. The skull just kept oozing, out the eyes and between the blackened teeth. The earlier silent atmosphere now echoed with a menacing laugh. I’d blame it on the wind but there wasn’t any. I tried to look anywhere else, but it didn’t help. Glancing back down toward my feet, I caught sight of the skull again, and its jaw started to open, the laugh surrounding me –
And then I woke up. Every night for a week. I never did tell my Mama about that dream, but it stuck with me, every detail, for years and years. The whole thing felt like an episode of Scooby Doo gone horribly awry. After a few minutes of collecting my thoughts, I realized why I had recognized the Inn. It was my own house.