Her Nightmare Realm
Eventually she would be brought back to them again. The dead, the murdered. They always had a way of finding her in the realms of her dreams at night, turning them into inescapable nightmares... Nightmares she'd willingly stay within until she'd wake up in the morning.
As always, after closing her eyes for sleep, she'd immediately open them and find herself in the dreary dusk of an old forest. A ghostly mist drifted over the clearing of the forest where she found herself this horrible night, hovering just inches off the ground. Large, dead oak trees surrounded her like a sea; nothing else in sight, but the trees and the dirt clearing that it surrounded.
She sat up, the sense of death around her returning once again, as they always did. She could hear breathing, synchronized within a group. She couldn't hear her own shallow breathing, but she could defiantly hear their stony-lungs once filled with graveyard dirt, let out ragged, dreadful breathing sounds; Their last breaths, their death moans.
She couldn't see them. She never did. She could only hear them. Whispering in the cold air, air she could literally feel brushing past her skin as she faced the center of the clearing. As always, as she stood up and walked forward, she'd be rooted to the single spot in the middle. Being dragged, willingly, toward the center, The voices, muffled, ragged, would grow as the spot grew closer, yet something always felt different each time the scene would play out within her nightmares.
She knelt down and began to dig with her hands without hesitation. The dirt was soft, muddy. Her fingers easily slid through the soft patch of soil, digging and clawing at the ground, throwing dirt in every other direction, She dug until the soil below grew rougher against her fingers, until her fingers bled and her nails would be literally pulled out of their place and lost within the deep, hardening soil. This wouldn't stop her, instead, it would make her more determined than ever to reach whatever was buried there.
Finally, it reached it's end as she reached what she was looking for. Her hand, buried within the soil as she dug, brushed past something hard. Not rock. It felt like a wooden stick of some kind, and that was what bone always felt like; wood. Thin, without skin. She brought her hand up and noticed the 'wood' was sticking up slightly. Two little pieces.
Human fingers.
She brushed the dirt off, and could clearly see the tiny index finger and tiny middle finger sticking up out of the ground. When she dug around it, it soon reveled an entire human hand. Skeleton hand, without skin, replaced by hard soil as it's eternal skin. Small, fragile hand.
A shallow grave.
When she started to dig deeper, she'd always find the complete body. The skin not there, the bones in pieces; scattered around the ditch that seem to take forever for Gaz to dig with her bare hands an fingers, deeper and deeper into the soil that grew harder as she reached her goal, to find what the spirits were trying to have her find. There was barely any hair on the top of the head. Though she could tell it was a female body due to the fact the hair was long, curled still, even in it's decomposing, withered-state. It was so mattered with dirt that she couldn't tell what the birth color of the hair was. But by the looks at how small the bones were... Undeveloped, newly beginning to grow, she knew she had found the bones of a little girl. She could see the eye sockets, deprived of eyes, and the small jaw wide open, casting a vision of the child within the last moments of her life, screaming. Meaning she died while screaming for mercy. As her eyes examined the body, she noticed the large crack on the top of the skull; cracked like a fragile eggshell. The girl's manner of death.
Gaz felt that horrible pang of pity again, prying at her insides. There were no clothes of the small skeleton's body, and added with the caved in, cracked skull and the jaw wide open in a frozen, unheard scream, this child must have died a horrible death, and suffered in her last minuets... Whoever she was.
Most kidnappings ended up like this, especially to the children and the women. Always. That's how it was always going to be.
Mom...
She thought of her mother again. Those long buried memories of the mother who disappeared, lost among the long list of the missing... left behind by Gaz to help ease whatever it was that was leaving a terrible mark in her mind. A horrible scratch, a longing, a need... It was the need to know the truth about what happened. And that was why, at eighteen, she decided to try and forget her mother, for the questions and theories had swirled and drove her near insanity.
And now here she was, at age twenty-three, lost in the realm of her nightmares, the personal obsession for the subject long forgotten to keep her from remembering. But as always, the dead had a way to find her, in the dark void of her dreams.
As the body began to vanish before her eyes, the aroma of decomposing, rotting flesh filled the air. This was new to her. She never smelt rotting flesh before... It gave her a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she did not move her hand to cover her face. She didn't hold her breath ether. Instead she simply let the terrible smell flow past her senses, swallowing her in the stench, essentially staining her skin with the mark of the rotting dead.
Then the whispers began. It was the girl, she knew without even thinking about it. "I died here, you know..." the girl whispered from somewhere beside Gaz, unseen even in her nightmares. But the presence was there, unfamiliar but not frightening to her. "He put me in that hole."
Gaz did not respond. She never did. No questions were asked. She simply sat there, staring at the dirt staining the delicate white flesh of her hands.
This time however, she did speak back. "They all say I look just like her," Gaz replied quietly, closing her eyes.
"Everyone said I looked like my mom too," the voice responded, a hint of sorrow and pity blended perfectly together in the child's tiny voice.
Gaz stayed silent, gathering in the dreadful yet comforting silence that the dead had to offer, a silence that the living never offered to her back in reality. These may be nightmares to someone else, but to Gaz, really, they were a doorway. A doorway to essential answers. And sure, it was a frightening experience, seeing a new body every night of a woman or child, but Gaz was one to usually daunt her own fears, whatever those few fears may be.
The presence of the girl left, and eventually the stench of rotting skin faded away as well.
There was a reason why Gaz willingly let herself be drawn in deeper and deeper into her darkest nightmares that, always, by the end, she'd find some odd sort of serenity within the sorrowing silence, surrounded by the smell of the soil. Graveyard soil. The reason was that, in her mind, if she continued to have these nightmares, maybe, just maybe, the answers of what happened to her mother may reveal themselves within her nightmare realm.
One day, she would finally learn the truth.
A/N: Gaz is kind of interesting, even if she's kinda a bitch. XD I like diving into the dark-side of writing by having her in these really chilling one-shots about death and murder... The horrible reality living right outside our doors, waiting. I had my finals already and now I am at my Dad's house. I have an A in my English class, which I'm proud of. :)
Because, let me just tell you all, I have been writing for five years, and I've always loved to read. But ever since 7th grade, a year after I started writing, I have been getting dreadful, horrible english teachers; bitchy and boring. So, I failed English in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. Ugh, my 9th grade English teacher was the WORST. I fucking hated that chick. She was so boring and un-fun, and when I don't like or get along with a teacher, I usually will not put effort into a class. And so I had to repeat English 9 again last year, BARELY passing because she kept losing all my work. T_T But now I've been getting A's in English, acing my tests and loving my class because my english this year, Mrs. Cook is like, the sweetest woman EVER. She actually appreciates my writing, has a great sense of humor, teaches extremely well, is friendly and kind, and just an overall joy to be around. She said I'm doing so well she might recommend me to Regular English for next year. Cause I'm in RSP classes since I have some learning disabilities.
So, yeah. Anyway, I'm on vacation now, FINALLY. Happy early Holidays to you all!