Last night, I had a curious dream. I was sitting in a dark alleyway, the air was moist and hard to breathe, and I was particularly frightened. There was no sound at all, just a haunting silence.
A few minutes into the dream, I hear a dull clicking, "click…clack…. click…clack," tolling in the night. A thin silhouette appeared in the dark alley, as it got nearer, I see it is a skeleton. The bones were brown and black with age. This particular skeleton had no right hand. The black stump was rotten and an occasional maggot came thorough the hole in the side. The mouth was gaping, like a void in space. And the eyes, Oh! The eyes. They were no eyes! Just sockets, and like the mouths, were a never-ending blackness. Despite, the emptiness, looking into the sockets sent a chill up my spine and a sense of maliciousness. They seemed to bore into my soul and look at my well-hidden secrets and desires.
I stared and froze in fright and dismay at the horrifying parade displayed as if for me. One-by-one skeletons passed, each glancing at me with their all-seeing eyes. They carried coffins and gravestones that were battered and as rotted as they were.
One skeleton stopped, and asked in a raspy and low voice, "Put this down for me." Frightened as I was, I managed to take his gravestone. Once I touched the gravestone, I felt a piercing pain in my hand, as if it was stabbed and was numb with pain. I wanted to scream and drop the gravestone, but the skeleton was staring at me. I quickly and lightly set the gravestone down and rubbed my throbbing hand. He said in his grating voice, "Too bad, too bad." Not wanting to offend the skeleton and face his wrath, I feebly responded, "What is too b-bad?
The skeleton scratched the inside of his rib cage. The sound was horrifying and made me twitch. It was as if nails were scratching a chalkboard repeatedly. Screeching over and over, even when he was done scratching. It was like a banshee screaming, threatening to split my eardrums. I was afraid I was going to die, the sound never seeming to stop. Eventually, the skeleton's voice pulled me out of my trance, he had said, "Everything.
" I regret to have died. I am disgraced of my family, after all I have given and worked for, they have forgotten their dead family and me. Look at my gravestone and coffin, they are ruined! Years I have spent underground, waiting, waiting for a descendent to come and at least brush off the dust covering the top of my gravestone. No one comes to pay his or her respects. We have been forgotten and cast away as if we were an old toy that was played with and eventually neglected, causing to be thrown in the closet. Our pride is broken. Once, our descendents respected us, and cared for us, they would come and polish our gravestones and send us flowers, once the flowers withered they would replace them with a more vibrant bundles. But those years are gone. As the years passed, the flowers became less frequent and more bland, eventually there were no flowers given."
The skeleton paused and considered what to say next. As his speech sinks in, I become less afraid of this skeletal monster. After a few moments pass, the skeleton started again.
" We have taken our revenge. We would crawl into their houses and create horrible dreams for them. They would dream of loneliness, bitter coldness, and experience the feeling of insects crawling over their bodies. If the dreams do not disturb them, we whisper in their ears when the sleep, we make floors creak and doors slam, we touch them with our piercing cold hands, one small touch will wake a man, and he will scream. They smell our pungent stench of our rotting bones. They feel as we do, and we have taken our revenge."
The skeleton paused once again and sighed. I was more terrorized than before because of his stories of nightly visits to his descendents. Like before, the skeleton continued his mournful tale.
"We are traveling to find a new cemetery where we will be cared for, a better neighborhood, you could say. We have suffered and we shall, once again, be content with our gravesite."
The skeleton turned to look at me and then, I awakened.