Brendan Dude

I didn’t usually have weird dreams. Most of the time they’d be pretty subdued and concern stuff like school or friends. And yeah, they’d have freaky stuff that came out of nowhere (I once had a dream where Luke was a giraffe and kept saying, “The pool will bake sunny-side up at midnight”), but none of it ever really got to me. And for a while, I counted my blessings that I’d never had a real nightmare before.

I guess I got jinxed or something, though, by thinking about it.

The worst dream I ever had was a little after David died, if that wouldn’t have been obvious enough already. It was a pretty boring day that day and I went to sleep as always, not really minding anything. Nothing was nagging in my head. I wasn’t anxiously awaiting something that would keep me awake. So it’s kind of weird to me that something so sinister could sneak up in my head and terrify the living shit out of me when I least expected it.

Jesus Christ, just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. I don’t want to talk about it. But at the same time Luke once told me to let it out if you want to move on, so I guess here goes nothing.

I was sitting on my bed in the dream. When I looked out the window to my room, the sky was hazy with thick rain clouds, not much of a surprise down in overcast Claymore, where the sun never wanted to shine. I wasn’t doing anything and everything felt like a dream – very stiff, very movie-like, really fake. Like if you made one wrong move, you’d tumble out of dreamland and go back to reality. I remember glancing at my hands and seeing all the folds in my palms, wondering to myself if we were born with the wrinkles in our fingers.

Then I looked up at across the room. Sitting on the bed was David. He had a knee pulled up to his chest and he was dressed in a tanktop and gym shorts like he almost always was. He wasn’t wearing his hat, though. I could see his dark roots growing in, a sharp contrast to the bleached curls he dyed once and never again. His face was blank. I mistook him for a stranger at first.

Then dream-me said to him, “Hi.”

David smiled back at me, but he still didn’t look like himself. He looked like a stranger, still. Then he stood up. He walked over to my bed and sat down, his weight bringing down the mattress and pulling me down too. I noticed the wings sprouting out from his back – big, shimmering, feathery wings that were crooked and didn’t look like they folded in quite right. I stared at them for a moment.

But I looked back at him, made eye contact, and gasped. His chocolate eyes had turned ruby. They were even more bloodshot than they normally were, too, and the bags that hung under them had multiplied in size. He looked forty years older. Suddenly I knew that this wasn’t him. This wasn’t David. This was a stranger, somebody I never met before in my life. Not even in dreams. But this wasn’t even a dream, it was a nightmare.

That familiar half-smile turned downwards, morphing into a deathly scowl. In a flash of demonic eyes, terrifying crimson ones that still haunt me, he’d pounced on me and pinned me down by my arms on the bed, just like that one time when I confronted him about fighting with Joey at school. That time, though, he was still David.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even struggle against his superhuman grip. His hands felt like frayed rope wrapped around my wrists, only hurting more when I tried to escape. Even though he hadn’t bound my legs, I couldn’t wiggle them, either. I was frozen, stuck in dream-time. The only thing I could do was look up at him in question, terror spread across my face, and ask, “Why?”

And he leaned over, our foreheads nearly touching, and screamed, “Why did you kill me?!”

There was a pang in my ribcage, a strike in my heart. It hurt. It felt worse than being held by his vice-like grip. Nothing was floating in my head – not words, not emotions, no comprehensible things. Just a blank nothingness. I stared that demon in the eye, trying to find something in him or in me to counter the blankness.

David screamed it again. “Why did you kill me?!”

I couldn’t find it in me to say anything back. I could whimper and cry, but I wasn’t able to find a string of words to match the newfound jumble of feelings surfacing in my heart.

He grasped my hands tighter. I knew he wasn’t that strong in real life. That’s when I knew for sure that this wasn’t David. But that didn’t quell the fear rising everywhere in my body.

He screeched it for a third time. “Why did you kill me, Brendan?!”

And everything faded away.

The bed disappeared underneath me. My room shattered into pieces and folded into the black hole that had sucked everything but me and David into it. I couldn’t break my gaze away from the ghost pinning me down, but out of the corner of my eye I saw it all vanish. And just like that, we were floating. We weren’t flying, we weren’t falling. Just floating in the infinite haze of time and space. Blackness sinking between my fingertips, between my toes, through my hair.

Gravity melted away. David still had me tightly bound in his twice-the-size-of-mine hands, yanking me forward and getting in my face, still repeating his catch phrase. I was jerked around in that trance, my motions blocky and flickering like a 1920’s movie going off of its roll of film.

And I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t find the words to talk back. It was like I was a baby again, unable to speak or comprehend the mass of emotions scattered through my brain waves. And also like I was a child again, I felt so small, cowering underneath the growing massive frame of my big brother. My hands grew tiny in his grip, shrinking like the rest of my body. Actually, I didn’t know if I was shrinking or if he was growing. Probably both. But in the fucked-up state of dream-mind I was in, I couldn’t tell. And like I said, it hurts to look back on it.

He kept on staring at me, right into my eyes, my innocent eyes. The bloodshot veins sprouting through his flooded over his pupils and the whites of his eyes, turning his gaze a bright cherry. Blood. Tiny black pupils bore holes into my head, little dots in the sea of red that took over his eyes. Like tears, the blood flooded and pooled at his bottom eyelid, threatening to break the floodgate and pour out.

His words were clear and rang out, echoing in the abyss. He said nothing other than my name and that question. He drilled it into my head until the words were nothing but funny little mush-mouth letters that made no sense.

I kept on shrinking. And soon enough, I slipped out of his grip, slinking out of his giant hands that kept me bound, tumbling into the darkness after floating for so long with him. As if to add insult to injury, he pushed me below, letting me go. His hand so much bigger than me at that point, he simply shoved me down, spiraling me into nothing.

And still, I couldn’t rip my eyes off of him.

I tumbled down, down into space. Endlessly falling. Looking back at my still-growing brother, haunting me. His flesh melted off of his bones, blood and guts splattering into a rainy puddle beneath his floating feet. He became nothing but a skeleton. His wings looked like bats’ wings, bony and naked. Even though all of his organs and entrails had sunken down from his frame, his heart remained beating through his ribcage, looking gray and cold, beating lifelessly. And those red demon eyes were still engraved into his skull; something about two black dots surrounded by burgundy hell still glaring at me sent me falling further away, wanting to never feel the terrifying feeling of fear again.

I fell so far that eventually David disappeared. He was a tiny white dot in the distance, a star in a big black sea of nothingness. Then, boop. He was gone. His screams no longer echoed. I couldn’t hear them anymore, rattling around in my head like an alarm clock waking me up for school.

I looked down at my hands. They were tiny, chubby, like little sausage fingers. My arms were short and covered in a thin layer of baby fat. My legs, twitching aimlessly with nothing to do, were bare and plump. I was tiny. I was a baby. I was a kid again, staring at my disappearing brother like he was just a stranger, nobody I ever met before.

Suddenly, the blackness gave way to big bright shapes teasing me through my peripheral vision. Triangles and squares and circles, morphing and twisting around me in pastel colors. Red, blue, green, pink, purple, orange, yellow. Catching me in a trance, causing me to dart my head around to catch a glimpse of the ever-changing imagery. It was like when you push your hands against your eyes when you have them closed – all of those stars coming in and those childish shapes shooting across the backs of your eyelids like some kind of fucked up kid’s playhouse.

The twisting shapes contrasted against the stark black background. I was turning upside down, flipping over and trying to catch those shooting stars, but never coming close enough to touch them. And my grubby chubby hands were too short, too miniscule to ever grace them, to ever brush against them.

And just when I was certain that I was about to grasp that red triangle that kept eluding me, all of the color drained away. The shapes disappeared. I was nothing. I was a baby, staring at the darkness and growing that tightening sensation of fear. That familiar terror and horror. Floating in space, nothing but a speck – not even that. I was alone.

Then I started to cry these big baby cries that shrieked and echoed in the nothingness, but never reached the ears of another. And oh god, it hurt. I didn’t have any tears in my toddler tear ducts, and so I was just dehydrating myself to feel something. My heart felt like it was going to explode, like it was gonna burst in my chest and kill me, an overflow of blood rushing through my system.

I was a baby, crying. And I didn’t have anybody to hear me suffocating in the blanket of space, doing it all for nothing.

And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, I jerked awake. My eyes shot open in real time, catching glimpses of black nothingness that was only the dark of night, made worse by the ever-cloudy grip of Claymore. For a moment I thought I was still locked in that goddamn nightmare, then I squinted at my hands, trying to see them through the thick chunk of night.

My fingers were long, calloused, weathered and worn from years of playing the drums. They weren’t chubby anymore; they grew into the sausage-like fat.

And I started crying again. This time it hurt even worse, ‘cause then I knew for a fact that I was alone. I wasn’t wondering. It was painful, leaving a puddle of tears on my pillow where the sweat had already sunken in. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. So were my boxers. My mattress had to be worn down from all of the moisture going into it.

I couldn’t fall asleep again that night. I was too terrified. Even though the alarm clock said it was one in the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to face that demon again and be a child again, losing myself while somebody I loved slipped away from me. It fucking hurt too much.

And I kept on crying that night. I cried so much that I rose with a splitting headache that made me feel like my brain was being dissected. Maybe it was. I don’t know. Maybe I was still locked in a dream all that day, hurting in the mind and slipping into brief bouts of consciousness. I don’t know. All I really know was that it hurt more than anything to be crying and yet for some odd reason it felt nice. The pain was good.

- - -

The end of that nightmare wasn’t the end of the nightmare I had to face all day, though. Since I just didn’t want to fall back asleep and face the wicked dreamland again, I was stuck tossing and turning in bed, trying to yank myself out of slumber. I went to school acting like that. I nearly fell asleep on the bus and almost missed getting to school. And it didn’t help at all that I had the world’s worst headache, a brain-splitting pain that shook me all the way to my spinal cord.

I dozed off in a couple of my classes. I even fell asleep in Spanish, but thank God I wasn’t dreaming there. It was only for ten minutes, too, since any longer and the teacher would’ve called me out on it and beat my ass for it. And my eyes were heavy in science class, which I had with Soria and Luke, but not Ren – our lunch period. I struggled to stay awake.

And I could’ve snoozed in that class too, but the dumbass teacher was showing a video on space exploration and standing in the front of the room, watching all of us. What kind of teacher does that? When they put a movie on, they know that some lazy kid is gonna fall asleep. Some lazy kid who didn’t get any sleep the previous night because they were too busy having nightmares about blankness and screaming.

I was hunched over on my desk for half the class, bored and exhausted. I still felt like I was trapped in that dream. Everything still felt blocky and lifeless in my vision, the colors of everything surrounding me smeared in blurs, like a finger painting.

Luke and Soria finally opened their mouths at lunch. The cafeteria’s usual noises of chatter and gossip didn’t penetrate my ears; I was too busy focusing on staying alive to listen in on conversations I had no part in.

“Are you okay? Are you sick or something?” Soria had asked, opening the milk carton on her tray as we sat down to eat. “You’ve been, like, out of it all day.”

“I was just about to ask him that,” Luke added, staring at me quizzically.

I groaned. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. Maybe half an hour, tops.”

“How come?” Luke asked, drilling the questions in. He took a chicken nugget off of Soria’s plate nonchalantly, not caring when she slapped his hand away and glared.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t wanna relive it all over again and think about it. That’s what I was trying to avoid all day – being reminded of that nightmare. So I sighed real slowly and said, “I had a really screwed-up nightmare last night. There.”

Neither of them laughed, or even cracked a smile. Which was nice, considering how I envisioned them snorting at my pain and calling me a pussy for getting bent outta shape over something that wasn’t even real. But fear has that funny way of wrecking you, even when you know something isn’t gonna happen in real life…

“You don’t wanna talk about it or tell us what happened?” Luke dug.

I shook my head.

“I bet you’ll feel better if you tell somebody about it,” Soria shrugged casually. Then she stole a nugget off of Luke’s tray, subtle vengeance for what he did earlier.

I blinked. Everything around me still looked so fake. “I don’t know if it’ll make sense to you guys, though.”

“Doesn’t have to. At least you’ll get it off your chest,” Luke told me. “C’mon. If you don’t tell us about it now, then I’ll just make you tell us later.”

“Okay, fine,” I spat through gritted teeth. “Just…don’t tell anyone, okay?”

They nodded, leaning forward.

I spilled it all. I told them everything I remembered in that dream, about how David had me trapped underneath him while everything around us melted away into a black hole. How I shrunk in his grip back a decade, and how his flesh dripped from his bones and how he disappeared as I fell further away from him. I couldn’t tell them much about the colors and shapes since those were just…I don’t know. They changed when I looked at them so it was hard to get a look at them, so it wasn’t like I could just sit there, observing them forever.

But I told them about how I was a kid, crying. And I ended it there. Because that’s when I started having trouble breathing and didn’t want to continue ‘cause I knew I’d just end up crying again, and I didn’t need to do that in public.

They both were staring at me with furrowed brows.

“Bren, that’s totally normal to have dreams about that kinda stuff,” Soria explained. “It happens.”
“Dreaming about dead people?” I asked. I don’t know, I didn’t have the slightest clue about that kind of stuff. I figured Luke and Soria both did.

Luke brushed back his hair, smiling a little bit. “Dude, that’s nothing to be freaked out about. It was just a dream and it’s totally normal to dream like that at some point.”

“Do you ever get nightmares?”

He froze, going blank in the face. “I used to.”

“I mostly just have dreams where whoever died is still living,” Soria said nonchalantly, leaning back in her seat and crushing her corn with the spork in her hand. Her voice was quiet.

“I get those too,” Luke added, staring at the table.

“Nightmares happen. That kind of crap would happen even if it never happened,” she shrugged her shoulders like it was nothing. “Most of the time the good dreams outnumber the bad dreams about the loved one, though. At least in my shoes.”

“But it was so weird and terrifying,” I spoke my heart. Probably the most honest I’d been about my emotions in the dream.

“But it wasn’t real. So just keep pounding that into your head and you’ll be fine. Seriously.” Luke had a half-smile on his face when he said it, pointing right at me.

And I shut up. I pursed my lips, sucked them back in, and tried to take his words to heart.

It wasn’t real.

It didn’t happen.

I was fourteen years old, David wasn’t an evil skeleton, and I lived on planet Earth, not in the vast emptiness of space.

I breathed in. I breathed out.

Later on that day, Luke told me to “feel better, man,” as we walked toward the bus loop to go home. Right after we parted ways, though, he called my name and I darted around, walking back to him.

He dug something out of his pocket – a cross. It looked like a necklace, but he wasn’t wearing it. (He always wore a cross, but he kept the actual crucifix tucked underneath his shirt.) “Here,” he’d said.

I held out my hand and took it, observing the warm and corroded metal in my palm. “Isn’t this yours?”

“You can have it. Hang it above your bed tonight. I don’t know if it’ll help, but it can’t hurt,” he figured. He was looking me in the eye, too, standing there straight and confident.

I couldn’t help but crack a smile. “You’re fulla cheese.”

“Hey. I don’t care. I don’t want you falling asleep in class again.” He turned around, throwing the words over his shoulder with a grin. I turned to walk away too, but he grabbed my arm and added, “Feel better. Really.”

“Alright,” I said.

“And call me if you need to talk,” he reminded.

I just waved goodbye to him as we walked to our buses. That kid was full of mush, but he was the best friend I ever had and I was thankful for that.

That day, as soon as I got home, I hung up the crucifix above my bed. I didn’t know a lot about God and stuff, even though I believed in him and all, but Luke was right – it couldn’t have hurt.

And it didn’t hurt. Not in the least bit. I went to bed at eight at night, saying to my parents that I didn’t get crap for sleep, and I was out like a log almost immediately upon hitting the mattress.
I didn’t dream about David, and I didn’t dream about anything else that struck nasty chords with me. Nope, I dreamt about something completely different.

That British guy from that show with the crappy restaurants was cooking hot dogs in my kitchen in that dream, and when I asked him about it, he called me a nice string of swear words and ran out of the house. Then a penguin walked through the back door and started squawking Spanish words at me. I tried petting it, but the thing bit me and I went back into my room. When I went to my room, Luke was lying on my bed with Joey and they were playing video games and kind of making out. Which was weird. But I never said I didn’t welcome weird dreams.

‘Cause no matter how weird it was, it sure as hell beat waking up in a puddle of sweat and tears. I guess you could say that it was an improvement, but it still left me asking a lot of questions the next morning…and it was kind of hard to make eye contact with Luke the next day…