When I wake up in my bed, I look over to my alarm clock and see that it’s 1:36 in the morning. I went to bed last night a 10-ish and I usually wake up around 7a.m. to go to school. I figure that I can get in about six and a half more hours of sleep. I feel my bed creak a little under me. I have a loft bed so I keep my desk and a tv under it. I also decorated it a little, so I don’t know what shook it. I also sleep above the laundry room so it could be the washer or the dryer. I feel my bed shake again by one of the legs. I also hear the floor creak under it. I dismiss it thinking that the floor is “breathing” with the cold and wintery weather outside.

I fall back into my pillow with my eyes closed trying to back to sleep. I sit there for a little, smelling a foul smell. It didn’t really matter too much because I fell asleep a few minutes later. I have a cool dream. In this dream, I can personally control what I do and how things work. Whenever this happens, I make myself fly around a tall city looking down at things and getting a great rush of the sky passes through my fingers and hair. I love that feeling. I also make myself an extraordinary person, doing things others can’t and making myself special and valuable.

I wake up later with the lights still dim and dark. I try and lean over to look at what time it is on my alarm clock. I start to lean up and over but I’m stopped. I look down my bed and my body. I see brown restrains that look like belts up and down the bed I’m in. They’re put into a way that I can’t budge at all. I try and shake the bed and loosen up the belts to press my luck, but I can’t I keep on doing this over and over and eventually get tired. I lay my head down on the flat mattress and try and fall asleep. I do. I wake up again but find that what happened wasn’t a dream at all.

This time I find myself tied down in a chair with rope, zip ties, and some of the same brown belt loops. I can see the bed that I was laying in. On it I see blood stains all over it. The pillow is also soaked in blood. I see that the belts had little barbs sticking out of the bottom so that they would dig into skin when I wriggled around. I look down and see holes in my shirt with blood dripping out of them. I don’t know why I didn’t feel them from before, I might have been in shock.

I look around the room even more. There is a staircase with a blinking light. The light has a blue tint to it but it’s still white. I look to the left of the staircase and see a table along the wall with sinks, jugs of chemicals, and tools. There are kitchen tools, power tools, and regular tools (screwdrivers, saws, etc.) all of the tools and sinks have bloodstains too. I don’t want to even think about what the tools were used for and I don’t want to know what is going to happen to me. I can’t see behind me because the chair is stuck and I’m tied down. The bed that I was first in is to my right.

I figure out that I didn’t just go from the bed to the chair by myself, so I say that there is someone else in the house or room I’m in. I don’t know where or who they are, but I know they were in here at one point. I look around the room more and see a clock by the stairs. I watch it for a while but it doesn’t move. It reads 1:36. That’s the same time that my alarm clock read when I looked at it.

I wait for a little more, nothing happens. After what feels like an hour and a half, I see a shadow appear in the light from the staircase. The light flicked again and the shadow got bigger. It stays like that for a while. It then keeps on moving down the steps without hesitation. Taking steps slowly but lighty. Not too light by being sneaky. They’re obviously wanting me to know that they are there. When they make it all the way down the stairs, I can see they’re face, although I can’t. They’re wearing a mask that is white with some blood stains around their mouth. I don’t know if that’s put there on purpose or not. Their mask is also very wrinkled. It looks like it is  made of leather.

They stand at the bottom of the steps, staring at me, waiting for me to do something.  

“Please don’t hurt me,” I say to them. “I’m just a kid, trying to get through school, which is already tough. Please don’t make this worse on me,” I say this as tears start to roll down my face

He doesn’t respond. I wait and tell him that if he lets me go that I’ll never tell anyone what happened. He starts toward me turning his head cock-eyed while smiling. I can tell by how his mask curls at his cheeks. This tells me that the mask fits right on top of his face. I don’t know if this is helpful much.  

He walks to me, step by step. He reaches me and stoops down to be a little bit lower than me. He picks up his hand slowly and drags his cold and wet fingers up my cheek, then across my forehead. Once he lifts up his finger, he turns around and walks toward the counter. I wipe my cheek on my shoulder and feel a slimy residue. It’s clear like water but sticky and slimy. I have no idea what it is.

He reaches the counter and picks up a big jug with the label torn off. There’s even the parts of the sticker still on it. He picks it up and pours it on a small cloth. The cloth soaks it up almost instantly. He starts towards me with the cloth. Once he gets to me he pulls down my shirt up at my shoulder to reveal a spot with four scratch marks, which I assume he made.

He takes the cloth and puts it up towards my shoulder. I keep anticipating what the pain is going to feel like. The cloth finally reaches my arm and I feel a horrible, stinging sensation. It burns. I can almost feel the liquid dissolve and eat away at my skin and muscle. He holds down the cloth for a long time. It feels like it takes hours for him to pull off. He finally does. The pain doesn’t get any worse-nor better.

Not much happens after that. I think I fell asleep a few minutes after he left. I saw him go up stairs, slowly like he did before. After he gets to the top of the stairs, I hear the floor above me creak. I can he his steps, every, single, one he takes. The last step I hear is directly above me. After that I think I fall asleep, because I can’t tell what happens after that.

I wake up and still, everything is the same. I  try to look behind me to see what is there, for all I know he could be there with a gun or knife ready to hurt and injure me. As I look behind me, I see a little hole in the ceiling. I stare at it, as my eyes adjust to the dark, shadowy hole. I can finally see up it. I make out an eyeball. The man was watching me as I was asleep. After that last step, he must’ve laid down and watched me sleep. I feel a shiver go down my spine. He sees thats I saw him and gets up. I hear him in a rush to get downstairs.

Once he gets down here, he comes straight to my chair and puts his hand around my neck, but not choking me. He’s just holding me so I can’t move, which I couldn’t even do before. He starts to let go, by slowly drawing his hand back to his body. He eventually gets up and turns around. He puts his hand up to the top of the bridge of his nose, pinching the bone. He turns back around aggressively and puts his arms around me on the back of the chair. He stares me down in my eyes, trying to make a connection. He starts to move my chair around so I can see the back wall. Now I know that the wall has some important information. I see the wall has blood on it, which surrounds news paper articles of “a man that kidnaps children tortures them mentally and physically, then eventually kills them”. There are many home surveillance pictures along with the articles. Throughout all of them, he wears the same mask. My eyes widen and I start to pant. I start to scream for help. I keep yelling. I feel that no one can hear me, and I think I’m right. The man pops up from behind me and punches my head, with the intentions to knock me out. But I don’t.

He bends back up to walk away. As he does, I lean up and punch his gut, knocking the wind out of him. He falls to the ground while I get up to grab a glass bottle. He’s still on the ground as I hit him on the head. He falls to the ground motionless. I grab another bottle and hit him again-just in case.

I wake up in my bed and feel so relieved. I come quick to realize that it was a dream. I almost cry because I see how much I love to be alive. I lean up and run out to the living room to give my parents a hug. As I’m about to enter the living room, my dad steps in front of me, blocking my path. I see that he has a large bruise on his left side of his forehead, near his temple. He has a broken glass bottle in his hand. I don’t know what is happening, so I look down at my shoulder.

I find four scratch marks that are red and inflamed.      

THE END