Tag Archives: animals

Nightmare #313 – Corpse in the Trunk

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(Male, 40′s) This might not sound like it, but this is definitely a work-related stress nightmare. I was at work – well, not exactly the place where I work. It was a different building located right downtown Detroit near one of the old auto plants. I was working so much overtime that I hadn’t gone home at all for two nights. So, in the logic of the dream, I had loaned my car to a few coworkers so they could all carpool home in it.

It was morning and I was still in my pajamas, at work, remember. And my car arrives and a half dozen of my coworkers get out. The normal stupidity of work starts up and then I get a phone call from someone who is staying home that day. And my manager basically tells me I have to do his work for him in addition to mine. This is more than I can take.

I go out to my car and find it is in a sorry state. First of all the door locks are broken so the lock is just a metal rod flopping uselessly in the driver’s side door. The car has been broken into but I never have anything in it so nothing was stolen. The door panel on the driver’s side back door was torn off, revealing the inner workings of the door. It made sense to me that was how the thieves had broken in, by dismantling the door. Then I walk around the car and find an addict crouching by my car. He says “I didn’t do any of that stuff” but I notice that he’s stuck a used syringe into my rear car tire. He mentions that I might not want to look in the trunk.

At which point, I realize that someone has stashed a dead body in the trunk of my car. Next thing I know the cops are there, writing up a report. But the report doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my car. One cop says “The gorilla is still missing. That’s why we recovered the jaguar.” At first I thought he meant a stolen car, a Jaguar. But then I noticed an actual jaguar prowling around the parking lot. I panicked and ran toward the door of my office. The police yelled “Don’t run. It’ll chase you.” Sure enough the jaguar started running after me, obviously ready to pounce and kill me.

Public Service Announcement: Wolfsbane in Bloom

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“Even those who are pure of heart, and say their prayers at night,
can become a wolf, when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

As a public service announcement to all readers who are werewolves, shape-shifters or otherwise lycanthropic, this is what wolfsbane looks like. It comes into full bloom this time of year, right around the time when animosity against the lycan community tends to be highest.

Be aware.

Blog – Home-Repair “Nightmare” and the Secret Tenant

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To be honest, very little is nightmarish about the repairs we’re making to the bathroom. The buddy of mine who’s helping is scary efficient and competent, though he occasionally sings along with the radio which I’m attributing to that irresistable urge to sing while in the proximity of a shower.

The real horror show was the condition of the place before we started: spongy floor, tiles that stuck to your feet (i.e. not to the subfloor) and hidden terrors like load bearing walls with large gaps in the joists.

And one secret tenant.

We found a mummified rodent encased in the wall. It’s clearly not the remains of Poe’s Black Cat, which is good, I suppose for several reasons, one of which is that I rather like cats. I really can’t convince myself that it’s a rat – though again that would pump up the goth factor of the Ye Old Homestead a bit. It was, in fact, a squirrel – a kind of creature I have no spare love for – and in its current condition, it’s cool as hell. See for yourself:

So the stinger to this tale is what my daughter said when we broke the news to her.

Me: “Eric found something in the walls”

Grown daughter: “Was it a dead baby?”

It’s the chance exchange like this that reminds me she’s my kin, that there was no mix-up at the hospital, no abandoned basket on the doorstep. Where my first thought was a dead rat, like a nice and proper piece of Nosferatu set dressing, Dear Daughter’s imagination shot straight to an essential gothic plot device: a buried child.

Nightmare #240 – The Deadly Panther

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(Male, 40′s) I was at home. Most of the time when I dream about houses that are supposed to be my home, it’s not really the house where I actually live. But in this dream, it was really my home and what’s more it looked like it does right now. This is remarkable because much of the furniture was moved around recently. I was in the front room. I was looking out the front window. It was night. A very large panther walked down the side walk and it saw that I noticed it.

The panther was huge, svelte, sleek muscles, serious expression on its face. It took a couple strides and then made a bounding leap at the front window. The glass in the pane didn’t break but it sort of bowed inward under the blow. The panther bounced off back into the night.

“…nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody…”

I looked out the smaller window by the door. At first I thought I saw a mass of curly auburn hair but when I looked again, it was just a Christmas wreath hanging on the door. What really caught my attention though was what was on the lawn. Scattered across the front yard were nearly a dozen household pets from the neighborhood, all dead and bloody. It resembled the empty beer bottles in front of a frat house after a party.

One of the cats nearest the door wasn’t dead. It was only maimed. It stared out at me, pleading with me for help but I knew if I went outside, if I even opened the door, that the panther would attack me. The panther was trying to lure me out.

Nightmare #231 – Zombie Skunk

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(Male, 30′s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.

“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”

I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70′s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.

I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.

“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”

That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!

So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.

Nightmare #228 – Dead Horses

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(Male, 40′s) I have this enduring fear that I’ll end up living on the street in a damp cardboard box and this nightmare for some reason called that up.

“…the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses…”

I was downtown in a big city. It had a pretty thriving city life, though things were very grimy and a big run-down. Like there were two extremely tall wooden houses built with timbers probably a foot or two thick and covered with dirty yellow clapboards. These houses must have been ten stories tall and then BETWEEN them, that is, over the street another house had been built that was supported by being wedged between them. It was a busy street and the supports to the middle house were obviously falling apart. It was just a matter of time until it fell.

I was dressed like a street person. I’m not sure that I actually wasn’t a street person. In one hand I held a large clear plastic bag with ice water and a couple dozen cans of soda. I guess I made my living selling soda to the commuters as they came out of the buildings to evacuate the city and go home to the suburbs.

There was a crowd of people. I had made enough for the day to cover expenses and get a meal so I was about ready to sell the leftovers to this other street person who had the same gig. Then a loud clackitty clanging sound came up the street. It was a horse drawn carriage. It looked like a couple had just gotten married, because the woman was dressed in a frilly white dress and the guy was in a tux complete with a tall top hat. Except the carriage itself was jet black as were all four of the horses.

And the strangest part was that three of the four horses were dead. They hung lifeless in their harnesses while the fourth and final horse dragged the whole carriage along. The people in the carriage acted as if it was nothing to have three dead horses attached to the carriage, perhaps as long as things kept moving along they didn’t really care about how it happened.

NIghtmare #216 – Haunted Panther

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“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”

(Male, 50′s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.

We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”

“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”

The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.

Nightmare #214 – Not A Very Safe Haven

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(Male, 40′s) This started off a much more normal dream but became a nightmare around this point. I had just exited a cottage, like a Hansel and Gretel kind of cottage, but it was on a suburban street of suburban style houses. All those houses though were empty and dark. Abandoned. It was evening, the last part of evening before things become totally dark, before it’s night. There was a woman there with me who had long blond hair. She stood facing the street like she was on guard watching for something.

“…They are more powerful than you can imagine…”

There was another woman, powerfully attractive, with long black hair. She stepped up to me, so close to me our bodies over lapped. It’s hard to describe but it felt like she was standing in the exact spot where my feet were standing. There was no point to embracing each other with our arms because we were already as close as we could possibly be. The woman with the black hair whispered in my ear. “Don’t be afraid of the wolves.” I looked down and a dozen wolves ran by us in slow motion. Some of them were real, flesh and blood wolves but others were the merest suggestions of wolves, like a wolf-shaped cloud or a wolf-shaped mist. The woman said “They are more powerful than you can imagine. They are always all around us. In the middle ages, astrologers thought it was the movement of the stars that determined our actions when really it is the movement of the wolves.” Despite what she’d told me, I was terrified of the wolves.

Just then the blond haired woman alerted us that she had seen something. When the black haired woman moved away from me, I found it hard to breath. We all retreated into the cottage. I was the last to enter and as I closed the door, I heard a gun fire many times. The bullets came toward me in slow motion and I was able to watch them and I knew they would miss. I watched them spinning in the air. Except they weren’t bullets; they were golden screws. Five of them. I watched them impact the door jam and slowly screw themselves deep into the dark wood. They were clustered tightly together, like a shotgun blast. I closed the door and I woke up

Brightly Colored Bats

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Another Colorful Bat

Another Colorful Bat

In honor of Friday the 13th, I wanted to treat all you trixodecaphobes to something kind of sweet. My son and grand-daughter were doodling the other day and happened to come up with some very happy bats. I thought they were delightful, especially for the colors they chose to depict these children of the night. Am I the only one who’s getting a little bored of scary things having a dreary color pallette? These are happy, cheery little bats who are smiling, perhaps because they’ve just feasted on the blood of some paisley-wearing hippy.

A Colorful Bat

A Colorful Bat