Tavern of Terror Vol. 11: Short Horror Stories Anthology

NIGHTMARE WEAVER

Alan Parker was dead once. For four minutes and thirty-five seconds, his heart had stopped beating. His head had smashed through the passenger side window of his friend Paul’s SUV after a city bus lost control and blew a red light, plowing into the vehicle. Paul died. Alan fractured several ribs and his pelvis, and he sustained numerous lacerations, including a punctured liver and kidney. One nurse had told him it was a miracle he’d been revived.

The accident had been years ago. Physically, Alan had recovered completely, although his shoulder never had the same range of motion again, and he tended to get more frequent headaches. But he could walk again and do things normal people did.

For some time after the accident, people would hound him with questions about what had happened. They had profiled him in the local news, and they always insisted on using the word “miracle” in the headline. That word got stuck in people’s heads. He was the miracle man who had been to the other side. Soon strangers sought him out to ask if he had seen heaven and what it was like. The guys at Hannigan’s were a little more tactful, after the first wave of interest. But Alan always felt that, whenever he went for a beer, there was a non-zero chance somebody would bring up the accident. And that was always a problem because he couldn’t tell them a damn thing. Eventually he stopped going to the bar.

The blunt-force trauma he had experienced during the accident had ensured he remembered exactly nothing. He remembered getting into the SUV with his friend and then waking up in a hospital four days later. He had no memory of the events in between. And if he was being honest, he didn’t want to remember any of it anyway.

While his body got better with time, his mind was slower to follow suit. Though he could not remember his own death, he constantly dreamt of his friend dying in a hundred different ways. In his dreams, Paul didn’t always die in a car crash. He would see Paul die in a fire or sometimes of a horrible disease. He watched Paul fall from buildings or be stabbed by unseen assailants.

In time, Paul’s face faded from his memories. The dreams of death remained, but his friend was swapped for someone else. Sometimes he would dream of his mother being attacked by a pack of wolves. Or the cute girl who worked at the gas station drowning alone at sea.

There was no rhyme or reason for the deaths in his dreams. It could be any person and by any means. Some got terribly elaborate, like power lines falling into a swimming pool during a storm or someone being locked in an industrial freezer for days. Others were as simple as an unexpected heart attack.

He saw a doctor who told him dreams of death were to be expected after the physical and emotional trauma he experienced. There had been a physical injury to his brain. There was no telling how that would affect him in both the short term and the long term. How he dealt with it was more important than the fact it was happening at all.

The doctor prescribed some medication and gave him some exercises, like meditation and breathing techniques that could help him if the nightmares began to stress him out too much.

When the accident had been some years behind him and the nightmares had become manageable, there was a time when he felt like he might be really getting over everything. He still didn’t recall any pleasant dreams, but the nightmares had become less frequent. A night might pass without one, and then two. Eventually, he could get through an entire week. He had escaped the nightmares at long last.

That was what he had thought at the time. Until it happened again.

Alan recognized the street. It was Market Way, right next to the park downtown. He had walked down the road countless times in his life, he was sure. But now it was night. The lamps in the park hummed and produced a soft, yellow glow. One of the streetlights was out, and a large section of the street was in darkness. There were only a few cars and a man walking alone.

If Alan had ever met the man before, he didn’t remember it. His face was not familiar. He was younger than Alan, and he was tall. He wore expensive sneakers and had AirPods in his ears while he walked with his head down. He didn’t see the other man slip out of the park behind him.

The tall man kept walking, while the other man crept along in the shadows. Then he jumped the tall man and stabbed him.