The Dream Singer

Kitty couldn’t breathe. Iron bands tightened steadily, remorselessly around her lungs. She tried to thrash out but her arms were pinioned tightly against her chest, fingers clutching, bruising her upper arms. Suddenly other senses awakened. Her feet were moving. Vision and sound arrived as though she had pressed the “on” switch of a TV. She walked with bare feet through cold viscous mud up to her ankles, straining with every muscle to lift herself up and away from its clammy touch. Her feet made sucking sounds as she walked, releasing a stench like sewage and rotting flesh. Footprints appeared in the dark muck at her feet, leading down a trail between dense thickets of brush. The empty house loomed ahead in a clearing, gray and indistinct in the sickly light of a three-quarter moon, the windows dark hypnotic eyes that compelled her toward the door.
The door was standing open.
Leading her inexorably forward toward the malevolent dark rectangle, the footprints continued – unclean obscenities fouling the steps, blemishing the dimly illuminated surface of the floor inside. The room, bathed in a pale foxfire glow that ebbed and pulsed like the ragged rhythm of her own labored breathing, was devoid of furnishings. She knew where the footprints would lead: across the empty room and down the dim corridor to the bathroom. The vortex. A yawning black unknown that reverberated with stark, blind terror. She had to go . . . had to see. She tried to move. Her body would not respond. She fell to her hands and knees and fought to crawl into the charged darkness, straining forward. Someone was holding her back – someone inside herself – using her lungs, her throat, in a strangled effort to emit screams that came out as gurgling, choking sobs. She fell prostrate before the door . . and awoke flailing, gasping for breath, her sleeping bag twisted around her body. Her left shoulder was painfully wrenched, her body soaked with perspiration. Exhausted, she lay still.
Dust motes danced in a pallid ray of sunlight that streamed from a small high window through draperies woven by generations of spiders. In the dim light she could see the rough plywood walls with metal shelves on one side that held boxes of paper towels, toilet paper, and cleaning fluid; the broom, dustpan, mop and bucket were propped against the opposite wall of the room.