Living Your Nightmares

1)

I woke up to a sharp nudging at my shoulder and opened up my eyes to see myself looking back down at me as I lay on the mattress on the floor.

The mattress was there because I had used the cherry wood bed frame to board up the windows in the bedroom. Even on the second floor, you needed to slow things down if they tried to get in.

The Fetch didn't need to explain why it woke me up, I could feel the presence of Nightmares on the hunt for prey pressing down on my mind, but just like me, it always felt the need to say something to make sure everyone was on the sage page.

“Hounds, I think they caught my scent from the school.”

I glared up at it “My scent, you don’t have a smell.”

It did have my most recent wound from climbing over a fence that had a loose strand of wire fencing. Its condition always reflected my own, which was handy since it was nearly invulnerable to everything else that tried to hurt it. But the cut on my arm was real, while the cut on it opposite arm only appeared to bleed. The reflection of my blood would run down its arm just like mine, but where it would drip off of me, it just vanished as it beaded and broke free from it.

As I sat up and began to put on my last pair of clean socks, my Fetch sat down beside me and plucked its own identical socks from the air one by one and put them on its feet as well. It didn’t have to mimic everything that I did, but its appearance always changed to match mine after a moment or two, and it complained that having clothes just appear on it felt weird.

In the days right after the world ended, most of the other survivors thought we were a set of those weird identical twins that always dressed in the same outfits, right down to our shoes. But as things fell apart, the matching identical signs of wear and tear on every item of clothing clued people into the fact that “Fletch” was one of the Nightmares, a rare companion type.

Most companions came from people who had practiced lucid dreaming, their ability to control their dreams extending to controlling their Nightmares in the waking world.

Me, I had been meditating on the concept of distance with only one point of measurement. My own Koan much like the classic concept of the sound of one hand clapping to put me into a meditative state of mind.

It was apparently close enough to sleep that things we called Nightmares showed up to kill me as I woke and saw it in front of me to anchor itself to this level of reality with my dyeing thought. Or at least that’s the theory on why they do what they do.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Even though it can talk, it can’t confirm or deny any of the theories. Its mind became as much of a reflection of me as its body did. With my mind being in a meditative state, it didn’t have any way of looking for my fears and taking their form before fighting me to the death.

Instead, it was just the embodiment of my concept of self. Sometimes I almost felt bad for it.

I called it a Mirror, and unlike the other Nightmares, say the pack of hounds now tracking me down, Mirrors don’t eat people. They don’t need to, being my reflection anchors it in this reality just fine.

For at least as long as I live.

Which is why it watches over me in my sleep and watches my back when I’m awake. If I die, it loses its anchor and goes back to where it came from. It doesn't know where that is, only that it fears returning to it on some deeper level than its conscious thoughts.

It, like me, looks like a pale skinned man somewhere in his thirties, at a medium height with a thin build, well, more like gaunt these days. Platinum blonde hair which looked more and more plain old gray with each passing day. Pale blue eyes, usually bloodshot with dark circles around them since all of this started.

No one sleeps easily anymore. Who knows what dream may come...

There’s also a constant look of concern on my face that makes it look somewhat constipated, something that I would have appreciated anyone bothering to warn me about on any of the occasions when I had that look on my face before.

The Fetch waved at me to get me to focus in on it again. “They're at the end of the block, I think they have a Ganger directing them.”

I hissed at it in irritation. “I know, stop telling me what I already know. I hate that.”

It gave me an irritated look. “Yes, I do.”

Our conversations tended to go like that. It not only knew everything I knew at the moment it appeared before me, which was freaky enough, but could also guess almost everything else I knew and felt from that moment on.

It also doesn't see itself as a separate… thing. It identifies itself as me.

And it hates me as much as I hate it.

Three reasons why I haven't killed it yet.

First of all. Only other Nightmares can hurt it, otherwise, it matches my appearance which makes it almost indestructible. So while it reflects the same injuries that I have, I would have to die to kill it that way. Second. It can’t let me die without dying itself, so I got something with no other choice than to watch my back.

Third, kill it how?

Normal Nightmares can be killed because they took somebody's place and are now fully part of our world, or at least exist on the same level of reality. They bled and die just like us. The Fetch isn’t so much really here, then trapped halfway between here and wherever it really belonged.

The only way to get it killed is to trick it into getting killed in a hopeless fight with a Nightmare, which is hard since it thinks the same way I do, and, it has the same desire to live that I do.

So I got up from my nap and struggled to pull on the jeans with the bite marked magazines taped on in multiple overlapping layers. The work boots with steel toes. The black military fatigue jacket with more magazines held on with bolts on each corner and two in the middle. And lastly the batter’s helmet with the logo spray painted over.

The belt I had taken off of a dead cop got strapped on next, then I slipped the gun into the holster.

The gun was for me, the Fetch could shoot its copy, but no bullets would come out of it. Instead, I had to pick up and carry around a baseball bat with eight inch nails in three rows of three nailed through it so my Reflection could make itself useful.

The Fetch called it “Stucker.” I wish I had thought of it first.

Then I headed downstairs.

"Alright, kiddies. Welcome to Elm Street, where Nightmares come to die."