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.

It 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.”

“My scent, you don’t have a smell.”

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

As I sat up and began to put on my last pair of clean socks, my reflection sat down beside me and plucked its own identical socks from the air one by one and put it’s on as well. It didn’t have to mimic everything that I did, but its appearance always had to match mine.

In the days right after the world ended, most people thought we were a set of weird identical twins that always dressed in the same outfits, right down to our shoes, but as things progressed, the matching wear and tears 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 was meditating on the concept of distance with only one point of measurement. My own Koan like the sound of one hand clapping to put me into a meditative state of mind.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It was apparently close enough to sleep that what we call a Nightmare showed up to kill me in my dreams and then anchor itself to this level of reality by eating my corpse, or at least that’s the theory on why they do what they do.

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 chowing down on my remains.

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 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, he loses his anchor and goes back to where he came from. It doesn't know where, or what that is, only that it fears returning to it on some deeper level than its thoughts.

It, rather I, 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 since all of this started.

No one sleeps easily anymore.

There’s also a constant look of concern on my face that makes it look somewhat constipated, not something that anyone had even bothered to warn me about when I had the same look.

It 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 him 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 know everything at the moment it appeared before me, which was freaky enough but also everything else I knew and felt from that moment on.

It also doesn't see himself as a separate… thing, but identifies himself 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, and 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 watching my back.

Third, kill it how?

Normal Nightmares can be killed because they took somebodies place and are now fully part of our level of reality. They bled and died just like us. Fletch wasn't so much as here, as trapped halfway between here and wherever it really belonged.

The only way to get it killed by a Nightmare would involve tricking it somehow, which is hard since it knows everything I know as soon as I knew it, and, it has the same desire to live that I do.

So I struggled to pull up the jeans with the bite marked magazines taped on in multiple overlapping layers. The work boots with steel toes. The black 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, it 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 nine nails in rows of three nailed through it so my Reflection could make itself useful.

Fletch called it “Stucker.”

Then I headed downstairs.

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