I woke with a start. My window was open again. Not wide open, just open far enough for an arm or a cat to slip through. And my blinds were raised, all the way, exposing me to the eerie blackness of the night. My window opened onto... nothing. There was nothing outside; no stars, no moon, nor ambient light from the city's blasted streetlights. Just blackness.
It was hard to breathe. Fear constricted my airways more efficiently than any python could have hoped. I could not move. I was paralyzed by the blackness beyond my window panes. That deep well of darkness, home to everything I'd ever feared and many things I had yet to fear, stared at me, licking its chops, and savoring the smell of a girl paralyzed by its gaze.
I struggled to move, to sit up, to stand and turn the light on. Maybe with some light I could allay my fears, convince myself that it was just a cloudy night. The light only made the dark seem more sinister; the light only revealed what the dark had hidden.
At my window, so close that his nose almost pressed against the screen, a man's face appeared from the dark. He had sharp features, almost as though he were carved from marble. His high cheek bones, framed by brown curls, and refined nose might have rendered him handsome in combination with his deep brown eyes under other circumstances. These were not those circumstances, and I found myself legitimately afraid for my life.
I kept my eyes on him, like I would a weeping angel. Don't Blink. Blink and your dead. I thanked the Universe for giving the world David Tennant. It was damn good advice.
I recognized him after a moment. In Chemistry, earlier, he'd cheated off my test. I'd been sitting next to him in class for a week - didn't even know his name, it was something like Blue... Bruce? - and now he was cheating off me and watching me sleep. I'd read this book before.
"Bruce," I said, suddenly angry.
"It's Eric, actually," he said helpfully.
I faltered for a moment. how could I have been-. It doesn't matter. "Eric, this is unacceptable behavior. If I ever catch you doing this again, I will stab you. In the chest. With a wooden stake," I said, glaring at him. "Then I will leave your shiny fucking corpse in the middle of fucking Venice or wherever the fuck it is, with a strongly worded letter to your sparkling overlords telling them exactly where your pot is."
"You've read those...books...too?" His voice was fading and everything became blurry, washed out. "Do... hard it makes...for an Incubus...?"
I woke with a start, sitting up abruptly at my desk. "What the fuck was that?" I murmured, looking around. Eric was beside me, cheating off my history exam. Catching my eye, he winked knowingly. I have yet to figure out if he was letting me know that he knew about my dream, or thanking me for letting him cheat off me.
The preceeding was a fictionalized account. Any and all resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental. Well, except for the fact that I basically did have that dream, but at home, in bed, sans the conversation with the creep watching me sleep, plus a whole lot of me being scared half to death of open windows in the weeks following. Other than that, not a mite of this was true.
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