Feel The Fear

When Shadows Dance

Some call me fear, though I am known by many names. I am the movement in the mirror, the whisper in the dark, the curse upon the night. Every dusk, as stars blow up and sparkle in their vain attempts to loosen the shadows, I wander the world. Each night, I crawl inside the dreams of those that sleep.
But they are not merely dreams. They are nightmares. Always.
I watch them sleep, dreading the hell that their minds will create, before falling into their dreams. Although, strangely, the worst of a dream is never the feeling of fear. In sleep, terror is muted. The mind creates its own prison of fear and, as quickly as it has been created, it can be destroyed.
Only, I do not merely watch their terrors unfold. I walk between their nightmares, breathing life into the shadow. Every horror I visit, I pull back into the waking world.
I don’t just feel their fear. I make it a reality.
Tonight will be no exception.


1. The musician
Somewhere far across the sea, I find myself standing in the bedroom of a young man. As he lies to sleep, his eyes dart back and forth to the piano, which is the centrepiece of his room. Pages of torn and crumpled sheets of paper, strewn with lines of music litter its surface and the floor surrounding it. Though disorganised, there is not a single grain of dust floating atop the keys of the piano. I walk towards the man, regretting having to offer him the cold touch of my hand as I delve into his mind.

...The boy sits alone in a semi-dark room. A dim glow emanates from a yellow-stained lamp in the corner. He is seated tentatively in front of a beautiful grand piano, bright red, with black swirling embellishments. He raises his arms elegantly above the polished surface and proceeds to play. The haunting notes waver and echo around the man’s head and I am awed by the skill with which he mingles such beautiful, lingering sounds. The piece is elegant and defined as waves, lapping upon a quiet shore, and moonlight gleaming and painting shadows in its pearly mist.
Through this reverie, the waves of notes begin to crash down upon each other. It is still beautiful, but in an unsettling manner, as though it is building to something. A wave of ice seems to creep across the room as the man continues to play, spitting a chill into the air. I tried to close my eyes, sensing an evil of sorts, but they are burned open to follow the sprinting hands of the boy across the instrument.
So focused on the gripping sounds, at first, I do not notice the figure of a man, looming over the piano.
“No!” He seethes, his angry voice clashing and shattering the music.
The man continues to play, his hands moving faster and faster, his head bending further towards the piano.
“You’re a disappointment.” Spits the shadow “You are not my son.” The silent man keeps playing with his eyes screwed up, holding back tears. Despair etched and ingrained into the rigid lines of his face.
“It has to be perfect!” Hisses the figure with damning finality as he fades back into the dark. I move closer to the boy, hesitantly. The music that had begun so sweet and delicate has warped into something entirely unrecognisable. A terrifying clash of frenzied notes, crashing in a continuous crescendo.
Something catches my eye, and drags my sight towards the piano. A glint of something bright adorns one of the pristine pearl keys. Gentle drabs of blood begin to speck the surface. Like smudged flowers, they flit across the unmarred white of the piano.
The boy continues to play.
His fingers swirl the blood into artful patterns as he crashes upon the keys, hitting them with more force every time.
“Perfect.” He keeps muttering, arching is back further inwards. “Perfect.” He swirls bloodstained nails cross the slick keys. The red coagulation bites under his nails and seeps across his dancing hand like a permanent ink. Scarring him.
Unthinking, and unable to take more of this horror, I run to prise his bleeding hands from the instrument…but as always, my arms pass through his as I turn back to shadow. Helpless I watch him paint the keys with red ridged fingerprints, as the air in his mind becomes more and more claustrophobic. As the terrible music chokes us...

The boy wakes with a start, and I am dragged back to his cluttered bedroom. His eyes wide and his breathing shallow he looks around wildly before seeming to relax. He appears to realise that he has woken from a dream and turns to sleep.
Then lets out such a scream when he sees the blood still staining his ruined fingertips.


2. The Child
“Fear” they call me. Yet every night I seem to forget who I am. My hands turn to mist and my voice turns to ashes if I interfere with my own work.
After watching the man lose his mind, I flee to the other side of the world and find myself between four brightly coloured walls. As soon as I see the room I know what horrors lie in store for me. It is the bedroom of a young girl, with posters of cartoons and some unnamed football team sprawled across the walls (none higher than the three feet or so that I assume the child can reach to).
It’s strange that it is the dreams of children that trouble me the most, but time and time again, I am terrified by the terrors of the untamed minds of youths. Adults grow up and adapt to the concrete world they live in. They fear loss. They fear death. They fear failure.
Children are different. Every night paints the world with shadows, and in those shadows lurk the dull eyes of every terror imaginable. Bracing myself for the worst, I offer her the marble silhouette of my hand and reluctantly carve myself into her head.

...The child lies in her bed. She is in her room, though the colours are distorted and unnervingly vibrant. She sits up, slowly, and the colours drain from the walls. Slow tendrils of shadow slither around the darkening floor, choking out the light, creeping towards the child’s curled feet. Slow and deliberate, more like the fingers of a grasping hand than snakes, they clasp and claw at the curtains, pulling the light to their depths.
Until the room is dark.
Suddenly it is cold, the biting chill of a winter night. It is still dark but we are outside now, standing at the mouth of a cave. The mind of a child is abstract, surreal and entirely mad. Their dreams lack fluidity, and often jump and jolt as their head loses interest in the image it has shown before.
I strain my eyes to see the child emerging from the darkness with four other kids. They appear to be laughing and smiling as only children can. The other children run to greet their parents who stand outside of the cave. They greet them with hugs and shrill, echoing sounds of delight. The girl, suddenly ecstatic runs to her own parents who stand near me.
But as she runs, she falls and sprawls across the floor of the open cave. Her parents seem disinterested. They turn away. Away from her, and away from each other. Every parent and child that seemed so happy abruptly scatter in every direction, like insects being set on fire. The girl remains lying still on the floor of the strange cave as her companions swarm into shadow.
Silent tears shake her and moonlight cracks open and spills into the cave, illuminating a figure standing near her. In vain I hope that it might be her father but my heart plummets and my bones shrink when he turns towards me. He is faceless. The silver light casts slight shadows on where sunken eyes may once have resided.
The child screams. I scream, but once again, my breath of terror turns to dust in my mouth and dissolves in the night air...

Torn suddenly from her dream by the movement of something in the house, the child bolts upward and cries for her parents. I watch helplessly as tendrils of the nightmare stalk their way up her bed, reaching out and touching the faceless figure in the corner of her room.


3. The Old Man
Burdened by the heaviness of all that I have seen and haunted by the nightly screams, I wearily watch a different figure sleep. It is an old man, lying in a single bed. Insipid floral patterns twirl around the walls and the sacred heart of Jesus adorns the space above his dresser. There is a framed picture of the man and an elderly woman gathering dust on the same dresser, and an empty single bed beside him. Weary, and torn asunder by horrors, I reach to touch his forehead.

...The man is sitting on a fold up chair, watching the sand fall in the hourglass. Most of it has fallen through the gap, floating to settle at the bottom. The sand seems to have fallen in an array of different colours. At the bottom, the grains are vibrant, though as the pile continues, they lose their intensity, as though falling has wrung them of their colour. Trickling like the tired pace of a waterfall. Yet gravity pulls it down, and inevitably, every drop will fall to the bottom.
What began in beautiful shades of green, turns to reds and pink, tumbling into purple and the richest blue. Colours rising and falling like a tenor’s sharp scales, before all fading into something that seems grey. A shadow of its former colour. The man patiently watches as hours pass as drops of sand, dripping through the glass, seemingly weary of following gravity’s tired old pattern to the bottom of the hourglass.
Eventually only a few grains remain. The man makes an attempt to stand. Placing his hands on his knees he hauls himself up, bones weary with fatigue. With a great deal of sadness in eyes as old and vast as the sky, he places a hand upon the hourglass, and watches as the final grain floats to the bottom...

I seem to float back to his room. Confused, I search the room for an unearthly horror. My eyes are drawn the picture of the man and the woman and decide that he looks younger in the frame. I turn to the man, who seems very small in the bed.
He does not wake up.