Characters in ANY sexual situation are 18+.
"Does one's waking life transcend into dream; or perhaps, is it the other way around?"
*
Something was wrong. In fact, everything was wrong. The flowery wreath depicting the nativity scene--from the book of Luke of course-- that usually hung over the door to the home had been replaced with one made of barren grey branches.
In the center of the wreath was a star housing the silhouette of a man pouring liquid from a vase that seemed strangely small for the great flood that fell from within.
Daniel slowly put his hand on the doorknob and began to turn. It was unlocked. A chill washed over his body as the freezing air bellowed past the open door.
Darkness.
"Mom ... I'm Home".
Silence.
Walking down the hallway, something caught his eye. Breaching the veil of darkness was a dim amber smear of heaving light, lowly casting on the bleak walls leading to the kitchen.
When he finally reached the kitchen, everything looked different, yet so similar. Like a doppelganger of a loved one, familiar but unknown. No sign of a fight between his mother and so-called boyfriend, but there must have been something. Something that would give him enough clues to know what happened here.
He hated that son of a bitch. His mother was always so kind and welcoming; and that piece of shit was a cold, narcissistic machine of abuse. Belting insults about his manhood at any chance he got. One time, he had reached for something in the fridge and knocked a few of his beers on the floor. He had struck him for that. The beer was still good too, just a bit shaken up. How could he have gotten his perfect mom? "Opposite attract, I guess" he had always thought.
Daniel kept at his blind saunter through the kitchen until loudly bumping into the dark brown wood of the family dinner table. The discordant sound of metal flying off and hitting the floor reverberated throughout the room, ringing in his ears.
The table was set for two.
He ran his hand along the top of it for balance, until he struck something solid and cold.
"Shit." Blood gently trickled from a newly struck cut on his hand.
A knife.
It was a carving knife, one with an ivory handle made by a master craftsman back before the civil war. His deadbeat father had left it to him before he left. Or maybe he had just forgotten it when he skipped town, and that's what his mother had told him to let him have something to remember him by. The gesture was made with good intentions, but anything that tied Daniel to his father weighed him down in feelings of anger and abandonment.
He picked it up and continued walking out of the kitchen. For some reason, all the doors to the interconnected rooms were closed. Ones that were always open. Daniel felt so uneasy and scared about this turn of events, but the desire to find his mom--or what was left of her--gnawed at him. The silence didn't help either. This all reminded him of the passage in the Bible where Mary Magdalene found Jesus's empty tomb after his crucifixion by the Romans.
The candlelight was getting stronger as he continued walking through the house. The shadows and flickering flames of the hefting light source cast eerie shadows on his face, but it did nothing to distract him from his task.
He could hear the sound of someone moving around in one of the rooms upstairs.
Daniel wondered if they were watching him from a window. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he felt slightly sick, but at least the adrenaline rush made it easier for him to move. If they had been able to see him approaching the home, they would have come out by now, he hoped.
He didn't want to think about what might happen if they caught him here--or worse, what they might do with him once they trapped him. He tried not to dwell on that idea too much.
The normally bright and familiar wallpaper of the hallway--dotted with bible motifs--had been stripped bare to a now cold and liminal grey; and with the help of the candlelight, materialized a hazy and abyssal ambiance throughout the twilight house. The family pictures that once adorned the walls of the long hallway were nowhere to be found. Replaced by what looked like the scribbles of a madman, and some strange symbols that he couldn't begin to understand.
As Daniel walked towards the dreamlike warmth of the light, he could have sworn he heard faint whispering; and the unmistakable convulsing feeling that he was now being watched. "Mom!?" He called out again frantically.
More rustling from upstairs.
Daniel tried his best to shake off his feelings as he reached the living room. It was a very large space with a high ceiling and beautiful oak floors, its walls lined with bookshelves. The light danced across the creases and crevices of the space, casting ethereal shadows that resembled many sets of dark burning eyes watching him.
Between where the furniture of the living room would have sat, was a circle formed from various candles. They were all thick and uniform in their height. Intertwined between them was the very same star from the front door, but now it sat strangely flipped upside down and drawn in what looked to be chalk.
"Where have I seen this before." He wondered.
The sinking realization began to assault his already twitching mind as he remembered an old horror movie. A movie his mom would never have let him watch.
"It's... a ... pentagram." Walking quickly picked up to running as he turned away from the warmth of the candles and made his way out of the living room and to the stairs. "Robert couldn't--he wouldn't-- have done this".
Whether it was pure instinct for the sake of self-preservation, or perhaps some conscious thought that whoever did all of this was probably still here, who's to say? What was evident, however, is that before he bound that inaugural step on the stairs, he stopped in his tracks and stoned up like a corpse on a pike.
Moaning.
Very light, very sensual, moaning.
"What the fuck is going on." The shock of that thought ran through his at this point, throttling brain; and with the reason--If any-- unbeknownst to himself, Daniel began to slowly trudge up.
At the top of the stairs, he remembered the whispering he heard earlier in his exploration; but the notion quickly left when his focus drifted again to his beloved childhood home. Now it's as though completely different people lived here. "Who could break in and do all this before I got home?" He wondered.
"Home ... from ... where?"
Try as he might, Daniel couldn't remember any part of the day he just had. His memory was as spotty as the light guiding him.
It was slowly starting to make sense to him what was going on.
A new faded and faint marker of interest shone towards Daniel. This time thinly shining down the hall and underneath the very last door on the left.
"Mom's room."
No fight or flight, no adrenaline, not even an arrhythmic bump to his beating heart. Cold, just like the alpine air that surrounded him. He began to walk. Whatever horrors awaited him in the bedroom of his mother, whether a monster or a drop into an abyssal void, it would surely be what freed him from this nightmare.
The crystal sheen of his mother's doorknob... was strangely, gone. Replaced by a grotesque pink, like peeled flesh. With a sick and pulsating movement. The shock of the intangible had long since faded from Daniel. In fact, the demented started to feel strangely native.
As he began to turn the moist and ghastly abomination attached to his mother's door, it didn't take long for him to see what vile, satanic monster was waiting for him.
It was ... his mother.