Where Dead Girls Go At Night

The first time Chloe Walker woke up to the strange wet, pulsing cough, the ceiling was sputtering. She watched it seize above her as though somehow, someway trying to catch its own breath—or maybe it was trying to catch hers? The longer she stared, the more she realized it wasn’t just moving, it was breathing with her. Slowly expanding in the dark, the veins in the mopped texture filling and releasing whatever oxygen was left in the air, a pair of plaster lungs hidden beneath the rough façade keeping pace with her own muted breaths.

Chloe waited for the pulsing to stop, for the room to stop this little dance. Her heart fluttering with each beat as she tried counting the seconds to calm herself down. The clock on the nightstand still read: three-twenty-five. The same as yesterday. The same as five-minutes ago. The only difference was this time, she was fully awake and the numbers still weren’t moving. The second-hand kept twitching, as though nervous, a trick of the eye she refused to acknowledge. Her brain unable to understand exactly what, if anything, was going on.

She had been dead now for nearly three years when the dreams began remembering her. It was strange at first, Chloe never knew the dead could dream—and these weren’t the usual things one says when they die will happen—no, there was no frolicking in fields of daisies or meeting with long-lost family. Chloe Walker was not having the best time. It was odd waking up and being able to breathe, or think, or feel. She never dreamed of coffins, or incinerating, she never dreamed of her family or an after-life. In fact, her dreams were ordinary little things that left chills on the coldest of spines. Dark hallways with dripping tiles that fell from the floors above, leading nowhere. Televisions that screamed her name through the news report, the news anchor crawling haplessly through the room to pull her back to report on her own story, murder has a way of changing things. She often dreamed of doors that opened out of cliffs, doors that lead to skyscrapers that dropped into nothing. Doors that went to the home of her childhood. Now empty. The usual, typical, boring things of small nightmares that would keep you or I awake. Maybe, even, if one was used to it, they might wake up and shake it off.

Not when you are dead.

When you are dead there is no waking up. There is no pretending to wake up, or pretending to be asleep. One doesn’t get those simple luxuries. It didn’t help she hadn’t seen this room in over three years, and she kept waking up to it, over and over and over again, as though it was haunting her ghost. Her psyche. The damned thing wouldn’t shut off, not even in death. Chloe Walker had woken up in the exact same apartment where she took her last breath and though her death wasn’t an accident, she felt this wasn’t either. Everything was exactly where she had left it, not a single bit of dust, or chaos, or confusion remained. It was hard to imagine this place once being a crime scene. She could barely remember that. Her blankets were draped over the couch, a few throw pillows where she had fallen asleep. It was night time, raining, and cold outside. She couldn’t feel it, but she could tell by the way the windows held the moisture. Her dreams were reliving that horrible, fateful night—and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The television ran a few more hours, she watched as the time passed and yet the clock on the wall still held constant to that same, exact time, three-twenty-five. She wondered what was so important about that hour, that moment, that second. She hadn’t died then, if memory served her correctly, she had actually died somewhere closer to four-fifteen. It was a fickle thing, time. Watching it pass you, not being able to spend it in any other way. Being chained to it forever, even upon death. Which, is, as you can tell, still most certain.

The room felt like it was holding tightly to her last set of breaths. It was a feeling she had grown accustomed to over the past few nights. Being reacquainted with the sensation of air filling her lungs, or the ache of curious fear and worrying thoughts. It was unnerving, but this dream felt real, that she was sure of. It had to be a dream, the clocks were frozen, shadows blinked and moved around, even the photos were different. Gone were the dozens of photos that lined her walls—friends, family, fun trips to the mountains, or New-Years-Eve celebrations. That was a life long-gone. In the place were silhouettes, blacked out, hazy figures that hugged her but didn’t actually exist. Her face was distorted in every picture. It was as though reality wasn’t real, it hadn’t happened the way Chloe Walker remembered, and it seemed she couldn’t quite remember what or who was supposed to even be in these pictures.

Just then, like clockwork, the apartment would plunge itself into a storm-darkened twilight, a sharp pain cracking through her skull like lightning, and she would realize with sickening clarity that she had never woken up at all. She was still trapped in the dream. This happened a few terrifying times before, Chloe Walker even assumed it was why she could dream after dying. But there was no one to ask. She was never able to talk. Never able to whisper, or speak. It was a wonder how she had ever woken up at all. She didn’t dream about that. Not once in any of these dreams, and the problem was, she started remembering her own death. She could still taste it, her mind trying to fix what she couldn’t. It wasn’t clear thoughts, only bits and pieces. Her death, thankfully, only existed in fragments: the violent bloom of something heavy, or sharp splitting her skin. The feeling of eyes on her, watching her, lingering over her as she took her last painful breaths. She remembered the strangeness of peace enveloping her mind, her body, her spirit. She remembered enough to know she shouldn’t exist, not in reality, or dreams—and yet she wondered why she hadn’t dreamed of her killer, or visited anyone else’s dreams.

Every time she awoke back at this place, she felt the overwhelming sickness before the void took over:

Elephants on the chest.

Breathing.

Thinking.

Dying.

Waiting.

It all happened so fast.

She tried talking, tried screaming. Her mouth was so dry, so parched she felt it splitting. No sound ever emerged outside a troubled wheeze. She dreamed of streets where her reward posters taped the shop windows. Her murder had gone unsolved, remained that way, even through this very dream and yet, even then, she lay bothered. Her peace shattered.

They say you only see the faces of people you have met in dreams. Maybe that was why she could never see his. She began to wonder if death dreamed of her too, the way she did it. She grew tired of faceless crowds, and looping streets, or endless storms. Then there were the dreams where all her teeth had fallen out, one by one after she realized she had gum stuck in her molars. At first it all seemed so utterly harmless, but that sinking feeling would fall to her stomach when she realized the dream would play out for hours, unabashed, and unable to be stopped. It was absurd, she would pull the wad of oversized gum out of her teeth, and it would never loosen, never pull free enough. The gum never ended, stretching from her mouth in light pink stringy ropes. A small crack, a painful release, a wet ripping yank—as a tooth came free from its housing. Followed by another, and another and another. The gum growing with each tooth.

These were her nightmares: gum, teeth, the inability to control anything anymore. She was choking, the gum would fill her entire mouth and then she would wake up. Startled. Except, she never truly ever woke up. She spent other nights in the city, maybe she had run into her killer here. Somewhere where only he had seen her. Places where faceless assailants slowly chased her around for hours. Never fully getting close enough to sink their knife into Chloe’s back. But the footsteps were heavy, loud, padded. They got close enough to keep pace with the blood boiling up into her ears. The breathing was all she could remember well enough, in any dream. The same sputtering breaths that woke her up tonight. They belonged to something that she was sure wasn’t human. Something that had followed her home and invaded her most private dreams.

Her thoughts never fed her nightmares, it was the anticipation of what would happen, when they would end. Why they were happening. What they meant. It had been three years and yet, she was still reliving the same set of nightmares, over and over and over again. Unable to fully die, unable to fully live. The nightmares kept what was left of her, long after she assumed her body had gone. She could feel the faceless, nameless thing standing beside her, watching over her, waiting for her to go to sleep.