Tom looked around him, blinking. He did not understand what he was seeing — a small, cramped room, with hardwood floors and olive green walls. A bureau sat against the wall opposite him, a tiny television hanging above it. There was art on the walls — bland depictions of boats on pastel blue water, lighthouses with flocks of birds in the sky. He did not recognize any of them.
This was not his bedroom.
Tom’s bedroom had brown carpet and cedar plank walls, decorated with three of his favorite impressionist pieces, collected over the years from the art fairs he and his wife, Rita, loved to wander together. It sat inside the single-story rambler they had purchased three years ago with the money he’d earned from the construction company he had built to profitability from the ground up.
Tom ran his hands over the soft, puffy arms of the chair he was sitting in — an armchair patterned with navy blue and beige stripes. Tom did not have an armchair in his bedroom, and certainly would not have chosen one so tasteless and sterile as this. The fabric felt cheap and worn, and static built up under his palm as he rubbed it.
He lifted his wrist to check the time, but his watch was gone. Weird.
“Rita!” he called. He felt a sudden urge to see his wife right now.
Tom stood up, his knees wobbly, and walked to the television to inspect it more closely. It was incredibly small and thin, hardly stuck out from the wall at all. He had never seen anything like it.
“Rita! Come look at this thing!”
Have I travelled to the future? The thought made him chuckle — ridiculous, of course. They’d only just barely landed on the moon. Time travel was at least several decades away. Must be all those episodes of The Twilight Zone I’ve been tuning into lately.
Tom had always been a fan of the uncanny and otherworldly. As a teenager, he had collected every new edition of pulp fiction like Tales from the Crypt. Eventually, his mother had forbidden him from purchasing any more, as he had begun to have nightmares induced by the gory tales within. So, it was no surprise to him that his mind had immediately turned to such fanciful theories.
Still. Something felt… wrong. Maybe even Twilight Zone wrong.
“Rita? Babydoll?!” No response.
Tom was getting nervous. Where is she? He could hear a quiet murmur coming from outside the closed door and it took only two quick steps to open it and look outside.
There was a hallway, pristine and scrupulously vacuumed. The walls were white and painted with a repeating pattern of blue waves, topped with tiny, handpainted sailboats every few feet — whoever had decorated this place obviously loved the ocean. The hardwood floors continued throughout, and soft lighting gleamed down from bulbs sunk deep into the ceiling.
Then he saw what was walking around here… and his heart began to race.
Strolling through the hallway were monsters wearing human bodies. One of them — a horrible skull with strips of flesh hanging from its jaw, sitting atop a whole and undamaged body — shuffled past him, barely glancing in his direction. It looked like it had crawled directly from the cover of a Tales from the Crypt book. Tom recoiled, biting down hard on his lip, and barely contained a scream. Pain flared in his mouth and he tasted blood.
“Rita!!” Tom was really panicking now and tears sprung to his eyes. “Rita! Where are you?!”
A body wearing beige slacks and a tan polo shirt emerged from a door across the way — its head was a slimy green snake, flicking its red tongue out as it passed. There was one in a pink dress with the hairy head and mandibles of a pitch-black spider, its eyes red and glinting in the overhead lights. It leaned down to use a water fountain, though given its lack of a tongue, Tom saw no way it could drink.
But the spider-monster’s pink dress… It reminded him of something…
Rita! She had worn a sundress just that color on the night he proposed to her!
Tom stood frozen in that hallway of terrors, remembering that night, nearly fifteen years ago…
###
Rita’s hair was chestnut-colored and shiny, cascading down her back to her waist. He had packed a picnic in a woven basket, spread a blue gingham blanket on the grass in the park near her parents’ house, and she sat on it with her legs curled back, the pink sundress rippling as she moved. He loved the way it sat on her collarbone, demure and proper, but just low enough that he could see the little nubs beneath her throat. He’d made bologna and Swiss cheese sandwiches — her favorite, though he thought the cheese tasted a bit like armpits.
He watched her, grinning like a fool, as she rummaged around in the basket and pulled out a carton of strawberries. When she opened it, she gasped, shouted in delight, and threw her arms around him, tears springing to her eyes.
Inside, atop the ripe, red fruit, sat a shining diamond engagement ring.
“Think you can handle me forever, babydoll?” Tom asked her, leaning back and looking down at her grinning face.
She did, of course, and now it was fifteen years and two kids later, and they had a house and a car and a successful business. And they were happy…
###
Oh my god! The kids! Are they safe?! Tom was jolted from his reverie by the thought. They were just eight and ten years old, and would be terrified by these monsters!
“Rita?” he called again, softer this time. He was afraid the monsters would notice him if he made a commotion, and he didn’t know what he’d do if they came at him. “Jenny? Tommy?” He hoped his children would not answer — that they were somewhere very far away.
His wife and children did not come, so Tom did the only thing he could. He picked a direction and started walking, shuddering as he passed a creature in a periwinkle-blue sleeping dress with the head of a gorgon. The snakes writhed and hissed when he glanced at it, and he quickly averted his eyes, giving it a wide berth. He’d read a comic about a gorgon once; it had depicted the monster with prominent nipples on its curvaceous, feminine body — the perfect mix of sexy and scary. Unfortunately, his mother happened to walk by while he was looking at that page one time, and had immediately grounded him for three weeks. The embarrassment had almost eclipsed the horror of the nightmares the image had caused — he’d be necking with some pretty girl from his class in some backseat of some car that wasn’t his, and he’d open his eyes and find he’d been kissing a snake.
At the end of the hallway, he emerged into an open-plan room, similar to the common room in which he’d played card games with his college dormmates. Instead of students, there were more monsters with human bodies: over by the window was a mummy, dozing, half-unwrapped bandages flapping in the slight breeze; a giant fly with multi-faceted eyes looked up from the puzzle it was building and tracked Tom’s progress across the room; a man reading a paperback in a large, soft armchair — navy blue stripes like the one Tom woke up in — looked normal, until Tom saw the other side of his head. It was smashed in and bloody, the brain matter exposed to the air. All of them could have walked right off the pages of those old horror comics, or the screens of trashy B-flicks that he’d seen with his friends.
Tom felt bile rising in his throat and swallowed hard, fighting the urge to gag.
One of the monsters was walking directly toward him. It wore lavender-colored hospital scrubs. Its head was a horrendous green alien with one bulging black eye. The eye, which reflected no light, pointed right at him and moved wetly in its socket as the creature spoke.
“Mister Kirkman? Is everything alright?” The eye blinked once, slowly.
Tom stumbled back a step. “What… How… How do you know my name? Where am I?”
The alien head tilted, seeming almost… sympathetic. “You’re feeling a little strange, aren’t you? A little confused?”
Well, that’s an understatement! “More than a little!”
“How about we go back to your room? I’ll help you lie down.” The creature’s voice was sweet and gentle, a total mismatch with her horrid appearance.
Tom was scared, and he was becoming irritated. “That wasn’t my bedroom! I want to know where I am, what all these… things are, and where my wife is! I need my wife!” His voice broke and he felt ashamed at the display of emotion. This wasn’t like him at all.
“I need Rita,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.
The alien stepped forward and put a gentle hand on his forearm. “I understand, Mister Kirkman,” it said. “You often get scared these days.”
“What does that mean?” Tom snapped at her as he flinched away. He heard buzzing in his head.
No, not in his head! Another scrub-attired beast was approaching, its head a beehive, crawling with fuzzy, buzzing honeybees. Tom was afraid of bees, had been since he was stung on the armpit when he was six.
“Mister Kirkman, you have a visitor,” said the beehive, the cheery voice emanating from an opening in the papery grey material, and bees flew in and out of the opening as it spoke.
Tom was horrified. He took several steps back, getting ready to turn and run. He didn’t know where he would run to, just that he needed to get away!
Then he saw her.
Beside the beehive was a girl. She had long, chestnut hair cascading down her back. She was wearing a pink sundress.
Rita?
He lurched toward her, the held-back tears finally spilling from his eyes. “Oh, thank God, Rita!” he cried, and enveloped her in his arms.
Rita stiffened for a moment, then wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.
“Hi,” she said, and the sound of her sweet voice pushed away all his fear. “You okay?”
Tom pressed his face into her shoulder, tears and snot soaking into the fabric. “No, babydoll! I’m not! Where are we? Why are we surrounded by monsters?”
Rita pulled away from him and inspected his face. Her plump lips shone with fresh gloss. Her freckles sprayed across her nose just like always. He wanted to kiss every one of them.
“Let’s go sit down, alright? That room with the green walls? You know it?”
“Yeah…?” What’s wrong? Why is she acting weird?
“Great, let’s go there,” Rita said, and took his hand. When he looked down at their interlaced fingers, he saw she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring.
“Forget your ring by the sink again, babydoll?” Tom teased. It was easy to forget being scared when he was with his Rita.
She paused before answering. “Oh, yeah. I’m always forgetting, you know,” she said, but her voice wavered, and Tom glanced sideways at her. There is definitely something weird going on.
Rita led him down the hallway and into the room with the armchair and the hardwood floors and the olive green walls with the art he didn’t recognise. Rita always calmed him. She'd never been impressed by the horror flicks he’d taken her to see when he was courting her. It all looks so fake, she’d say with a laugh. And Tom would laugh along with her, the gore and screams and gruesome monsters overshadowed by her light and laughter; by her tiny hand in his; by salty, buttered popcorn on his tongue.
The creature with the alien head followed them in, and Tom raised an eyebrow, wondering what she was doing. Doesn’t she know this is a private moment with my wife?
Rita patted his hand. “It’s alright,” she said. “She’s just here to help you relax a bit. You haven’t been sleeping enough… honey.” Her voice faltered on the last word.
Tom let Rita lead him to the bed, its covers smooth and clean. She pulled back the comforter and patted the mattress. Tom started to protest, not wanting to dirty the bed with his street clothes, when he looked down and noticed for the first time that he was wearing pajamas.
“You’ll just take a little nap,” Rita said, holding his hand while he lay down. She pulled the blanket up and tucked it in around his chest. “You’ll feel a lot better after.”
Tom felt a twinge in his left arm and flinched, but before he could turn to see what it was, he noticed Rita’s eyes — glossy and shimmering.
“Rita? Babydoll? You okay?” He reached his hand to wipe an escaped tear from her cheek.
Rita nodded and swallowed. She took a deep breath and smiled down at him. “I’m okay.”
Tom began to feel heavy, but it did not scare him. The bed felt like a cloud, and he thought he might sleep for days.
“You’ll be here when I wake up, babydoll?” he asked, his vision blurring.
“I will. I love you,” she said. She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead.
He was asleep before he could respond.
###
“He hasn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours,” the nurse said. “I thought he might let us near him with the meds if you were here to calm him down.”
“That was a good idea,” Jenny said, nodding.
She looked down at her father’s peaceful face. He was already snoring.
Jenny finished tucking the covers under his chin, then noticed the photo frame fallen over on the nightstand. She set it upright, smiling at the image and stroking it with a loving finger. Her mother, in her favorite pink sundress, smiled back at her from a moment made eternal, nearly fifty years before.
Rita would, indeed, be there when Tom woke up.
She leaned down one last time and kissed her father’s papery, wrinkled cheek.
“Sleep well, Dad,” she whispered, and left the room, closing the door with a quiet click behind her.
Ava Christina, a lifelong Tri-Cities resident, is a writer of fantasy and horror stories, often blurring the lines between the two. Instagram: @ac_bookaddict Blog: www.penandsword.blog
