When I finally fell asleep I was running. To this day I do not know what from. Whatever it was it must have been the most terrifying thing ever to exist for I seemed to be running without trying to. It was as if I had almost no control over my body. I wished to see what I was running from so I tried to open my eyes. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. Perhaps I thought that my body would not respond to my commands as it didn’t with the running. Therefore it was a surprise to me when at my first attempt to open my eyes they did. I so wish I hadn’t. What I saw still haunts me most nights. I know that it was worse than any horror story ever made. For that reason I have great difficulty in dictating what I saw on that dreadful night not just emotionally but for the fact that the words do not exist to express exactly what I saw but I will do my best. It was worse than any horror story ever made there was a thick liquid dripping down the walls that looked suspiciously like blood. And it was not just dripping; it was splattered over the walls as if someone had been brutally murdered there. There were scratches in the walls, like someone- no not just someone- but a child by the size of the marks-had literally worn their fingers down to the knuckles trying to escape, as if that was there only way to survive. It did not seem logical that they stopped there at the time for it looked then like there were miles and miles left before the end of that gruesome tunnel. But then my feet felt as if they were on fire. I looked down and I saw then why those poor unfortunate souls had stopped there. Nails two inches long at least, sticking up out of the floor, and the walls and the ceiling, but these nails were red hot. I mean you could actually see the words scratched lightly on the wall ‘turn back’ ‘this is your doom’ and little scratchy tally marks all over the top of hundreds of tiny little skeletons all stuck on the spikes like spoils of war. As I looked at the skeletons time seemed to turn backwards these pale bleached white bones seemed to grow younger and then it started. They grew rotting flesh on the bones with maggots crawling in and out and then the flesh grew and grew, the maggots still crawling around.
Then the flesh started growing and forming skin and then the faces started screaming out in pain calling out for their mothers and fathers. Then the screaming intensified louder and louder until it reached a deafening pitch and volume thousands of dead children screaming in fright, pure terror in their eyes but they were all looking in different directions, at the spikes that were brandishing them where they were slumped. Then the spikes started growing and lengthening. Growing through the bodies of these thousands of children, all still while they are screaming themselves ‘to death’ without taking a single breath. That was the only sign that they were not ‘living and breathing’, that and the fact that the blood from where the spikes bored holes in their young frail bodies was gushing onto the floor faster than I ran through that awful tunnel. The layer of blood was growing and taking over the floor until it was lapping over my still running feet which were stepping, I just released, on every single spike they could find, until they grew too huge. I tripped while my foot was still speared by the now over foot long spikes. As I fell into the deep layer of blood collecting on the floor I felt the spikes attack every inch of my skin, gouging through my eyes, carrying on through my brain, paralyzing me and then shattering my skull until I was face flat in the blood. The blood of thousands of dead children swelling in my ears, filling my mouth as I try to scream out for help, going up my nose as I try to take a breath. I could feel myself dying. I could feel my own warm blood filling my skull and drenching my hair. I knew I was going to die. I tried and failed for one last breath, the blood of all those poor children. Children whose parents would have never had closure for their deaths, some still thinking that their babies will one day come home, knowing in their heart of hearts that they are dead and never coming back, filling my lungs. And then I woke up drenched in a thick cold sweat, terrified, of ever sleeping again.