The Ladies of Horror

Magenta Dreams
by A.F. Stewart

Have you ever walked through the place of nightmares?

I have.

It’s beautiful, all midnight violet and stillness stretching across an indistinct horizon. A land of indigo woods and an amethyst haze, nestled in ethereal mist woven from stygian secrets.

It shifts along the unconscious, against the thought boundaries of the sleeping.

I can hear them, you know, the ones asleep. Like whispering voices at the edge of the trees.

They don’t know I’m here. They’re too busy dreaming sugarplums and bright happy wishes. They never look deeper.

They never learned to walk through other people’s dreams.

I started at thirteen, a jaunt past my own haunting fears about school and bullies, into a surreal fantasy with clowns and upside down ice cream cones drenched in scarlet rain. After that, I’d wander every night, a salacious voyeur into other people’s private dreams, and then their shuddering nightmares.

That’s how I found my orchid hued sanctuary, this imprisoned oasis. This vision in dark violet where all the underbelly horror lives. The black thoughts, the dark deeds, the furtive desires lurking underneath those sugarplums. All the ideas we don’t dare voice aloud.

It felt like home. It’s where I came to live, after…

And it’s where I made my decision to set them all free.

Tonight, I let the nightmares of the human race loose. Show them the path to escape.

That will be fun. They’ll ooze out from slumbering eyes and breathing noses, spew from throats, past groaning hypocrite lips, consuming their way into reality. They’ll leave behind hollow husks and empty shells, a legacy of dead dreamers. And best of all, as they’ll turn the world mauve and indigo and shivers, they’ll take me with them.

And I can finally wake up.

Fiction © Copyright A.F. Stewart
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from A.F. Stewart:

Horror Haiku and Other Poems

Words linger…
In the darkness of shadows, in the distant screams.
They whisper past the drip, drip of blood.
The strange beauty of words hide, waiting for you.
Embrace the horror.

Venture past safe reality, into the world of terror told in verse. Horror Haiku and Other Poems brings forth surreal dread and spins it in artistic countenance. From small chilling bites of poetry, to murky morsels of fright, come find where the words haunt you, where they live and die.

Available on Amazon!

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