Be nice to your friends or their ghosts will eat you

Creepy, creepy dream last night.

Basically, there was this nightmare ghost that came around at night, and it killed people. This might or might not have been a result of the earlier part of the dream, where we broke into this creepy old library. (There's nothing quite like shelves upon shelves of dusty old books and movies set up inside something that looks like an abandoned bomb shelter to make you wonder what the hell you just stepped into... and, yes, you can have that reaction even when you're dreaming.)

So anyway, there's a point that I sometimes hit in certain horror movies, where I'm tired of the suspense and I just want to go confront the monster and get it over with -- even if it kills me. Which was basically how I ended up grabbing the nightmare-ghost as it was creeping up under my blanket. (Yes, I was sleeping in my dreams. Apparently I'm ready for a starring role in Inception II.) And pulling the ghost up to where I could see it. And demanding to know what it was doing and what it wanted.

It turned out to be the ghost of the younger sister of one of my old college friends. Not anybody in particular, not anybody from real life; but in this dream-identity I'd spend a lot of time partying with this girl. And her younger sister, who was now a ghost, was the one who always got ignored and left behind. And her hands were all scarred because when she'd bring people beer bottles (in a pathetic bid for attention) she'd have to use her teeth on top of her fingers to get them open.

So I opened a couple of bottles for her, and that kind of settled her down. At least, she quit being scary, and she didn't kill anybody else. I was never entirely sure if she was going to come back, but she never did.

Now that I'm awake, I can be more flippant about the whole thing and point out that returning from beyond the grave to murder people seems a little extreme as a reaction to being ignored; I mean, it's not the sort of thing that leads people to say, "Oh, she's not a bad kid, this is just a cry for help." But in the dream, that was pretty much how it worked, and it was pretty NFBSKing creepy.

Halloween Story 2: We don't go out at night.

At first we didn't believe it. We thought it was a hoax, some sort of mass hysteria, something like that. It just seemed so unlikely, you know?

But it was true.

It was an archaeological project in Armenia that set them loose. That's what they say, anyhow: a bunch of academic types using a small army of grad students and local labor to unearth some very old ruins. They breached the wrong vault, and found something inside - and then they died screaming in the darkness.

That night, most of Armenia was overrun. The night after that, Georgia and Azerbaijan and parts of Turkey and Iran. On the third night, they pushed down into Iraq and Syria, and up as far as Volgograd. A hastily-assembled U.N. task force moved in to try to close the vault. They were still fifteen miles from the site when darkness fell. Nobody made it back out.

The following morning, they bombed the ruins. Maybe that sealed the vault, maybe it didn't - nobody can get close enough to be sure. It doesn't matter anyway - whatever came out of there had already established nests outside the ruins.

A year later, we still don't know what they are. Hell, we don't even know that they're a "they" and not an "it." We know more than we did at first, but that's not saying much. The little ones are about the size of birds. They don't look that dangerous, but if they get you with those tentacle-tongue things... You don't come back from that. And the big ones are worse.

We know they don't come out in daylight, but we don't know why. Maybe light hurts them, but maybe not, too. There's some evidence that they don't actually feel pain, not the way we do. We don't know if they're intelligent, or if the things that look like planning are actually just instinct. We don't know if they communicate, and if they do we don't know how.

We know they're everywhere. The cities are still safe - anywhere there's enough light is safe. But without the countryside, the cities are dying. Maybe we'll reach a point of equilibrium, as we lose more of our population; maybe not.

We don't go out at night. We don't want to see those obscene shapes drift past, darker than the night. We don't want to feel that soft, questing touch from the shadows. We don't want to watch our world slipping away from us.

We huddle close to the light. Some of us, the ones who haven't given up hope, still search for something, anything, that will save us from the things in the darkness. The others... they hold on for as long as they can.

It's all we can do.