Dream Haunting

Last night I fell asleep anxious, and my anxiety bled into my dreams. Terrible, nightmarish things, in lands of eternal nightfall and claustrophobic thrashings. I beheld at once an old building– tall, but not so much as the trees surrounding it– bathed in starlight and shadow. At one end was a window, aglow with a singular pale light; as though a candle, or a lantern; and at once I became the light, gazing through the attic of the building– one long, ashy, uninspiring corridor– and I realized I was not alone, at least in spirit, if so in body. There was a ghost in this attic– in this timeless, forgotten building– in this dayless land of eternal darkness and shadow and terror. I could see her at the far end. The rafters framed her in a long upside down V; her faint white incandescence barely standing out in the dim– and she was screaming something awful, though not always– or perhaps always, yet I could only hear it some of the time, I wasn’t sure. I was only sure that she was afraid, afraid of something worse than what was there– for I understood that those walls and those rafters and those trees outside and those stars above them and all of the shadows in between were not young things, not to her– nor were they the same things she knew. Once, there was sunlight there, and people, and life, and hope– but now, nothing, not even a trace of such, yet still she screams in terror of what could come that could possibly be worse.