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Sometimes, I have very strange dreams. In those dreams, I am a famous author, acclaimed for a bestseller that's sweeping the nation. Naturally, I had read my book a million times during editing, so I never bothered to pick up a copy...but when people started to come up to me, telling me ecstatically about what they loved best, I have no idea what they are talking about.
"Oh...yeah," I reply to their comments, excusing myself to pick up a copy of the book that I had apparently written...and unfamiliar words jump out at me, wonderful and musical, but certainly not mine.
And other times it is worse, in that the book under my name is not a bestseller at all. In fact, as people tell me how awful it is, I wonder along with them how it was ever even published. My name is sullied, my career over.
But there are nightmares that are still worse, those where our beloveds, our favorites, our creations die at the hands of some evil, whether we had written this scene or not, haunting our minds and seeming so real that we wake up crying. And for me, these were most common of all.
With a creative mind comes nightmares, whether about the book itself or the idea of having your name in print. As writers, we dreamed by day...but at night, insecurity and fear settled in.
So it was this insomnia, and this nightmare-fueled determination, that saw me up late at night, typing away at my computer, immersed in scenes of love, war, hate, peace, all alike. My characters seemed real to me at these times, in their happiness and pain, and I felt in tune with every one of them, from the main characters to the villian to every last kid in the streets. At last, wearied by the mental strain, I ended the paragraph with a flourish and resolved to finish the scene in the morning.
Immediately exhausted, I sank into dreamless sleep.
Early the next morning, I climbed out of bed, grabbed some breakfast, and got back to work. But the moment I sat before my computer, I knew something was wrong. The screensaver was not on, the monitor asking for my password, though I had not touched it for hours. Strange...I typed in my password and clicked Enter, patiently drawing back from the keyboard to let the slow computer work in peace.
But I did not need to. A small window came up, a red X adorning its left side.
PASSWORD INCORRECT. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.
Strange...
I typed my password again--to no avail. No matter how many times I typed it, experimenting with caps and spelling, nothing happened.
I cursed; I was locked out of my own computer. I selected the Forgot Your Password? option and followed its directions, finally finishing the chapter and forgetting all about the strange incident.
At midnight I got home, from a party with friends, and once again, found my screensaver gone. But this time, the password box was different.
There were already letters inside it. Nine of them, I counted in bemusement. Curious, eyebrows furrowed, I hit the Enter key.
The password box went away, and my document popped up on the screen. I immediately went to the Account Settings menu, scrolling around until I saw the option CHANGE PASSWORD.
I pressed it.
There it was, the blank spaces. Old Password, New Password, Confirm...and the question it would ask me, a hint, if I had ever thought to look at it. I read it, once, twice, hardly believing it. INstead of the paradox of a trick question I had had before, that matched perfectly with my long, 15-syllable password, five words sat innocently before my eyes.
"Do you think you're dreaming?"
Nine letters...on a sudden, hypnotic inspiration, I typed in the first word that came to mind.
N...i...g...h...t...m...a...r...e...
I clicked the APPLY button.
My password had changed. Now, it was nothing.
But once, it had been the most sinister word I could imagine.
That night, I dreamed that not only was I a writer, I was a character in my own book. I fought side-by-side with them, my favorites, watching them amass battle scars, wounds, injuries both mental and physical. I remembered the scene--they were fighting to the doors of a great temple, through endless hordes of the evil army. Here, friends had died, and the enemy had won...but three of the characters made it through, bowing low at the doors of the temple. Suddenly, I was one of them...a red, narrow eye peered at me through a crack in the doors, and dimly I heard it speak. "What is the password?"
"Nothing," I replied. "There is no password."
The red eye closed as the demon inside laughed, and the door swung open into utter darkness.
And then the dream ended, and I was back in my bed, my clock flashing me three bright red numbers.
3:47
I got up, unsettled somehow, and sat befor my computer once more.
The password box was completely gone. My document sat innocently before me, completely exposed.
As if still dreaming, I took hold of the mouse and scrolled downward. There, towards the end...the three characters approached the temple doors and waited for the demon with the red eyes to demand the password.
But after that...everything I had written after that was gone.
"Nightmare," said one of the characters solemnly, and then in black and white before my eyes, all hell broke loose. The demonic apparition attacked them, killing them all...and many others, even itself, in the most gruesome ways I could--and could not--imagine. I stared in horror at the strange, intense style, the unreserved violence, the full descrpitions of every single detail of the cold-blooded murders. I could see it in my mind...
Slowly, my hand shaking, I pressed CTRL+Z--Undo.
Highlighted, more words appeared that were not my own, horrible, gory, yet beautiful...I found that the prose was a master's work, though it was not my own. I pressed the keys again and again until finally, my original words came back. Paranoia rising, I clicked Tools, Options, Security.
Another password. But what should it be?
In a trance, I typed nine letters.
N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E.
An error screen popped up, but before I could read what it said, my screensaver appeared.
I screamed, jumping out of my chair.
The monitor was coal-black, with slow, steady drops of red rolling down the sides, collecting in an ever-growing pool at the bottom of the screen.
Frozen with shock, I felt a presence behind me. I was afraid to look...but with some inner insanity guiding my muscles, I felt myself turn and face the unholy beings.
All of them, hundreds and hundreds of faces, pale, bloodstained...all of them were faces I loved.
My characters...
"What do you want?" I whispered to them.
They stared at me, with hollow, feelingless eyes, and with a sudden plummeting of my heart, I realized that they were all dead.
"You were cruel to us," my very favorite woman said coldly. "You slaughtered us, our friends, our family."
"I was orphaned," a girl said vaguely, her voice echoing.
"I was murdered," a tall boy said, with a hollow, sickly voice, blood dripping down his forehead, unnoticed.
"My mother--"
"My town--"
"My life--"
"My hand!" a teenage girl cried. "Look at what you did to my hand!" She brandished a shriveled, useless arm at me, the blackened fingers curled and motionless.
"I didn't...I would never..." I was lost for words. It was true; these people had suffered much misery at my hands, many of them dead, and all of them left miserable by the ravagings of the war I had created.
"I love you all," I said quietly, knowing it was true. "I created you, I love you!"
They laughed at me, hissing laughter that sent chills down my spine.
"If you love us," they said gently, taking me by the arms, "then burn in hell with us!"
And as I let out one last, bloodcurdling yell, trapped in a nightmare, I knew that I had loved them...and I still did...but I had betrayed them. I had had the power to give them a peaceful, happy life, but did not.
I loved them, but I did not deserve their love. In their eyes, I deserved naught but the fires of a hell that I myself had created, long ago, in the beginning.
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