I Help Boy (Part-3)

Part-1: https://wrytin.com/abhishekmudigonda/i-help-boy-jqkqin5f
Part-2: https://wrytin.com/abhishekmudigonda/i-help-boy-jqkrg86h

That noise must have woken me up, for the next thing I remember is sitting up in my bed, the noise of my own cry apparently having jolted me from sleep. I tried to suppress the memory briefly before I remembered the dream journal lying beside me. Grudgingly, I picked it up, and flipped to the first page, meaning to record my vision in all its gruesome detail.

But something stopped me. For on the first page of the journal, written in red ink that I knew could not have come from any pen I knew, there was a single word, scrawled with such frantic desperation it was barely legible. It ran:

HELP

I shut the journal and didn’t sleep a wink the rest of that night. I told myself it must have been an accident. That perhaps I had sleepwalked and written that final, awful word before tucking myself back into bed just in time to wake up. I prayed that was all it was.

I was so, so wrong.

This is not pleasant to write, and while I appreciate that it is providing the people here with entertainment, I really must ask that you allow me my moments of respite from the memory. They are rare enough, even without a site full of readers clamoring to see those memories in print. Nevertheless, I must go on. This story is worth telling, if only to see if what I suspect to have happened to me is in any way plausible when I re-examine the facts. In any case, I must go on, so let’s not waste any time.

As I’d said before, the day I received that miserable little dream journal was Christmas Eve. Now, having to spend Christmas day with very little sleep would have been bad enough. Having to spend it with the awful image of that swirling abyss of vermin was its own form of nightmare. My little sister, seemed to have been completely rested, and wanted to play with every single toy under the tree. This would not have bothered me, except she insisted I join her, and what little energy I had was painfully defunct within very little time.

Eventually I swatted her away and scolded her for not leaving me be, and retreated to my room, where I couldn’t stop myself from staring at that one, single, frantic word so desperately scrawled in my dream journal. I considered telling mum and dad, but they would probably say exactly what I hoped was true: that I’d done it in my sleep and only thought it frightening because I hadn’t been conscious. I considered throwing the book away, too, but perhaps due to some twisted curiosity about whether the experience would repeat itself, I decided against this, at least for the time being. Even at 10, I rather enjoyed puzzling out mysteries. Moreover, much as I was terrified of the idea of the boy from my nightmares writing to me in my dream journal, I did manage to overcome my fear long enough to ponder the implications.

Was the Sad Boy real?