I Help Boy (Part-4)

Part-1:https://wrytin.com/abhishekmudigonda/i-help-boy-jqkqin5f
Part-2:https://wrytin.com/abhishekmudigonda/i-help-boy-jqkrg86h
Part-3: https://wrytin.com/abhishekmudigonda/i-help-boy-part3-jr0b45vs

If so, did that mean I was sharing a dream with someone else? Perhaps even with someone who was in at least as much pain as I was? If so, did that mean that we might be able to communicate and find some way to make the nightmares end together? And why this boy? What made him special? I tried to focus on productive questions like this, mostly because I didn’t want to think about the prospect that some part of my own mind might be begging me for help, or worse, that I might be the victim of a ghostly. So, perhaps foolishly, I held on to the dream journal.

In fact, when I’d worked up enough courage, I decided to try an experiment. So, before I went to bed that night, I opened the journal to the page with the word “HELP” on it, and wrote under it, another word:

How?

If the Sad Boy could communicate through the journal, I reasoned, this should have allowed me to communicate right back.

I turned out to be right in the worst possible way.

The dream I had that night was, if possible, even more terrible than the one I’d had the night before. In it, the Sad Boy was in that same, rickety, worthless bed, but this time he wasn’t asleep. He was tied to it with crude leather straps, and his mouth was gagged so he couldn’t speak. He was entirely naked, and covered in bleeding sores on every part of his body. What was worse was that this time, I knew – somehow – that he could see me.

But that wasn’t the worst thing of all. The worst thing of all was the third occupant of the room: the Thing beside his bed.

From a distance, it would have looked like a shadow. But up close, I could see what it really was: a gigantic, humanoid form made entirely of writhing, chittering bed bugs, every one of them fat with blood that must have come from the Sad Boy himself. It stood a good seven feet tall, and though it lacked a face that I could see, I knew with the certainty that only dreams could bring that it was happy to see me. It wanted me here. It was going to show me something terrible, and I could feel the awful, sadistic pride radiating from it as it stared at me. It was the sort of pride I’d once seen on my sister’s face when she’d shown me how cleverly she’d torn the wings off a butterfly: naked, irrational passion for destruction and pain.