Val was having nightmares. All variances on the same theme. He was there, either as himself or represented. Always charming, smiling, endearing her to him. He would draw her in, engulfing her with his voice, his flesh, his word. He pulled and pushed her along, chattering, endlessly chattering about nonsense. The landscape seemed to pass rapidly and she couldn’t focus on anything.

As the dreams unfolded, sometimes a darkness would descend, sometimes not, but she always felt an evil creeping in, a shivering cold, an unseen threat. In the dreams she would become anxious, vigilant, seeking the source, surveying the landscape, yet she couldn’t help but to feel he was the source. At first she would catch only glimpses out of the corner of her eye. His face would change, transform rapidly back and forth between bright-eyed charm to something sinister. Sometimes the change was subtle, nothing more than a flickering of facial expressions. In other dreams, the change was something out of a B-horror movie. The skin would bubble, bones shifting beneath skin, leaving a grotesque visage.

It always happened when her back was turned. It was rapid, and like a game of “red-light, green-light”, she tried to turn faster and faster to catch it, to know for sure it was not her imagination. He would always smile reassuringly at her then. The dreams seemed to last for hours, with this game of hide-and-seek becoming more elaborate. Finally, in each one, there would be a definitive moment when she would know to turn when he wasn’t expecting her to, or in one instant everything would flicker, shift into focus, and the horror of his true identity was revealed. Having forgotten himself, he would smile, not realizing he had not yet returned to his charming self or that the illusion had worn off. Each dream ended with the same icy terror ripping through her as the full realization of how close she had been to evil all along sunk in.

There were other people too. Protectors. In one, a man from her past who was literally “a protector” appeared suddenly following the revelation. He ran alongside her, calm and unshaken. In others it was strangers, or friends. There were also women. Women that he knew or just met who would appear at the end, after the revealing, his face frozen in its true form to her, and yet these women would not see it as Val did. She wanted to warn them, but their eyes always had a far-off or glazed look. She would stare as he ripped into their flesh, or crouched on their chest like an incubus drawing the life from them, or licked their skin as he embraced them in what they saw as an innocent hug, or chewed on their hair as a maniacal demon. Then she would run. He would call out to her, still not realizing she could see, that his protective shimmering spell had worn off for her.

He never chased her. Chasing had never been part of his game.

Wakening to sun, she felt no fear, no residue. Dreams, she knew, particularly her dreams, used exaggerated symbolism and the messages they whispered had long ago been known to her. It had never been a matter of escape. It had always been a matter of waking up.