'Nightmare' by Barbara Chapman

Dark fingers of dread pull at me. Where am I? I become aware of my mouth – dry and sour. My head is a space above my shoulders – aching, filled with grey fog. There is softness beneath my stiff cheek – a pillow; I kick and my foot tangles in softness – a quilt. So it was a dream?
I roll over. The room swims into focus. Feet somehow transposed to the floor, I sit blinking, trying to shake off the images that blur and flow together like an Edvard Munch canvas.
So real; it feels so real.
Terror is etched on my skin in a sheen of sweat. If I relax I will fall back and it will reclaim me. The curtain stirs, a fragment of breeze whispers across my face. Cold...dank....enclosed. TRAPPED!
Running directionless, blind. Black shifting to grey rock to earth. Where am I? My overriding urge – escape. Something... someone is there in the dark.
In my semi-waking state I become a conduit for the dream – I look down and see myself, a figure running, groping, stumbling. I am sinking back onto the bed. Once more I am the prey of sleep. The nightmare grips me ...
A smell of diesel. The coach has pulled onto a wide space below the hill; taken a spot beside other vehicles. Passengers are spilling out, stretching, pulling on coats and jackets. It is not really cold, but once inside it will be chill.
I join the flow of bodies; the narrow entrance funnels us; now I am a single droplet forced forward.
The smoothness beneath my feet changes - the path has become rock. A line has been crossed – now this is another place; in my nostrils the tang of earth, iron and old air. A thin light draws the eye to the side. We are meant to see. I cannot – a jumble of dark shapes blocks me. I hang back in the chill air breathing its blackness, waiting. I am here for this; I too must see. The crowd shifts then begins to dissipate. I feel myself pulled forward into the vacuum of their departure. What am I seeing? There are words, a sign. But what meets my gaze is wrong – the shapes are not those of old mining tools. I stare, angling for meaning through the weak pool of light and the shapes, like fish glimpsed in the depths form, becoming bones – twisted ribs, a crushed skull.
Sound whispers around me. A voice long dead, trapped in this cavern:
I am the rock the rock is me. Caught. Cold. Dead.
Blood cooling, freezing in veins like threaded minerals waiting to be freed by a miner’s pick; flesh marbling with patterns of decay, falling away to reveal stone-white bone.
Horror claws at my chest, bursting my lungs. The rasping I hear is my breath.
I must get away from here. Move! Run! My legs will not obey.
The light goes out fog-thick darkness envelops me. Air congeals, clogging my lungs; I am stuck.
My thoughts – must free my thoughts. My mind is my own it can move still. See light, see a path. Light cuts a path. Lift a foot, grope forward. A sound or is it an echo in my mind? “There is no light.” I no longer know where my skin ends and the blackness begins. “There is no you.” Terror would be welcome a leaping emotion in pumping blood, but instead all is heavy, cold, weighted with nothingness.
A shape pressed in a mould of darkness - no flicker of warmth or life. Images are squeezed into nothingness; the concept is forced out of existence with the word. Thoughts have nothing to give them form.
The end is solid nothingness trapped in rock and clay; bone without blood, brain without thought.
Something. What? A sound. It vibrates through the chamber, defines edges, walls. Form returns. Water, falling water. Turn and lunge, scrambling, clawing upwards. Lungs burn, ears drum. I snatch at the thread of sound and haul myself towards life.
A cold breath shivers around me; my skin rises in goose bumps. I struggle to make sense of my surroundings. The yielding bulk upon which I am lying is the mattress. My hands are clenched into the softness of the quilt. Still I am held by the sound of falling water. The curtain billows away from the casement; rain beats down. My blood beats to its drumming. I let the cool air draw me out of the nightmare into the rain-silvered light of a new day.