After several minutes I felt it shift beside me and thankfully (finally) realized it was my dog curled up beside me. It took every bit willpower I could muster to open my eyes and I found I was embraced by darkness pressing in tightly around me.
Again I could not move. I was a little boy again awakened from (to) the nightmare. The shadows around me writhed in agony from the presence that followed me into the waking world.
The seconds drug out for days as I tried to convince myself there was nothing waiting to grab my ankle from under the bed, and drag me into the abyss. Finally I was able to jump out of bed and fast enough to be fight the shadows back with blessed light when I flipped the light switch before the creature could claim me.
There wasn't enough light.
There will never be enough light.
The presence still pressed against my chest and the image haunted my mind.
More light. I needed more light.
I turned on every light I could reach by stretching my arm around the corner of my door (careful not to step into the dark) to the kitchen and living room, but the darkness still pressed in on me.
I had been somewhere no mortal was intended to find. The presence had laid dormant for centuries in its prison, and I had freed it in my mind.
In the dream every fiber of my being had desired to configure the laser cutting tool to cut a pattern that would cause the thousands of feet of earth resting on the sarcophagi to crush it thus trapping the creatures, and if we were lucky crush them.
But I was compelled to act differently.
I set the machine to cut around the sarcophagi and retrieve them.
The grey faces of the creatures were the last things I saw as they descended upon my party of would be archaeologists. Their faces were featureless except for the raised, cross pattern in the center. There was nothing beneath this pattern, only a black abyss.
I understood these to be mouths as I fought out of the dream. It peeled back across the entire face exposing the emptiness beneath.
The screams of friends were all I could hear as their souls were devoured.
Then the creatures turned their attention to me.
Their savior.
Their prophet.
Their prey.
