Chereads / Lurking Demons: An Anthology Series / Chapter 1 - Story 1: Astral Nightmare

Lurking Demons: An Anthology Series

🇮🇳Akash_Bharnuke
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Synopsis

Chapter 1 - Story 1: Astral Nightmare

This is a fictional story which came from my thoughts but no one can say that this might never happened before in real life. Life is strange on many occasions, and this might also fall into one of those.

It is a story of a boy who has somnambulism or in simple terms, sleepwalking disorder. He walks at night without realizing or remembering anything that he might have done in his sleep. 

But one day, he went into such a deep sleep that a phenomenon called the "out-of-body experience" happened to him. We will call it, his "Astral form". 

He was able to see his entire room and also him lying on his bed. He was roaming the entire room like a child which he was not. He was 24 years old and was studying for his Masters. He was not a bright student but also not a dumb duck.

While roaming in his astral form he heard a noise and turned towards it. He saw that his body started moving on its own. He wasn't surprised as he knew about his sleepwalking from his parents. He was thinking as if this might be a dream and if not, he thought of it as an opportunity to watch what he does in his sleepwalking time.

He saw his body picking up something from his drawers, then left the room and went outside by unlocking the main door. The boy was surprised and said. "I can do this in my sleep, cool!".

Just up ahead the road his body was walking on the footpath and time past midnight. It was a dusky night like a thick fog which enveloped his vision and made him unable to see anything. After sometime, his body suddenly stopped at a turn leading to an ally.

As in his astral form, he moved behind to see why his body stopped. He was able to see a person with an old jacket and a circular hat which seemed like a detective, but was just a normal person smoking his joint and blabbering about how bad his job is (classic!).

The boy was seeing his own body slowly moving towards that man. He was not able to comprehend anything he was about to witness, that might throw him off completely. His body started running towards that person and while that person was about to react to the running voice, the boy's body put his hand in the pocket and pulled out the scissors he took from his drawer and sliced that man's throat.

Blood started spurting out like a fountain, the more he tried to shout for help, the more he was losing his blood. He was struggling. He was trying to scream for help, but unfortunately, no one was there for him.

The boy's body didn't stop on only that, as he approached closer to that man and stabbed his leg from behind the knees. The man screamed his lungs out, but no one was there to listen to his suffering and pleading.

Still that boy's body was not stopping. His body kept on stabbing, and stabbing, and stabbing. His body kept on doing that until he was able to put his hand inside that man's chest and rip his heart out. And as he does it, he grabs that man's heart in his left and slashes it with his right and showered himself in his heart-filled blood.

The blood bath could be seen all over his body as the t-shirt was drenched in that man's blood and it's color got changed to bloody red, his hairs all messed up. But what was more horrible was that he was seeing all of this, what his body was doing in his sleepwalking while being in the Astral form. His expressions were like, "Who is this guy? How can he be so brutal? WHAT IS THIS?".

The night was still long, and his body just started walking towards finding his next prey in those drenched clothes.

Even after all this, it seemed that the body was still not satisfied because walking at some distance his body encountered a girl walking down the road, and as I said, the night's atmosphere was pitch dark, the girl was unable to see anyone coming her way.

The boy was still following his body, not able to recover from the last reveal and yet following to see the greater picture. He saw his body getting closer to that girl, but she is completely unaware about the murderous intent closing in towards her. As his body reached a little too closer, she started to get the smell of something rotten. As she got the visual of the boy's body walking towards her, she screamed like she had seen a ghost, but now we know, he is worse than that.

 Seeing the boy walking towards her covered in blood like it was raining blood tonight and having a pair of scissors in his hand made that even weirder. She was shaking in her boots, getting sweaty as her mascara started to flow below her eyes. She mustered all of her strength and tried to escape it, but... it was too late. 

The body just grabbed her hand, twisted it and made her submit on her knees. The girl was pleading to him but his body just forcefully opened her upper jaw and with all his strength while looking into the girls eyes like a love-luster, he shoved that scissor right in her throat.

He kept looking her into the eyes and as his body released her jaw, she just collapsed on the ground like a battery died from an electric toy. With that, the blood started flowing through her mouth with slight or should I say, 'life ending' body movements while her blood flooded on the road.

As the boy was looking at all of this while being in his Astral form, he noticed that his body had a smirk on his face. Does that mean that he was enjoying it, or was the person in Astral form enjoying while watching all of this. 

The boy got into his internal thoughts, "My life is not that great going still, I feel calm and light in the morning. Was it all because of thi-". It was like a reaction from storing all the pent up frustration being released on the people with whom he has no connection at all. All of this was happening because he was running away from the ones he must face head on.

From a distance he was watching his body and saw a crooked smile on his face when his body walked over the girl. The more he walked the wider the smile got. After all this, his body started returning to his house. He reached home and got into a shower, changed into a new t-shirt and as his body reached near his bed, he suddenly collapsed. When he opened his eyes, he was back in his body lying on the bed.

He got up, looked at his hands and took a deep sigh. The bright sun rays coming through the window gave him the essence that it was just a bad dream. As he got up, he remembers that today their is an event at his college and he needs some things with him to decorate. 

He started looking for things like paper, decorative materials and finally he opened his drawer to get the tape and scissors, but he was unable to find his scissors. He stopped for a while in those train of thoughts, but disregards all those as he thought someone might have misplaced them.

As he moved towards the bathroom, he picked his brush and paste and started brushing slowly. While looking in the mirror he stopped and noticed that he was not wearing the same t-shirt which he wore while going to sleep yesterday. "This... this... It was not what I wore at night! This was...". This was the t-shirt he wore after last night's killing rampage.

He dropped his brush, washed his face, but the flashbacks of last night's incident started playing in his head. That wasn't even the worst part. The scariest part was that the more he was remembering what happened last night, the more his smile started widening.

 With all of this, there was one constant thought which he subconsciously had in his mind. "I thought I could suppress myself. I thought I could control my urge and not to get my hands dirty. Dad... Mom... I... I didn't killed our pet. I.. I was just practicing... how to SLICE someone cleanly. I... I'm not bad, right."

He was trying to stop his smile but his body was given himself up to those urges and internal conflicts. Thoughts were continuously going through his head and after sometime, the train of thoughts stopped and his mind became clear like water in a silent lake. He calmly opened the drawer which contained his father's shaving kit and all.

From there he picked up a pair of scissors and calmly walked back towards the mirror. As he looked into the mirror, he was able to see that grinning smile he had on his face while remembering all the things he did last night, and he knew that he couldn't stop this without some drastic measures. So in that split of the second, he slits open his throat using that scissor.

Blood splattered all over the place which covered the entire mirror in a thick blood through which your eyes won't be able to see any other color. What you could see as if the whole world became blood thirsty over us...!

 Still, in his final moments, he... didn't stop SMILING.

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