A legacy of nightmares (weekend freewrite)

She felt compelled to pick up the pencil. When she did, it started again, like she had known it would. The nightmares ran through her mind, although she had her eyes wide open.
'Please, stop,' she whispered to the pencil, but it didn't seem to care much. Lena gritted her teeth and squeezed the pencil in her hand. The flashes in her head were violent, full of terror and darkness. She recognized some of the people in her nightmares, though not all. Some of them were very old nightmares, ones she hadn't dreamt since she was a child. Others bore the shadows of fresher pain. And others were not hers at all. Her head was flooding with the nightmares of strangers.
She let out a long sigh and sat down at the table. She pulled out a paper from the top drawer of her desk and started doodling, to take her mind off the nightmares.
She watched as the shapes on the page twisted and transformed, from little squibbles into bigger, nastier things. And it filled her eyes with tears to see what she was drawing, because in her head, she heard it all. The story of the girl in the picture, the pain and sadness behind those eyes. The loves that would never be felt, the lips she would never taste, the baby she would never hold in her arms. Lena forced herself to take deep breaths, to keep her hand steady, because she knew that if she lost her balance, she would destroy the portrait and the nightmares would start up in her head.
This, at least, was one continuous nightmare. It was a story she could follow, and although sad, one she could understand. It no longer felt as if monsters were coming at her from all sides. So, she kept her hand steady and drew out the picture until the pencil wouldn't move. It simply stood up, as if it was stuck in something. Perfectly still in her hand.
She put the pencil down carefully and listened to the wonderful silence. There were no monsters in her mind, no pain coursing through her veins. She was as she had been before finding her father's pencil.

She took a step back to admire the drawing and couldn't believe her eyes. It was the most beautiful face she had seen in her entire life. She'd never drawn anything even remotely as...perfect. But the more she studied it, the more sadness she felt. She had drawn it so well that she'd managed to capture the pain in this young woman's life. The eyes in the drawing – blue, of course, in real life – cried out of the baby who'd died right before them. Writhing in her arms, until it did not.
She could see every aspect of the girl's life in the picture, just as she'd seen it in her mind.

'Did you hear that Mike called the company president an asshole?' he said.
'Huh?' Lena looked up to see her husband standing in the door. She'd been staring at the picture for the better part of an hour. She told herself she was enjoying the quiet, the absence of the nightmares, but she knew it was more than that. Besides, the nightmares weren't absent. Or at least, one of them was not. It was staring right back at Lena, every dark aspect of it.
'What about Mike?' she asked, turning back to the drawing.
'Never mind,' Jeff said softly, coming towards her. He knew his wife well, they'd been together five years, although sometimes it seemed much longer. 'What are you looking at, gorgeous?'
He put his hands around her shoulders and Lena smiled a little. These hands used to make her feel safe, but when he touched her, she felt nothing now. 'Wow baby, this is good. Really good. Did you do this?' he asked, picking up the drawing.
Lena nodded, although she wasn't sure. It sure hadn't felt like her. All the pain and the violence – that wasn't her story to tell, yet she had told it. She'd taken on the role of story teller.
'This is amazing,' Jeff whispered, 'I never knew you were this good.'
'Jeff,' she could barely hear her own voice, 'do you see anything? In the image, I mean, what do you feel?'
Jeff shrugged, looking into those piercing blue black and white eyes. 'Sad, I suppose,' he said, after a while. And she knew he was telling the truth. She heard it in his voice, the cold creeping in.

Lena took the drawing from her husband and put it back in the drawer, together with the pencil. And that was that.

Or so she thought. The next night, Lena woke up to terrible nightmares and a scorching headache ripping through her mind. She wanted to scream out in the dark, but there was so much screaming in her ears, already. Besides, that wouldn't ease the pain, she knew. She stumbled out of bed, finding her way to the desk. It was all so clear in her mind, now.
She sat down at the desk with a heavy thump and opened the drawer. It was nightmare time.
After about a month, she had hundreds of drawings, all scattered around their house. They were images of people, mostly, faces, loss, torture. And the screams. She could hear the screams in every single picture, but she no longer saw it in her mind. They were all out there, on paper, all the nightmares that had so troubled her, all the untold stories and the unheard voices.

'Maintenance is required, clearly,' Lena's mother said, on the phone. 'I would do it myself, dear, but my legs have been killing me lately.'
The cemetery had slipped Lena's mind entirely. Nobody had been to see her father and the weeds had apparently grown tall and unruly. Lena had never understood this – why should it be kept clean and tidy, why should the dead care? But lately, she'd seen so much horror and pain, so many violent deaths had burned through her head that she thought maybe, they deserved a little kindness.
'I'm on it, Mom.'

Then a thought crept through Lena's mind. 'Mom, can I ask you something about Dad?'
'Of course, sweetie, anything you like.'
It struck Lena again how at peace her mother seemed since her father's death.
'Did you ever see him having like a waking nightmare? Like there was something bad going on in his head?'
On the other end, her mother laughed. 8'Oh honey, you know a lot of bad things went on in his head. It was his job, after all.'*
'Yeah, but did you ever see him...was he ever not there? Like something was happening to him and he wasn't fully awake?'
The change in her mother's voice was immediate, 'Honey,' she said in her most conciliatory voice, 'you father spent a lot of his life in his office. I don't know.'
And Lena knew that if there were any answers to be had, she would not get them from her mother.

She stood on the bench opposite his grave, playing with the pencil between her fingers. She'd torn up the weeds and swept the little alley and she felt it was time she and her father had a little chat.
'You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking about all the people who asked you where your ideas came from, your stories. And how you lied to them, Dad. How you said you didn't know. But you did know, didn't you? You had an idea where all the nightmares were coming from, didn't you?'
She twists the pencil in her hand and thinks, not for the first time, that it's exactly as long as it was that first day she found it. All the drawings haven't left a mark. Neither had all her father's stories, it seemed.

'I'm okay with that, Dad. I really am. You do what you have to. If you wanted to keep this little...secret, fine. But why leave it to me? Why did you leave them all to me? I can't sleep, Dad. I look at Jeff and I find I have less and less to say to him. I spend most of my day at the desk. Why did you do this, when you knew exactly what it meant? You knew exactly what you were leaving me...I never wanted this. I never wanted fame or to sell the drawings for so much money. I never wanted to be like you, Dad. Could you really not live with that?'
The grave is silent, freshly cleaned and all out of weeds. The little image of her dad seems to stare at her in defiance.
'Well, I don't want this, Dad. I don't want to write nightmares, I don't want to draw nightmares. I want nothing to do with this.'
Lena stands up and throws the pencil at the stone as hard as she can. She watches it snap in two and fall in the grass and she walks away.

When she gets home, she takes out a big empty trash bag, to fill it with the rest of the drawings, the ones she hasn't sold. She is done. As she scoops up the handfuls of papers and shoves them in, she feels something fall and tap on her naked foot.
She looks down to see her father's pencil, intact.

This was a weekend freewrite, based on the prompts offered by @mariannewest, the lovely woman behind the 5 Minute Freewrite Challenge. Check her out and maybe join our freewriting community, as it's a lot of fun and we have new prompts every day, so...

I shall be getting back to my ongoing series tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can catch up by reading: