Matt jabbed the tac into the ceiling only to have it ping out, plummet, and smack him in the eye. He shook it from his face, stepped backwards, and yowled as the pointy bit sank into his foot.
“Shit!”
He hopped around, catching a glimpse of Bella doubled over, hugging herself, hocking out deep belly laughs. “You clumsy thing.”
Matt scowled at her through water-laced eyes, then limped to the bed where he seated himself and hitched his foot onto his knee.
“Are you okay?” Bella asked.
He grunted, tilting his foot so he could see the sole. There in the pad of skin below his toes the shiny end of the tac twinkled at him—the sharp end couldn’t be seen, but he could feel it in there alright.
“Aw,” Bella giggled. “Poor baby.”
Wincing, he pulled the pin from his flesh. A fat blob of blood rolled out. He pouted and stuck the tac on the bedside table.
“All this for an ugly dreamcatcher.”
He stared at the stupid thing tangled up on the carpet, it looked like a dirty spider’s web with wooden beads instead of flies and drab feathers from whatever poor bird the invisible arachnid sucked dry.
Just looking at it invited memories that made him shiver. Chills iced the back of his eyes. His tongue felt numb and heavy.
I imagined it, he assured himself. It wasn’t real.
“I like it,” Bella said. “I don’t know why you had that funny turn when Aunt Clare gave it to us.”
Aunt Clare. The thought of the eccentric old bag who always pierced him with her snapping turtle eyes made him shudder.
“She hates me,” he mumbled.
Bella smiled and shook her head. She plucked up the dreamcatcher and let it unfurl its spindly tendrils. “She’s only joking when she says I can do better.”
Matt stared at the dreamcatcher as it spun in front of the bedroom curtains. His mind flashed with the vision it had invoked—the silently screaming figure, finger outstretched as she melted through the living room wall.
He shook the memory away.
That wasn’t real.
“Do we really have to keep it?” he said.
“Course.”
“But it’s tacky, it smells funny, and I think it’s haunted.”
Bella burst out laughing again. “Haunted?”
Fuck, Matt thought, did I just say that out loud?
Bella chortled as she tied the catcher’s hanger around the curtain rail. She turned to face him with a beaming grin on her face. “You think the dreamcatcher’s haunted? Seriously?”
“I just think it’s ugly,” he said.
“Well, I think it’ beautiful, and, who knows, maybe it will stop you moaning and tossing about with bad dreams.”
“I don’t have bad dreams,” he muttered, pulled his shirt over his head and lobbed it at the washbasket.
It missed.
Of course it missed.
Nothing had gone right so far, why should it now?
He stood up and started to hobble over to it.
“Stop!” Bella yelled. She shoved him, sending him sprawling onto the bed. “You’re getting blood on the carpet!”
“What?” He sat up to see her grab his shirt, then scrub the bloodied floor with it. “Bella! That’s my best shirt.”
“Oh.” She stopped using it as a cloth. “Sorry, I didn’t think.” She pawed at the carpet. “Nothing gets blood out.”
Matt dragged an arm over his face. He could feel his foot throbbing. The meat in his skull pulsed with a brewing headache. He peeked out from beneath his elbow and stared up at the stupid dreamcatcher that waggled to and fro over his head. “And you can shut up, as well,” he said to it.
Bella bumped down on the mattress beside him. “Come on, mister grumpy.” She clambered up and straddled him, smiling down, sporting those dimples and curly hooks of golden hair.
Matt felt his groin tighten and pressure build in his abdomen.
Bella leaned into him and pressed her lips first to his mouth, then to his neck, then to his shoulder. Her hands touched his chest, gliding over his slightly flabby body. He let out a sigh to wash the sourness from his lungs and raised his hands to pull her top off.
The black beast came from nowhere. It shot across the room, jaws open, teeth poised. Coming straight at them.
Matt yelled and threw both arms across his face. He bucked his hips and felt Bella fall off. “Fucking hell!”
“Matt, what’s wrong?”
He panted heavily, stared around the room, but saw nothing except the dreamcatcher spinning on its string. “You didn’t see it?”
She laughed at him. “See what? All I saw was you freaking out.” She nudged him. “You’re so jumpy today.”
She went to kiss him, but he pushed her aside. Any lust he’d had died in the same moment his heart nearly bounced clean out his chest.
“Let’s just go to bed,” he mumbled.
He saw question and disappointment sag her face, but ignored it. She didn’t understand. Maybe he was losing it? He hauled himself onto his side, nudged the covers from his way, flicked off the nightlight, and settled himself inside his personal mattress dip.
“Matt,” Bella said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said, snapping more than intended. “Just tired.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.
“You’re not coming to bed?”
“I’m sleeping on the sofa.”
Great. That was all he needed: a tac in his foot, blood on his best shirt, visions he couldn’t explain, and his wife throwing a hissy fit because he wasn’t in the mood. He heard her getting off the bed and listened while she stood over him, no doubt awaiting an apology.
Well, he decided. She could wait. He couldn’t apologise for her sulk. He clamped his jaws and pushed out his lips as his brow sank towards them.
“Matt?” she said.
“Night,” he said and rolled over.
“Fine!” Her voice came out like the yap of an angry Chihuahau.
He screwed his eyes down, hearing her grab her pillow, then flinching as she ripped the blanket off him, took it and her pillow and slammed the bedroom door.
Matt crunched himself into a ball, mashing his face into the cushion beneath his head, only to get poked by the quill of a feather.
“Fuck this shit!” He grabbed his pillow and banished it from the bed.
He heard it bump into the curtains and saw the shadow of that stupid dreamcatcher dancing on the wall as shards of moonlight slithered around it.
“And you can fuck off, as well,” he said, jumped off the bed and ripped the thing down.
It hung like a crippled bat in his fingers and he threw it at the wardrobe. “Good riddance!”
Snorting, he huffed and puffed and climbed back into bed, lying in the centre like a spread-eagled prostitute, no blanket, no pillow.
He folded his arms and stared at the ceiling.
All this fuss over a tacky holiday souvenir that smelled of lavender with burnt rubber mixed in.
There was the other thing, too. That thing he couldn’t have seen, but did. The image burned in his mind every time he blinked.
It was an hallucination, he decided. A daytime nightmare. The smelly dreamcatcher couldn’t even do its job.
But …
No, just go to sleep.
He let his lungs deflate and his eyelids fall. Blank bliss engulfed him and he felt some of the tension lift as the muscles in his face relaxed. In the morning he’d head out early, buy flowers, make Bella breakfast, tell her he was sorry.
A floorboard creaked.
Matt tilted his head.
Another creak.
“Bella?”
He opened his eyes and her silhouette poised over him in the dark bedroom.
“Aw, Bella honey,” he said, sitting up. “I’m sorry. I’m such a douche.”
She just stood there.
“Bella?”
Sitting forwards, he realised she had her back to him. She must really be pissed. But, why just stand there? Did she want him to beg?
He stretched a hand to touch her arm, but gasped as his fingers slipped through thin air.
“Bella?”
It’s not her, he thought, drawing himself to his knees on the bed.
He tried to touch her again. This time his hand swept back and forth through the nothing. “Holy shit!”
I’m dreaming.
He pressed his foot, the one the tac had skewered. No pain. Relief swept him. It was a dream. Just a dream.
She span around and screamed. Her mouth opened so wide it gobbled up most of her face, revealing rows of needle fangs. Her eyes blazed—except they weren’t eyes, they were dream catchers. The holes in her head, where the eyeballs should be, held wooden rings with woven string threaded with tiny beads.
Matt yelled and instinctively tried to push her away. He flew forwards with his own momentum, crying out as he smashed face first into the carpet.
The nothing woman, the apparition he spied shimmering in the corner of the living room as Aunt Clare presented the dreamcatcher, vanished.
Only himself, a sore foot, and the damn dreamcatcher remained.
“That’s it,” he said. He grabbed the dreamcatcher, tangling it’s strings in the process, ripping off two feathers. “You’re out of here!”
He clutched the thing in a tight fist, limped over to the window, pulled it open wide and hurled the dreamcatcher … and himself … out.
Bella sat bolt upright, hugging her legs to her chest. Matt could be such a bellend sometimes, so self absorbed, stroppy.
Maybe Aunt Clare was right? Perhaps she could do better?
She rubbed an eye with a fist. No, Matt was moody—a pain, uptight—but he was also sweet, loving, and tender. He was just blowing off steam because of his foot. She shouldn’t have laughed at him.
She decided to return to the bedroom to make things up, when a strange thump snapped her head towards the window.
“What was that?”
She shuffle-walked to the drawn curtains. Perhaps a fox knocked the bins over?
She opened the drapes and screamed.
Aunt Clare fished a tissue from her purse and handed it over to Bella who three days after the funeral remained a crying ball on the sofa.
She took the white wad of flimsy paper and pressed it to her nose and mouth. “It was my fault,” she blubbered. “I upset him. I laughed at him.”
Aunt Clare swiped a finger over a dusty coffee table and smudged the residue between her forefinger and thumb. “I’m sure he didn’t top himself because you laughed at him,” she said.
Bella let out a loud sob and buried her face in the tissue.
Aunt Clare put a hand on her shoulder. “The man must have been in a lot of pain and—”
Bella looked up. “It was the dreamcatcher,” she said.
“What?”
“He hated it and when they found him it was …”
“Let me make you some tea.”
“It was stuck to his face. He must have thrown it out the window first and landed on it. The strings had sliced like razors into his skin. The beads pushed his eyes out.” Bella cried loudly. “They had to peel it off.”
Aunt Clare shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said, opening her bag. “I always thought you could do better, but I was wrong, Matt was perfect.”
Bella lifted her tear-streaked face. “You really think so?”
“Oh, yes.”Aunt Clare lifted something from her fake-leather bag.
Bella stared at it. Her hand went to her mouth and she felt her eyes bulge.