Sample from Embrace the Darkness

I was around seven or eight when I first had a nightmare. At least, that was the initial one which was vivid enough that I can still recall it. It was short, not a lot of detail being provided in my mind. I saw myself lying upon the bed in my small room and there, in the farthest corner, between the top of the wall and the ceiling, was the creature. It had formed a kind of nest, strings of white hanging from the ceiling as it nestled there, web-like entrails surrounding its dark form. In my dream, I could not see it properly. It appeared just as a shape, but the terror which I felt that night is something that I remember well. I did not sleep in my own bedroom for a number of weeks after that night.
When I was fourteen, I awoke in the early hours of the morning, screaming. My sleep had been interrupted by another nightmare, a continuation from the one I had had all those years previously. I was still sleeping in the same bedroom. We had resided at the house all of my life, only my bed was on the opposite side of the room at this point. The monster, however, was back in its original spot, now appearing directly above me and this time it had begun to move. I recall the dream as clearly as I do the previous one. I remember, in my dream state, gazing up at the creature and thinking, 'That's the same monster from my dream before!' It was a feeling of wonderment, rather than fear, to begin with. That was until it started to shift, an almost human-like face unfurling, jet black in its entirety except for two pupil-less, perfectly round, white eyes. As the terrifying face began to push against the web which it had created for itself, I screamed, waking from the nightmare as I sat upright in bed.
My fourteen-year-old-self was more able to accept that it had only been a nightmare, but I still felt uneasy each night, desperately trying to think about other things before sleep took me. No sooner had I managed to banish the dream from my mind, then I had another one, yet again the same. It was only the briefest moment, that awful face continuing to press against the web as if it were trying to come closer to me, but the level of terror that I felt was enough to begin affecting me during my waking hours. I would see the creature in a whole host of places, more and more often as the weeks went by. My family thought that I was suffering from arachnophobia at one point due to the way that I would recoil from the sight of a spider on its web. Shadows in the corners of rooms would take the form of that face, nowhere felt safe.
Read the rest of the story, as well as the other five, in my recently released anthology of the same name. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/154853640...
Signed paperbacks are available exclusively through my Etsy shop at https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/54575...