I'd been ill. Nothing too serious or anything worth mentioning but my throat felt like sandpaper and I got chills even when the heating was up high. It wasn't anything too serious, I hoped. But when I slept, I slept like a log—my body doing its utmost best to fight the infection. It was strange how our bodies worked in times like this; hallucinations, vomiting, anxiety, the taste of cardboard. I should have assumed worse of my condition. For days I would imagine something staring at me in my room in the dark of night, midpoint through a fever dream I'd been yanked out of it. I chalked this all up to my medication—to my sickness. But even I was not sure of what else was to follow.
My friends call me Mister No Fear. Nothing scares me, nothing jumps me. I always figured Mister Fearless had a better ring to it but I wasn't put in charge of nicknames with my friends. Alas, my day to day life was filled with all manners of pranks, jokes, and jests at my expense. My friends had tried to scare me constantly throughout the years, one time they locked me in an abandoned house and had somebody hid in there with a clown costume. Another time they attempted to jump me when I was sleeping with masks. I laughed through that one, and then there was the one which I still remembered vividly. The old joke which even they didn't understand. They decided on taking me to a graveyard and they'd set up a little girl in a dirty dress to talk to me. We sat and spoke for twenty minutes until finally she disappeared. When they arrived later, they'd told me the joke was off and that their little girl hadn't shown. I was oddly shocked but still, no fear.
And so that's been my life. Things that I'm supposed to be predisposed to are merely just funny, odd things to me. Ghosts, ghouls, goblins are not scary—no demon, vampire, or spectre will get a reaction out of me. But the Hag got one that even she didn't plan on.
Friday night. Rain pouring. Temperature soaring. I had retired myself to my bed, which had felt empty since my long-term girlfriend had decided she enjoyed sleeping in my brother's better. Six months of pure silence and loneliness between the bouts of drinking, working, and sleeping. This particular night my fever was running high and I had to sleep. I switched off my lamp and let the darkness wash over me. I'd popped two aspirin for the booming sinus headache and I'd nodded off into dreamland much quicker than I expected. I don't remember much, but what I do recall is slipping back into my room, on my bed.
My face tickled as if spiders were crawling over it. But when I opened my eyes, I was facing a black mound of long hair lightly dabbing over my face. Above it in the ocean of black I saw the face of horror encompassed; pale white, sleak, with black tar running down its eyes and mouth as if it had just feasted on something decrepit and rotten. I felt droplets of it on me as the specter grinned at me with evil in its grim grimace. I couldn't move, locked in between the real world and dream one. The Hag slid off the wall and crawled down to my side, resting her head on the mattress, breathing heavily towards me, building up her rage, and trying to breathe in what fear was coming from me.
I could feel my body limber up and loosen as she moved closer to me, her forehead on mine as she mustered deep heaves, her eyes pure white besides the pinprick of black. And within my one free move as her forehead pushed on mine, I leant forward and pushed my lips onto hers. There was no taste as she recoiled from me, letting out a hacking cough. I felt my fingers being able to move, unsure of whether or not this truly was a dream, a fever-twist between two worlds, or even reality. I stared at her in her dirty potato-sack dressed with her hair covering her face.
