It was frankly the ugliest thing Janice had ever seen. Not that she really thought of herself as an appreciator of sculpture, but this really was grotesque. She caught sight of it while on a shopping expedition to help furnish her new apartment, squatting in the middle of a small display of pottery in a second-hand store and looking as if it was giving serious thought to breaking the other statues. Despite herself, she stopped to take a closer look.
She'd never seen anything quite like it. It looked like some sort of gargoyle, a leering, demonic figure with a bulbous, corpulent body carved out of dark gray stone. It was just over a foot tall, although the statue was posed in a slouching, frog-like squat with its belly (thankfully?) hanging over its crotch. Its face was twisted into a knowing, lascivious grin, with eyes made out of some kind of glass or polished red stone that almost seemed to glow under the fluorescent lights. It had sprawling, gangly limbs that seemed too long for its body, enhancing its unnatural appearance. Its right hand rested on its knee, while its left hand was extended in a beckoning gesture. Incongruously, next to it someone had hand-written a sign that said, 'Take Me Home Tonight! Only $18.99!'
Janice shuddered. She felt a little bad about doing it-someone had very clearly worked hard on this thing, getting definition on the ropy muscles of its arms, sanding the swollen belly down to make it look just right, working for hours to give the face that perfect contorted leer. All their hard work had wound up in a second-hand store, marked down to under twenty bucks, and even then people like her only gave it a second glance because it was eye-catchingly icky. Even so, she couldn't help herself. Every time she looked at it, she got the creeps all over again.
With a final shiver of revulsion, she pulled her gaze away from the hideous little gargoyle and started to roll her shopping cart past it. As she drew level with it, though, she felt an absurd, superstitious urge to keep an eye on it as she walked past. Like she didn't want to turn her back on it. It was stupid, like that Facebook thing about the walking statues on that British show-the ones that could only move when you weren't watching-but all the same, she stared at it out of the corner of her eye all the way until she went around the corner. Then she watched the corner a bit longer.
Janice wound up buying an old oak dressing table that was a steal at ninety dollars, and a handful of blackout candles (her new neighbors had warned her about the antiquated power grid in their apartment building, and she wanted to be prepared). She most emphatically did not take home the statue.
*****
The rest of the day passed in that peculiar kind of exhausting boredom that comes from setting up a new place. Janice unpacked dishes and put them into cabinets, she shifted furniture around until her arms ached, she scraped her shin on door frames carrying boxes and she bruised her elbow assembling bed frames. By the end of the day, she was so hot and sweaty and exhausted that it didn't even matter to her that she couldn't figure out how to get the hot water going in the shower. She washed off the grime and sweat, toweled off her naked body, and collapsed onto her unmade bed without even putting on pajamas. She'd never been so tired in all her life, and all she could think about as her head hit the pillow was eight solid hours of deep sleep.
Which is why the dream surprised her. It was intensely vivid, the kind of dream where you're convinced you've woken up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and the only thing that tips you off that it's a dream is that impossible things are happening. For Janice, the dream started when she opened her eyes, suddenly wide awake and awash with adrenaline, and saw the gargoyle sitting on her new dressing table.
Her dreaming mind remembered it perfectly. It squatted there, hunched over and reflecting in the three-way mirror as if it was the vanguard of an infinite army of stone demons, its hand beckoning her closer. Janice shook her head at the wordless invitation-she had no intention of getting anywhere near it, waking or sleeping. She tried to make herself wake up, knowing that if she could just wake up then she would look over at the dressing table and see nothing on it but a few tubes of lipstick, but telling herself that she was dreaming didn't seem to help.
Then it stood up. Janice felt an icy chill crawl across her naked skin despite the June warmth as it slowly unfolded its gangly limbs and raised itself up into a standing position. Its belly still hung low, but Janice could see its balls dangling between its legs now that its squatting hunch no longer hid them. It looked at her looking at it-at him, she realized uncomfortably-and his leering, twisted smile widened. Then, with a single frog-like leap, he cleared the gap between the dressing table and the bed and landed right between her feet.
Janice tried to push herself backward, but her limbs were gripped with that horrible paralysis so common to dreams. The gargoyle stared her down, as if daring her to move as he crept along the mattress towards her, his eyes catching the light of her bedside lamp and reflecting them straight into hers. Movement of any kind felt strangely impossible under its gaze.
A night terror,
she realized.
I'm having a night terror, I've heard of these, you feel like you're awake but you can't move and there's something in the room with you, it's not real none of this is real it's just a night terror it's not real it's not real-
