Fingers tapped softly against the veil of his dream.
And another sound: like the tumbling of empty cans down a wet gutter. A figure, dark, ragged and faceless under the dull red cast of the blood moon shuffled towards his bed, palsied limbs twitching and jerking as they reached for him. He lay still, eyes closed against the horror in the vain hope it would pass him by
A smell came to him, a rancid, long since turned smell.
A floorboard creaked as the pressure on it shifted.
He felt his muscles tightening, the small hairs on his scalp prickling beneath the electricity of fear.
Touches against his skin, by turn dry, cold, hard, wet.
Another sound, a deflating sigh.
He wanted to open his eyes, to look at the dead man in the chair, but what if... what if... what if he wasn’t in the chair anymore? What if it was the dead man’s breath he felt on his cheek, the dead man leaning over him like his mother, fingertips brushing the hair from his forehead?
His eyes flickered, fighting the instinct that begged them to stay closed, and opened.
A face, dead-eyed and blanched pale, smiled down at him.
And swooped...
...The Watcher threw himself backwards, fetching the back of his head against the metal bedstead, hands up instinctively to ward off the nightmarish fangs of the dead priest. He could feel his heart in his throat, beating wildly on a collision course with the mortuary slab.
“Oh, Jesus... Oh, Jesus...”
Father Joe was still propped in the chair as dead as he had been five hours ago.
The Watcher flinched as the dead man’s hungry face retreated back into his subconscious, the last vestiges of the nightmare hanging over him. He climbed out of bed, walked over to the dead priest propped in his cabbage patterned lounger, and beat the pallid leer off his face with the full force of his fists.