Bound in Dream

The devil 

 Mom! Do you believe a dream can be real?

That was the question Amelia asked her mother one night. She had been having weird and troublesome dreams, and they were affecting her even after she woke up—seeing most of the things from her dreams in her room one moment, only for them to vanish the next. At nineteen, she'd been dealing with this for a while, and it was starting to give her a bit of depression.

"Dream or dreams?" her mother asked. Mrs. Rosemary was a kind and honest woman who had been helping the needy for close to a decade now—an average woman who cared about her health and that of others. At forty-five, she looked like she could be Amelia's twin.

"Does it matter? A dream is a dream, Mom!"

Her mother laughed with a twinkle in her eyes. "Sorry, honey. Well, dreams have different meanings, so they say."

"How?"

"Some people say a dream is our subconscious mind wandering about."

Amelia rolled her eyes. "Come on, Mom, you can do better than that."

"Well, how about this: a dream is like a spirit world, where our spirit lives in another realm apart from the physical one."

"Go on, Mom."

"It's simple. We live here, and our spirit lives in another world. Like when we sleep, we kind of detach from ourselves and enter the spirit world. It's like two worlds—one physical and the other the spirit realm."

"Do you believe in it? Is it real?"

"I don't know, honey. I've never had such ideas in my head. I live a simple life."

"So what if I dream that I had a bloody hand, and then when I wake up, I see blood on my hands?"

"You must have cut your hand somewhere before you went to sleep."

"No, Mom. I dreamed my hand was bleeding and there was no cut, and when I woke up, I saw the blood—one moment it was there, and the next it wasn't."

"I don't know what that means. You must have imagined it."

Amelia just sighed and nodded her head. Who would believe such talk in this modern world? They might think she was going crazy, so she kept quiet and just agreed with her mother.

A week later, she dreamed that she had been to hell and married to the devil. She saw herself saying "yes, I do," and she wore his ring while he put a chain around her neck. Then he bit her with two fangs on her left hand, sucking her blood and proclaiming she was bound to him in spirit, flesh, and blood.

She woke up with a throbbing hand and a heaviness on her neck. As she tried to feel it, she touched the chain—it was hot like burning coal, but it didn't burn her. To her greatest shock, there was the ring on her finger. She tried to remove it, but it wouldn't come off, and she screamed.

Mrs. Rosemary was just getting ready to go out when she heard her daughter screaming. She hurried to her room, her heart pounding like it was about to explode. She burst into her daughter's room and saw her tugging at her hand and neck. "What is the matter with you?" she asked.

"Mom, get it off me, please."

"Get what off you?"

"The ring and the chain."

"What ring? And what chain?"

"This," Amelia said, holding out the ring and the chain toward her mother.

"I can't see what you're showing me, honey. Stop fooling around and get ready to help me. Seems like I can't leave you alone now."

"Mom, I had a terrible dream that I'm married to the devil, and when I woke up, there's this chain and ring on me—exactly what he put on me in the dream."

"But I can't see anything."

"Here," Amelia said, holding the chain right in front of her mother.

"Still can't see what you're showing me."

"I'm dead," Amelia said as she jumped out of bed, crying. As her mother went to her, Amelia passed in front of the mirror on her dressing table—and that's when Mrs. Rosemary saw the chain on her daughter. It was a huge chain, black as night, with a symbol of a grinning skull at the center, its eyes glowing red.

She shuddered and nearly fainted as she gasped, "I can see it in the mirror!" she exclaimed. "What in the world is that?"

"I just told you—it was given to me in the dream as a wedding gift, and he said we are bound in spirit, flesh, and blood."

"Not my daughter," she said, swearing it would never happen.

But he appeared right in the room—a handsome man with dark hair and eyes as black as midnight. "I have marked your daughter, and she is mine. Nothing you can do to unbind us. And when she dies, her soul will be mine forever."

"You will not have my daughter, demon!" Mrs. Rosemary roared. "Begone!"

The man sat on the bed with a grin. "Now tell me, how are you going to stop me—me, the devil?"

She fell to the ground, crying and wondering how this could happen to her family. Should she fight him with faith and prayer, seeking help from a priest? Or was there a darker way to break the bond, something that might cost her own soul? What if accepting him was the only way to save Amelia... but at what terrible price?

If you were Mrs. Rosemary, what would you do