The library, as I remember leaving it, no longer exists. The additions are artless, sculptural, and tacky in the extreme. Oddments everywhere, trashy hand-painted mass manufactured bricabrac tipping over into the floodwaters creeping around the edges. No-one seems to think anything of it. None of my old friends acknowledges how tasteless their interference has been, how everything I had carefully filed is now lost beneath an abundance of thoughtlessly contributed, indiscriminate crap.
False walls falling. Painted skulls toppling into brackish filth. Immense wyrms thrash beneath the foul waters seeping in. Their bulk as thick as my thighs. The flooding quickens.
I don't even remember what it was I was after, in my library. (It stopped being my library.) Wishing I hadn't left so much of myself behind with these people. (It's not my library anymore.) Shelving sags, buckles, trash paperbacks tumble into the foam. My feet catching in the churned mud, I stagger and fall.
And the wyrms are upon me.
I'm half-awake, gasping and caught in our bedding, not quite conscious. I have to force myself awake. Trying to roll free, I hear Siegfried asking what's wrong. Straining to I look 'round, all action & reaction working askew of reason, the bulging quilted mound of dark fabric sways nightmarishly over me as I clamber to fall backward out of bed.
"WhasswWwrRroOonNngGg," demands the heap, looming.
--and then I do wake, shouting, shivering, my mouth dry, throat catching. Siegfried asking what's happening. "Only nightmares," I say.
Third time tonight. Goddamned sleep paralysis.
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