"I once thought that there was a cure to nightmares, someway to keep them from creeping up to you in the night, and trying to kill your peaceful slumber....but I found the only thing that can kill that kind of monster is an even bigger monster, one with much sharper teeth"- Rusty
Rusty the Man[]
I was born as Rusty, you don't need a last name so don't ask, I grew up a through a fairly decent life. I had lots of friends, played NES, good times were had all around for a long time; nothing to cry on about in my childhood or my highschool years. College was a bit rougher but I earned a snug degree in nursing, with another billet in psychology. What most people had no idea of was that I was very much interested in how people reacted to their own dreams.
I went into working for a mental health facility and had the pleasure of interacting with all sorts of the psychologically diseased. I made friends with a psychopathic man named George; who was there after they had found him hovering around a high rooftop, a little too close to the edge and he nearly had 'slipped'....or at least that's what he would tell me. Very nice man, polite and and effective counterweight to a schizophrenic serial abuser; the schizophrenic woman really needed someone there to keep the voices of her's at bay and so I bent a few rules to keep them in company with each other more often then was allowed. But these are just a few defining characters I liked.
After a few months of work I was finally allowed access to a man who had been admitted due to his constant nightmares having driven him over to a collapse in his mental health. I was to be the assistant to the psychiatrist assigned to him and help see that the man received plenty of uninterrupted sleep so we could analyze the results when he woke up. He didn't take it all too well and started to become violent as our testing went on. We never discussed what his dreams actually were, all we did was look at his behavior afterwards and sometimes we took him to another hospital for MRI scans while he was asleep. We found him to be your classic psychotic, an umbrella term to be sure but it fit his strange attitude after his dream cycle.
It took only a single trigger and the man had been sent off about how we were conducting our analysis, we had a security officer in place just in case but the man stood at six feet seven inches and had muscles the size of baseballs. He had a straight jacket on in case of this emergency. But that didn't stop him from using his legs to kick our guard and he still had a shoulder to crash me into one of the walls of the room. His head met the doctor's with enough force to cave in the psychiatrist's skull. It was....traumatic to say the least; and two more men came in and attmepted to give him a sedative, but he was struggling too much so they slammed a night stick into the back of his head and he went down with a loud thud.
When he regained consciousness he was strapped down to a chair bolted into the floor, I was adjacent to him flanked by security personnel and I began to speak with him about why he was so angry after the run ins with his dreams. He was a big guy, he was fearless, and he was completely and utterly insane; nothing should be able to make him that angry, but that sort of logic is hypocritical when talking about someone with mental issues.
"Why do you get so emotionally riled up after sleeping?"- Rusty
"The monsters won't stop."-Patient
"What monsters?"-Rusty
"The shadows that lurk in the brain, those visions of what's fucked up with the human mind."-Patient
"You mean what's wrong with your mind personally?"-Rusty
"No, I mean what we as a collective species have locked away, the fuckin monsters; I studied mythology in college,"-Patient
"What does that have to do with anything we're talking about?"-Rusty
"Everything, everything wrong with humanity can be summed up with the monsters we created; Ammit the Devourer, she was a creature of Egyptian mythology that was comprised of the head of a crocodile, the middle body of a lion, and the lower body of a hippo, she would eat anyone who was not truthful in their heart when Anubis weighed their hearts against the feather of Ma'at"-Patient
"I still don't follow"-Rusty
"Don't you get it? There has always been something deep inside our minds that tells us there are monsters and that they look as weird as we can imagine. The more we know about them and think about them, and believe in them; the more they become real and prey on anyone and everyone"-Patient
"I see"-Rusty
I had been taking notes the entire time he had been speaking, I continued as he went into great detail about how the monsters in peoples dreams ate at their emotions like a siphon....more were preyed upon than others. After our little interview I smiled, understandingly, and wished him the best of luck fighting with the monsters in his dreams. It was a day later I found out he had died in his sleep due to a drug overdose administered by a fellow nurse who had said she had just tried to help the poor man get to sleep. I imagine he had told her what he told me and she devised a plan to help. I didn't ever really figure it out, I went home that night and went to bed.
I never woke up ever again, not in the conventional sense anyway; you see I was struck with a case of sudden death by something or other. I'm not sure, maybe my body was so unnerved by the information my brain had received it decided quitting would save me. Well what happened after my death is the fun part, I was still completely aware of myself. I couldn't feel anything but I knew I was still in my body. The police came and I was taken away by the coroner. I'm lucky I couldn't feel anyhting as they harvested my organs for donation; can't waste perfectly good kidneys just cause a guy never wakes up. This was after the autopsy told them that I had just up and died for no particular reason so my organs were up for grabs. It took a good week but I was given a proper funeral, burial, and I was left to rot away the time, thinking about everything for a good......long.......eternity.
Rusty the Skeleton[]
You know, it's not that bad being a skeleton. I was cozy rotting away in my smelly casket, I was content with my entire existence now being by myself and alone. At least for a few years until some jerk dug me up out of the smelly casket and took away all my flesh; rotting though it was. He put all of my cleaned up bones into a big oven that was scorching hot.....man it must have been ridiculously heated in there because when my bones came out they were brittle and broke into dust when they beat them with hammers and ground them down more. They took the bone dust made from me and mixed it in with clay and it felt weird, like I was being split up.
The clay I was mixed into must have been special, or maybe the dust was from my head because after a while I couldn't feel the rest of my body. I could only feel the clay being shaped and formed, and then little holes made in it before I was put in another oven, this was still very hot but not as bad as before. I came out of it and cooled down before they stuck wires in the holes they had made before and I was packed in with the rest of the things made from my bones; all of them skeletons.
It took a while but we arrived at some little souvenir kiosk, and I was picked up by a man in his late forties looking for something cool to give to his teenage kid, who owned pieces from all around the world thanks to his dad having brought him all kinds of things. It was a very long drive until we reached his house and I was taken out to be shown to the teenager. He laughed and found me enjoyable enough and put me up above his bed. From what I could see he had lots of dreamcatchers, large and small; ornate and simple in design. I could tell he needed my help. The night I showed up I saw into his dreams, he was constantly bombared by dark ominous clouds just beyond the horizon he saw. I had my work cut out for me......
Been a few years now, and I must say I've done a swell job keeping my main man happy and healthy, he even acknowledges me by my real name, and knows when I look at him, he knows what I'm there to do. He isn't afraid of me and he actually likes that I'm eating what goes bump in his nights. I think I'll enjoy being around him, if it weren't for that creepy Buddha statue glowing in the dark and staring at me ominously this would be perfect, but hey you can't win them all.
I'm Rusty the Skeleton, I eat nightmares and I feel more alive in death than life, I guess insanity has caught up to me from those lunatics at the hospital......
Rusty the Skeleton is watching you while you sleep and eating your nightmares
Written by Mandalore75
Author's Note: Keep in mind Rusty the Skeleton is a real person, and he does take it personally when people say he isn't really 'alive'. You should remember he knows where you live and he's watching you. Just my honest warnings is all, thanks.