The shelf with all my notebooks was on the wall where the bed/living room turned into the kitchen, I picked up the one from my nightstand as I flicked through the pages to see how many I had left before nodding, I’d have to go to the store soon and get more of them, it was cheaper than buying online, plus the shop close to my apartment that I bought the notebooks at had a very lucky building number.

            “Two nights left” I sighed as I looked at the last two pages, you could see my handwriting devolve through the notebooks, at first my handwriting got better because I was writing so much and I was a teenager, so my handwriting was clearing up and getting better, but then is started getting worse and worse, almost turning into manic scribbles at some points. There was one night I recall where when I looked at the page the next day, all I had written was GET OUT over and over and over, covering the pages entirely. On another, all I had done was on the page was written the date before ripping the page out, all that was left was where the page met the binding with the date still visible, I never did find that missing page, but I do recall that the next morning, my mouth had the weird feeling as if there were papercuts on my tongue, so I could only assume that in my sleepwalking state I had ripped the page out and eaten it. I set the notebook back on the nightstand and set the pen atop it as I climbed into bed.

            When I opened my eyes, I was in the back of a car, a taxi of some kind, everything outside of the taxi windows was a smear of motion blur in various shades of blue, the interior grayscale with a hazy glowing figure in the driver’s seat with the chain off their throat…taunt and primed to be pulled back, face the same vacuous void of someone not soon to die which confused me a little. The figure to my side, lunged forward and grabbed the shoulder of the driver as the hazy, echoing faint voice of a woman shouting, “Sir!” echoed from the second figure, obviously feminine by the shape, face defined and distinctly this woman as the collar around her throat shifted so the chain was backwards, panic, and sheer terror on her expression as she tried to get the attention of the driver.

“LET ME OUT!” the woman shouted, but there was no response from the driver. The taxi was taking turns far too quickly and far too often. She let go of the driver as she grabbed at the door, trying to wrench it open, but it wouldn’t and her attempts to open the window or even break it were futile, in the dream, the glass just seemed to ripple and flex as if it was made of rubber as she pounded her firsts against it.

The chains around their throats rattled before the driver suddenly turned the wheel, sharply left…there was a very loud sound of crunching, ripping and sundered metal as the familiar, but smeared image of a highway guard-rail shot past as the chains softly rattled. The taxi hit the surface of the water hard enough all the windows suddenly shattered inwards, the roof clamped down like the jaws of a starving animal, no air bags deployed either. I don’t know who’s chain pulled them back first; the driver or the woman, they were so quick after the other that it was hard to tell who was pulled first. All I could recall was the searing pain that was going through my neck and chest that could only be a fraction of what it would feel like to have a broken neck or an intense concussion, the icy cold of the sound as the pressure of the water rising against my chest followed, I tried to undo the seat belt, but it wouldn’t undo as the figures around my trashed. The woman was half-way through the back windshield before the chain ripped backwards and her form was sent screaming through the water. I hadn’t realized the driver was also gone until the last tail of that woman’s scream; bubbling, gurgling and in absolute agony was nothing more than a distant whisper on my hearing…drowned out by the sound of churning surf.

            Of course, I woke up screaming…I quickly tuned my lamp on as I opened the notebook and recounted that dream on the page, my hands shaking so violently that the text looked as if I tried to write while being inside a dryer turning the spin cycle. My skin was slick with sweat and icy cold, my head pounding, and my throat and chest burnt extremely, my entire body felt like I had just been struck by lightning multiple times over making me entire body…not a single cell in my body wasn’t trembling. My throat felt dry, like I had eaten sand, but the very idea of taking a drink was just as scary as going back to sleep due to what I had seen, plus…a plastic cup would have broken with how much my hands were shaking. I panted and breathed as I tried to center and ground myself, but no matter how many exercises I did to try to do so…none came.

            I looked around to see that my coffee table had been turned ninety degrees and the plant that’s always on the left of the TV was now precariously perched atop it. I really wanted a shower, but I wanted nothing to do with water for a handful or so of hours. I got out of bed as I set the notebook back on the nightstand as I walked the yard or two over and fixed the coffee table, turning it another ninety degrees six times so it was straightened then picked the plant up and put it where it goes before moving it back to atop the TV then back and repeated it. As I sat on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket as I shivered in fear, my hand trying to hold a mug of tea still enough for me to drink out of it, but my hands were shaking enough that more than a few drops had ran over my fingers making me set it down as I tried to stave off the shaking. I turned on the TV, just for some light and sound.

            I didn’t know what was playing, I’m not the most avid TV watcher, it was some cooking show that while not really something that interested me that much, it was light and sound enough to make me feel as if I wasn’t alone. At some point, the show had been interrupted, either I had leaned on the remote or something, but it had flipped to the news and the show they were talking about was the anniversary of…an accident. A woman on her way to a business meeting hailed a cab, only for that cab to have been driven by a serial killer who used that taxi to pick up victims, the police had been tailing him for a while and the moment she got in, the sirens went on, the driver knew the jig was up and decided that he was not going to prison…and that woman was not going to get to her meeting. The taxi had been altered; bulletproof glass in all the windows, no possible way for someone in the back to be able to unlock the doors from the inside, no window between the front or back and weapons galore hidden about it. The driver led the police on a fairly short high-speed chase before turning the wrong direction on purpose on a road leading out of the city…driving the taxi right off the road and into the sound. The taxi hit the surf and the police believed the driver died upon impact due to the lack of air bags, when the car was recovered, the woman had been able to get half-way through one of the windows which had shattered upon impact with the rocky ocean below, but due to the impact and injuries, died when she was half-way outside of the taxi and the driver’s hand was frozen in rigor mortis…holding the woman’s ankle keeping her from fully slipping through the window. According to the news, that taxi accident had been roughly two decades ago, I would have been about five by the timeframe, but as they showed the picture of the woman and the serial killer…my heart dropped into the void of my stomach, the faces of the two were exactly the same faces of the two I saw in the dream.