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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DJ_Storytime on 2024-11-11 01:34:30+00:00.
Rainbow Creek isn’t the most interesting town, and it likely wouldn’t exist at all if not for the two colleges it was built around, or the federal prison a few miles outside of town. It’s a small city nestled in the Montana mountains, and while the locals are happy to live the small city life, college students, like me, crave things that remind us of the cities we came from.
That’s what brought me into Gannon’s antique shop. Back home my mother would take me antiquing with her. She had a taste for the old and unusual, and as I was nearing the end of my first semester of my freshman year, I found myself feeling homesick. So, one day, as the cold late autumn air nipped at my skin on my evening walk, I finally decided it was time to drop into the old antique store.
There was an old bell that rang as I opened the door, and the old man behind the cash register barely acknowledged my presence, looking up from a stack of old documents he was reading that I guessed must have something to do with the jeweled sword laid out on the countertop.
I started browsing the wares and was quick to notice that this was unlike any antique shop I’d ever been in before. The antique stores I was used to shopping at with my mom had old things, some up to maybe two-hundred years old, but this place was in an entirely different class.
Old was not a strong enough word for many of the items old man Gannon had for sale. Many of them would be better classified as antiquities. The newest item I found was labelled as being from the year 1852, but most were older than the fifteenth century, and some were even marked as being over two-thousand years old.
It was one of these older items that caught my attention. It was a bronze figurine, roughly six inches tall of a winged, goat-headed, hermaphroditic creature with serpents crawling across its belly. The craftsmanship was exquisite, showing every detail in clear relief with such a lifelike appearance that I could almost see it move. The eyes were made of some kind of deep red jewel that seemed to glint with a light all their own. The body was completely corrosion-free and shone like it had just been polished.
It was ugly and beautiful. It was alluring and horrifying.
I had to have it.
I checked the label next to it. It read simply Idol of Baphomet Circa 500 CE $3,600.
I was no expert on ancient artifacts, but I did know that high quality art from before the renaissance was ridiculously expensive, and this figurine, this idol, was far more finely crafted than anything I had seen in museums. If it was real, it was a true masterwork of antiquity, and that made it vastly underpriced.
Still, $3,600 is a lot of money. It was, in fact, exactly as much money as I had in my bank account after paying bills for the month. I’d been saving for a rainy day, setting aside something from every paycheck I’d received since I got my first part time job at the age of sixteen, and it represented my life savings, but this idol was too good an opportunity to pass up.
I took it to the checkout counter and got old man Gannon’s attention. “I want to buy this,” I declared.
He looked at me, and he looked at the small idol I had set on the counter, then back at me again. “I don’t think you want that particular item,” he replied. “It’s special. You don’t pick it, it picks you.”
I scoffed. “Don’t insult me old man!” I replied testily. “I may just be a student, but I have enough money for this!” I handed him the label with the price listed, and he examined it intensely.
“That’s not the price I put on it,” he said slowly.
“It’s the price,” I replied hastily, sensing that the old man was going to claim the idol was supposed to cost more before jacking the price up. In fact, I was certain of it. An item of that age and quality was definitely worth more. He probably left a zero out of the price by accident.
It’s the price,” I repeated, and I have exactly enough money to pay for it.” I produced my debit card from my wallet and held it out to him.
He stared at me thoughtfully for a moment before taking my card and running it. The charge came up as good.
“It seems the idol has chosen you after all,” he said, and I could swear I detected a hint of sadness, maybe pity in his voice. “Be careful with it.”
“Wait here,” he commanded, then went into the back room before reappearing a minute later with a binder. “This is the provenance of your antique,” he said in a businesslike tone. “Be sure to read it as soon as you get home. It tells you the story of this particular item as far back as is known. There are gaps in the history, but that’s expected for an item of this age.”
I took the binder from him and flipped it open. It was filled with documents in protectors, half of them old and in other languages, and the other half new translations to English placed in a separate protector behind each original document.
“Don’t forget to read them,” old man Gannon said warningly as he packaged my new idol for transport home. “Always know the details of anything you buy, new or old.”
“Sure thing,” I said dismissively as I took the package from him and scooped up the provenance binder. “I’ll read it at my first opportunity.”
If only I had actually done as I said, maybe I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now.
I hurried home with my prize and placed it in the center on my desk’s bookshelf.
I stepped back to admire it, snapped a picture with my phone, texted it to my mom, and called her to tell her about my amazing find. We spoke for a little more than an hour, a lot of our conversation being speculation about the true value of such an artifact, wrapping up with a promise that we would take it to an appraiser when I came home for the summer.
It was early evening by that time, and all of my friends were done with classes for the day, so I put the binder of provenance on the bookshelf, left to go party with the girls, and promptly forgot about it.
I got home late and exhausted, so tired that I fell into bed fully clothed, and I swear I was asleep before I even hit the mattress. I had vividly troubled dreams. Visions of damned souls screaming in eternal torment in Hell. Images of violence and bloodshed among the living. Lies, pain, and betrayal were all around. Behind it all, ever in the background, was a winged, goat-headed figure with glowing red eyes and an evil smile splayed across its caprine lips.
The next day was tough, not just because I stayed out too late and my first class was early, but also because my dreams seemed to have sapped the rest from my sleep, leaving me slow and foggy all day long. I barely made it through my classes, went to my dorm, and promptly went to bed despite it being early afternoon.
My dreams remained troubled, filling my head with the same visions as the night before, only closer, more present this time. I could swear I actually smelled the stench of sulfur and burnt flesh. I could feel the pain and anguish of betrayed lovers. I could taste the iron blood in my mouth as people were gruesomely murdered.
Mixed in with the overwhelming cacophony of torment, I began to feel my own response. Horror and revulsion gripped my heart, and I felt like I was suffocating, barely able to breathe as I choked on the smoke of billions of damned souls. I felt physical pain, and my mind screamed to wake up, but I could not. I was trapped in the hell world of my dreams, and there was no escape. I was bound to sleep, forced to suffer along with the many, many tortured souls that filled my every sensation.
It felt like a lifetime that night, and when I woke up to my alarm blaring next to my head, it was with a great gasp for air, trembling, and a racing heart that took many minutes to slow down as I went from gasping to hyperventilating as the panic overwhelmed me. It was only when I was able to convince myself that it had all been a dream, a horrible, horrible dream, and the waking world was safe that I finally was able to slow down my breathing, and eventually get myself under control.
I looked over to my desk and set my eyes upon the idol of Baphomet sitting in a place of honor where it was easily visible. Seeing it, I was reminded of how the demonic figure in my dreams had taken on the form of my new relic, and I wondered for a moment if the two were somehow connected. I walked over and picked it up, examining it closely from all angles. It was so lifelike, and the gem eyes were so lustrous that they seemed to glow much like the eyes of the dream demon.
“How peculiar,” I muttered quietly. “Why are you showing up in my nightmares? You’re beautiful.”
I stared into the luminous gemstone eyes of the idol as I spoke, and it felt as though they were staring back at me until I finally set it down in its place of honor and left to attend my first class of the day.
My friend, Geraldine, could see that I was out of sorts during our first class and caught up to me when it was over. “What’s going on?” she inquired. “You look like something’s eating you.”
“You have no idea,” I replied exasperatedly.
“Then give me the idea,” she quipped.
Her manner may have been on the sassy side, but I knew she was sincere. “I’ve been having nightmares the last couple of nights,” I told her. “Real bad ones, and they feel more like I’m actually there than like I’m dreaming.” I trailed off at the end, then continued. “But that’s ridiculous, right? They’re just dreams. I don’t really feel, smell, and taste anything in them any more than I s…
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