Night Terror

Cailin jolted awake to the stench of singed hair and bed-sheets. Her dorm ceiling was lost in gloom, moonlight slicing through the slats in her blinds, her alarm clock frozen on a blinking 2:29 AM. Burnt out in her sleep again, probably while she was jostling around. A quick glance down at her Unity Link told her it was actually closer to 4:00. Forcing a breath out through her nose, she forced herself upright, running her hands through an unruly patch of static-shocked auburn hair. She had crawled into bed no later than 11:30, but fatigue weighed on her like she hadn't slept at all.

Her nightmares hadn't stopped. Call it homesickness, or stress, or whatever. All Cailin knew was that she'd never slept worse than since when she'd moved out of her dad's house and into this theme park haunted mansion. She massaged her eyes as traces of her last dream still rooted and replayed in her mind. A corridor in the main school building. Always the same corridor, stretching toward an unmarked door.

"Lord, help me." Her pillow case had colored yellow from the heat of electric currents, and she reached behind to pluck black feathers out from the back of her matted hair with a long sigh. Muttering a light prayer under her breath, she sank back into her blankets, and it wasn't long until she felt herself spiraling back into the deepness of sleep, only hoping that she might rest dreamlessly for just a couple hours until the morning.

Slipping, slipping...

She was sinking into darkness, enveloped in freezing cold. Experimentally, she reached out, flailing her arms, but they swung through nothingness. It could have been the void of deep space or the heart of the ocean. Cailin felt herself plunging down into the navel of this unfathomable depth at terminal velocity, as if sucked down by a monstrous torrent, the oxygen draining out from her lungs. Blind, spinning through empty atmosphere, she had no sense of up or down.

"Child." It drove in through her ear and hammered through her skull, sharp as an ice-pick. It was a voice like the breath of a hurricane or the crackle of a fireplace, not identifiably human, strangely pitched and distorted in the vacuum. The sound seemed to reverberate all around her, echoing through her. "I can help you."

Light bloomed overhead, and Cailin crashed into a black pool, polluted water forcing its way up her nose and down her throat through her open mouth. Sinking, sinking. Refracted rays of light sliced through the murk, and she could make out the outline of her own hand reaching up, fingers desperately clawing through the water.

"I can save you." Still, she sank, the light dimming as another silhouette drifted above her. Cailin, strength sapping from her limps the more she twisted and fought and flailed, managed to reach out toward the shadow with panicked clutching, tugging a white hand down toward her. A drowned face leered into view, pruned and blistered green and black, with only the bloody stump of an arm. She shoved it back, weakly, but now the corpse seemed to press down on top of her, leaning in close enough to touch noses. The voice rang through the darkness. "Will you help me?"

Her thrashing had almost stilled. The cold stabbed through her heart.

"Will you let me save you?"

One last conscious thought pulsed through her, as a stream of bubbles erupted out from her throat. Save me. She couldn't lie here forever with this corpse. Save me. Don't let me die.

Solid ground slammed abruptly beneath her, dry polished wood floorboards, now soaked underneath her. Cailin heaved up a stomach full of black water, shaking on the ground and soaked to the bone. She stood up at the end of a long corridor, a column of flickering lights stretching overhead, leading down toward an unmarked door. This was the main school building, her dorm wasn't far away, but she couldn't turn her head. A sharp pressure, like invisible nails clawing into her scalp, froze her neck in place as she moved to turn around. No lights lit up the corridor behind her, a wall of darkness preventing her from turning back. "Help me, child."

A chill rattled through her, making her feel like she was standing on lead legs. She couldn't open the door, she didn't want to open the door.

"Help me." Black water drained out through the keyhole, seeping out from under the door frame, creeping toward her. "Help me, Cailin." The voice warped into a hideous sob that seemed to shake the walls, and a heavy THUD! smashed from the door that couldn't be opened, again, and again. THUD! THUD! The door splintered and creaked and bent under the blow, the latch rattling, and the lights snapping off over her head, forcing her forward down the corridor, closer to the door. Cailin felt the water steam off her night-clothes as the distance shortened between her and the thing behind the door, black water lapping at her feet, a sensation of explosive energy pulling taut in her chest. "HELP—ME."

That energy coursed out in a burst of white light, and then a rush of black smoke, and the spatter of foul dark water against her face. Cailin's eyes sprang open to the scream of the sprinkler over her bed as it doused her in black sludge. She went rolling out of bed, coughing from the haze of gray smoke that had filled her dorm room, as well as the inexplicable but unmistakable odor of rotten eggs that now drenched her hair and skin and clothes and cot. Flames blazed up from her blankets where she'd been clutching too tightly, quickly extinguished.

"What—the—fuuuuuck!"

Sprinkler water, after forty years of stagnating in a pipe system, tended to come out looking like black sewage. The smell was hydrogen sulfide.

With electric currents hissing and snapping over her head, the lights surged on without touching the switch, the bulb flaring twice as bright as usual before popping with a sharp bzzt! She was at least back into waking reality, stuck listening to the trill of the fire alarm. Cailin sank helplessly back into her soaked bed, staring up into the darkness. I shouldn't have moved out.

When flesh and hair burned this hot, and this close up, you could almost taste it in the back of your throat. One burned head of hair could curl up and linger in his nostrils for weeks. Ryan had been in this position enough times that he could even hear the blood boil and steam from the napalm-level temperatures; a strong odor of ozone and burnt iron almost overpowered everything else. In his opinion, it was the only thing stopping the smell from being indecipherable to charred pork-rib. Maybe that's why he liked his meat cooked on the rare side.

Violence and chaos raged across the estate grounds, flames rising up from the blown out windows of the mansion, but that all faded into white noise.

Experience and practiced habit told him to turn his head to avoid getting a lungful of ash, but this time, he couldn't turn his head or turn away. Lord Vou Lupo, fur and flesh sloughing off his mutated animal features, howling with pain and rage, was still churning his legs toward Ryan's father, and then ripping and tearing with his hideous claws as he folded down over on top of him.

Ryan could've closed his eyes or turned away, but he stirred forward instead. Before he was even five feet closer to his father, the scene began to bleed colors, the lawn underneath his feet transforming into paved asphalt, slick with rain. Where his father and his killer had been lying, a young girl stood in front of him now. She mouthed the words to speak, but the voice that came out didn't match. "Traitor." The voice was raw with ice, as loud and all-encompassing as a thunderclap, shaking the alley walls around them. "Traitor to your father."

He faltered a step backward, fighting to keep an even face. The rapid murmur of his heart seemed to roar in his ears. "Traitor to your family, traitor to your friend, traitor to your wife," the voice continued, disembodied from the girl, almost sneering with derision. Ryan felt flames sparking to life at his fingertips. "Traitor to your children." With a sharp intake of breath, Ryan leveled his arm and snapped his fingers, unleashing a column of flame down the alleyway, filling his sinuses with the familiar odor of steamed blood and singed hair, but as the smoke cleared, the girl still stood. A gruesome red face leered out at him, the outline of a small skull.

The walls once again melted away, but not the rain, or the burned child, and they stood together in the long shadows of dusk, ink black water filling in around them. Steam rose up from his skin at the rush of indescribable cold. "You remember me. You loved me. You worshiped me." The water was rising up around his torso. "I need you to help me." Up to his chest, and then to his neck. "Don't forget me. You can't forget me." A red and black blistered hand gripped face as he struggled to keep his chin above the surface. "You have the pin."

When Ryan woke up in his office, he swore he could still smell the hair. He pushed himself up from his desk and pillow of scattered papers, a mix of maps and printed articles from Esper, and peered at the corner of one of his monitors through the harsh glow. "Son of a bitch," he hissed through his teeth. Almost 4:00 AM. When did he crash? Glancing down at the dizzying cloud of words and roads laid down underneath him, and with another sharp curse under his breath, he swept his arm and sent the papers flying from the desk. Ryan considered it a mark of restraint whenever he threw something instead of incinerating it. He rubbed his neck, sinking deeper into his chair. Maybe it was the crook in his neck, or the workload, or just being here in this building, but it was impossible to catch a nap in this office.

Just like that, it was back to work hours. Coffee. Or gin and tonic...