Posted By admin on March 1, 2010
“Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight.” –Robert Graves
The stairs seemed to go on for an eternity, descending in a twisted maze of shadowed steps that sent shivers down Sam’s spine. They were straight, in reality; she had climbed them only as much as she had to, of course, but she did not doubt her knowledge of this. The twisted versions were steeper, darker and almost defiant in the face of gravity; on more than one occasion she had the impression that she was walking on the walls, or even the ceiling. The ever-present ink, rust and rain lurked within sight at all times, making the going even tougher, but a sense of acclimation was seeping into her skin in regard to that. It seemed that even a creature so possessed by fear had to prioritize, and with everything else she had to worry about, the ruddy mess was far and away the least of her concerns.
Her discussion with Miles about the state of the world outside brought her to a standstill at the base of the stairwell; she would not have recognized it as the base, if not for the dim daylight that radiated into the darkness and beckoned her forward. He had said there was no respite, and that the things she fled from were waiting for her there, as well. She had made her peace, albeit fragile, with leaving him behind, but part of her wanted to deny his words; to pretend that he had misjudged, and that her first step into clean air and dry pavement would put an end to her ordeal. Taking that final step would, once and for all, determine her next course of action by opening – or closing – potential exits. The possibility of freedom excited her, drove her forward; but the gnawing feeling that she was wrong, and that Miles had spoken truth, left her faltering.
She had come so far; it would be madness to return. Her heart in her lungs, Sam gritted her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache, and then stepped outside, into the alien world she both knew and rejected with every bone in her body. If she had not paused to rest and make use of the painkillers in her backpack at her first sight of the twisting stairwell, she might not have been able to tolerate the view that greeted her. Even so, it was enough to coax a whimper from her sternest attempts at solidarity.
The sky was impossible to miss. Sam had spent her lifetime with her head in the clouds, or so her parents had always told her; the Nightmare did not warp those things she found comfort in without doing it tenfold. The pale blue sky, sunny even in winter, and on most days, clear and almost transparent, was gone; no other word seemed to fit it. Rather than the absence of color that came with night, the sky was saturated with a combination of all the colors in the spectrum, reflected to an opaque, unsettling white. The sun nor the moon were visible; night and day had once and for all lost their meaning. The tree-lined walkways and manicured gardens that surrounded the Shadowbrook apartment complex seemed black and menacing by default. The trees themselves loomed overhead, threatening to engulf her; she looked away, unwilling to give her heart or mind into their clutches so soon.
The strange sounds that crept into the very edges of her hearing, combined with the impossibility of the sights before her, brought Sam’s mind out of the stark rejection she had mustered and into the bitter realization of undeniable truth; Miles, of course, was right. He would never have lied; not to her, and not about such important details. She was beginning to realize just how easy it was to lure herself into a false sense of security. Psychologists loved to throw that phrase around; it was not the first, nor the last, time she would hear it. For the moment, it seemed like a cruel joke to her exhausted mind.
In the throes of despair, Sam sat down on the edge of the curb, her feet sticking out into a street – her street – with an utter lack of vehicular presence. Midway Avenue was one of the busiest streets in town, and looking at it now just convinced her further that her time left on earth was limited in the most violent of ways. She hunched over her own knees, her eyes blank and empty, as she stared at the ragged patterns in the asphalt. What good could there be in continuing? The small efforts she had made to survive – heroic, in light of her many weaknesses, she thought – meant nothing. If the creatures Miles spoke of wanted to kill her, what would stop them? If anything, this broken world was theirs, not hers, and they could do with it as they pleased.
She was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown when the woman entered her peripheral vision. She was a young woman, with her straight and proud back blocking any view of her face from Sam. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, unkempt but lovely in its wildness; it was the same length and color as Sam’s own, though she always kept hers woven into braids to avoid startling herself when it fell into her eyes. Her movements were slow and deliberate, and from the way she held herself, it seemed as if she cradled something precious in her arms. Sam’s first thought was of a mother carrying a child.
Sam almost didn’t notice her dress, laid against the sky, until it was too late; the woman wore pure white. It was not the radiant white of a wedding gown, nor the sporty white of a tennis uniform, nor even the stained and filthy white of unwashed socks; it was something both like and unlike all of these at once. If she had tried, she could not name it, and she had the funny feeling that to name it would be to court her own death by madness. It was at once a mystery that Sam knew she could not, and should not, solve.
The woman was crossing the street, a great distance away. Sam leapt to her feet, shaken out of her panic at the sight of another living soul. Of course, she had not forgotten Miles; approaching her was out of the question. She could, at least, follow her; with any luck, the ethereal creature might well know the way to safety. She looked human enough, at least, but Sam had never been one to trust appearances. There were too many stories, both hers and others that she read, where the vilest sort of demons were born from human flesh. If this was a trap meant to lead her to her doom, then she would be no worse off than she had been before; if not, then her only hope of salvation was passing before her eyes. In this case, Sam could not afford to be too hesitant, and she knew it well.
Hoisting her backpack onto her shoulders again, wondering how it seemed to feel heavier each time she did so, Sam began to make her way toward the woman in white, keeping her eyes as much as possible on the empty street and not on the woman herself. It was rude to stare; Sam did not want to admit it, but the woman was somehow captivating. She was beautiful, like an angel or a saint, but somehow flawed in a way that she could not put a name to. She felt strange urges welling up inside her with each moment she looked at the woman; she wanted to touch her, to comfort her – how she knew the woman needed comfort, she had no idea – and at the same time tear her apart and strangle her with her bare hands. She had only felt such violence toward another human being once, and the regret for it still haunted her memories.
The psychologist; her first. Her parents had insisted, and she had never forgiven them, in all the years since. She couldn’t remember the woman’s name, or face, or anything; at her impatient questioning and selfish assumptions of what Sam was feeling and thinking, she had given in to her basic instinct for survival. It was an experience that left her traumatized, swearing to never hurt anyone or anything ever again; the psychologist had spent time in the local hospital before quitting her job with all haste. She had always wanted to apologize, to make things right with a woman who had only tried to do her job, but there were reasons – legal ones, as well as emotional ones – that prevented her from doing so. The restraining order said everything it needed to, in no uncertain terms.
The woman in white began to move quicker, as if in a hurry; Sam forced her memories aside in an effort to keep up. At first the woman’s motion seemed like just a brisk walk, but as Sam struggled to follow, it became a run and then almost a kind of floating or flying. Sam found herself stopped and struggling for breath beneath the weight of her backpack at the same moment that the woman disappeared. Not around a corner, or into the distance; she disappeared into nothingness, as if she had never come in the first place. Sam reached for glasses that no longer existed, thinking to clean them; instead, her hand dropped to hang beside her, useless. Once again, her hope for salvation was gone.
She didn’t have long to revel in her confusion before the awful scent and sight of blood assaulted her senses. She had not been paying attention to where the strange woman led her; she had arrived at the intersection of Midway Avenue and Cypress Street without notice. In the middle of the crosswalk lay something that Sam could not look at without screaming; it was human, but it was dead in a way that no human being should ever be. She had not seen death before, outside of her television set and in her mind’s eye as she wrote stories about it; a sort of bitter humor billowed up in her stomach. Of course, the Nightmare would bring to light her worst fears. Of course it would.
This death was not typical; the man had not died from gunshot wounds or a stabbing. He had in no way chosen to commit suicide. The violence that spread before her seemed to go on forever, as if whatever killed him had intended to make its mark in as large an area as possible, to send a signal of its conquest. Vague marks in the shape of alien handprints marred the scene further, and laid against them, other bloodstains began to take on almost recognizable shapes and designs. Sam managed to draw blood from her knuckles in her mouth before she even realized she had put them there in the first place. It was perhaps less shocking, in some small way, because it didn’t seem real, but the metallic scent of blood mixed with the scent of death left her no doubt of the scene’s authenticity. She could not get rid of that without running away, which seemed like a very, very good idea once it had reached her halting, railing mind.
She had just managed to flee the stench when the woman appeared again, this time much, much closer to Sam. If she had not skidded to a halt the moment the woman entered her field of view, she might have bumped into her back. Sam found herself fighting to breathe, from the run, from the proximity of another living creature, and from the new scents and sounds that seemed to circle around the strange woman’s presence.
There were roses, faint and rich and fresh; there was the warmth of a raging fire, burning wood into comforting smoke. There was the scent of her body and hair; a human scent that Sam had not realized she had lacked since her exit from the real world. In the end, though, above all these things, there was the scent of warm animal fur, and the faintest hint of a purr. She knew then that she had no hope of surviving the day, or night, conscious.
The woman stopped and turned to face Sam, the motion seeming as if it took an eternity. Perhaps it did, and Sam never knew until too late. When it stopped, however, and the vision before her became clear, she could not help the reaction that sent her backward on her butt, scrambling for purchase in a street that had nothing to hold onto.
The woman wore Sam’s exact face, and a radiant smile that seemed to chase the darkness away wherever she looked. In her arms, a black cat slept, his back rising and falling in steady rhythm, unafraid and oblivious to his protector’s motion. He did not wake nor stir at Sam’s outburst; the world itself might have fallen around him, but in the arms of this mirror image of a woman, he could sleep forever. Sam would have known him anywhere at a single glance; she did not need to ask, or wonder, if it was Poe.
Her first instinct was anger, and it came from nowhere at all that she could fathom. How dare this woman, whoever she was – and she was not, could not be, the real Sam – take Poe away from her? And for that matter, how dare Poe himself sleep in her arms as if she were the real Sam? He was her cat, her protector, her pride and joy, he knew her better than anyone else! Yet, for some reason, he didn’t seem to need her anymore.
The urge to break the strange angel before her grew tenfold, and only the shock of her body prevented her from a reprisal of the violence she had shown to her psychologist years ago. Perhaps it was also something in the knowledge that destroying a woman who could be her own twin was too poetic; too ironic and sadistic to manage. Though Poe had given up on her, she could not interrupt his peace, either. At least someone had managed to come through, to this strange and terrible world, and survive.
As she fought the urge to attack, the woman seemed to direct her smile at Sam alone. Well before Sam had time to recover or react, she reached up with a careful, gentle hand to stroke Poe’s head. The cat leaned into her touch, rapt in his feline pleasure; then he opened his eyes. They were the same ethereal green that they had always been, but he did not blink when she looked straight into them, as any cat – including him – would have done by instinct. Instead, he stared, for all the world as if she were some sort of threat; or was she prey? Though he was her friend, he was still a cat, and she could only determine so much by a glance. A handful of guesses at his mood left her with even less purchase on reality; he might be accusatory, or bored, or interested in her plight depending on which angle she considered. It was not impossible to think she might have been attributing her own thoughts of herself onto him, either. What, then, did it all mean?
Sam felt as if she were drowning. She had only a moment to gasp for air before the woman, and Poe, disappeared again, fading into the distance with no warning and no reason that Sam could determine. With their departure, and the encroaching silence, came the knowledge that she was now more than alone. The silence almost seemed appealing.
It was an unfortunate appeal; the silence that descended upon Sam was the kind of silence that comes within the eye of the storm, and the storm was one of the fastest that Sam had ever seen. Where the woman and Poe had stood, something else appeared, shambling toward her, as if somehow called by the woman’s absence. Unlike the strange woman or the heap of a corpse that she had run from, this creature was not in any way human. Its sudden appearance, she began to realize, might be blamed on the opacity of the sky, hiding a great deal from her view. She might have believed it hid the woman, too, if she had not dematerialized within a handspan of Sam. Or, she admitted to herself, she was groping for answers in the dark.
The creature was almost upon her by the time she noticed it. It had bulging eyes, and it had a mouth, which was twisted into a hellish grin. Its hands were huge and long and gnarled, with thick palms; Sam did not have to think long to realize that it intended to grasp and clutch her in them until she died. What other purpose could there be for such an abomination? In the next instant, she recalled the bloody handprints left at the scene of the horrific murder she had come upon; this, then, was one of the creatures Miles had warned her about, the kind that sought human blood. There would be no escape.
Her first thought was to give up. If Poe was happy, then what did it matter if she returned home? What home could there be, without her beloved friend to share it with? Then the thought of pain entered her mind. She was, after all, still human herself. If not for her abject fear of pain, she might have ended her own life years ago, back in the real world. She had not been able to do it, then – she could not do it now, either. It labeled her as a coward of the worst kind; but it dictated that she must live, or die trying.
An image of Miles, and of the desperation that fueled his search for the right lever to free his daughter, and of Melissa’s perfect, innocent face, crept unbidden into her mind, and she found herself fighting inertia to extract Miles’ pistol from her backpack. She did not have much time; the creature’s pace was swifter than the one she had encountered in the Nightmare replica of her bedroom, and unlike that creature, this one was intent on doing her injury rather than passing her by.
She did not want to live for Miles, or Melissa, either. She denied all possible thought that began to trend toward that, in her panicked scramble. Miles was all but dead already, and Melissa would die too, without him; she could not rely on them. She should not have relied on Poe! Reality was a harsh mistress. If she was going to live, she was going to have to do it for her own reasons and her own needs. Though she had none of those things, she could at least make sure that there was time to seek out new ones.
Still on her butt, Sam pulled the pistol free of her backpack. As the creature sallied forth, its foul breath reeking all too close to her, she managed to cock it and point it forward, between her bent knees. Her hands shook with effort and uncertainty; she did not want to harm anyone or anything, but this was self-defense, and the rage of everything she had been through over the past few hours had broken some of her inhibitions; just the ones she needed to survive the encounter. Murder would be easy. Her first kill would be easy.
She emptied the entire bullet clip into the monster. The second shot ended its advance, and the third ended its so-called life, but the others were for good measure.
Covered in the creature’s foul, rancid blood, poised in a half-crawl away from the horrible corpse, Sam dropped the spent pistol in the street and began to laugh. Her uncontrolled and hysterical laughter filled the air until her exhausted body and mind gave up the fight and her eyes rolled back into her head in a dead faint. It was dangerous to leave herself exposed, in this strange and alien world; she might die anyway, despite her last stand to defend herself. She just could not find the strength to maintain consciousness a moment longer. The world was beginning to take its toll on her in ways that no human should have to accept, much less consider. If she could not die, then she would have to release the tension by other means; science, it seemed, still worked in the Nightmare to some extent.
The last thing she saw was the hem of a dress that was white and yet not white, covered in a thick layer of dark blood and matted with black fur. The glowing green eyes of a black cat that was no longer hers attended her fall into darkness.
Category: The End (Red) |
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