The End (Red) > Chapter Two: Wonderland
Sam awoke in Wonderland, to the best of her knowledge. The comfortable bed that she had crawled into the night before had changed while she slept, as had the quiet apartment around her. This was not, she knew in an instant, the town of Kentford. It might never be, again. The room was still as dark as she had left it, and her glasses remained on her side table, but her sight could not have been clearer; this anomaly had been the first to arrest her attention upon waking. Where her eyes did fail her, however, her other senses supplied the information that left her wanting to curl into a fetal position for protection. She had had dreams and nightmares before; this was neither, as much as her mind yet wanted to deny its existence in reality. Every minute of her psychology study flashed before her eyes, and at last led her to the inevitable realization that it had failed to prepare her for more than just the necessity of interaction with human nature. Psychology was complete and utter bullshit.
She forced herself to open her eyes for the hundredth time since her return to the world of the waking. No matter how many times she prayed to a God she didn’t believe in, or promised herself that she would get more sleep from now on, the vision before her did not waver. The walls… she couldn’t take her eyes off the walls. Pristine white they had been, cold and emotionless, just the way she liked them. Now, they ran with what appeared at first glance to be a mixture of rain, rust and ink. It was not still, like paint ought to be; it ran, dripping into pools that she couldn’t seem to locate no matter how hard she tried. The stench in the room seemed to corroborate her guess as well; a cloying, metallic odor that left her wanting to choke.
The desk she had left the night before was no longer the clean aluminum frame she had bought on sale; it was black steel, harsh and wicked in the dim light. The digital clock she had forgotten was flashing midnight, in red numbers that had never been part of its original display. The bathroom door was open — she always, always closed it — and this alone was cause to send her pulse racing. She knew she was strange, and had strange habits, but those habits were as much a part of her as her own flesh and blood. Overlooking something as arbitrary as a bathroom door would be normal for anyone else, but not for Sam. Cold sweat poured down her face in the absolute silence. As if any of this weren’t enough, the bed itself lay claim to her delusions like nothing else could.
Her sanctuary, it had always been; a place to go to hide her head away from the noise of the world around her. It was just a twin, nothing fancy; she’d had it since her first failed attempt to normalize by moving into a dorm in college. The springs were worn in just the same places as they had always been, every motion she made seemed correct… but that was where the familiarity ended.
Where soft, rose-colored sheets had once enveloped her with a sense of peace and comfort, dirty steel gray fabric that scratched across her skin like burlap had come to replace them. The pillow pinned beneath her head was flat and hard, a bitter stand-in for her usual soft, fluffy indulgence. The comforter, a delicate thick floral bordered with lace — a gift from her mother — had been reduced to a single stifling layer of the same woolen fabric that lay beneath her. All of it smelled like dust and decay, but this didn’t concern her as much as the fact that she could not get away from it no matter how hard she tried.
Black leather straps, still carrying the odor of the blood of the beasts they came from, prevented her exit from the changed bed. There were several of them; one long one to hold her feet in place, and two shorter ones to pin her arms to her sides. Another short one had wrapped itself around her neck, tight enough to press against her skin in ways that made her want to gag, and still another wrapped around her slender waist in much the same way. They had enough give to bend when she struggled against them, but no more than enough to give her the slightest hope of escape before reaching their limit.
Last but not least, a black leather strap had been forced between her teeth, removing any hope she had of speaking, or calling out to some possible companion in the darkness. This, perhaps more than any other, left her wanting to scream; a lifelong vegetarian and a soft heart for animals, the scent and touch of leather brought rage and hatred to life inside her, and this leather in particular was raw… more raw than she could think about without her stomach churning. Vomiting around a gag would be suicide; she focused on that thought first, to try to force her mind into some semblance of order.
Searching for something calming to focus her gaze on, Sam found that her window to the outside world was open. From her vantage point on the bed, nothing had changed outside; the night was still dark, the rainy clouds still hung over the stars like a wet blanket — no, she couldn’t think of blankets. Her hands, damp with sweat, clutched the awful burlap sheets as if they were her last link to survival. Whatever had happened on this dark and dreary night, it was clear that something, or someone, intended her to stay and wait in this macabre rendition of her own room — not that she had much of a choice.
Her mind, in its desperate search for answers and sanity, seized on the absence of her only true friend; what had become of Poe, in this twisted layer of hell? It was too silent for Poe to be present, of that she was certain; if he were here, he would have noticed her and made his presence clear by now. She couldn’t bear to think of what could happen to a cat in a place like this, let alone herself…
The combination of missing cat and leather stench reached a conclusion in her mind that brought tears to her eyes and a fresh, empowered struggle against the bonds that held her. They failed to give, as they had so many times before, and she fell back against the hard mattress with sullen fury. What purpose could there be in this torment for her? She had done nothing, to her knowledge, to anger anyone. She knew, of course, that there were criminals in the world that did frightening things to young women; this was above and beyond that kind of ordeal. Barring her own sudden descent into all-consuming madness, the simplest explanation was that this was no trick; no joke. Something beyond accepted possibility was taking place just outside her reach, but with her at the heart of it all. She had to know why.
Just as her gaze shifted away from the window, the sound of shattering glass brought it back in a heartbeat. The window glass lay in shards across the barren floor, providing ample opportunity to do grievous harm to her bare feet even if she might have found some avenue by which to escape. Try though she might, the only assailant she could find came in the form of a rock. Alien in its smoothness, it gleamed in the pale moonlight that broke over the glass, still clinging to the window frame in pieces.
Sam’s first thought was that in order to crash through a window, a rock had no choice but to be thrown. It seemed clearer that she had made an enemy, somehow; an enemy that wanted her to fear for her life and her reason. Her second thought was that the rock itself reminded her of something, something she had seen before. Unable to free herself from her bonds, the former was a thought that she had limited options of dealing with. Until someone arrived to cast off the leather straps — if they ever did — she would be fastened to this nightmare replica of her bed. The rock, however, she could afford to think about. It would take her mind off of the rest of her situation.
It wasn’t long before she came to recognize the rock, though the realization was enough to tax her sanity further. She had not seen it before, not precisely; she had seen it in her mind’s eye, and through the eyes of her characters. It was yet another torn fragment of her destroyed novel; a more concrete reminder this time than the paper Poe had offered her.
It had been a symbol in her writing, a story about a girl seeking vengeance on a group of classmates that had always tormented her. Dropping that unusual rock down a well was the keystone, the moment that altered the flow of the girl’s destiny. It was the Stone of Promise, a long forgotten tool of the dark and sinister Lost Gods, and Their power held sway over anyone who took it up. Touching it, a regular person would become twisted, bound to the blood of the Lost, and redemption could no longer be possible…
How could such a thing exist, when it was but a figment of her imagination? Worse — did it somehow bear the same properties that she had written about so carelessly? And if it did, what did that say about her?
What frightened her most, however, was the memory of Poe’s piece of paper. She had scoffed at his poor sense of humor and gone to sleep in a huff, ignoring her own foolish words scrawled on the page that she had already cast aside in her own mind — and look what had happened! Now Poe was missing, and perhaps she would die after all. His teeth marks were still visible on her hand, where he’d bitten her to gain her attention. Strange premonitions and unusual knowledge always were his knacks, when he chose to use them.
Sam’s pulse started to race, just as a sound cut into the still darkness. Her mind seized on it; an incautious rattling in the direction of what should have been her door. In this twisted environment, the door was battered and broken in places, littered with holes that offered small glimpses into the hall beyond. On the other side of the broken door, she could just make out a series of rusty chains barring outside entry — or inside flight.
Sam realized that the sound was the doorknob, twisting, useless, against the chains. Someone, or something, was trying to gain access to her. A low grunting sound followed the rattling after a few moments, and this was enough to make Sam sink as low as she could into her terrible bed and start to tremble. The sound was close enough to human to trigger her fear, to be sure… but it was also beyond human, and the only thing that Sam could imagine was worse than a human, was something both like and unlike one.
New sounds joined the rattling; the sounds of shuffling of feet, and of the clanking of an over-large, heavy ring of keys filtered in. Sam did her best to strain her vision, desperate to catch a glimpse of the approaching visitor, but the holes in her door would not allow for more than the detection of motion. Within a few moments, and with a few further grunts, the approaching visitor succeeded in mastering the chains. They fell to the floor in a series of tinny crashes that echoed perhaps more than they should have in her ears. A final heavier thump had to be the lock that had fastened the chains. She had only a moment to try, one last time, to struggle against her bonds and fail, before the door creaked open with an ominous groan to admit her new companion.
Sam forced herself to lie still, her eyes closed but for a tiny slit where she could watch the room from behind her eyelashes while appearing to be asleep. If she was going to survive this encounter, she would be best served by appearing helpless — she was of no use defending herself until she could move, and that wouldn’t happen if she posed any sort of threat to her captors. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears; a sound so loud that it almost blocked out all other sources of sound, but the thing that entered her room was so audibly far from human that she had no choice but to hear it anyway. It shuffled, it did not walk; it scraped, it did not step. When it breathed, it rasped, like her father had after years of smoking away the family budget. It did not breathe often, which she was glad for. It smelled like death, or at least what an innocent psychology student in her twenties believed must be the smell of death. She had never witnessed death before.
The thing approached with timid, uncertain movements, though it was, without a doubt, approaching. Sam fought to maintain her composure, uncertain of what she would see when it arrived at her bedside once and for all. She tried to brace herself for the shock and terror of witnessing something that mere humans should not be asked to witness; the sheer inhumanity of the creatures she had only dreamed about in her mind, and never imagined having to greet. Could it be one of her own creations? The thought was no longer an impossible one, given Poe’s failed warning and the Stone of Promise that lay just far enough out of her reach to remain useless, whether dark power source or red herring it was. She was defenseless, a sitting duck before her unwelcome visitor; all she could hope for was that the thing was not hostile without provocation.
It arrived near her bed and turned to face her, while it examined something in great detail on the table beside her, and Sam got her first good look at it. She knew in an instant that she had made a grave error in looking, for the sight alone set her trembling more than any of her panic attacks ever had in the past. There was no way that the creature could ignore her now, and her own inability to control herself would send her to a fate perhaps worse than death. The knowledge that she could not fool it was instant; she opened her eyes, her teeth clenched tight enough against the leather strap to leave permanent marks in it. She would have no choice but to throw herself on the mercy of the creature, if in fact it had any such concept in the world in which it lived.
It was as tall as a human and shaped similar to a human, but bent forward, its body hunched over like an old woman’s. It had no eyes that she could discern, but it was covered in thick, black fur from top to bottom. Where the mouth on a human would be, there was one on the creature, but it was gaping wide open as a permanent feature, displaying several rows of fangs and a tongue that seemed three times as long as a human’s. Its face twitched every few seconds, as a human with a facial tic might, but Sam realized that it was not ill; it was reading scents on the wind, to make up for its poor sight. Its body was draped in stained rags, displaying wrinkled and marred flesh or jutting, decaying bone between them by turns. It was clearly dead, or almost so — or perhaps it was already, and such things meant nothing at all to it anymore.
It must have had ears somewhere, for the creature froze in place and snapped its head around, convulsing in a twisted series of twitches that left Sam feeling sick. Though the scents had not changed, Sam’s motion had, and it adjusted its behavior to avoid her, rather than do her harm as she had expected. It grunted, the same low, guttural grunt that she had heard on its way in, and picked up her glasses from the side table. It turned the glasses over several times in its hairy paws, exploring them with a careless touch, and before Sam could even think to cry out, it shattered the lenses. It seemed stunned at the destruction of the unfamiliar object for only a moment before lifting the broken glasses to its face for closer inspection.
Without warning, the creature let out a howl that sent every muscle in Sam’s body taut and the hair on the backs of her arms standing straight up. It backed away from her with an agility that she had not known it possessed, hissing in an almost cat-like fashion. A flash of realization in the back of her mind made her link the creature’s black fur to that of the missing Poe, but she had no time to consider the relationship further. The creature writhed in what Sam could only guess was pain, though she could not see how it had injured itself; perhaps the broken glass had cut into its hands? Perhaps the glass on the floor had posed as much of a threat to it as it had to Sam? She watched as the creature gained enough control of itself to throw the mangled glasses across the room, twisting them even more out of shape and snapping the frames in two across the nosepiece. She did not need to wonder about the amount of force it could wield when necessary any longer.
The creature continued to twist and howl, a reaction not dissimilar to what Sam would have written as the reaction of a demon to holy water. It was also retreating further and further toward the open door. A brief moment of elation swept into her mind; she would not be eaten or murdered after all! Despair took only a moment to replace it when she realized that her only hope of being set free now seemed to revile her. Despite the thing’s offensive appearance, odor and behavior, it was the closest thing she had to an ally in the insane world she had entered. If it couldn’t free her, who could, or would? Was it better to die at the hands of the creature, or risk a slow death by starvation and suffering if nobody came to find her?
The creature had almost reached the door, but Sam watched it stumble, helpless and furious, into the wall instead. It began to scrape its body along the wall rather than walk upright, and the behavior was similar enough to the same pattern that Sam had followed every night since she was a child, that her mind recognized it in an instant.
It looked through my broken glasses… I’ve looked through someone else’s glasses before. It’s like a whole different world. I think it doesn’t understand… it thinks my glasses did something to hurt its ability to see! But… that means it does have eyes, then?
Unwilling and unable to answer her unspoken question, the creature at last found its way to the door. Still hissing, it ducked out into what appeared to be an adjacent hall of a much larger building. It slammed Sam’s heavy door behind it, almost as if it wanted to shut Sam away from it again, but she was all too aware that it was too distraught to lock it again. Freedom could be hers, if only she could manage to get free of her leather shackles! She also knew that the creature was loose, somewhere out there. It had not harmed her despite noticing her consciousness, but if it didn’t intend to have her up and about, it would do more than just explore her bedside table, next time.
Without warning, a heavy mechanical groaning sound arrested her attention from somewhere in the direction of the hall. At first Sam was certain that some new doom had been prepared for her, to end her life for the unintended insult she had paid her visitor; but in the time it took her to start to tremble again, she felt the leather straps loosen around her body, disappearing of their own accord into unnoticed deep grooves in the sides of her bed. Confused, but wasting no time in getting free, she leapt out of the awful bed and fell to the floor in sudden shock, gasping in pain. The bonds themselves had not injured her, but her muscles felt atrophied, as if she’d spent ten years in those same bonds without rest. How long had it been? The clock still flashed 12:00 in an endless pattern of red lights.
The Stone of Promise lay just a handspan away from her on the floor, between countless shards of broken glass. Sam hadn’t noticed before how filthy the floor was; while the walls ran with ink and rust, the floor was just plain dirty and unwashed, like the floor of a cheap gas station bathroom. It occurred to her that the stains and dirt appeared like splotches of ink might from a leaky pen, or mud might after being tracked indoors by the rain, but she cast those thoughts aside in lieu of gazing at the Stone. The simplest explanation, on any other day, would have been that someone had thrown a very strange rock through her window. Today, however, she had already ignored one hint too many. Under these bizarre circumstances, Sam had the feeling that the simplest explanation would have to be that this rock was, in fact, the Stone of Promise — and the very same one from her story.
She knew what the risks of picking it up were, more keenly than anyone else ever could or would. After all, she had written them. The fact remained, however, that Sam was defenseless in a world that she still suspected would destroy her out of hand, if she let down her guard for a moment. How she would get back to her normal apartment, with her beloved Poe, was anyone’s guess, but she could not fathom how she might be able to do that without the aid of the Stone; or at the very least, a good solid rock to use as a weapon. With these thoughts in mind, she pulled herself to her feet, brushed her filthy, sweat-soaked nightgown off as well as she could, and bent down to pick up the Stone.
It was anticlimactic, Sam thought. No aura of magic, no sudden feelings of empowerment, no ethereal angel come to herald the promises of power that came with the Stone. But that was how she’d written it, and she liked it that way.
At last, with only a little more confidence in her sanity than she had managed since her arrival in this twisted world, Sam tried to compose her thoughts. Escape was the obvious solution, but who knew how long that would take, or if it were even possible? This world held things unlike any she had ever known or dreamed. She liked to think of herself as braver than most girls, when it came to things of the imagination, but she was no fighter, no warrior like the ones she so often wrote about. Mistakes would kill her; of that she had no question at all. She would have to take this slow, one step at a time, until the sunlight of normal, boring old Kentford shone down upon her face once more.
She had to believe she would find a way out. The alternative was too much for even her writer’s imagination to comprehend.
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