Sam’s hand, her palm laced with sweat, ink and rain, reached for the knob of the open door before her. The blackness in the distance beyond triggered dueling instincts; part of her wanted to throw open the door with a scream and a yell to drive back the darkness, while the rest wanted to leave it untouched and walk away. The overriding feeling that something important and necessary lay beyond the shadows galvanized her when her own mind would not. That room, whatever associations with her ordinary life it had, was her only way through the Nightmare, and that was all the justification she needed to push forward.

The door resisted Sam’s pressure against it for only a moment before filling the hallway with a low, echoing creak, not unlike the dying groan of a dead man. Her feet moved forward without her mind having to consider or accept the fact; she was functioning on instinct and necessity again rather than choice. This simple, animal behavior might have frightened her once, before she had come to the Nightmare; now it brought comfort in knowing that her heart still possessed the will to survive at any cost. If nothing else, she could be certain of her own fault-filled humanity. In the Nightmare, such things could not be taken for granted.

Once inside the room, it took her eyes several minutes to adjust to the darkness, and several more to begin to focus on the room itself. Even though she still didn’t seem to need them in this strange replica of reality, she still missed her glasses, and her mind had yet to accept the missing piece of her daily attire. The dim light from the hallway filtered in, leaving a single line of brilliance illuminating the path to the only other light in the room; a small television against the far wall. It was on, broadcasting nothing but silent, muted static.

Other parts of the room, lit by the distant screen light, began to emerge as Sam studied her surroundings. A giant armchair, boasting massive piles of upholstery, sat in front of the television, its back to Sam. She might have been able to fit three of herself in it. The kitchen to her right was simple and sparse; Sam suspected that her former neighbor had spent more time using the counter space for pursuits of pleasure than for anything approaching a culinary endeavor. The bathroom door was closed, much to Sam’s relief; her own bathroom triggered enough phobias to last her a lifetime. The apartment windows, unlike Sam’s, were large, spanning the entire wall; she could not decide whether the fact that the curtains were open, or the view from beyond them, startled her more.

The eerie white sky had changed since she last laid eyes on it. No longer could it be mistaken for a coming snow or a dense fog; the color had taken on a reddish tinge that could only be related to blood. It still looked heavy and menacing, as if it might fall down at the slightest provocation, putting an end to the Nightmare and all within it. The sidewalk she had passed during her brief attempt at escape was no longer smooth and walkable; it was fractured in a million places, and looked more like earthquake rubble than anything meant for human assistance. The street itself no longer trailed off into the distance; it ended in a jagged crumble of asphalt that Sam had difficulty finding words to describe. She had never seen anything cease to exist in such a violent manner before. If she had believed in giant monsters, then one might have chewed upon the street for a morning snack, leaving only the crusts behind.

Disturbed, Sam wrestled her gaze away from the windows and back into the room. She had entered expecting to find some new direction to continue her flight, or barring that, the bloody corpse of the woman who had lived there. The only perceptible exit seemed to be by breaking the glass windows, and the woman was nowhere to be found. The television’s static began to attract her wandering mind; the instinct for trying to form patterns amid the random scatters of light and color was too strong. After a few moments of careful study, she found herself drawn forward into the main living room for a closer look.

All at once, the reality of her situation came crashing down upon her. What had looked like an ordinary room was anything but. The armchair had blocked her from seeing the truth. Sam’s gaze slid down to the armchair’s seat, and to the woman sitting in it – not her neighbor, or a bloody corpse, but herself. On the bare glass coffee table in front of the chair lay the single, impossible object that Sam had suspected her mirror image of stealing from her. Poe was gone. The mirror image of Sam did not even boast so much as a single cat hair to mark his absence.

She was still beautiful, in an ethereal sort of way. It would have been easy to assume she was only a ghost, if Sam had not already known that she was capable of affecting the world around her. She sat straight-backed in the chair, as regal as a queen, comfortable and content in the midst of hell; she possessed none of the phobias that the real Sam did, and might have laughed at Sam for hers. The hem of her white dress was still bloody, serving as the only reminder of her true nature, and how dangerous she might yet be. She had stolen Sam’s only potential defense, as well as her best friend. What other harm might she intend?

Her eyes were focused on the window in front of her, past the television set. Sam found herself reaching for her backpack, groping for her set of keys without taking her eyes off of the woman in the chair. Foolish though they were as a weapon, they were her only choice. The last time Sam had seen the strange copy of herself, she had been standing over a mutilated corpse.

The mirror-Sam’s gaze shifted to bear its weight upon Sam herself. It took Sam a breathless moment to realize that the sounds that began to spill from the mirror’s lips were words. They might have been Sam’s own words, twisted backwards or upside down, but somehow they still formed into audible language, after a fashion.

“You are not what I thought you were.”

Sam froze, her fingers brushing the edge of her key ring. She had not expected the woman to address her, but then, she wasn’t certain what she had expected at all. Talking to Miles, and to herself amid the ruined hallway she had left behind, seemed like a million years ago.

In the end, curiosity aided it. “I don’t know what you are, so that’s fair.” Only after the words escaped did she realize how foolish they were; of all the questions she might have asked, she chose to focus on the obvious! This woman, whomever she was, knew all the secrets of the Nightmare, and she was sitting right in front of Sam. It would have been the perfect time to get the answers she needed.

“That is simple enough. I am you. Did you not notice?” The mirror-Sam smiled, and the expression was just as radiant as it had been over the corpse in the street.

Anger welled in Sam. It was one thing to remind herself of how stupid she was – she did that every day. Yet, to have this perfect version of herself remind her, seemed cruel. “Don’t toy with me. I’m leaving this place. Tell me how.”

The mirror-Sam sighed and leaned back in her chair. The motion made her seem, for only a moment, more human than she had at any point prior. “I thought you knew, but you aren’t going anywhere. Haven’t you realized that every step you take is meaningless?” She stretched her legs, and propped the heels of her bare feet up on the coffee table, thin strips of white against the stark darkness of the room. The line of red staining her hem stood out even more.

Sam shook her head. “They aren’t meaningless. There has to be a way. I should have…” She swallowed hard, uncomfortable with the word. “I should have died several times now. I may be insane. But I’m still alive. I have to believe there’s a way. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise, what?” The mirror-Sam’s cold, piercing green eyes stabbed into Sam’s. “You should just lay down and die? Why fight, when you can’t win?”

Her gaze began to trigger a violent headache in Sam, who dropped her backpack and began to rub at her temples by instinct. The mirror-Sam ignored this, her words still harsh. “You can’t win anything. I know it, and you know it. Even Poe knows it.”

The sound of his name on her lips brought out the violent, desperate child faced with a psychologist’s assault in Sam’s personality. Before she realized what she was doing, her keys were in her hand and she stood poised over the armchair, shaking with rage.

“You took him from me. You stole everything from me! Why am I even here? I just wanted to go to bed, and when I woke up, everything was wrong! Tell me why this is happening!”

“I stole nothing.” The mirror-Sam’s face returned to its previous relaxed expression. “You did not want Poe, so I took him. You did not want the Stone, so I took it. You thought you could handle everything yourself. So, I let you. Now you blame me.”

“Of course I wanted Poe!” Sam’s teeth ground together. “I have looked for him every minute since I got to this hell!”

“If you found him, and escaped, what would you do?” The mirror-Sam shook her head. “Return to the life you led? Continue to allow him to ease your pain, while easing none of his? He is a living creature, not something for you to drown your sorrows in.”

She looked up at Sam again, this time with a slight frown on her face. “You are nothing but a child. You need not play with such toys.”

Sam lunged forward, before the mirror image of herself finished her words. As she expected, her keys did little more than leave a ragged scratch across the woman’s arm. She did not expect how unaffected the mirror-Sam would be by the minor injury. She still sat, unflinching, as blood welled up to the surface of her skin. Whatever she was, she had substance, but seemed to feel no pain.

“Do you feel better now? As I said, you are not who I thought you were. It is difficult to believe that we are the same, isn’t it?”

“I’m nothing like you,” Sam spat between her teeth. “If you’re so perfect and know everything there is to know, why are you still here? Why do you keep tormenting me? Just let me die.”

The mirror-Sam smiled again. “You waver between life and death so often.” Her gaze drifted to the Stone. “I wonder what you will do with it, when you decide to use it?” Then she paused, her eyelashes veiling the expression in her eyes. “Or maybe, you’ll never decide at all. I look forward to seeing your choice.”

Before Sam could demand further answers, or muster up another careless attack, the woman before her seemed to blur around the edges. Sam watched her mirror image twist and deform into a true stranger’s body. A young teenage girl, with dark hair and eyes, stood pouting in her place, her vacant expression fixated upon the Stone. She still wore the white gown with a bloody hem. It took Sam a handful of minutes to realize that she was looking at a living replica of the main character from her unfinished story; the awful, unbearable manuscript that had brought her here in the first place. Her name was Alma, and she was a cold-blooded murderess.

Alma’s story was a sad one, and the plot of Sam’s novel centered on her. It was her descent into madness and discovery of her power that brought the story to life. It was her fate to wield the Stone of Promise, and by doing so, bring punishment upon the cruel teenagers that taunted her beyond hope of mercy. Sam had always identified with her, perhaps more than anyone else in her life; it was cathartic to write from Alma’s perspective in order to let out her own hatred of the world and its people.

Seeing her as a living, breathing person, however, disturbed Sam more than she could have believed it would. If the Stone was real in the Nightmare, then Alma had come to retrieve it. The Stone was a dangerous weapon, and it had caused enough murder and mayhem in her stories to make her think twice about allowing it to fall into the girl’s hands in reality as well. It was bad enough that she herself had held it in her own hands.

Alma stretched out a long, slender hand to try to pick up the Stone from the coffee table, and Sam found herself forced to act. In her haste to lunge forward and knock Alma’s hand away from the Stone, she collided with the glass table – which supported her weight for a single, tense moment before shattering into a million fragments of glass and metal. Sam fell hard to the ground, clutching the Stone tight enough that her hand ached around it. She could feel bloody scratches on her hands and knuckles; the possibility of glass being stuck inside them was high. That, however, held little threat when compared to the possibility of what Alma would do next.

She had no time to consider how insane it was, being faced with first her own self, and then a figment of her imagination. All that mattered was acting to stop it. She looked up from the floor to find that more than just the glass coffee table had shattered during her tumble. The world had once again shifted, and her situation had become even more complicated than it had been before.

The thing that had once been the mirror image of Sam, and had been Alma mere moments before, had changed again. In the sea of broken glass, a pair of tiny sneakers tied into perfect bows arrested her attention. The sneakers belonged to a little girl she would know anywhere, and who idolized every flawed piece of Sam without any reason at all. Melissa, Miles’ daughter, stood in Alma’s place, her wails and sobs filling the room with echoes that sounded not unlike the sobbing that Sam had heard from the hallway. She had assumed the tears to be her neighbor’s – perhaps they were not.

Melissa threw herself at Sam, hysterical; only when she got closer did Sam realize the extent of the child’s pain. She seemed uninjured, which was a miracle in itself, but she was filthy. Her soft, flyaway hair was matted to her face with what could only be a mixture of sweat and blood. Her jeans were filthy with stains that might have been mud; her shirt was stained with rust-colored liquid that Sam didn’t dare identify. Her skin was grubby and dirty, as if she’d squeezed through hallways coated with rust-rain. As Sam cautiously wrapped her arms around the little girl, she couldn’t help but feel her own heart race.

Was the child truly Melissa, Miles’ daughter? Her behavior was perfect. Yet, she had been Alma and the mirror-Sam mere moments before, all of which had been false creations brought to life by the Nightmare. Perhaps Melissa was a trap. Perhaps Melissa had been twisted by the Nightmare to allow for such transformations. Sam could not find it in her heart to guess. The sheer possibility that it was the real Melissa was all the reason she needed to pick up the Stone and get hold of herself. Melissa, at least, was worth saving, even if Sam herself was not. Even the mirror-Sam could not argue with that logic.

Melissa cried until she couldn’t breathe, and then cried some more. By the time she fell asleep from utter exhaustion, Sam had collapsed against her backpack for support, left almost numb by recent events. She watched the child’s every intake of breath, stunned into trying to plan her next step. As she had always feared, Melissa had become not just Miles’ responsibility, but her own as well.

As strange as it seemed, her fear now was for keeping Melissa alive, not for the knowledge that she was a part of something larger than herself. The rest wouldn’t matter, unless Melissa survived. Now, more than ever, Sam would have to find a way to survive the Nightmare, and escape it. The alternative would be impossible.

Silence reigned, apart from the constant, heavy repeating drip that marked the passage of rust-and-ink into the rising flood. An hour or more had elapsed since Sam’s desperate pleas for Miles had ended with the utter loss of usable vocal chords; now she lay broken and despairing on her twisted bed, unable to give voice to her darkest fears.

Miles, for all she knew, was gone or dead. The Stone of Promise was forever lost. The woman who wore her face, the one who had put her here, and the traitor tomcat Poe had succeeded in their plot to destroy her. The will to fight had flown from her grasp, and lay as motionless and silent as she did. The water would prevail; time and the unspeakable bonds that held her would ensure its victory.

How had it come to this? Sam’s mind railed, trying to find the source of her failure and where she might have turned the tide. That way, of course, lay madness, but it was preferable to the madness invited by the necessity of listening to each foul drip as it passed. Her apologies to Miles had come too late, and Poe; who knew what sins Poe held against her? She had given him everything she had, every love and kindness she could spare, and he had turned his back on her.

She had always known that true friends were rare and special beasts, of the kind a person found one or two of at best in their lifetime, but of Poe, at least, she had been certain. She missed his warm furry body, pressed up against her side. She missed the deep resonance of his purr in the darkness, filling the void of silence with unexplained feline joy. Now, when she needed him most, he was off in the arms of a stranger wearing her face, and giving her what he had always given Sam. If anyone, Poe should have been able to tell the difference between Sam and the stranger. She would have known him from any black cat on the street, or so she wanted to believe with all her heart; the reality was too much to bear.

Sam closed her eyes, unwilling to look at the Nightmare’s rendition of her apartment any longer. The dim light that Miles had brought to her room with his previous attempts to free her only called attention to the worst of the shadows that crawled their way up to and out of the small broken window near the top of the adjacent wall. More than once, she had imagined the shadow of a cat, or of a pair of glasses, or of a monster like the one she had killed approaching her room. She would believe anything, now; perhaps they could walk through walls, or create new dangers for her from nothing at all.

Her eyes still closed, Sam felt the rising water’s filth brush the pads of her fingertips. She didn’t need to see to know that the water had reached the edge of her bed; if she could stand, it might have been waist-high. Even if she could get free of her bonds, she would have difficulty maneuvering toward the door, to say nothing of what lay beyond it. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the hallways outside might be twice as flooded and even more impassable. The inevitability of her own death seemed more poignant in that moment than any other, even including her panicked battle against the thing she had killed in the street. Would such creatures be as inconvenienced as she was by the flood, or would they revel in its approach?

Sam opened her eyes to greet the water as it surged one more time, enough to spill over the top of her bed and soak her back. The chill invaded her body at once, as if it had torn away her clothing and attacked her bare flesh instead of multiple layers of cloth. At the same time, a sound in the distance twisted her gut, making her cry out with a hoarse gasp that she could not have determined the source of: panic, or joy. It made the room itself shudder this time, perhaps because of the water; she didn’t care. The important part was that the bonds holding her down to the bed also shuddered, and inched back into the sides of the bed from whence they came, just as they had the first time that Miles saved her.

Every muscle in Sam’s body revolted against her sudden flurry of movement; she found herself forced to slow down lest she injure herself and render the miracle worthless. Ignoring the icy fluid that stained her back, she reached for her backpack, hoisting it up onto her shoulders. The bottom of it trailed into the water; she didn’t have time to lament the fact. Whatever losses she took would have to be accepted, because there was no time for more caution or more preparation. It would be many hours before she realized that the fact that she was still in possession of her backpack after the incident in the street was unusual.

Sam’s only thought was for the door, and how fast she could get to it. Gritting her teeth, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and plunged them down into the frigid water. She wanted to scream, and to panic, and to shudder in revulsion; she couldn’t see beneath the surface of the black filth, and couldn’t know what lurked below. All of it was irrelevant to the knowledge that escape would be the only thing to save her life; if death waited in the blackness, it would only hasten what already came one drip at a time. She had nothing to fear, for once.

With this thought held in her mind’s grasp, Sam took her second leap of faith and lifted herself off the bed, immersing the length of her lower body in the rising pool. As she had predicted, the water stopped just short of the zippered fly of her jeans; not quite waist high, but close enough to make that a fair estimate. Grasping the straps of her backpack with white-knuckled fists, she took a slow step forward, listening to the vile sucking sound that accompanied the water’s rush into the space she left behind. One step led to another, and another, until walking almost became easier than standing still. Panic made her giddy and she wanted to laugh; she wasn’t even shaking, and half her body was bathed in unnamable muck! Her paranoia in regard to germs, perhaps, was fading, though only in response to the presence of things far worse in the hierarchy: cold, pain and impending death.

She maintained her pace toward the door, forced by the sheer depth of the water to limit the speed of her advance. More than once she felt certain that something living brushed against her ankles as she passed; she did not have enough bravery to both manage the flight toward the door, and reach down to investigate. She wanted to stop and look for the Stone, but that too was impossible. One foot in front of the other toward the door was the only possible mode of advancement, and that knowledge wedged itself in both her mind and her heart without room for anything more. What happened beyond that, she would only be able to manage if she got that far. Being able to prioritize, and to put aside her worry for once in her life, almost seemed as liberating as the absence of her bonds.

Arriving at the door, unable to suppress a shudder at the cold that made her muscles sluggish and weak, Sam grabbed the doorknob with fingers that at last trembled. The fluid that surrounded her possessed a quality that made it somewhat slick, and though it did not impact her movement much, it did impact the things she touched. She had to try twice to turn the knob, all the while wondering if the hallway outside would pose even more of a threat than the room itself. At last, the doorknob turned, and Sam’s decision was made for her.

Pulling back the door was a challenge that required all of Sam’s strength, plus the strength of her rising adrenaline. As the door inched toward her, the thick water seemed to writhe with a sadistic pleasure, then forced itself around her and out of the open door into the hallway. Sam had no choice but to watch, hanging from the doorframe for support, as the rising pool in her room gradually became nothing more than a wet floor. The grates in the hallway swallowed up what the carpet could not contain.

It took Sam the better part of ten minutes to decide that she no longer needed the support of the creaking doorframe. She still expected the worst; the water might come back, or a wave of it might bear down on her the moment she stepped beyond the confines of her room. Despite her hesitation, she knew there was only one way to determine whether her efforts had been as successful as they appeared. Taking a deep breath, she peered around the edge of the doorframe. The same damp darkness that she had seen during her last journey through the hallway greeted her again.

Foolish joy sprang into Sam’s breast, and she could not stop a smile from finding its way to her face. Miles had come through for her after all! Why he hadn’t answered her shouts was anyone’s guess; perhaps he had been waylaid by monsters, or found the lever to free Melissa. They were both good excuses, and if the former was true, he had survived the encounter. Though her mind still seized first on his continued survival as a means to her own, she was concerned for him; if only to herself, she could admit it.

The first thing to do, after such an ordeal, was to find Miles and muster up the courage to apologize for her behavior in person. He deserved that much. She had been a fool to walk away from him, nervous though she was; strength came in numbers, and it would be better to travel with someone than alone. Ever since her departure from his offer of protection, things hadn’t been going very well at all for Sam, and on top of the sickening Nightmare and its twisted surprises, she now had an enemy – herself. If she stayed with Miles, she could guarantee that anything approaching the two of them had to be her twin. Otherwise, who knew what the woman might do next? She had already fooled Miles once.

Of course, that also meant that Sam might have to choose her words with caution, when she did find Miles. With a sigh, she readjusted her backpack on her shoulders, and strode with more bravado than she felt down the hallway. The carpet was still damp, and the walls still ran with ink-rain, but that was her new sense of normal, and she welcomed it where she had once been appalled by it. Deathtraps and distant monsters were the real threats.

She paused, mid-stride, when she reached the first of her neighbors’ doors. She remembered all too well the shriek of agony that cut through the silence the last time she passed without acting. Her heart and her head both told her that the selfish fool of a woman was dead, and that it was far too late to rectify her own past sins, but still she hesitated. Being trapped in a room full of rising water, unable to save herself, had cost her a little in the magnitude of her inhibitions. The woman inside, if she yet lived, might never admit to being saved by the “crazy chick next door,” but there was a certain attraction to her knowing it, anyway. Miles, she thought with a grimace, would not have hesitated.

Biting her lip, Sam reached out and touched the doorknob of her neighbor’s door. Perhaps, at least, she could find out what had happened, if nothing else.

The moment her slippery fingers touched the doorknob, Sam’s temples began to throb with the worst pain she had ever experienced from one of her headaches. Crippled by the sudden onslaught, she twisted away and leaned against the wall; its foulness no longer even registered on her senses through the blinding pain. Her hands, even as filthy as they were, went to her head, applying pressure in all the places that she knew might offer her comfort – none of them worked. She set her backpack down, searching for her pain medication.

Everything around her shifted. She had no better word to describe the way the walls writhed with impossible life, or the way the floor beneath her wanted with desperation to become the ceiling. The door she had touched disappeared, leaving behind a solid blank wall that continued to run with ink-rain. Sam could detect two things through the mounting agony; the rapid pounding of her heart, and distant sobs that sounded at times like a little girl, and at times like the dead woman that should have been inside. She bit her lip hard to make certain she wasn’t the source of the sobbing.

The scene that greeted her after the shift was brutal. No longer were there clear distinctions between floor, walls and ceiling. The carpet was torn and shredded where it still remained; where it didn’t, cold black stone jutted out from beneath, creating twisted tunnel-like passages all around her. Any sort of movement brought sensations that Sam was going to fall, even when she was almost certain of which direction ought to be down. In the distance, she thought she might be able to see the next door down from the woman’s – the boy who had died at his father’s hands – but the number plate on his door was swinging from one corner, twisted beyond legibility. Her own door was nowhere to be seen, no matter how hard she peered into the blackness behind her.

Unable to make sense of what she was seeing, Sam took a slow, careful step forward, and tripped over a stone spike. For once, she found herself pleased that she had not fallen, even if she was still as clumsy as ever. Navigating the hallway, if it could still be called that, would be five times harder now. The Nightmare, again, seemed to sense her advancement and respond in kind, seeking to keep her from prevailing; she would have none of it, this time.

“I won’t stay here. Do you hear me? All your tricks, all your lies – I’ve had it.” Sam’s voice echoed, surprising her, as she spoke. How could a carpet-and-stone hallway echo? “Whoever you are, I’m going home. You can’t stop me.”

The hallway did not respond. She had halfway expected it to.

Being unafraid of the walls now gave Sam better purchase as she tried to make her way toward the second neighbor’s door. There was no longer any hope of saving the woman; stopping to think of whether she had even existed at all would have been an indefinite waste of time. She had tried, this time; whatever sadistic mind controlled her current surroundings had decided for her again what she would do. She was growing more tired of it by the minute. Whatever sort of weak, apathetic monster she knew herself to be, she was a grown woman, and the only person that could hold her back…

The thought was interrupted by Sam’s realization that Miles might have been caught in the shift, just as she was. Could Melissa have disappeared as well? She couldn’t elaborate on the thought. If that had happened, Miles would be inconsolable. His injuries had been too severe, too numerous, for him to survive that kind of shock. The now missing woman Sam had known was no friend; regret still weighed on her for the chance she did not take, but she had no more ability to affect what had happened. Could it be that Miles now needed her as much as she needed him? Every moment of hesitation could seal his doom.

She was sure she didn’t like the thought of Miles needing her. She might have talked herself out of aiding him again, but the thought of Melissa’s disappearance disturbed her far more than the woman’s. Even if she couldn’t bear to be in Miles’ presence, she could at least make sure that his daughter didn’t suffer in his absence.

Steadying her grip on the things she could see, Sam made her way through the twisted, demented hallway, one slow step at a time. She had to duck, crawl and bend in strange angles to fit herself through some of the new spaces, but each time seemed to get easier than the last. She would find Miles and Melissa, and together, they would all find a way out of this hell, however they had come to it in the first place. Poe, if he chose, could come along… she wanted that more than she dared give voice to, but fear of facing him to ask more than overrode the desire. This time, he could come to her; she had looked for him long enough.

Sam’s progress through the hallway was abnormally slow; a fact that she only noticed after what might have been an hour of gymnastics that were ill-suited to her level of flexibility. Though she had performed stunts that she considered miraculous, and formed shapes with her body that were close to inhuman, she was no closer to the boy’s door (and Miles) than she had been when she started. When she paused to think of it, wiping the sweat from her brow and catching her breath, it almost seemed like she had made no progress at all. The hallway stretched on in front of and behind her, beckoning her forward into freedom or back into hell – both, she doubted the reality of.

Perplexed, tired and frustrated, Sam hung her backpack from the nearest stone spike and reached inside, rummaging for the first thing that entered her mind; a package of sunflower seeds. Childhood memories crept into her mind, as they often did when she was confused. Her mother had read her a story in which two lost children left a trail of bread crumbs to mark where they had passed. There were only two possible options, given the massive chaos before her; either she was getting lost and turned around due to the strangeness of the hallway, or it was infinite. As unusual as she knew it was, neither option seemed any less likely. The seeds would tell her everything she needed to know the difference.

Tearing open the package of seeds, Sam began to drop them, one at a time, onto the floor, taking great care to leave them visible amid the confusion. They would do her no good if she lost sight of them! Then, one more time, she bent, and twisted, and crawled through the spaces before her. Her jacket caught on some of the stone spikes, and she knew she would have bruises from running into so many things in the twisted darkness, but she was determined to work herself free of this newest trap, once and for all.

The package of sunflower seeds emptied at the same moment that Sam heard the sobbing in the wall stop, and another heavy grinding sound that she associated with Miles. Despite her sudden flare of hope, the hallway did not change; Miles being responsible for that would have been too easy. Turning to look at the wall where her neighbor’s door used to be, and the place where the sobbing had originated, Sam made an unhappy discovery.

The door was back, and open, just a crack. There was nothing but darkness behind it, as if to tempt Sam into investigating further. Unlike before, there was no scent of blood, only the same mustiness that came from the ink-rain on the walls.

In the middle of Sam’s ensuing pause to gather her wits, she noticed one final thing that troubled her more than even the door. Behind her, her trail of sunflower seeds was gone. There was no sign that she had ever passed this way before, and yet the bag in her hand was profoundly empty. The seeds had been there each time she looked back, until now; she’d made certain to check.

That left her with no more options. Sam set her gaze on the strange door before her, crushing the empty bag of sunflower seeds in a fist that shook with nerves. If the hallway would not allow her to pass, then the only way to proceed would be to do what she had tried to do earlier, and see what had become of the woman she loathed. What she would do if the door disappeared again while she was inside, she couldn’t fathom.

One thing kept her upright and steady; one thing kept her from sitting down on the wet and ragged carpet and crying with fear and exhaustion. That thing was hope, and Miles had given it to her despite all odds. She would find a way to give it back to him, as soon as it was possible to do so; she didn’t know how to handle gifts, and never had. Her life, almost lost for good in the rising flood, was spared, and she had to believe that there was only one reason for that twist of fate – anything else would be too much coincidence for her to trust.

She now had a chance to fix her mistakes, if she could manage to succeed.

The silence and the dark overwhelmed Sam’s delicate senses. She couldn’t tell the difference between having her eyes open or shut. Around her, the scent of rain, rust and ink began to smell more like blood than either of those three. If it was paranoia, speaking from her previous encounters with her neighbors and the vile creatures outside, she had no way of proving it, and the unknowing was far worse than any truth. The one classic fear she managed to avoid throughout her life was claustrophobia, and now it was doing its best to add itself to her list. The lack of visuals suggested that she had moved, somehow, out of the street. Even that assumption was dangerous. Perhaps the world had just gone dark for the final time instead. If the bloody remains of the creature she had slain lay just inches from her own body, she would never know.

She had killed it. There could be no denial, and no excuse would make the act any less of a sin. She wanted to cry, and apologize, and beg for forgiveness now that the deed was done, but her heart and mind refused to give in. Whatever twisted menace came upon her, it was not just another innocent life. It was an abomination, a filthy abstraction of the truth that governed nature, and it deserved to die. That was the only possible answer left. If another beast attacked her, it would die too. The rules, in her mind, had changed forever, and they were far simpler than any of her previous rules. For once, she thought perhaps less thinking might be beneficial to her continued survival.

With false bravado, she lifted her hand to begin exploring her surroundings, and failed. Her wrists were bound, and the rest of her as well. She lay prone, unable to move more than an inch or two in any direction. Her mouth, too, was bound, and the unforgettable taste of rancid leather became apparent as soon as she realized it. More straps, more confinement, more delay in the progression toward her freedom. What deranged mind demanded that she remain in this place? One step forward, two steps back, and the world around her was turning black. The words, to her mind, sounded funny, but she couldn’t laugh. Was she back in her room, again, then? Or had she visited some new hell, instead?

The silence around her ended with an echoing flurry of heavy pounding beats that made the slab beneath her tremble. It repeated itself again, followed by a third and fourth time. It took her until the end of the third to realize what it was: knocking, or pounding might have been more accurate. Someone, or something, wanted access to her, and it wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer. The vibrations echoing off the walls seemed to suggest a space no larger or smaller than her previous room; she was almost certain that she had somehow returned to her original location, strapped into her bed like the worst kind of mental patient. She couldn’t even deny that the treatment might very well be what she deserved.

The yelling began in the spaces between the thuds of the fourth pounding sequence. Sam did not need to think for long on its source. “Sam? Goddamn it, Sam, I know you’re in there, I saw you go in. Stop shitting me and open the door. I know you hate me, but I need to show you something, it’s important. I think it might be a way out.”

Out? Sam’s body tried to sit bolt upright, and it tried hard enough to make the bonds restraining her cut into her skin. If Miles had found a way out, she had to take the chance! Every wasted minute was one more that she didn’t have to suffer! Then, over the elation of renewed hope, came the realization of his other exclamations. He had seen Sam enter the room and shut the door. If this was her apartment, as she had thought, then the first creature she had encountered had broken the lock. If Miles couldn’t get in, then that implied a new, perhaps stronger, lock. Yet another way to hold her back and keep her from leaving! Whatever wanted her to remain had options at its disposal. Might it even know that Miles succeeded in finding a way past its defenses, and was acting to counter his newfound wisdom?

Sam felt a growl rising in her throat. She had never understood religion; she was unprepared to face the possibility that all of her countless flaws were deliberate acts by a careless deity. At the same time, she had begun to think of the twisting world around her as having a host; a puppeteer, playing at invisible strings that moved her where they pleased. It was too well planned, too detailed to just be a handful of coincidences. The marks of fear that could only trigger her unique psyche were too deliberate. That puppeteer was a sick man, a monumental bastard, and she had killed once, already. It was not so hard to think of doing it again, if it meant she could find her way back to reality. Be it a God of something wicked and vile, the God that lived in churches, or just a man or a beast, she could end it. She would end it. She would go home.

First, she had to get up. Miles, of course, held the key to her door, if her previous play for freedom was any indication. He had forgotten that, and instead assumed that she was capable of opening her own door. He said he saw her go in, but that was impossible – after her violent encounter in the street, she had lost consciousness, and regained it only after the door was already locked! What, then, had he seen? A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach reminded her of the other traumatic experience she had had while traversing the streets outside her apartment. There had indeed been a creature, but there had been someone else, too. Poe, and the unexplainable mirror image of herself. If the other Sam had brought her here and locked her inside, it would explain everything.

The fact remained that the real Sam couldn’t move. The strap serving as a gag prevented her from speaking. She couldn’t reach Miles, and couldn’t yell back for help. It was infuriating enough to be trapped there, like some kind of rat in an unwashed cage, but to know that help, and freedom, were just beyond her reach, made her crazy. On top of that, the knowledge that she would have no choice but to reach out for help beyond her own hands pushed the limits of what she believed she was capable of.

Miles had helped her by mistake the first time, and she had been willing to accept that. This time, it would be asking him to help her; asking him to go out of his way for her. Knowing he was interested in being more than just friends, knowing that his child might be forever lost, never mind the state of his own health, only added fuel to the fire. She wanted to break something; to scream, to destroy, to lash out as she had that day at her psychologist’s office. Something, or someone, had to pay for stranding her here, in the arms of people she could not – or would not – trust. She would rather have lived in the filth and decay forever than reached out for another’s aid. It was too much. It was beyond too much.

Fury took her, then, and she couldn’t quite remember what she did next until after it happened and the red-tinged haze of rage subsided. She set her jaw and clamped her teeth down like a wild thing possessed, twisting and grinding and tearing all at once. The taste was magnified five hundred times, and she could swear she tasted blood – her own, or something else’s, she could not be sure – but she bore down, relentless in her pursuit. She lacked the strength to tear free of her other bonds; it would have to be this one, if she wanted to go home. There was only one chance, and necessity, Sam was discovering, was the mother of insanity as well as invention. Her jaw ached with the pressure, and her mouth filled with unspeakable thick liquid, but she held on as if that strap were her last remaining hold on life. As far as she was concerned, it was.

Just when she thought she could hold on no longer, and her jaw muscles began to tremble and weaken, the strap snapped. In the span of a split second, it divided and sprang apart, tearing itself from her mouth and flailing across her face. She could feel the ends slap her, and the raised lines that formed in their wake, but that was a secondary concern. Her first concern was ridding herself of the unspeakable fluid in her mouth, which she did between gasps and chokes of fear and disgust.

“Sam? What’s going on in there? Are you all right? Look, just open the door, please, I’m begging you!” Miles had heard her. “I’ll get you out of this, just let me help you this once more. You’ll never have to see me again.”

Her voice cracked and failed twice before she got the words out. “I’m here.” She couldn’t bring herself to say his name. Even if she hadn’t been fighting nausea, she wouldn’t have managed. “I’m tied down.”

“Tied down?” Miles paused a moment. “Like before? How did you…” She imagined him shaking his head in confusion. “That’s funny, Sam. I could have sworn you locked yourself in there. I heard the key in the lock.” Another pause. “So, if you tied yourself down, maybe, I dunno, maybe you should untie yourself and get the hell out here?”

The irritation was clear in his voice. Sam had never liked angry people. Her temper flared in kind before she even meant it to. “Think what you want. The fact remains that I can’t get up. Either you go back and let me out, or we sit here until we die. Your choice. I can’t…” She choked on the threat, but managed to get it out anyway. “I can’t go out for drinks if I’m dead, you know.”

The sigh from behind the door was loud enough that she could hear it without trying. Miles didn’t respond; he stomped off into the distance, which was also loud enough for her to hear for the first few steps. Then, she was alone again in silence. Had he stormed off to let her die? She wouldn’t put it past him, after how nasty she’d been, and how she’d left him alone to rush after a foolish attempt at escape. She hadn’t even given a second thought to helping him get to Melissa. Yet, a part of her wanted more than anything to trust him; he hadn’t abandoned her, despite everything. If he loved her, he wouldn’t walk away and leave her to the creatures of the night. But maybe he didn’t love her. Maybe he just thought he did, like most of the boys that had tried to get into her pants over the years. The quiet ones never said no, or so they thought. It hurt her twice to have to hit them.

Without warning, lights from overhead flickered on, then sputtered and dimmed, almost fading again into full darkness. Sam flinched, expecting the worst; from somewhere down the hallway she heard a thud and a very coarse word shouted loud enough to wake every creature in the entire world. It seemed that Miles had hit the wrong lever. It was a useful mistake, however, and she took the opportunity to look around. As expected, she was in the twisted Nightmare variant of her apartment, and very little had changed. The things that did change, however, left her breathless.

The night sky outside the broken window was pitch black, as if a thunderhead had managed to press itself up against her window. It did not shed a single bit of light into the room, the way a normal night sky would. That was the minor problem. The major problem was at her feet, and growing more complicated with every minute that passed.

Beneath her disgusting bed lay a pool of dampening filth. The ink, rain and rust she had found so overwhelming had good reason to bother her; it was growing. No longer draining into mysterious grates that she could not find, it instead rose up the walls of her room. An inch, she guessed by sight, already covered the floor. She watched it run down the walls and into the pool in a kind of trance, unable to believe what she was seeing. If Miles didn’t hurry up and find the right lever to free her, she would find herself in over her head.

The thought of being body deep in the muck was horrific enough, but a new fear began to override that more obvious one. Sam couldn’t swim. She had refused all lessons as a child, fearing the chemicals, the other children, and the potential for said children adding their own “personal” brand of chemicals to the deal. Her mother was mortified at having to rescue her squalling child from a group of peers laughing and splashing away. Her father wasn’t surprised. She had wanted to learn, as an adult, but the fear still lingered, and the chance was never safe or good enough to take. Countless teachers and college professors had promised to go with her, for moral support, but each time she found some excuse not to go. She had not expected to need such skills in the defense of her own life! Even at the beach, she stayed well clear of the water.

“Miles?” Sam’s distracted mind allowed her to form the name for the first time out of necessity. “The water’s rising.”

Silence greeted her shout. As far down the hallway as he was, even her loudest scream might go unnoticed, and he was so focused on his task that her chances of success were even lower. Fearing the worst, Sam’s mind jumped to her one remaining secret weapon: the Stone of Promise. She might be able to use it to save her life, but there were so very many reasons why that was unlikely to work. She could, at least, try and see what happened. After all, she was the writer; why shouldn’t she be able to break the rules any time she pleased? If a figment of her imagination existed where it should not, then how much further down the path of madness did she have to be to assume she could affect it, somehow? It was a risk, a foolish one, but unless she took it, she might not survive long enough to try later.

Gritting her teeth, Sam realized that she would have to be able to reach the Stone to use it. Her back pocket was the single most impossible location on her body for her to reach. She had put her entire effort into freeing her mouth to ask Miles for aid, but she had not considered what she would do if he could not, or would not, help her. Now the weight of that decision threatened to crush her. Miles couldn’t be trusted; nothing in this forsaken world could! Wherever he was, he couldn’t save her now, and she lacked so much of what she needed. Her keys were in her backpack, which of course was across the room; she lacked the long nails that so many of her fellow students wore, and she was no contortionist, to be able to bend down and chew through her other bonds. There had to be some way to get to the Stone! Her previous faith in action over thought was starting to dwindle.

At last she seized on an idea, and began to make tiny shifts of her body up and down in her bonds. The Stone might come out of its own accord if she did things right; her bonds would serve as an aid in pressing the Stone up and out of her pocket. Never the athletic type, and forced into making awkward movements, she found herself tiring almost before she began. No matter how hard she tried, there was always something ready to push back; to slow or stop her every move.

As Sam’s body began to falter and fail beneath her struggle, a thought registered in her mind. Her attempt to get to the Stone was a good one, she still believed that very much. But there was a certain lack of weight in her back pocket that she had not noticed before; there was no lump pressing into the back of her butt the way there should have been as she lay on a hard surface. Instead, the same cold slab that stood in place of a bed sent its chill beneath her jeans and into her skin without interruption.

Her last hope was gone. Somewhere, during the trials and tribulations of her flight from the apartment, she had lost the Stone. Was it while she was fighting the creature? Or while she had been sick at the deaths of her neighbors? Or had she lost it in the room, in the midst of her thrashing about, and hadn’t noticed? A quick search of the floor put that thought to rest with ease, unless the Stone had already been covered by the running filth – which had risen another inch since her struggle began. Somehow, deep in her gut, she knew that it wasn’t just out of reach; she would have noticed if it had splashed to the floor below! That alone sealed her fate. Unless Miles returned, she would die a miserable death, drowned by the foul rising liquid that was anything but mere water.

Panic took her, then, as it had not before. Being faced with her own inevitable death was more than her overwrought mind could handle, but death by something she feared as much as drowning was beyond cruel. She would rather have been torn to pieces by creatures; at least the pain would end. Now, she would have to feel the air being wrenched from her lungs, feel her body begin to struggle for more that it had no chance at receiving, and at last, the moments where she did not have enough, and her body shutting down one cell at a time. It was better to scream for Miles, better to kill herself fighting her bonds, than it would be to suffer that kind of end.

Tears ran down her cheeks and fell away, joining the rising muck beneath her, as she began to scream for Miles at the top of her lungs. Whether she liked it or not, he was her last chance at salvation. There was no time to think of regrets; she could have been kinder, and she could have stayed to help him, and she could have done more than walked away when faced with the admission of his love, but none of that could be changed now. Maybe he would think she had a change of heart only to save her own skin. She deserved that. But she was a fool, and she had known it all her life; these were not the first mistakes she had made, nor would they be her last. She hated herself for them, wanted as few of them as possible, but they were as much a part of her as her name and her face. Death, to pay for them, was appropriate, but she wanted a chance to set things right. As young as she was, she had a whole lifetime to change, and grow, and learn – but only if she survived.

Between sobs of fear and terror, and screams of the name she had only earlier found too uncomfortable to say aloud, Sam found the words that she had wanted to say all along in a whisper too soft for any ears but her own.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The knowledge of the missing Stone continued to haunt her as she begged for her life. The very real possibility that she had taken it from herself was all the more reason to get free of this place as soon as possible, and get home to the few things and places that did make sense. Only then would the confusion and pain cease at last.

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.

The dark hallway that Sam saw from her bed, was indeed as she had seen it. It looked every bit like the hallway that connected the apartments in her building, but twisted by the Nightmare to be beyond comprehension.  The walls were even more ruddy with the foul stain of ink, rain and rust than her apartment had been; the stench was also stronger, and made her head begin to throb the minute it assaulted her senses.  The carpet that the maintenance crew worked so hard to keep clean every Wednesday appeared at first glance to be charred by an unseen fire; Sam heard it crunch beneath the weight of her boots.  The old fashioned lights that aided in traversing the hallways were out.  She should have moved into a “proper” apartment after all, she realized, not this bizarre refurbished hotel that opened onto hallways with low ceilings and empty walls, rather than outdoor breezeways.  Any other residence would have seen her outside already, giving her a pause for fresh air!

One thing was different, between the Nightmare replica of her apartment, and the hallway.  The pooling foulness from the walls ran into rusty metal grates that were set into the ruined carpet.  Those had never been there in the real world, she was certain.  What use could there be for drainage in an apartment complex?  Steeling her resolve, she stepped closer to one of the grates and looked down; it was to be one of her first mistakes since leaving her apartment.  Where any sewer would have had a bottom, after a fashion, this grate had none; the water, if it could be called that, ran, endless, into the blackness as if it had never existed at all.  Even her flashlight proved useless in penetrating the depths of the darkness.  She had moved into a second-floor apartment; how could there not be anything below her?  Her palms were sweating already.  Falling was yet another of her personal phobias.

The sound of heavy grinding gears that now seemed like a frequent if irregular occurrence, again penetrated the silence and darkness, interrupting her panic.  Sam took an involuntary step backward against her door, brandishing her keys in the same breath that she realized how foolish she must look with only her keys as a weapon.  This time, she was able to determine that the sound came from far ahead of her, down the hallway; far enough to not be an immediate threat, but closer than she might have hoped.  Could the creature be coming back at last?  If it was, had it forgiven her for the glasses incident?  She still had not determined why her eyesight was just as good without her glasses in this world; it was a thought that she had pushed to the back of her mind, in the face of more pressing questions.  The hallways were dark enough to challenge her sight without the aid of her flashlight, in any case.

The frequent shifts between the rush and calm of Sam’s heartbeat were beginning to put more stress on the headache that the stench of the air had triggered.  With an inward curse, she realized that stopping to take a painkiller, with an enemy so close to her position, seemed like a poor idea.  Even if the rustling of her backpack as she searched for what she needed didn’t alert anything to her presence, it would be a good half an hour before any relief set in; if anything attacked her before them, it would be far too late anyway.  Trying to push the pain behind her, she squared her shoulders and looked ahead into the dark hallway that surrounded her.  Her own apartment was at the end of the hallway; there was only one direction to go, and – of course – it was in the same direction as the grinding noises.  There was no choice; she would have to risk it.

Her slow, deliberate progress took her past the door of her nearest neighbor; a woman she didn’t know, but whom she had seen in passing a time or two before.  She was a typical woman in her mid-twenties, like Sam, but unlike Sam in that she was one of the “beautiful people.”  She was always having some party with her friends, giggling until the wee hours of the morning, long past the scheduled apartment quiet hours.  There was always at least one man seeking her favor; not all of them went home at the end of the day, Sam was certain.  The music was what really bothered Sam, when all was said and done; a constant stream of pulsating dance beats that left her wanting to break down the wall and scream for silence.

Silence was what came from the other side of the door, now.  As a creature of habit, such minor interruptions to her admittedly small view of the world seemed even more disturbing than they might have to anyone else.  Part of her considered knocking on the door in search of help, or to offer her own, but she knew that she would never do that, and she knew all the reasons why she wouldn’t.  The woman was too much like everyone else Sam had ever known; the ones who had everything handed to them and worked for nothing in life.  They were the kings and queens of the world, fit for nothing more than to rule over the lesser beings, like Sam.  All she could hope for, in the end, was that the woman still lived.  That much, at least, was the human thing to do. Somehow, even if the world was coming to an end, Sam knew beyond question that the woman would never want help from a lesser being, and she herself would die rather than beg at the feet of a queen.

In the moment it took Sam to step beyond the woman’s door, everything happened all at once.  The sound of a feminine scream split even the sound of the grinding gears in two, followed by a sudden slamming sound that made the closed door shudder.  Sam leapt away in horror, her heart frozen and paralyzed with fear, but the sounds continued.  She could hear the woman begging, pleading, whimpering like a small child, but there was no response from whomever shared the room with her.  The door shuddered twice more, and then the pitiful wailing stopped, punctuated by a scraping sound that ended in a dull thud.  Silence, except for the occasional gear sound, reigned again.

Sam could not catch her breath.  She was hyperventilating, choking, but she could not even begin to settle her mind.  There was no question of what had happened.  The only questions were who had done it, and why?  Was the murderer one of the woman’s many suitors, come to punish her for some foolish betrayal of his trust?  Or was it something more sinister?  Could Sam have done something?  Should Sam have done something?  She had no love for the woman, no responsibility for her, and no desire to involve herself in anyone else’s affairs; yet now her neighbor was dead, and Sam had not even lifted a finger in her defense.  She hadn’t known until it was too late; the thought did not ease her pain.

Deep and painful gouges in her arm led Sam to the realization that she had dug her nails into her own flesh to try to stop her panicking mind.  Pain was often her only recourse, when focusing on something else did not stop her panic attacks.  The doctors had not noticed the marks and scars that littered her body from previous abuses of that fact; she had not been interested in telling them of her failure to heal herself the way they wanted her to.  She took great pride in the fact that she only had to hurt herself twice, maybe three times a week, but the rest of the time, she could stop it with her mind.  It was enough, for her.

The gouges in her arm remained, even after she had relaxed her grip; at least she had not drawn blood.  Her writer’s mind offered a grim reminder of how many stories she’d read – and written – in which monsters could track and follow the scent of blood.  Focusing on this idle train of thought, divorced from the immediacy of the violent act that had just occurred, at last allowed her to pull herself together.  Her temples pounded a heavy rhythm that brought a sense of nausea to the forefront, but she forced it back in favor of moving on, past the door that had so upset her, and onward toward the freedom she had promised herself lay beyond.

If she had looked back, she might have noticed the thin trails of blood that crept out from under the abandoned door, joining the ruddy, pooling filth of the walls and disappearing into the nothingness below the metal grates.  If the monsters could smell blood, Sam would be the least of their concerns, now.

The next door down was empty and heavy with shadows; Sam could not have been more grateful for that fact.  The man that had lived there – well, more of a boy – was a college student, and shared the same habits that young male college students prized.  He seemed to be always drinking and carousing with his friends, but Sam had never seen him do anything beyond ogle the young women, herself included, in the apartment complex on his off time.  She had guessed that he was acting, in order to fit in with the expected norm, but had not bothered to inquire further about his behavior.  It was none of her business, and knowing would not change the fact that she had no desire to look outside her own apartment for companionship.  He had moved out without warning, or so the front office claimed; the payment they received in turn for his breaking lease was enough to pay for the renovation of several empty apartments.

Sam’s surprise, therefore, when a human voice echoed from behind the door, was greater than it might have been otherwise.  The voice grew louder, and Sam realized that it was the voice of the student after all.  Had he not left yet?  The tone of the voice grew desperate, and she focused in on its words.

“What’s wrong with me?  I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me, Dad.  I’ve been living a lie for the last twelve years, all because you’re too stupid to handle the truth!” A pause punctuated this angry outburst.  “Yeah, well, maybe you’d feel different if you hadn’t married Mom.  You didn’t even love her and you know it.”  Another pause.  “I’ll talk to you any way I please.  If you can’t accept that I was brave enough to tell you, after all these years, that I’m gay, then you’re not my father anymore, period.  I’ll live my own life.”

Shifting, uncomfortable with the frankness of the conversation, but at least vindicated by the knowledge that her guess had been accurate, Sam took a step past the door. As with the woman’s door before it, this door commanded her immediate attention just as soon as the thought of leaving entered her mind.  The voice changed in pitch, and rather than being laced with anger, it was laced with absolute terror.

“Dad?  What the hell?  Put that down.  I’m not your enemy, I just want…  Dad, stop!  Dad…   Please!  I’ll change my name, if you can’t take having a… fag carry on the family name.  Just don’t…  Don’t do this!”

Sam’s hand was on the doorknob, trembling, by sheer instinct rather than any personal goal of protection or aid.  She twisted it, preparing for the worst.  The door was locked.  Inevitability came, disguised as the sound of a bullet, fired from a heavy shotgun.  The accompanying scream did not echo as much as the sound of the bullet itself.  This time, the blood came quicker, creeping beneath the soles of Sam’s heavy boots.  It was enough to undo her sanity at last.

The tears Sam had been holding back burst forth in a flood far greater than the one that rushed down the walls.  She thrust herself away from the door and the blood, falling hard onto the disgusting carpet below.  Her fist was in her mouth, her teeth biting down hard on her knuckles in a blind attempt at inflicting pain; even pain failed, this time.  The weight of her backpack unbalanced her fall and toppled her over; she curled into a fetal position, her mind gasping out fifteen different forms of begging for help.  Nobody heard any of them, of course, except her.  The smell and sight of the blood brought her up to her knees again, retching; she could only thank herself for failing to eat a heavy dinner the night before.  Blood was high on her list of phobias, higher than she had realized until that moment.

She closed her eyes and began to breathe through her mouth, trying to shut out the terror that invaded her senses.  Relief, at least in some small part, was immediate.  She could not pretend that the scene before her had not played out; there was not enough imagination in her to cast aside that level of reality.  The most she could do was to cast her attention away from it, and on to other things.  The throbbing in her temples reached critical mass, and in a rare stroke of luck, she found that the pain was aiding in her ability to recover, rather than interrupting her attempts at thinking her way out of her panic.  She had no choice but to be grateful for her headaches at that moment; it was a thought she had never had before.

Reason began to creep through her inner chaos as she considered her position on the floor, and the unusual violence of her reaction to what had just happened.  The man was dead, that much seemed obvious; yet grief was the farthest thing from her mind.  Her own fear had paralyzed her, left her helpless, distraught and unable to spare any consideration for anyone or anything else.  It was far from the first time she had been disgusted with her own perceived weaknesses, but this time it seemed even more disgusting.  People always cared about others; people always grieved when lives were lost.  How could she fail at that?

A second realization entered her mind.  She had passed two doors; both had made her witness to death within moments of her passing. The Stone of Promise felt as if it were burning her flesh through her pocket; guilt washed over her like a tidal wave.  The Stone had the ability to work miracles, but at a cost that Sam was not yet prepared to pay.  She could not deny, however, the knowledge that she might have been able to save either of the departed souls, had she only possessed the courage and the will to do so.  That made her as good as a murderer; an accomplice, if not the hand that killed.  She could have denied fate; instead, she had become a slave to it, like the rest of the world.  Guilty though it made her feel, she could not fathom choosing any other path but the one she had chosen.

What would become of the next door?  It was almost too much to consider.  One last apartment lay between Sam and the stairwell that would take her to the first floor, and then onward to freedom.  The heaving in her gut had stopped, and Sam made an effort to drag herself to her feet.  She put a hand out to steady herself, in what had become near pitch blackness, and found it against one of the filthy, running walls; her mental state was such that she dismissed it without further panic.  It did not cling, or drip from her hands; it was as if she had never touched it at all.  Did it even exist, or was it a figment of her imagination?  Could this be a hallucination after all?  Her mind spun in exhaustion, desperate for the answers that she knew would only come with further exploration, yet terrified by the prospect of an answer that confirmed her worst fears: that this was reality, and there would be no going home.

Sam took slow, mechanical steps forward through the increasing darkness, still trembling.  If she could spare her last neighbor the pain of death by not walking by, she might have done it; but past his door lay everything she hoped to gain, and everything that would save her sanity if it were indeed the key to her freedom.  This neighbor, she knew, albeit very much in passing.  He had introduced himself; a move that no other neighbor ever had before.  She had never had trouble with names, having so few to remember; he was Miles, a freelance photographer.  His young daughter, Melissa, lived with him after a messy divorce.  She would not have known any of this, if Melissa had not mistaken her for her mommy and thrown her arms around her, breaking any hope she’d had of ignoring the new tenants.

Miles was the kind of person she’d read about in fairy tales.  He was kind, thoughtful, and smart.  He loved his daughter with every breath in his body, that much was evident with every move he made.  He was lonely; to look in his eyes was to know the bitterness and grief he felt over losing his wife.  It was too much to bear for Sam, who had to look down and away from his naked need for companionship.  In another life, she might have been the perfect match for him, and the perfect match for his young daughter.  As it stood, however, she had both a grudging respect and a deep seated fear of them both.  They had broken through her barrier and made her aware of them like nobody else had; but resentment had crept in with the surprise and admiration of that fact.  Nobody got to Sam, not even her own parents.

Sam’s arrival at Miles’ door was, if anything, more stunning than either of the previous two doors she had faced, and in a much more immediate way.  There was no abnormal silence; no passing by as if nothing had ever happened.  Instead, Sam’s flashlight fell upon a pair of human feet in the hallway up ahead.  Her beam shot upward to reveal Miles himself, dripping blood into small puddles on the floor.  His face was a mask of frustration and anguish as he glowered, helpless at his door; it was not a door at all, anymore.  Where a door should have been, a giant panel filled with levers, switches and gears loomed large from floor to ceiling.  Sam could see the edges of a door behind the monstrous panel still; could one of those endless gadgets be the key to getting inside?

Melissa was nowhere to be seen.  A lump found its way into her throat at the memory of the little girl who had thrown herself at Sam’s legs with a need that far outstripped any that Sam had ever known before.  Her own loss of Poe was grievous enough, but if anything had happened to that beautiful child…  She couldn’t finish the thought.  Whatever sick, twisted thing had happened, it could not have twisted Melissa with it; she refused to accept it.

Miles noticed her, Sam was certain, but he was too focused on the task before him to address her at first.  Using the opportunity to benefit from her light, he pulled a lever at what seemed to be random, producing the low grinding sound that Sam had been hearing since her exit from her apartment.  When the sound failed to affect his door in any way, he slammed his fist against the panel in a fury, succeeding only in hurting his fist.  Cursing, he looked up at Sam at last; something almost approaching a smile crept to his face.  This act alone convinced Sam of the severity of his panic; Miles never missed the opportunity to smile at her, even when she did her best to ignore him.  When he spoke, his voice was harsh, as if he had been yelling or screaming for too long at once.

“So I’m not the only one here, after all.  I’m sorry to see it’s you, Sam.  I hoped you’d be free of… this.”

Sam studied the repulsive walls, unable to meet his gaze any more than usual, and unable to look at the bloody spots on the carpet.  He was always so kind, so chivalrous to her; he only wanted to protect her, and to find what mysteries lay inside her mind.  Indeed, in another life…  but in this one, she was terrified at the thought that he might, someday, succeed.  “What’s happening, Miles? What is this?”  It was all she could manage to say.

He laughed, but the laugh was a bitter one.  “Damned if I know.  I left to get Mel’s birthday cake, it’s her eighth today.  I was driving home and something just… twisted.  I don’t remember what happened, but I woke up with my car wrecked, the cake trashed and everything like… this.”  His eyes were unfocused as he relived the day’s events in his mind.  “I can’t get to her, Sam, I left her inside, sleeping, and now…”  His voice broke.  “I don’t know what to do…  I don’t even know if she’s…”  He couldn’t finish the thought any more than Sam herself could.

A heavy silence fell as Sam fought and failed to find something to say that would ease Miles’ suffering. At last, Miles sighed, sitting down hard in the middle of several of his own blood stains.  His eyes shifted back into focus as he forced his mind onto a different topic.   “There are things out here, Sam.  Things that I can’t even describe to you.  I fought them when they attacked, but… they’re not human.  They’re stronger, faster…”

“They attacked you?”  Sam frowned.  “There was something in my room.  It broke my glasses and then left without hurting me.  I was tied down, but something freed me.”

“Be grateful for small favors.  They don’t seem to like me, much.  I’m not sure why, I wasn’t the aggressor the first time.”  After a moment of thought, he added, “I thought you looked different.  Can you see okay?  Maybe you’d better stay with me.  I’m not the best fighter, but…”  He gestured to something in his right hand, and Sam noticed that he carried a pistol for the first time.  “It was my father’s.  I keep it where Melissa can’t find it.  Just in case, you know.”  He turned away from Sam, unable to look at her.  “It’s bad enough that I left Mel behind… I’d rather know you’re safe, at least.”

He winced as one of his many wounds began to bleed anew, and Sam tore her own gaze away from him, unable to tolerate the blood.  The Stone of Promise again ached in the back of her pocket, pulling at her mind, demanding that she use it to restore Miles to safety again.  He was only the best kind of man; a man who loved his daughter and who looked out for those who had no way to look out for themselves.  Who else could be more deserving of the power she had at her disposal?  Despite that knowledge, she couldn’t manage to bring herself to use it.  The feeling of regret, of guilt and shame, grew tenfold in her heart.  If not Miles, then who?  If not for Melissa, then who?

“Sam?”  Miles was worried by her brooding silence.  He struggled to his feet, reaching a gentle hand out to grasp her shoulder.  “I know you’re shy, it’s okay, you don’t have to be afraid.  I’ll protect both of us.  I don’t know you well, but…  I’ve always wanted to know you better.  I just didn’t want to upset you by asking, before.”

Her pulse raced at his touch, but not in the way that it should have.  Another panic attack gripped her, and she twisted away from his outstretched hand as if it had burned her.  His face fell almost at the same time that she backed away from him, her posture not unlike a cat with its back arched in defiance of some sudden enemy.  “I don’t need protection.  I’m going to get out of here.  I can’t take this anymore.  I have to find Poe and then I’m getting out of here.  I can’t help you.  I can’t help anyone.  Damn it, don’t look at me that way!”

Her last words were almost a scream.  She could see that she’d hurt him by refusing his help, but the hope that he’d held was more than just a romantic one.  She was leaving him to seek his needle in a haystack alone; leaving him, injured, to fend for himself against the creatures that infested the Nightmare.  Killing him might have been kinder.  He had found the only other living human being in this damned place, and he was lucky enough to have it be one of the people he had reason to care for, and she was abandoning him. At last it occurred to her that he had probably been the one to free her as well, not the creature as she had assumed; one of his levers must have done the trick.

The hurt in Miles’ face solidified into quiet anger before she had a chance to run.  “Sorry.  If you get out, tell my boss I’ll be a few decades late, all right?”  The dead calm of acceptance in his voice hurt her far more than any fear or any weapon ever could.  He was resigned to finding the right lever, or greet death in trying.  “Don’t worry about me.  I can handle myself too, you know.”  From his wounds, she could tell he was lying.

Unable to muster up any kind of defense or apology, Sam fled past his door with a shudder, anticipating the horror she expected would follow.  How could she abandon him to the same fate as her other neighbors?  If Hell existed, she would be guaranteed a place; if this was not already Hell.

Behind her, instead of a scream, she heard Miles clear his throat.  “Sam, wait.  Please.”

For once, fighting her instincts, she stopped.  Even if she was to abandon Miles, she could not deny him his final words.  To do so would be to dishonor him beyond her other neighbors, and that she was not willing to do for any reason.  She waited as he took a deep breath, then spoke.  “Just… don’t die, all right?  Even if you don’t give a damn about me or Melissa… don’t die.”  He kicked something hard in Sam’s direction; it was a second pistol.  “I’d like to know someone got out of this hellhole alive.”

With trembling hands, Sam bent to pick up the pistol.  She had no idea how to shoot or aim; she’d never handled a firearm before, and had never had reason to assume she would need to.  Still, how hard could it be to pull a trigger, in the face of something wicked?  She could not deny the effectiveness of the pistol over her own car keys.

As she studied it, turning it over like a live wire in her hands, Miles shook his head.  “I’ll do you one last favor.  I figured out which of these levers goes to the main door.  I can get you outside, but you need to know that it’s all the same out there.  The creatures are out there.  The world’s twisted just the same.  I don’t know how you plan to get free of all this, but don’t be a fool.  If you change your mind, I’ll be here.  Until I find Melissa, I’ll be here.  I don’t care how long it takes.”

He paused, hesitating, as if wanting to say more, but uncertain of what to say.  At last he decided to speak; Sam guessed that he didn’t expect to live long enough to have another chance.  “You’re not as strong as you think you are, Sam.  None of us are.  We all need someone to share our struggles with.  Life’s not worth living, alone.  Maybe this hell is our punishment for trying.  Stupid, I know, but I wonder.”  He sighed.  “If we get out of this…  don’t think this is the last time I’ll ask you.  You can run as long as you like, but I know there’s more to you than this.  You’re just too damned scared to show it.”

Sam came to two realizations as he spoke.  The first was that if the Stone of Promise had come to Miles’ hands and not her own, he would have used it ten times over.  He wasn’t selfish like she was.  Some heroine she was turning out to be.  The second realization came at his description of the outside world.  The freedom she had promised herself; the normalcy she had assumed lay outside her apartment window, was all just a lie.  She wouldn’t be free of anything.  Each step she took led her closer to yet another world beyond imagining.

With one last look back at Miles, Sam fled to the stairwell and descended to the first floor of the apartment complex.  Miles’ back was already to her by the time she disappeared, the grinding sounds renewed in earnest.  Despite her newfound knowledge of what lay outside the apartment complex, she couldn’t wait to be free of the sounds, and of Miles, and of all the confusion twisting inside her mind.  For the first time since she’d come into the Nightmare, she was more afraid of herself than what might happen next.

Water should never be red.  That was the first thought Sam had, after reaching her bathroom door.  The same obsession that led her to keep that door closed, also led her to keep the sanctuary within spotless; white gloves were not enough to satisfy her paranoia, nor would they ever be.  She could not stand for anything less than absolute perfection; the Nightmare replica was as precise in mangling her sense of normalcy as she was in maintaining it.

The walls ran with the same revolting mixture that had invaded her apartment.  She had not yet decided whether touching it would make her ill as well as insane.  The toilet, she would not approach for any reason.  The stench alone was enough to make her insides heave and her eyes water.  She did not need to get any closer to see the filth that had scoured the bowl into an unrecognizable sin; the water was red and opaque.  Her perfect sink was plugged with a vile tangle of what appeared to be thorn-covered vines and hair, too long and matted to be her own.  That left only one possible hope in her mind; could the shower still be sacred?

It had been fifteen minutes, by her guess, since she’d frozen in place, debating in endless cycles with herself over whether to risk pulling back the shower curtain and checking.  There was nothing she wanted more than a shower, unless it was to wake up from this world that she now called the Nightmare, but she knew better than to hope for that.  If the toilet was any indication, it was all but guaranteed that there would be no clean water to wash with.  From the brief glimpses of the outside hallway she had seen through her door, it seemed foolish to assume she could find any beyond her apartment, either.  A shower, then, was out of the question.  Dismissing the possibility seemed wiser, to Sam’s mind, than hoping against the Nightmare’s will.

One thing, at least, seemed certain.  In order to venture out beyond the doorstep of her apartment, she was going to need to prepare herself.  Her nightgown, once a beautiful but far more sturdy garment, was not going to protect her from anything but the shame of going naked into a world that was both alien and familiar at once.  The chill in the air demanded attention as well; she would freeze, if given too long to wander without a source of warmth.  Fall was giving way to winter, and in her own world, she had been all too eager to engage the dial of her heater and bask in its welcoming glow, but the Nightmare offered no such promises of safety and warmth.  There wasn’t even a dial in the place where it belonged.

Beyond her clothing, there were necessities that were only beginning to register in her mind; food, water, shelter and protection were never things she had to concern herself with beyond the simple matter of having a home to provide them all.  Her obsessive mind grasped the detailed pattern of needs well, but the fear of forgetting something necessary to her survival choked her with frigid hands of ice, making her slow and hesitant to act.  Awareness of the need for a healthy amount of haste at last drove her onward; if the creature returned and found her mobile, who knew what might happen?

Trying to refocus on the fractured shopping list that began to emerge in her mind, Sam shut the door to her bathroom with a firmer hand than usual and approached her closet, wariness in every step.  Her journey had to begin there; the cold was interrupting her attention at least as much as her own fear of failure.  Reaching for the handle of the closet shattered her resolve again, as the creative part of her mind supplied old childhood fears of monsters and demons, lying in wait for an unsuspecting child to fling open the doors and unleash their evil into the world.  It had taken her years to learn to doubt them, far longer than any other child she had ever known; perhaps she hadn’t learned, after all.  It was not a fear she still possessed in the normal world, she knew; it was the knowledge that this Nightmare seemed to bring to life things that she had long since buried, or only imagined.  If the Stone was real, what else might be real?  What dreams had merged with reality?

Several minutes passed, with Sam caught between impatience and a complete unwillingness to see what fresh horrors the Nightmare had designed for her.  The chill grew colder, as if beckoning her forward; she both resisted the call and longed for it.  She had always been a maze of contradictions, a murky puddle of fears and regrets.  In one breath she would flee her fears, and in the next she would turn, regretting the failure to face them.  The doctors had taught her, during panic attacks, to focus inward, to seek the patterns and obsessions that seemed so natural to her; they were ways of breaking her mind away from what paralyzed it.  It worked, most of the time, but Sam couldn’t help wondering how many of her obsessions and patterns were created from fear in the first place.  How long would it be before her inner mind no longer supplied an escape from itself?

As with most of her decisions, Sam made hers suddenly, as if to free herself as fast as possible from the need to decide.  A false sense of bravery, underlaid with thoughts of just getting it over with, at last won out.   Grasping the handle with sweaty, trembling palms, she let out a loud shout and pulled as hard as she could.  The door, unprepared for Sam’s adrenaline-laced strength, flew open and slammed hard against the adjacent wall, shattering the fragile hinges.  At least she would never have to fear opening it again!  Her gaze snapped away from the ruined door and toward her clothes, her mind attempting to prepare her for the possibility of further stress against her already fragile sanity.

More frightening than anything she had feared to find, was the absence of anything unnatural.  Whatever had twisted the Nightmare into being had skipped over the monsters that lived in her mind, this time.  She had never been a clothes horse, preferring simple overlarge hand-me-downs from her mother over the years.  Holidays were always good excuses to force Sam to shop, as far as her relatives were concerned.  Perhaps that was why there was no terror to be found in the closet, Sam thought.  She didn’t care enough about it in the first place.  It was not one of her self-imposed sanctuaries; a place where she felt safe enough to let all her fears and worries go.  The Nightmare had already tainted those, it seemed.  With a sigh and an inward curse, she began to sort through her meager rack of clothing.

The quickest garment that came to her hands turned out to be a fancier pair of dark jeans that fit her too well for her liking. Her mother had claimed they would “bring out her assets,” but Sam had not been keen on continuing that discussion.  It always led to boyfriends and marriage, and her lack of either.  For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that denim was sturdy, and that would indeed be an asset in this situation!  Recalling that most hikers and explorers dressed in layers, her next move went toward a pair of simple layered tank tops and a light leather jacket.  Her favorite sturdy but ugly boots would protect her feet well.  A flash of sudden inspiration led her to grab careless handfuls of the foolish decorative scarves that her mother had bullied her into buying.  They would serve well as bandages.  Her mother would just have to kill her – if she survived.

A low, guttural grinding sound cut into the oppressive silence just as Sam pulled her jacket on, challenging the nerve that she had begun to build up since defeating the closet.  The noise continued for a moment or two before fading into nothingness again.  What had the monster done, this time?  The sound was both like and unlike the one that had accompanied her freedom from her bed.  It was distant, at least, which reassured Sam to a small extent that the creature was not returning anytime soon.  Thankful for small favors, she took a deep breath and abandoned the closet, forging ahead once again into the Nightmare replica of her apartment.  She still had preparations to make.

She had left the Stone of Promise on her small coffee table, unwilling to handle it more than was strictly necessary.  Picking it up again with only a slight hesitation, she shoved it into one of the back pockets of her jeans.  Knowing its power, she could not plan to use it often; but if forced, she would need it close at hand.  Determining that her other needs would require assistance to carry them, she managed to dive beneath the couch to retrieve her old college backpack.  Since she had not bothered to use it often, preferring the quiet solitude of the shadowed spots on campus to the busy intrusion of classrooms, it was in near perfect condition.  Perhaps there had been some point to her attendance after all!

A studious frown crept onto Sam’s face as she tore around the room in a crazed sort of inner focus.  The items on her fragmented list were set in stone, but now was her time to guess, and second guess, herself on what the list contained.  How could she know what would be of use to her in this Nightmare?  She didn’t even know how long she would be forced to endure it, much less what sort of preparation enduring it would require.  She had played the high school games about what items she would take to a deserted island, but those were never about survival; those were about prestige, and what expensive gadgets a person had fallen in love with that week.  This time, forgetting something would kill her.  The colleges all purported to teach “life skills,” but now she knew that was an equal amount of bullshit to her own psychology studies.  The only grim humor she could find in the situation lay in the fact that any other girl she knew would have long since died from fright.

Her flashlight, and the largest pack of batteries she owned, came first.  Beyond her window, she could see that the day outside was covered in a thick array of threatening clouds; she would need all the help she could find in navigating the grim and fading light that the Nightmare provided.  Her wallet was a safe second assumption, though she had to wonder how useful her credit card or cash would be in this world.  If nothing else, at least she knew that if she died, someone could find her identification, and inform her family – assuming, of course, that anyone human even existed here.

Painkillers, the kind she took for her frequent headaches, came next.  If her headaches were not reason enough to pack them at once, her disposition toward accidents and clumsiness sealed the deal.  Following that thought to its logical conclusion, an empty notebook and pen joined the haphazard pile in her backpack.  They would be useful in the event that she needed to take notes on something, but they would be far more important if she got lost.  She had not spent much time beyond her apartment and its immediate vicinity; she would have to map herself through, or risk being forever unreachable in this world or any other.

Though she couldn’t fathom eating in such a world, she knew better than to leave the apartment without raiding the cupboard for nonperishables and water bottles.  The sight of clean water brought her almost to tears, but her focus was too intense to allow them to fall.  Stale granola bars and dried fruit would have to suffice, for the foreseeable future.  She pushed back a longing for a warm, fresh vegetarian pizza with a shudder; now was not the time for wishful thinking!  More grim humor invaded her mind; what would happen if she tried to order a pizza here?  A laugh, dangerous and trembling with nerves, escaped her before she could think about the possibility of detection.  She did not laugh again.

One last survey of the room and the contents of her backpack alerted Sam to the fact that she had failed to address the most important aspect of her flight; a means of defense.  She had prepared herself to be harmed, but not for the very distinct possibility of needing to harm someone – or something – else.  The thought was almost too much; how could she harm another living creature, even in self defense?  Despite her misgivings, she could not deny that necessity dictated the inclusion of a weapon in her plans.  Searching for further justification, she reminded herself that weapons were not just used to kill; they might get her through other obstacles as well.  She would never kill, not if she could help it.  Nothing was worth the careless destruction of life.  She chose not to think too long on whether un-life shared the same distinction.

A quick search around the apartment produced nothing that Sam could even begin to visualize as a weapon.  She was a girl, first and foremost; fuzzy, soft things were her element, not sharp or blunt objects.  She had done her best to avoid them, if for no other reason than her own inability to avoid injuring herself on them.  A knife from the kitchen would have been the classic move to make; even that would not serve.  She had yet to buy her own; her previous dormitory residence had outlawed such things for safety purposes.  Just as frustration and panic began to set in, the beam of her flashlight passed over something that glistened; her car keys.  She would have had to take them anyway, knowing that her car was perhaps the safest place she could be, but she could always use them to cut and scrape in the worst scenarios, as well.  They wouldn’t be much in a fight, but she would have to make do.

Keys in hand, Sam at last came to the realization that she was as prepared as she would ever be to leave the apartment.  Fear of what lay beyond clawed at her heart, but it could not win this time; not with the knowledge that outside lay her only potential chance for rescue.  Hoisting her backpack onto her shoulders, she took a deep breath to steady her nerves.  Where she intended to go, she wasn’t certain.  Running without any sort of aim would be, at best, foolish.  What safe haven could there be in such a place?  Where could she go for answers?  If she tried to locate the police, they would laugh.  If she tried to locate her doctors, they would have her institutionalized.  Perhaps that was the best recourse, but the idea of spending the rest of her life in a hospital left her breathless; they would never let a cat live with her in a hospital.  The thought was a mistake before it even crossed her mind.

Despite her frantic searching of the apartment, Poe had not emerged.  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been trying to promise herself the best; that he was hiding, unwilling to brave the troubling world he’d come to.  He was, after all, as much a creature of habit as Sam herself was.  However, it was unlike him to ignore her calls and searches, even at his most distressed.  That left only three conclusions, none of which Sam wanted to think about very hard.  The first; he had not come to this world in the first place, and still lazed about her real apartment, wondering where she had gone.  The second; he had run when the creature opened her door, and now wandered the Nightmare alone.  The last; he was no longer alive, in this world or any other.  It was foolish of her not to prepare for the worst.

Her teeth ground together and her fists clenched into tight balls, Sam rounded on the apartment door with a ferocity she did not often possess.  Poe was, if only a cat, her sole friend and companion in the world.  Whatever journey awaited her beyond the door of the apartment; an apartment that was becoming impossible to tolerate any longer, it would be with an eye toward finding Poe, as well as finding her way home.  Forgetting him, or dismissing him as capable of his own self preservation, offended her heart and soul as much as anything that she had yet seen in the Nightmare.  It was time to move on, to be sure; but every step would bring her one step closer to Poe, and to her freedom.  It had to.

As her hand reached for the dilapidated doorknob, Sam’s mind began to work its way back to a dull and methodical focus.  So far, she had been confronted with concepts outside the very expectations and assumptions of man; what right had she to assume that her most basic sources of assistance would be available to her, anyway?  Whatever this world was, it was a challenge for her; a challenge to survive, and to make it to safety.  Assuming anything outside of her immediate human needs and necessities would see her to an early death.  Running to the police, or to the hospital, would have to wait; the first task lay in escape to the outside.  Nothing else would matter until she’d made it that far.

With all the strength she could muster, Sam pushed open the door and stepped beyond her apartment’s threshold, gazing outward into the Nightmare for the first time.

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.

It had been too long since her last time writing, and she knew it.  What began as a labor of love, the story she had to tell before it consumed her, had become little more than a waking nightmare.  The words that spilled forth from her pen had lost their luster, their command, over time.  She had been able to leave her audience hanging, shivering, begging, just a year ago; now, she was the one in need of more.  Her reasons for taking a break were varied and many, but the more she allowed them to echo in her mind, the more they began to sound like bitter excuses wrapped up in self-abhorration.  She knew that somewhere, deep within, lay the soul of a writer… but that soul seemed so very far away; a ghost at her fingertips, intangible and yet necessary to her survival.

Endings had never been her strong suit.  She always began with the best of intentions, the best of ideas, but somewhere in the middle, those ideas stuttered, ground to a halt.  That which had seemed in earnest began to feel stilted and painful; that which had seemed frivolous began to feel deadly serious, and perhaps became the sole reason for the story’s existence.  She had grown jaded, unable to trust herself with even the most simple of projects, lest her inability to push forward destroy everything she had worked so hard for.  In the process, she had forgotten how to write, or so she told herself.  It was a tale that was not difficult to believe, after she had listened to it more than once.

Tonight, she had failed for the final time to complete her novel.  She had battled the demons and devils and emerged without a scrap of imagination, originality, or hope for the restoration of either.  The story, she told herself, just could not be finished, and she was a damn fool–a jobless, aimless fool–for thinking she could touch the world with her pen.  It was time to go out and beg for absolution in the form of a respectable paid salary from the nearest fast food dive; a horror different, but not far from, the ones she explored in her writing.  Demons and devils would eat at places like that, she was certain.

Looking up from the protective circle of her own arms, Sam found the strength to sigh, shove back her chair and stand.  The room was dark; she always forgot to turn on the lights when she was going to write in the evenings, and by the time she noticed, there was no hope of finding the switch without at least one stubbed toe.  The only beacon in the room was her clock in the distance, spelling out numbers in tiny dashes of green light–the night had passed and made its way into the early hours of the morning instead.  Her concentration had been such that she had failed to feel exhaustion setting in; it did so in a rush.

Finding the corner of her desk by touch, Sam pressed herself against the wall of her apartment as an anchor, tripping only once over the helpless remains of her notebook.  She was accident-prone by birth, or so most said; her mother still insisted that she just hadn’t grown into herself yet.  At just shy of six feet in height, Sam didn’t want to think about growing any further than she already had.  As if to prove her clumsiness, something hard and immovable slammed into her shin, leaving her with tears in her eyes and several of the less polite words in her vocabulary on her lips.  How she could fail to remember the location of her own bed every night was beyond her ability to fathom.

As she began to make her way around the bed’s edge, a loud and angry howl split the darkness in two and sent shivers up her spine.  As a writer of horror fiction, sounds played a unique role in undermining her personal psyche, and this one was no exception.  Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart skipped a beat–this particular noise was not, as so many often were, confined to the inside of her mind.  Stopping her progress around the edge of the bed, she froze in place and waited, listening.  If there was one thing she had learned over the years, it was that silence could send messages that sound never could.

A rustle in the dark filled the pause, and Sam had only a moment to clench her fists in preparation for an attack, before something warm and hairy brushed past her ankle.  A scream died on her lips when she realized that only one demon would be anywhere near her own bed.

“Don’t do that, Poe. Not tonight.”

At last finding her bed, and the table lamp nearby, Sam flicked the switch, casting shadows across the floor and onto her own personal demon; a large black ball of fuzz that could only be called a cat if one knew where to look for ears and a tail.  She’d named him after Edgar Allen Poe, of course, not the least bit because of his blackness, and his ability to perch in strange places, giving off malevolent and eerie vibes–when he wasn’t winding his way around her ankles in search of food or companionship.  Tonight, she had stepped on his tail in her wanderings, judging by the indignant look on his feline face and the way his tail gingerly flipped away from her general direction.

“Maybe you should look out for me, huh, Poe? You’re the one that can see in the dark, you know.”  Sam couldn’t help but chuckle as she sat on the edge of the bed.  The cat, as much as he often provided more trials than actual companionship, was her best friend, and her only confidant in life.  It was easier to talk to a cat than to people, she’d found.  People asked such awful questions, questions that made her feel like a foolish child by comparison.  They always wanted to know where she worked, what she did for a “real” job, who she was dating, how her family was.  Life was complicated enough without people and questions in it.

Poe leapt up next to Sam, purring as if his pride had never been injured.  When he failed to attract her undivided attention, he leapt back down from the bed and made his way over to the fallen notebook against the wall.  She watched, only half seeing him, as he stretched out a paw toward it.  It wasn’t long before he was wrapped around her failure, his teeth lodged firmly in the spine and his back feet kicking without mercy at the fluttering pages.  It was a fitting punishment, she thought with a wry grin.

“I don’t suppose you have any ideas, then? I’ve chewed on that stuff for days and it didn’t do me any good.”

Poe looked at her, his feet, his head and the notebook all pointing in opposing directions.  It was the answer he always gave to complicated questions.

“Fine, don’t tell me.  It’s too late now, anyway.”  Sam removed her glasses and set them next to her lamp.  The room appeared even darker and blurrier with her glasses off, which only encouraged her to close her eyes and rest.  It wasn’t long before she found a comfortable spot beneath her blankets–one of the only places she felt safe and relaxed.  “I’m never writing again, you know.  That’ll be good for you, huh? You’ll have lots more time to push your high and mighty self into my lap.”

Poe’s response involved the experimental destruction of a notebook page, removing the torn segment and carrying it around in his mouth for further contemplation.  While good for comic relief, Poe never managed to solve any of her problems, real or imagined.  He never understood her fear of people, and always rushed to the door when the doorbell rang, or pounced on the phone when it cut into her thoughts.  He didn’t understand why she waited until the footsteps were gone before opening the door to see if anything remained.  He didn’t understand the way her heart pounded at the slightest suggestion of human companionship.  He didn’t understand the panic attacks that gripped her when she returned from the grocery store or the pharmacy, on those rare times that she ventured out of the apartment.  All he knew was that she stayed home a lot and wrote, and that was just fine by him.

As a child, her parents had done their best to cure her of her “shyness,” sending her to this summer camp or that church function, but it had never subsided in any way over the years.  She had never fit in with the kids, never belonged, and she never would, if they had anything to say about it–they always did.  Their taunts and jeers still echoed in her mind, a constant reminder of why she would never trust them or anyone like them ever again.  She had forced herself into college for the promise of education and knowledge; in the end, her bachelor’s degree in psychology had not taught her a thing about how to deal with the people she so despised.  Left with no further options, she had turned to her then-diary, imagining all the terrible things that she would do to them, if given the chance.  These fantasies, combined with years of watching others in an attempt to understand them, led to the brain-child she had nurtured for the past three years–and that now lay helpless on the floor.

Though her fear of people would not permit her to remain long in their company, she had always wanted to tell her story to the world; to expose the weaknesses that lay in every human, not just herself, and make them just as vulnerable as she was.  It was a point of pride, to write things that left the giggling cheerleaders breathless and the football players in the arms of their mothers.  It was a way of trying to reach out to those in her place as well; a promise that those who lived in fear of others were not alone, and could still make something of their lives.
However, without an end to her story, none of that would ever happen, and her faith in her own ability to become more than just her own fears was starting to wane.  The weight of her failure lay heavy on her heart and mind, and try though she might to console herself, the darkness was impossible to banish.  Even the blackness of Poe’s fur could not compare to the blackness in her soul.  The only thing worse than an empty page, to Sam’s mind, was a stack of hundreds of pages of promise with an irredeemable flaw lurking just at the end.

Snapping off the light again, Sam took a deep breath.  It would be a bad night for sleeping, as confused and angry as her mind was, but without sleep, she would be even less inclined to go out and search for a job in the morning.  It wasn’t long before Poe joined her, settling down in the middle of her blanket-covered chest; his usual place.  However, something paper-like and wet around the edges landed squarely on her face, distracting her from sleep more than anything else had that evening.

“What is it this time, Poe?”

She snapped the light back on and removed Poe’s gift with suspicious care.  As she had expected, Poe had delivered the scrap of paper that he had dissected from her notebook.  Just as her hand was about to close around it, forming it into a tight wad, she froze in place.  The words on the scrap were still legible, despite her attempts to destroy it and Poe’s violence toward paper in general.

In the sloppy cursive scrawl that indicated her own note-taking, the scrap read:

“sleep and die”

“Very funny, Poe.” Sam’s hand closed at last, and she tossed the scrap of wadded paper into the nearby trash can, already full of similar helpless wads of paper, the kind that Poe best liked to chase.  “If only I could give up on all of this, I would.”

It was not a happy thought to fall asleep on, but then, most of Sam’s thoughts were anything but happy.