by Narrator » Fri Mar 09, 2018 3:21 am
The night that follows is restless. Sam just can't seem to settle down enough to really get some deep sleep. Even when she does doze off it's fitful; full of vague and confusing dreams. There's a constant feeling of being expected to do something only to be faced with an endless field of impossible puzzle-pieces that just won't fit together and even if they did there's just too many of them to satisfy the dread of not being able to finish the task set before her no matter how much she hurries and tries and fails and stumbles. The pieces all shift and shuffle, taking on faces, memories, impressions. Scenes of violence interspersed with the occasional reprieve of spotting a calm of pleasant scene. Finally one of them seems to open up around her, swallowing her whole as she falls through dark hallways of a familiar, yet unsettlingly different house. She recognizes it as the hallway between her room back home and her sister's, stretched and distorted like only dreams manage to turn something familiar into strangeness without ever losing what makes it resonate in the first place.
But worst of all, she knows this setting, this nightmare. Knows the feeling of hurrying down the hall full of worry and concern only to have any hope for relief dashed when she opens the door and is greeted with an even louder scream from her sister. And she can't make it stop because she can't put herself back together enough, the primal stuff of nightmares not letting her and only reinforcing itself. Eventually she'd fought it back down, somehow, but now she can feel the fear tear into her. The monstrous shape beginning to take hold in her thoughts instead of vice versa. Claws are made for tearing. Thick strands of sinewy muscles so easily crush the door-knob. What's about to happen is so much easier to bear if you just let yourself become the stuff of nightmares...
Before the horrible scene can play out Sam mercifully wakes with a start, her skin roiling just under the surface.