Rob
Pew Pew Pew
Screams From Before
1035 Words
1035 Words
Takes place after:
Prisoner
“Mikhael!” Lina called out in a mixture of desperation and anger as her chains dug themselves further and further into her skin. It had been well over a week now since she’d last heard from the demon that kept her captive in the abyss of her own psyche, and for some reason the quiet was slowly getting to her.
It didn’t really help either that her voice was becoming hoarse, because she had been screaming and shouting the demon’s name so much. She didn’t think the day would come where she would miss having the man’s torturous ways, but this ridiculous draught of no interaction with anything whatsoever was definitely not helping her sanity one bit.
“Mikhael!!” she yelled out again, but again there was no response.
Her eyes, no longer capable of watering it seemed, slowly drifted off to a place that was supposed to bring the gravedigger rest, but instead only served as nightmare fuel to an already excruciating experience. She had trouble keeping her muddy, lifeless eyes open, but whereas before she would embrace the sleep... she now could no longer enjoy even that. Her dreams were full of haunting images of her own demise, and every time she died in her sleep it became more gruesome.
The first time it happened, a couple of days after Mikhael had stopped showing up, it was just him standing over her worn-out body. She’d watched herself die from exhaustion and, while that was definitely not pleasant - ridiculously morbid, even - it had given her a strange sense of relief. Then she woke up again, and the pain returned and it was worse than ever before. This pattern would repeat itself, but with increasingly more painful deaths that were somehow mirrored in pain levels when she woke back up again.
The worst of the nightmares was probably the one where...
“Hi again,” a voice suddenly interrupted her train of thoughts, causing her to slowly open her tired eyes. “You don’t look too good.”
What stood before her, was the nightmare she was about to remember. A young girl, calling herself Alice if she remembered correctly, that looked more like a sweet young girl from a fairytale book than from a horror story, had been stalking her all dream long. With a machete. And bloodstained clothes. With a smile on her face. So big that her crystalline white teeth shone an incredibly bright ray of sudden death onto her very body.
Her eyes were pitch black, no irises, no nothing. Just a void of nothingness.
“You,” she responded. “Why are you... here?”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you all night,” Alice responded, “but you kept running away from me! I was feeling so sad about that too, so I thought I might as well come visit you here!”
“You weren’t just a... figment of my imagination then?”
Cocking her head slightly to right, her wide, jet black eyes staring sheepishly - if that were even possible - into her own eyes, Lina felt a surge of regret washing over her.
“Of course I am,” Alice responded. “All of this is, you know. This is all your imagination, I am part of your imagination. You being chained by Mikhael...? As well! Even Mikhael is a figment of your imagination... you are a figment of your own imagination.
“Does that mean we do not exist? I don’t know. I think, therefore I am, right? That’s how it goes, that’s how it works, no? So, I think that because you think I exist, I think I exist, and as such I do exist.”
This ‘revelation’, if you could call it that way, was kind of a bit too much for Lina, but because of how she felt right now... there was this ridiculously dumb sense of clarity bubbling inside of her, just waiting to be clouded over again. For now, though, the words of Alice rung as loudly in her ears as it possibly could.
“So all this...” Lina began, her voice trembling slightly, “all this suffering was all my doing?”
“Huh?” Alice responded sheepishly. “Your doing? Aren’t you misinterpreting something now? You thought us up, but that’s where your involvement ends Lina! You are the creator, but not the composer!”
“But Mikhael told me you guys are all ghosts of people I raided, how can I know how any of you look like! You’re all dead!”
“But so are you, aren’t you?” Alice’s voice sounded eerily sweet as she licked the machete in her hand. “You are dead, and though you don’t know us, we know you. We just needed to nudge you, give you a reason to think of us.”
Her head felt heavy, her eyes incredibly difficult to keep open as she gazed with her eyes into Alice’s, her mouth agape. She wanted to talk back to Alice, say that she was wrong, or even anything at all, but she couldn’t. Her mouth was being sewn shut again, and all she could do was watch as Alice crept closer to her with every passing second.
“That’s there and then, though,” Alice continued, practically placing her nose against Lina’s chest. “Now it’s here and... now, and we can finally talk. But, maybe not today. You don’t look too good after all, I’ll come back tomorrow, or maybe the day after.... we’ll see!
“But, I will come back, but not tonight.”
With that, the blonde girl dissipated back into the void, leaving Lina alone again. Not that she realized any of it, though, as she had already fallen into a deep, deep sleep, and tonight - as Alice had said to her already sleeping figure - the young girl didn’t come back again. Just for tonight, her nightmares had returned to the regular, fucked up dreams she’d been having ever since she got chained up here.
The only thing that was different now was the revelation that she was already dead, and that all of this... everything around her was a result of her own fucked up thoughts, but that also gave her some hope.
Hope that she could get out of this herself, just as she’d gotten herself into it in the first place.