Chapter 1
A scream yanks Julie from her dreams, her heart leaping into her throat. She finds a way out from under the covers tangling at her feet and makes her way into the hallway, the darkness forcing anxiety through her veins.
She pushes open her daughter’s door, whimpering escaping from under a shuddering comforter.
“Rose,” Julie whispers, making her way across the room, trying not to startle the six-year-old.
“Please leave me alone, please leave me alone,” Rose whispers as Julie reaches for the trembling covers. “Go away, go away, go away!”
“Rose?”
Julie peels the covers back, meeting her daughter’s terrified eyes
“Mommy?”
Rose pushes the covers the rest of the way off and wraps her arms around her mom, sobbing into her shirt.
“It was here, mom, in my room!” she cries, her eyes red and bleary as they beg for Julie to believe her. “I’ve never—I’ve never had one of them come so close to me.”
“Shh,” Julie says, holding her close and stroking her hair. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t know where she went,” Rose goes on. “She disappeared when I screamed and then I hid under the covers. She spoke to me, mom. She talked to me!”
“It’s okay,” Julie continues to console her blubbering daughter. Rose has been having nightmares almost non-stop for a year now. Julie barely gets any sleep as her daughter wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.
“Can—can I sleep in your room?” Rose hiccups.
Julie nods, pulling away as the smell of something burning reaches her nose. When she’s sure there’s no fire, she smiles gently. “Sure, baby. Get your stuff.”
Rose swallows hard, wiping her cheeks with the backs of her hands. She grabs her stuffed animal, a lemon-colored duck, and tucks it tightly under her arm. She calls it Duckie because that’s what Julie used to tell her it was. A ducky. It became its name as Rose grew up.
Julie stands, Rose padding out toward the hall and turning to wait for her mom to walk with her down its dark length. Julie glances around, a cold chill rapping its fingers along her spine. She’s had it before, this feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. It happens from time to time, but is most potent after Rose has her nightmares.
She glances around once more, searching for the source of the burned smell. After about a minute of walking around and unplugging various electronics, she gives up and exits, leaving the door wide open behind her.
The sound of Julie’s voice covers up the fluttering of wings in the bathroom, wings of a creature not from this world.
“Do you want to talk about it, Rosie?”
Rose shakes her head violently as she pushes the door open to her mother’s room. The glow of the alarm clock next to Julie’s bed shines brightly in the darkness. Three in the morning. The supposed “witching hour” for those that believe in the supernatural. Julie doesn’t believe in all that “mumbo jumbo” as she says, even if she does believe in a higher power.
Amazing that she even believes in that, after all she’s seen.
Clang!
Julie startles, gripping the doorway with white knuckles as she turns to where the sound had come from. Could Rose have seen not a monster, but someone who had broken into their apartment?
Julie pushes Rose into the room and shuts the door, grabbing her phone off the nightstand and shoving it in her daughter’s tiny hands.
“I’m going to check that out,” Julie tells Rose as another sound comes from the kitchen.
She moves over to her closet and puts her code into the small safe holding her personal information and her handgun. Loading it, she turns back to Rose.
“If you hear me shouting or my gun go off, call nine-one-one.”
Rose nods in understanding as something else makes a loud sound.
Julie grits her teeth.
Something skids across the linoleum.
She exits the room, holding the gun low as she takes it off of safety. Peering around the corner, she doesn’t see any movement. But the wall hides half of the kitchen.
Clang.
She pushes forward, rounding the corner and leveling her gun, aiming into a small empty kitchen. In the middle of the floor is a pot and a pan, the pot rocking side to side.
She moves around the small apartment, checking the windows, the doors. They’re on the second story and the walls are thin, so she would have heard it if someone was trying to run down the stairs to get away.
She shifts swiftly through the living room and back into the hallway, all windows so far locked. She doesn’t see any evidence of forced entry.
Julie touches Rose’s closed door. Had she closed it on her way out?
She takes a deep breath as she wraps her fingers around the knob, pushing it open. A strange sense of coldness creeps into her skin as she passes the threshold, the gun following her line of sight. The window appears to be shut and locked, but just to be sure…
Movement!
She spins to her right to find nothing but deep shadows. An eerie atmosphere bleeds into the space, seemingly from the shadow that looks too dark, too deep to be made by the nightlight on the opposite side of the room.
The shadow captivates her.
It seems to grow larger and larger until it steals the entirety of Julie’s vision, as if it’s swallowing her whole. Her mind blanks as a tingling rises from her toes and into her legs. Numbness swells in the right side of her body, but the shadow continues to hold her attention, paralyzing her.
“Mommy?”
Julie suddenly snaps her eyes to the doorway. Rose stands there, her eyes frantically darting from Julie’s face to the ground.
“Rose?” Julie asks, suddenly aware of how lost she’d gotten. She must be more tired than she thought if she zoned out like that. “Is everything—”
“Mommy?” Rose asks again, her voice choked as fear makes her tiny frame shake. “What’s—why are you see-through?”
“See-through?” Julie repeats, looking down at her pajama-covered body. Her breath catches in her throat and she nearly falls over at what she sees.
Her feet have disappeared.
The shadow that had captivated her shifts and changes, moving at lightning-speed as it grabs ahold of Julie’s feet and squeezes as it climbs upward. Her chest is constricted; she can’t cry out. Instead, her senses are seized by some invisible force. She can’t hear her daughter as she screams, running to Julie, reaching—but Julie’s gone before Rose can grab ahold.
Gravity shifts.
A purely red light takes over the darkness, exploding from above. It wrestles with the deep blue coming from beneath.
Julie’s vision returns, darkness draped heavily between the two colors, no white glimmer to ease the insatiable discomfort in her eyes.
Through the light and the black mist, she can make out the shape of a door. Her daughter’s door. Did she pass out? Is she dreaming?
Did someone really break in and attack?
Julie, her throat knotted, jerks forward, reaching for the door and yanking it open, expecting to see her hallway, but it’s more of the same. Red and blue light, black mist.
She forces the panic down as it attempts to expel itself through her pores. Panic clouds her mind. She has to be rational.
She steps through the door, unease sinking into her skin like rain on clothing.
Planting both feet on the ground, she searches through the strange darkness for an exit. There has to be one, right? Has to be.
Her fingers tighten around the gun in her right hand. It makes her feel better. At least she can protect herself. But why would it follow her into her dream?
She steadies her breathing.
Calm down. Think.
But how could she think in a place that makes no logical sense?
Something shifts in the distance. There’s a soft giggle, sounding like detuned bells.
The floor disappears from under her.
Julie plunges into pitch black, gravity yanking her down. She loses the grip on her gun, falling blindly, further and further down, down, down.
Then, ground.
Julie crumples, the oxygen exploding from her lungs. Her gun hits a second later and she hears it go off, a hiss of what sounds like pleasure cutting through the silence.
“Oooh,” coos a voice to Julie’s left as she rolls over, struggling to suck in air. “That causes pain? How… wonderful!”
The melodic voice is gentle against Julie’s ears as she sits up to see what kind of face it’s attached to.
A creature bathed in waning red light appears from the fog, grinning a too-wide smile. Her pupils are dilated, silvery-gray irises rimming them as she stares at Julie from beneath squinty, heavily lidded eyes. Black, straight, serrated hair falls over her shoulders like worms.
Her torso, shoulders, and biceps are of a grown woman, a red glittery top that would distract any male shimmering in the weird lighting. From her elbow down is skin that looks like melted wax, her fingers half the size of what they should be, ending in flat nubs. Across those nubs are long claw-like nails, parallel with the ground when her arms are resting at her sides.
She smiles, thousands of needle-like teeth staring back at Julie, some jutting out of the cracks in her thin, chapped lips.
Her legs are like a satyr, knees bent backward like a goat. A skirt matching the top covers her private parts, more of that waxy skin trailing down to her red-ringed chicken-like feet, the claws twice the size they should be, considering her body mass and height, and wickedly curved.
Two large, semi-transparent wings flutter on her back as she lands on the ground, red blood pulsating through the visible veins. There’s a red glow coming from the blood as she walks closer.
Julie stands, swearing she feels her heart stop.
What is this creature?
“You won’t need this,” it says, smiling as it curls a finger in the gun’s direction. The weapon rises into the air and seemingly blips out of existence, appearing in the monster’s hand the next moment. “So I’ll take it. The metal will poison us, but what’s a little poison in exchange for blissful pain?”
The creature licks her needle teeth and meets Julie’s eyes, its craze wavering as if it wishes for it to grow.
The creature caresses the wound on her shoulder, the place the bullet had passed right through. Around the neon blue blood is a green tainting, as if it really is poisoning her.
She closes her eyes with a smile as the hole closes, disappearing after only a few moments.
The creature pouts, twirling the gun around as if she’s trying to understand how to use it. After an impatient moment, she gives up, taking a handful of hair and tying it around the gun. It makes her head lean sideways and her skin pull in a strange way, but she acts as if it doesn’t affect her at all.
She smiles again, her face seeming to stretch a few centimeters horizontally.
Her face suddenly contorts, her body glitching like static on a television. She cries out.
“No, no, I can’t feel anymore!” She glares at Julie. “So this is the price of being in the same world as your chosen counterpart.”
Julie stays silent, all business. She should wake up from this dream any time now. Any time.
The creature cocks her head in the other direction, the gun slamming against her face. She doesn’t wince. Only giggles.
“I’m not going to get anything out of you, am I?” she asks, looking Julie over as she taps one of her chicken feet on the ground, the claw at the end making a series of sharp clank, clank, clanks. “I’ve read that most humans would cry and beg for their lives when presented with something unfamiliar and… terrifying.”
She takes a step toward Julie, her head tilting back to the other side, the gun pulling it down.
“No, ‘This isn’t real, I’m in some sort of dream’?” Her eyes glitter. “No wonder that child’s mind is so fragile.”
Julie feels her heart squeeze as her eyes snap sharply to the monster’s. Rose?
The creature’s eyes light and she jumps once, her wings lifting her as she smiles down at Julie.
“Oh! Oh, so you have an attachment to this beastie! I read that humans grow attached to one another! That will help me, it will. I should write this down somewhere. Darcel won’t hold a candle to what I’ll know at the end of all this.”
“What do you want with Rose?”
“It speaks!” the creature squeals, flying in a semicircle as it stares down at Julie. “Out of the mouth as well! Oh, the voices of humans, the voices of humans. We can’t hear them at home. We only see your expressions. This—this is fascinating!”
“What do you want with my daughter?”
“Daughter? The offspring,” the monster translates, dipping low to buzz right before Julie, staring into her two-toned eyes. “The beast. I simply need her subconscious imagination. No harm shall come to her.”
The creature grins nastily, her eyes flashing a deep blue.
“Physically.”
The gruesome fairy blips from existence.
She pushes open her daughter’s door, whimpering escaping from under a shuddering comforter.
“Rose,” Julie whispers, making her way across the room, trying not to startle the six-year-old.
“Please leave me alone, please leave me alone,” Rose whispers as Julie reaches for the trembling covers. “Go away, go away, go away!”
“Rose?”
Julie peels the covers back, meeting her daughter’s terrified eyes
“Mommy?”
Rose pushes the covers the rest of the way off and wraps her arms around her mom, sobbing into her shirt.
“It was here, mom, in my room!” she cries, her eyes red and bleary as they beg for Julie to believe her. “I’ve never—I’ve never had one of them come so close to me.”
“Shh,” Julie says, holding her close and stroking her hair. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t know where she went,” Rose goes on. “She disappeared when I screamed and then I hid under the covers. She spoke to me, mom. She talked to me!”
“It’s okay,” Julie continues to console her blubbering daughter. Rose has been having nightmares almost non-stop for a year now. Julie barely gets any sleep as her daughter wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.
“Can—can I sleep in your room?” Rose hiccups.
Julie nods, pulling away as the smell of something burning reaches her nose. When she’s sure there’s no fire, she smiles gently. “Sure, baby. Get your stuff.”
Rose swallows hard, wiping her cheeks with the backs of her hands. She grabs her stuffed animal, a lemon-colored duck, and tucks it tightly under her arm. She calls it Duckie because that’s what Julie used to tell her it was. A ducky. It became its name as Rose grew up.
Julie stands, Rose padding out toward the hall and turning to wait for her mom to walk with her down its dark length. Julie glances around, a cold chill rapping its fingers along her spine. She’s had it before, this feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. It happens from time to time, but is most potent after Rose has her nightmares.
She glances around once more, searching for the source of the burned smell. After about a minute of walking around and unplugging various electronics, she gives up and exits, leaving the door wide open behind her.
The sound of Julie’s voice covers up the fluttering of wings in the bathroom, wings of a creature not from this world.
“Do you want to talk about it, Rosie?”
Rose shakes her head violently as she pushes the door open to her mother’s room. The glow of the alarm clock next to Julie’s bed shines brightly in the darkness. Three in the morning. The supposed “witching hour” for those that believe in the supernatural. Julie doesn’t believe in all that “mumbo jumbo” as she says, even if she does believe in a higher power.
Amazing that she even believes in that, after all she’s seen.
Clang!
Julie startles, gripping the doorway with white knuckles as she turns to where the sound had come from. Could Rose have seen not a monster, but someone who had broken into their apartment?
Julie pushes Rose into the room and shuts the door, grabbing her phone off the nightstand and shoving it in her daughter’s tiny hands.
“I’m going to check that out,” Julie tells Rose as another sound comes from the kitchen.
She moves over to her closet and puts her code into the small safe holding her personal information and her handgun. Loading it, she turns back to Rose.
“If you hear me shouting or my gun go off, call nine-one-one.”
Rose nods in understanding as something else makes a loud sound.
Julie grits her teeth.
Something skids across the linoleum.
She exits the room, holding the gun low as she takes it off of safety. Peering around the corner, she doesn’t see any movement. But the wall hides half of the kitchen.
Clang.
She pushes forward, rounding the corner and leveling her gun, aiming into a small empty kitchen. In the middle of the floor is a pot and a pan, the pot rocking side to side.
She moves around the small apartment, checking the windows, the doors. They’re on the second story and the walls are thin, so she would have heard it if someone was trying to run down the stairs to get away.
She shifts swiftly through the living room and back into the hallway, all windows so far locked. She doesn’t see any evidence of forced entry.
Julie touches Rose’s closed door. Had she closed it on her way out?
She takes a deep breath as she wraps her fingers around the knob, pushing it open. A strange sense of coldness creeps into her skin as she passes the threshold, the gun following her line of sight. The window appears to be shut and locked, but just to be sure…
Movement!
She spins to her right to find nothing but deep shadows. An eerie atmosphere bleeds into the space, seemingly from the shadow that looks too dark, too deep to be made by the nightlight on the opposite side of the room.
The shadow captivates her.
It seems to grow larger and larger until it steals the entirety of Julie’s vision, as if it’s swallowing her whole. Her mind blanks as a tingling rises from her toes and into her legs. Numbness swells in the right side of her body, but the shadow continues to hold her attention, paralyzing her.
“Mommy?”
Julie suddenly snaps her eyes to the doorway. Rose stands there, her eyes frantically darting from Julie’s face to the ground.
“Rose?” Julie asks, suddenly aware of how lost she’d gotten. She must be more tired than she thought if she zoned out like that. “Is everything—”
“Mommy?” Rose asks again, her voice choked as fear makes her tiny frame shake. “What’s—why are you see-through?”
“See-through?” Julie repeats, looking down at her pajama-covered body. Her breath catches in her throat and she nearly falls over at what she sees.
Her feet have disappeared.
The shadow that had captivated her shifts and changes, moving at lightning-speed as it grabs ahold of Julie’s feet and squeezes as it climbs upward. Her chest is constricted; she can’t cry out. Instead, her senses are seized by some invisible force. She can’t hear her daughter as she screams, running to Julie, reaching—but Julie’s gone before Rose can grab ahold.
Gravity shifts.
A purely red light takes over the darkness, exploding from above. It wrestles with the deep blue coming from beneath.
Julie’s vision returns, darkness draped heavily between the two colors, no white glimmer to ease the insatiable discomfort in her eyes.
Through the light and the black mist, she can make out the shape of a door. Her daughter’s door. Did she pass out? Is she dreaming?
Did someone really break in and attack?
Julie, her throat knotted, jerks forward, reaching for the door and yanking it open, expecting to see her hallway, but it’s more of the same. Red and blue light, black mist.
She forces the panic down as it attempts to expel itself through her pores. Panic clouds her mind. She has to be rational.
She steps through the door, unease sinking into her skin like rain on clothing.
Planting both feet on the ground, she searches through the strange darkness for an exit. There has to be one, right? Has to be.
Her fingers tighten around the gun in her right hand. It makes her feel better. At least she can protect herself. But why would it follow her into her dream?
She steadies her breathing.
Calm down. Think.
But how could she think in a place that makes no logical sense?
Something shifts in the distance. There’s a soft giggle, sounding like detuned bells.
The floor disappears from under her.
Julie plunges into pitch black, gravity yanking her down. She loses the grip on her gun, falling blindly, further and further down, down, down.
Then, ground.
Julie crumples, the oxygen exploding from her lungs. Her gun hits a second later and she hears it go off, a hiss of what sounds like pleasure cutting through the silence.
“Oooh,” coos a voice to Julie’s left as she rolls over, struggling to suck in air. “That causes pain? How… wonderful!”
The melodic voice is gentle against Julie’s ears as she sits up to see what kind of face it’s attached to.
A creature bathed in waning red light appears from the fog, grinning a too-wide smile. Her pupils are dilated, silvery-gray irises rimming them as she stares at Julie from beneath squinty, heavily lidded eyes. Black, straight, serrated hair falls over her shoulders like worms.
Her torso, shoulders, and biceps are of a grown woman, a red glittery top that would distract any male shimmering in the weird lighting. From her elbow down is skin that looks like melted wax, her fingers half the size of what they should be, ending in flat nubs. Across those nubs are long claw-like nails, parallel with the ground when her arms are resting at her sides.
She smiles, thousands of needle-like teeth staring back at Julie, some jutting out of the cracks in her thin, chapped lips.
Her legs are like a satyr, knees bent backward like a goat. A skirt matching the top covers her private parts, more of that waxy skin trailing down to her red-ringed chicken-like feet, the claws twice the size they should be, considering her body mass and height, and wickedly curved.
Two large, semi-transparent wings flutter on her back as she lands on the ground, red blood pulsating through the visible veins. There’s a red glow coming from the blood as she walks closer.
Julie stands, swearing she feels her heart stop.
What is this creature?
“You won’t need this,” it says, smiling as it curls a finger in the gun’s direction. The weapon rises into the air and seemingly blips out of existence, appearing in the monster’s hand the next moment. “So I’ll take it. The metal will poison us, but what’s a little poison in exchange for blissful pain?”
The creature licks her needle teeth and meets Julie’s eyes, its craze wavering as if it wishes for it to grow.
The creature caresses the wound on her shoulder, the place the bullet had passed right through. Around the neon blue blood is a green tainting, as if it really is poisoning her.
She closes her eyes with a smile as the hole closes, disappearing after only a few moments.
The creature pouts, twirling the gun around as if she’s trying to understand how to use it. After an impatient moment, she gives up, taking a handful of hair and tying it around the gun. It makes her head lean sideways and her skin pull in a strange way, but she acts as if it doesn’t affect her at all.
She smiles again, her face seeming to stretch a few centimeters horizontally.
Her face suddenly contorts, her body glitching like static on a television. She cries out.
“No, no, I can’t feel anymore!” She glares at Julie. “So this is the price of being in the same world as your chosen counterpart.”
Julie stays silent, all business. She should wake up from this dream any time now. Any time.
The creature cocks her head in the other direction, the gun slamming against her face. She doesn’t wince. Only giggles.
“I’m not going to get anything out of you, am I?” she asks, looking Julie over as she taps one of her chicken feet on the ground, the claw at the end making a series of sharp clank, clank, clanks. “I’ve read that most humans would cry and beg for their lives when presented with something unfamiliar and… terrifying.”
She takes a step toward Julie, her head tilting back to the other side, the gun pulling it down.
“No, ‘This isn’t real, I’m in some sort of dream’?” Her eyes glitter. “No wonder that child’s mind is so fragile.”
Julie feels her heart squeeze as her eyes snap sharply to the monster’s. Rose?
The creature’s eyes light and she jumps once, her wings lifting her as she smiles down at Julie.
“Oh! Oh, so you have an attachment to this beastie! I read that humans grow attached to one another! That will help me, it will. I should write this down somewhere. Darcel won’t hold a candle to what I’ll know at the end of all this.”
“What do you want with Rose?”
“It speaks!” the creature squeals, flying in a semicircle as it stares down at Julie. “Out of the mouth as well! Oh, the voices of humans, the voices of humans. We can’t hear them at home. We only see your expressions. This—this is fascinating!”
“What do you want with my daughter?”
“Daughter? The offspring,” the monster translates, dipping low to buzz right before Julie, staring into her two-toned eyes. “The beast. I simply need her subconscious imagination. No harm shall come to her.”
The creature grins nastily, her eyes flashing a deep blue.
“Physically.”
The gruesome fairy blips from existence.
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