Nightmare

The bus wasn’t there.

It was late, or he was early. Either way, Adam looked at the vacant strip of sidewalk where it should have been and felt a renewed sense of dread. He’d put on an impressive show, sprinting down the street, weaving in and out of the other students, and keeping a safe distance between himself and Marcus. But the show was over. The curtain was closing. He’d given it everything he had, and now he had nothing left. The thundering sounds of Marcus’s feet were not slowing down. The deep breaths behind him had not turned into shallow gasps like Adam’s had. And now, with no safe haven in sight, the ending was inevitable.

As he passed the stop with the non-existent bus, getting slower with every step, there was only one thought making its way through the terror inside his mind. Get as far away from everyone as you can. Let us be alone when it happens. Let no one else see…

But the students of Wakehurst High were no different to any other group of teenagers. The suffering of another, particularly someone unpopular, someone who could never be like them, aroused a curiosity that was both shameful and thrilling. It wasn’t fun. Not exactly. It went deeper than that. In the minds of those watching, it was a lesson. A vital lesson, about pain, how it’s given, and how it’s received. It felt important. Almost as important as the subject of death itself. For here was someone who had strayed down the wrong path, and look how they suffer now. Aren’t you glad that isn’t you? Aren’t you worried that one day it might be? Better watch, and learn all you can. It is simply too important to ignore.

Almost every student on that road chose to follow Adam and Marcus. A few of the more eager ones even decided to miss their bus to do it.

About ten feet from the end of the road, Adam felt Marcus grab the back of his shirt and drag him to a stop. The first punch sent tendrils of pain shooting over the left side of his face. The second evened things out on the right. Adam tasted metal, and knew something inside his mouth was bleeding. A third punch landed on his stomach and continued far too deep, enough for Adam to feel something tear. There was a burning sensation that did not belong inside of him.

Up until that moment, Adam had been too shocked to do anything but stand there and take the hits. It had all felt distant, surreal, more like a dream than something actually happening to him. But that searing pain in his stomach had woken him up. Everything was now crystal clear, and the pain was no longer muted. The fourth and hardest punch caught him square on the nose and knocked him off his feet. He curled into a ball on the ground, his eyes leaking tears and his nose leaking blood. From there he could see just how many pairs of feet were gathered around. An entire audience willing to watch, and not a single one willing to help.

Marcus started kicking him, each blow making Adam squirm and cry out in pain. A feeling came over him, worse than fear, worse than pain. It was the feeling of losing yourself. Of being pushed so far you won’t ever find your way back. A powerlessness, that strips you of everything that makes you, you, and leaves you with nothing but the agony that your world has become. And you know, as only those who’ve lost themselves can know, that you’ll never find all the pieces of yourself again. That you’ll never be whole again.

Adam screamed, and the cracks that had never left his side seemed to scream with him, opening as wide as his gaping mouth, no longer filled with pure white light, but shapes and shadows that moved eagerly forward. Adam felt like all the lost parts of himself were being drawn into those cracks, the way decompressed air is drawn through the cracks on a crashing aeroplane. He could feel it feeding the shadows, giving them form, and thought, and desperate desire.

Then someone in the audience screamed.

Something had emerged from the largest crack. Something wrong, and frightening, and visible to everyone there. No, not visible. Not possible. It’s inside my head. Always inside my head. They must be screaming for me.

More people screamed, and many started running back up the street. Another kick shattered the side of Adam’s ribs. It was clear that nothing mattered to Marcus except himself, the boy on the ground, and the next bit of damage he was inflicting. He didn’t hear the screams, and he didn’t see the figure coming up behind him. But Adam did.

The first thing Adam remembered thinking was that he felt sorry for it. The feeling surprised him, something almost tender amongst all this pain. It was thin, and even smaller than he was, with skeletal limbs sticking awkwardly out of a lopsided body. It had a face that was familiar, yet strange. Like looking at himself in a mirror while dreaming, seeing a reflection that was both him, and nothing like him at all. But the thing that drew Adam’s attention and held it was the way its features were distorted, stretched into a silent, horrifying scream. Its eyes bulged, and rolled backwards into its skull, leaving just disks of bloodshot white. Whatever it was, it was clearly scared out of its mind.

It reached Marcus, and with one, spidery hand, it gripped his shoulder and spun him around so they were face to face. Then, at last, it was Marcus’s turn to scream.

Adam would never fully remember what he saw that day. His memory was already damaged by the pain and shock of everything leading up to that moment, and once it, the thing, the Adam that was not Adam but a living breathing Nightmare, had gotten a hold of Marcus, the horror he saw was enough to scramble anyone’s long-term memory. The human mind knows how to protect itself from such things. It knows when a memory would be nothing but poison, slowly spreading until only sickness or madness remained. Best to not let those memories in. Best to just see, and forget.

What Adam could remember was the way Marcus screamed, and the Nightmare seemed to scream back, and the way something seemed to move between them, not something you could see but something you could sense. An exchange, a part of him for a part of it. The next thing Adam remembered was seeing Marcus lying next to him on the ground. He was writhing in panic, and his face wore the same silent terror as the Nightmare’s. Bulging eyes, gaping mouth, but not screaming anymore. At least not on the outside. Adam knew with a cold certainty that screaming was all Marcus could hear on the inside.

Then he noticed the Nightmare coming towards him.

There had been a moment, when it first touched Marcus, where Adam had thought that maybe it was here to protect him. That maybe, just this once, the cracks had actually released something good. But that thought vanished as he saw it reach out towards him with those long, skeletal fingers. It was just like everything else that had ever made it through the cracks. A monster.

Hands grabbed him from behind. He was standing now, leaning up against something. No, not something, someone, and they were moving with him, running together in shuffled steps away from the Nightmare, who did not try to follow them. It just watched. It watched, and in Adam’s last view of it before he was pulled into a side street he thought he saw something new on its face. Something contemplative. Like it was confused. Like it was trying to understand.

It took another few blocks before Adam realised who he was leaning against, one arm draped around their shoulder as he hobbled along, relying heavily on his right leg since the left caused pain to flare up his side. It was the girl from detention. The weird one. But who was he to call anyone weird anymore? After what had just happened, he was quite possibly the weirdest person alive.

“Where are you taking me?” His voice wavered and broke at the end of each word. Despite everything, he couldn’t help but feel embarrassed to hear his voice sound so weak.

“To my place, you liar,” said the girl coldly. “We’ve got to tell my parents.”

“Tell them what?” The idea that this girl’s parents, or anyone’s parents for that matter, could do anything other than scream and run for their lives when they saw the Nightmare was almost laughable.

“What do you think?” shouted the girl. “That you just made some new fear-monster and it’s already started attacking people!”

“I didn’t make it,” said Adam, and even as the words came out he knew he didn’t believe them. He’d always known the cracks were a part of himself, that they were a sign his addiction to his own imagination was making him lose his grip on reality. That he was going insane. That’s why everything that had ever come out of the cracks had been terrible. Something sick. Something vile. Something to show him just how twisted his mind had become. And he would scream and run or hide, and eventually the monsters would always disappear. Of course they would. They were not real. No one had ever seen them before but him. And sometimes, late in the night, he would hear something moving beneath the floorboards, or see a shadow out amongst the trees in his backyard, and he would know that the monsters had never really disappeared. That they were just hiding too. Because Adam had made them, and he’d given them the worst parts of himself, and that included his compulsive need to hide from the world as much as the world would let him. But he couldn’t say all this to the angry girl half carrying him down the street. He couldn’t hear the accusation in her voice and admit that he deserved it. That took an amount of courage Adam simply did not have. “It was the cracks, they… they just open sometimes and… things come through… from the other side.”

“There is no other side, genius,” the girl spat back. “You’re a maker! You’re like me. The only things on the other side are what we put there.”

Something about that sounded so wrong to Adam that he started forcibly shaking his head. He played it back to himself, slower, one word at a time, trying to pinpoint exactly what part of it he could not accept, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. He couldn’t place it, but the feeling of wrongness remained, so he played it back again, in full sentences this time. And there it was. Something so wrong it made everything else seem wrong too. You’re like me. That’s what she’d said. You’re like me. No one had ever said those words to Adam before. It was not something he ever thought he would hear, not because he didn’t have things in common with other kids, but because other kids never wanted to admit they had things in common with him. That was the real tragedy of it. Being so unpopular that no one could accept they might actually like being friends with him. Being rejected before he’d even had the chance to be accepted. That was the sort of thing that drove kids to seek more destructive forms of connection. That was the place where addiction could easily start its slow chokehold over a person. Like the vines of a strangler fig wrapping themselves tighter and tighter around a tree, sapping it of life until it finally dies and only the fig remains, a hollow shell, a cheap imitation of the life it devoured. Adam’s addiction had been his imagination, because it was accessible and powerful, but it could have easily been something else. Something more harmful to himself or others. Although, after what he’d just done, no one could say that Adam’s addiction wasn’t harmful.

“No one’s like me,” he said, with such sorrow that the girl seemed to lose some of her sharpness. She continued to half carry him away from the school, putting in a little more effort to keep him from placing weight on his injured left side.

Before long they turned into a driveway, with a sign on the artful metal gate that read House of Aetos. It belonged to a home that made Adam’s look like a dilapidated shack. Three storeys, two garages, and one enormous oak door, it looked like the kind of household that needed its own staff to keep it clean and orderly. The driveway turned into a roundabout of small white pebbles, with an elegant magnolia tree at the centre.

“You live here?” There was so much surprise in Adam’s voice that this was undeniably an insult.

“What’s wrong with it?” the girl snapped, easing up on her support of Adam who winced as he took on more of his own weight.

“Nothing. It’s just… big, you know?” By the look on her face, clearly she did not know, and Adam kept his mouth shut as they clambered up the marble steps and used a brass knocker shaped like the head of an eagle to bang on the giant door.

The sounds of approaching footsteps brought Adam’s situation into such sharp relief that he felt like he’d been punched in the face again. An adult was about to open that door, and he was going to, what? Tell them that he’d made some sort of monster, and that it was hurting people, had done something horrible to at least one and maybe lots more by now. What were they going to do? Call the cops? Call an ambulance? Cart Adam off to a mental hospital and throw away the key? This was insane, what the hell was he even doing here? He tried to step backwards but the girl’s arm was still tightly wrapped around his upper torso, and as he let out a sharp exhale her grip tightened, just as a python would do to its panicking prey.

The door opened.

The woman who answered it was not what Adam had expected. She looked young, much younger than his own parents, but she held herself like someone with a lifetime’s worth of experience - someone who would be exceptionally difficult to shock. She resembled the girl beside Adam in a few key ways. The same dark hair. The same button nose, but her features were longer and more refined. Adam assumed they must be sisters. Surely she was far too young to be the girl’s mother? She looked down at them now, and if she was surprised to see a bruised and bleeding boy being carried to her front door, she didn’t show it.

“What happened, Cora?” Her voice was deep and even. It had a calmness to it that spread to Adam.

“He’s a maker,” said Cora, speaking fast but matching the woman’s tone. “He was being beaten up bad, and he made something. Something dangerous. Other kids saw it, lots of them. You’ve got to tell dad and the others, right now.”

The woman nodded, seeming to accept what Cora was telling her, but then she turned to examine Adam and he could tell what she was thinking. She hid it better than most, but he’d seen this look countless times before and would have recognised it anywhere. It was the look a person gives you after that subconscious weighing and measuring of your worth, and finding you deeply wanting. Just an unremarkable person, of which you can only expect unremarkable things.

“It’s most likely gone by now. Sometimes, under extreme stress, even Embers can make something that looks corporeal, but it never is, Cora. Just a Shadow. Just a wraith. To make something real, all on his own… it’s not possible.”

“But he did!” Cora lost the composure she started with, practically shouting now. “He’s powerful, mum, I know he doesn’t look it but I think he might be an Inferno, maybe even a Wildfi-”

“Calm yourself, Cora.” The woman did not yell, but she did not need to. There was so much authority behind her words that even Adam found himself obeying them. He could not understand how this woman could be Cora’s mother when she didn’t look much older than her early twenties, but Cora had definitely called her “mum”, and maybe there were other explanations. Adoption, or some miracle of genetics that made the woman look much younger than she really was. Regardless, Adam was glad Cora had brought them here. This woman’s age didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that she was in total control. When Adam was a little kid, he’d assumed all adults were like this. That they knew exactly what they were doing, and carried responsibility as easily as they were able to carry him. But then he’d watched his father slowly chip away at his mother, breaking off bits of her with each cruel word, stealing her self-esteem, her joy, her passion, for no reason at all. It had been horrible for Adam to witness just how little control she had over her own life, but when he saw what her leaving did to his father, he lost all faith in the authority of adults. His dad was devastated. Heartbroken. And above all else, shocked. Shocked that she would actually leave him. Shocked at what he had done. There had been no plan, no grand desire to bully his wife into leaving him. He had not been in control either. He was just a person who didn’t know how to deal with his own pain beyond sharing it with others. Adam had finally stopped questioning why he’d always felt so powerless. He knew it was his inheritance, from both sides of the family. Seeing Cora’s mother standing before him, her words, her gaze, even the way she held her body, all serving to project a sense of power that Adam had never experienced before gave him a flicker of hope that someone older, wiser, and stronger could actually swoop in and make everything alright again.

Cora went back to speaking in a quick but controlled voice. “Sorry, it’s just what I saw, it was real mum. Even you couldn’t have made that - thing. Even dad!” The woman’s eyebrows raised, not in surprise, or as if she took offence, but in a professional curiosity. It was clear that she greatly desired to see the Nightmare for herself.

“Take the poor boy inside, have Iris patch him up.” She stood aside, and Cora began pulling Adam through the wide doorway. He could see the spacious landing beyond, with a grand central stairway leading to the upper floors. It was decorated minimally, but beautifully, and Adam felt like he was entering some sort of museum, or art gallery. But as they were passing Cora’s mother, he planted his good foot and made them stop. He looked over at the woman, the most confident he’d ever met, and felt a rush of guilt mixed heavily with dread.

“Don’t go alone,” he said to her, and he hated how small and frightened he sounded. His mind brought up an image from an old picture book his mum used to read him, where a tiny mouse was trying to reason with a ferocious lion. That was how he felt talking directly to her. Like a mouse before a lion. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know… the Nightmare, it did something terrible to Marcus - the boy that was beating - a boy from school. It took something from him. Or gave him something. Or maybe both, but he looked like he was crazy afterwards, like it drove him mad, deranged even… It was horrible.” He couldn’t bring himself to say more, but his heart sank in his chest as he saw his warning had only increased the woman’s curiosity.

“If what you say is true, then you are a rare thing indeed,” she said softly, looking at Adam with much more interest. Then she turned to Cora, who simply nodded her head. “Very well then, I’ll call your father first, and a few colleagues of ours. Do not worry about me, young man,” she smiled at Adam, and he felt his stomach squirm. “For I am a rare thing too.”