29 Mar Cold Town

She stopped as her legs ached from hours of walking. She had come far. Very far. The day and night seemed to intertwine, never being distinct, if there could be said to be a circadian movement in the subtly shifting gray above at all. There did seem to be very occasional dim light patterns or movements in the misty sky, but she put it down to the trickery of her sleepy eyes. She closed and gently rubbed them before brushing a long strand of black hair out of the way. Determined to carry on, she inhaled and exhaled the air in one strong movement. It had a smooth, translucent texture that was easy on her lungs. Best not to overthink.

She was a lot more focused on the blacktop stretching ahead for miles than what was above, or perhaps far below. In truth, she was so confused that she didn’t know what to think, and thinking just seemed to throw more confusion onto her than clarity. Beyond the road on either side were several meters of white, textureless ground that disappeared into mist. Looking ahead gave her a much clearer view, and the road was all she had to follow.

Her shoes were black sneakers, and she wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt under a black hoodie. At least she knew that much from sight. She also knew she was sixteen. And her name? It was Jessica, typically abbreviated to Jess! But no one who called her that was here. There was a faint outline on the horizon of the road, but it took no aura of its own and only appeared in the gray-white hue of the mist. She stomped onward.

She had been walking for a few minutes again, but then she stopped tracing the cracks and lines of the road and turned her head back. She saw mist creeping up the road behind, which created the effect of having visibility of, she guessed, about one hundred meters back. How could she know how far or how long she had traveled? Its positioning wasn’t even. Rather, it seemed to envelop the road from the sides with two pincers that thickened the further back they went, leaving the road at a middle distance behind transparent, but, in contrast to where she was, not an inch either way off it. Ahead, the journey seemed much clearer. Since this had been the case last time she looked back, the only conclusion she could come to was that the mist was following her.

As she moved on, the outline ahead grew larger and even more transparent. It looked like a row of blocks…no! Buildings! Finally she would be somewhere rather than the endless nowhere! She quickened her pace. Straining her eyes, she saw that this road definitely led to a building complex. They were tall apartment blocks and had outer staircases and windows. She quickened herself some more, feeling her feet bounce on the road as she broke into a borderline jog toward it.

She was fast, and she estimated that at this pace she’d be at this seemingly vacant sarcophagus of cement in about fifteen minutes. The negative visuals of her thinking didn’t escape her. Desolation and wisps of mist made it look cold, lonely, and ominous. But it was somewhere, and anything now seemed better than the road. It had to be. What she wanted was to find someone.

HISSS… HEHHH.

What was that? The sound of some kind of breathing noise seemed to echo from ahead. She thought it sounded like a cross between a man’s exhalation and a reptilian hiss. She paused in her movement and strained her ears. Silence. She squinted her eyes, but nothing seemed to move in the structure ahead. Her heart pounded so palpably that she was scared anyone or anything around could hear it, though she knew that was impossible. A minute passed, and she started to wonder if she had been the sole witness to some kind of illusion. Being in such a strange and sad place in such a mood would account for this. Yes, that must be it! And it hadn’t been too loud. It hadn’t. It was an echo from the horizon.

Still, it was extremely unnerving, and she found the nails of her gaunt white fingers scratching at goosebumps on her forearms. The isolation was palpable, and its absence of life gave it a personality of its own. The place felt alive, as if the mist were the single, ubiquitous membrane of a body that held its internal parts at the center, concealing them together. The parts were her, the road, the buildings, and anything else that might exist in this world.

She wasn’t ruling out anything. How could she really be so arrogant as to assuredly dismiss the sound she had seemingly heard, clear as anything, just a few moments ago as merely an auditory hallucination? And who knew what the light patterns she had seen in the skies earlier really were? Wasn’t it smarter to assume the worst so she’d be less likely to be taken by surprise? But what even was the worst? She had no idea.

“Expect the worst, hope for the best,” her dad had liked to say. Her dad? She slowed but didn’t quite stop this time. Of course she had a dad. And a mother and siblings. Only now had her head been clear enough to spare them some thought. She had a family. But where were they? Now her mind was away from any danger here completely, and she was thinking about what was missing. Emotion swelled, and she felt an aching in her chest. Where was her family? She wanted so desperately to know. But there was nothing.

Peering closer at her arms, she saw her skin had been grazed by the clawing of her nails, which had left tiny white pressure lines and a few scrapings of abraded skin. No blood, at least! She noticed what appeared to be some ink smudged at the base of her nail on her right index finger. Why was it there? She strained her memory. She must have been writing recently. That was it. She had no other reason to have ink on her finger. Being the clumsy oaf she was, it must have gotten there when she was writing. Given how disoriented she was, she decided that realization was a small part of a puzzle solved. She just couldn’t recall when she had been writing exactly.

She pressed on even more quickly. As she moved farther along the road, she reminded herself that the pulsating drum was a rhythm in her inner ear that left no trace in her environment. Nothing would hear her heartbeat. She ought not to scare herself unnecessarily, whatever she might encounter.

Though her small physique and slight, angular face didn’t suggest it, she had always had an ability to deal with fear that was far from that of a typical girl and even surpassed most boys her age in that regard. But the fear was there, as it would be for anyone, restrained in her tight stomach and travelling through her adrenaline-laden blood.

As more minutes passed, she found it a great relief that the sound hadn’t returned.

But there were the lights again, up ahead of her as she walked. A swirl of brightness in the sky above. It wasn’t an illusion of the mist. It was a movement of some kind, for sure; the pattern it made was distinct and lighter than most of the mist. In an instant, it was gone, but it had possessed a distinctly bright luminosity in its shade when the rest of the sky was gray-white.

It was all so ghoulish that it might have been a wonder she calmed herself and found the resolve to press on to the building complex, now towering over her as she drew closer. That was the effect of wanting to escape the road. She looked back and saw the mist still at about one hundred meters down the road. It had not come any closer proportionally to her, considering her movement, but since it was clearly moving, she didn’t want to stick around to be swallowed by it if it had any will of its own to continue if she stopped.

She guessed it didn’t and presented itself in a particular way to her rather than following her. It was bizarre, but she decided a more comforting alternative than the mist remorselessly sweeping up the existence that had been behind her. But she knew that whatever it took, the road would remain. There was no logical way of knowing, but something told her the mist and road came and went together. She decided it was time to abandon the road the instant she was close enough to the brick complex and ran through an empty doorway in a surrounding wall at its threshold.

Her heart was pounding. “You poor little thing,” her mother would have said sadly as she tried to hug her. “Mom, I’m fine!” she would have defiantly snorted as she broke from her arms and pushed her away. But her mother wasn’t here. She entered a courtyard, which was the entrance, and found her skin sweaty. She had noticed the sweat had been there a little earlier, but it was cumulative. Encountering the strange sound, the lights, and the creeping mist had apparently exacerbated it as she traveled. She took off her hoodie. She wiped the sweat off her brow with her arm and then off both her arms with her hoodie. What struck her as she scanned the scene was the near total homogeneity of color.

Looking about, she saw the courtyard spread out everywhere into what seemed less like an apartment complex and more like a city, connected by courtyards, alleys, staircases, and walkways, all the same pale color. The only exception she could see to the almost garish color scheme was a steel handrail and a few white plastic chairs. Though blanched, everything was a tad yellower than the mist, and that was it. But since the mist wasn’t in the complex, that was enough, and she had as clear visibility as she thought she might have ever had, though life before the road was something she couldn’t perceive beyond the haziest snippets. She put her hoodie back on and zipped it up.

Jessica turned to the door in the wall she had come through and saw that the road was now completely gone, swallowed by her creeping stalker. There was no going back. Only the mist lingered, sitting just beyond the ghostly portal. She stared back into it. It said nothing to her. It didn’t even look in her direction.

Her hoodie’s black color seemed a striking contrast to the mist’s pale anonymity in her vision, even though she could only perceive its outline on her shoulders at the fringe of sight. This picture was her defiance of the mist. She wasn’t one to be cowed. Still, she wished there was a door she could slam shut in its face. This was just a lucid dream. It didn’t feel like one. It seemed completely real. But it had to all be some kind of nightmare.

The mist had completely tightened around the city’s skyline, shrinking the edges of existence and making it the circumference of the opaque embryo that was this horrid reality. She caught a glimpse of the swirling light again. And yet again it was gone in an instant, like a flicker of a lighter or the blink of an eye.

She marched defiantly into the courtyard. Desolation. Abandonment. Quiet. That was all.

She walked past an empty swing frame toward the building immediately beyond this entry courtyard. It seemed to be some kind of reception. It had large double doors that matched the sickly gradient of its walls. Since there was no doorbell, she decided to take the liberty of not knocking and pushed her way in. The doors swung open with a bang that echoed around the room, inside and out, across the myriad of buildings and courts she saw through the windows on either side.

“Hello?” she called. As she expected, there was just silence. At the back of the room was a reception desk with some paperwork and room keys hanging from hooks on the wall behind it. She found it strange that the temperature felt neither warm nor cold, and she was shivering. She imagined an unnaturally tall mannequin-like figure with elongated limbs and a smirk springing around one of the corners and sprinting to her, or a fanged reptilian monster scuttling from under one of the sofas in the center of the room. This place!

She also feared the mist moving into the city and constricting her further, making the building the sum of her existence, but she could see from the windows that it still hovered at the city’s periphery. “Hello?” she called out from the nearest window to the desk. “Can anyone hear me?”

Her voice rebounded from the stairways and apartments from as far up the skyline as they went, which was about halfway. It was extremely eerie, and she immediately regretted it. Why was she thinking that something in this place would be like her and want to help her? She went back to the reception desk again. Unlike the outside, the whole room had color and resembled the foyer of a normal hotel. Oak paneling covered the back walls, a pristinely clean chandelier hung from the center of the room over the sofas in a waiting area, and the floor was carpeted save for the area around the desk. She took a napkin off an ashtray and used it to wipe the ink off her finger.

There was a door behind the desk. She tried it but found it was locked, so she considered the keys, but it was immediately obvious they weren’t the right shape. It had a peephole next to the latch. She held the covering aside with her finger and took a deep breath. What if someone was there? She feared that if she looked, that she would suddenly see the demonic eye of the mannequin fiend appear. Even with the door locked, if it sprang up, she thought she’d die from a heart attack. She peered through the hole. Inside was just another empty room, but one much smaller.

A desk stood on the left with a swivel chair behind it. There was a silver nameplate on the desk that read: MR. PARK. Who was Mr. Park? Was he some kind of manager of this place? He was certainly absent. The main room looked like somewhere that should have hosted a noisy bachelor party or families on vacation. It had a purpose and was made for something. Every flowerpot and sofa and even the reception desk stationery had been prepared and placed with intent. But it wasn’t being used. The vacancy wasn’t right. She felt like a grasshopper in a reptile’s cage in the moments before the predator appeared. She wondered if this still place was some kind of trap set specifically for her, an illusion of homeliness manifested from the mist.

She set off up a staircase and found the reception area led to a larger atrium with two clear pathways running along either side. The center overlooked another courtyard below, with a running water fountain, though the sound was almost nonexistent. She found the height disorienting. She walked to the left. In the silence she imagined, as if in a cartoon sketch, one of the doorways in the hall swinging open and the mannequin creeping, in a mocking and exaggerated way, out of it. Or appearing suddenly around a corner. If it came, nothing could be done. Her fight was her strong spirit, not her puny body.

“JESSICA… JESSSICAAA…” its chalky voice would hiss.

She imagined its white form pouncing on her with long cracked nails, laughing hysterically and squeezing the life out of her helpless lungs or biting her and tearing away pounds of flesh. She imagined its red eyes dilating in sadistic delight as she writhed underneath its weight on the floor. If there was something that much bigger than her lurking about, it didn’t bear contemplating in case she jinxed fate.

At the end of the hallway, she found herself facing a corridor which opened out into three more long green-carpeted corridors. Each had black, numbered doors. 201, 202, 203, et cetera. Unlike the mist, the corridors stared intently back at her, and she felt as if the doors had been talking to each other and stopped as soon as they saw her. Like most places, these corridors made her feel small. They had an uncanny symmetry and were now watching her intently. She gulped and took the left again.

The doors towered tall over her as she briskly walked. What was this place? What were those lights and the strange noise from earlier? Wanting to get out of this building, she found herself jogging. She turned around a corridor at the end of a hallway and then a corner around another. She noticed she had some of the reception keys in her pocket. Good. She looked at one that said 223 on its handle and saw the room was only a few doors down from her. First, she tried to open door 220. It wouldn’t budge. 223 it was then! As she reached the door, she looked in either direction. She couldn’t help but think the corridor was the perfect place for something lanky to creep through.

She quickly put the key in the lock and clicked it right. The door opened. How many hotels these days still used actual keys to open rooms? she wondered. They tended to use swipeable keycards. The place was definitely very modern, but she just dismissed it as another uncanny detail. She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her. She made sure the lock clicked shut.

The room was small and neatly made, with a double bed, a flat-screen TV, and a small white bathroom accessed via an adjacent door to the left. Opposite the bed, a flowerpot sat on a desk under the screen with a tea set on a tray, a kettle, and the remote. The carpet was green and plain, exactly the same carpet as that in the corridor. Now she was really wondering if she was dreaming at all. A large dark cupboard stood at the other side of the room next to a window. She approached and squared off to it. It towered over her, and the silence made it look like something that wasn’t a cupboard. But that’s exactly what it was. There was no mannequin, man or monster inside. She wanted to break the suspense. In a heartbeat, she swung it open. Empty!

She approached the window. The empty pavement and underpass outside looked otherworldly in comparison to the real colors of where she was. The mist remained still on the outskirts of the metropolis. She noticed several buildings opposite, each with corresponding balconies and walkways on each ascending level. These blank quarters were a sterilized mockery of how humans lived. She scanned the windows and saw that the apartments were mostly empty, though there was furniture in at least two windows and a fridge in another. It really wasn’t much of a sight. Suddenly, a shift chilled her blood. She stumbled back and gasped. She had dropped under the window sill so as to conceal herself from what she had seen outside.

It had unmistakably been a pale figure in a higher window. She clutched her stomach to steady her nerves. A few seconds passed, and the internal chill of curdled blood stopped. She took a deep breath. Slowly, she peered up over the windowsill. Yes, up, a long way above, one of the windows of the adjacent apartments had a woman in it. Thank goodness it wasn’t the mannequin, at least! She was pale and had long black hair like Jessica. This was a mirror image of who she could be in decades to come.

She was strong-hearted and wise enough to know the figure was too far away to do anything, so she looked directly at her.

The woman, dressed in a white gown, seemed to be mouthing something slowly from her window. She stood upright in an unearthly manner. Her frame was skeletal, and her skin was completely white. White as in just white. Whiter than the gown. Like snow. She wasn’t looking at a human. The woman-appearing thing had jet-black eyes, as if they had only large pupils with no irises. The two appeared to make what she assumed was eye contact as the thing looked in her direction and tilted its head noticeably. The creature was pointing to the gray sky and mouthing something. She performed this gesture over and over. Nothing meaningful was being communicated, and Jessica couldn’t stand the sight.

Her head was swimming. She moved away from the window and calmed herself. She turned and looked at the room again. The bed was neat as if it had only just been made. Even after such a shock, she was so tired that a part of her still wanted to sleep, but she believed that if she did, it would be too late by the time she woke. Strangely, it wasn’t the woman that scared her; it was what she might have been warning her about. The woman had been the omen, and what that represented was yet to follow.

She noticed a notebook between the bed’s pillows that she was sure hadn’t been there before. She picked it up. There was a label with large, illegible writing on it. It looked like a twisted letter “I,” followed by a triangle missing one side, and a dot joining it to another with a line. She resisted the urge to look back at the woman. She flicked through the book and found similar symbols within. She quickly turned one page after another, and then another. The whole thing was full of the same. If it were a language, it was absolute nonsense to her. Then suddenly it struck her. Though the writing meant nothing, it was clearly hers. The curved letters, the commas that joined her Js, and the oversized circles she used for Os were all there, just not in any meaningful syntax. She looked back out the window and saw the woman was gone. The ink dripped off the pages as murky droplets covered her fingers, making them dirtier than ever. She threw it straight onto the bed.

She knew what was coming would come through the corridors. She wanted a head start. Now she knew what she needed to do. Run. That was all. She went racing down the hallway. She thought she could hear the doors wailing as she ran, but it might have been the whistling of her motion. Her heart was beating more than ever before now. She rounded the end of the hall, which she found led to two more corridors, but they seemed to be tightening. No way!

She sprinted back, determined to descend a level, pass through reception and head back outside. She hoped she could evade any pursuer if she was fast enough and took one of the many unused routes through the city. As she ran past the windows that looked down on the inner courtyard, she saw that the fountain was screeching and spewing up black liquid. She didn’t know what it was.

She raced down into the reception. Everything was the same. She ran past the stairs to the left this time to see the fountain up close. It hissed and gurgled, and she realized it was ink that was frothing down its sides. The fluid’s smell was too distinct, and it was splotchy and the same color as the notebook’s ink. It overfilled the basin and was quickly flooding the patio. But why ink? Was it some kind of symbol? Was it a message to her from the beyond? The white marble fountain spluttered at the moment she thought it, as if pointing a finger on cue to say, “Ha, yes, I am!” She felt mockery of some kind. Suddenly, she heard the same sound from earlier.

HISSS… HEHHH.

The sky crackled to life as a trail of lights followed one another in swirls, close but joined by outlines like her Js and Hs rather than held together by direct contact. Hissing followed the lights as they swam through the mist. This was what the omen had been pointing to. There was something in the sky after all! The lights blinked for a few seconds, then a gargantuan crack, like that of a piano falling, thundered down from above, and an extremely bright light came with it and crashed into the courtyard. She had barely time to cover her eyes to avoid temporary blindness when the strange noises started. She opened her eyes behind her arms and realized the meteoric light was gone.

She peered out from behind one of the columns surrounding the courtyard. Behind the fountain, she saw what looked like some kind of pod. It was about eight feet tall and oval-shaped. The opaque surface rippled as if its material were a body of cloudy water. A plume of steam rose from it like from a geyser and clouded much of the courtyard. She could feel its heat even from where she was, and it was the first time in a long while she felt warm. The surface seemed to be receding from the center. Paralysis gripped her body. She could only watch in horror as the refulgent shell began to open and long claws slid out, sinking into its oozing goo, the massive hands pushing like a dinosaur trying to break out of an egg.

Peering through the gap was a glistening eye. The eye was not any kind of eye one could ever imagine. It was outsized on its face and shone brightly like a star. But the most unsettling part was the formation. The spinning eye didn’t have a pupil or sclera. Instead, its cornea was a black-and-white swirling pattern that ran from the edges to the center. This perpetual motion was exactly the image hypnotists told people to stare into before they made them forget everything.

She wasn’t alone now. Had her mind somehow summoned some grotesque incarnation of her mannequin? She couldn’t tell if the eye could see her or not. As the steam evaporated, she saw, through the opening, an elongated nose with a large, twitching nostril, as well as a tall, pointy ear pressing against the inside of the craft. The long head remained motionless and inert, but, as if piloted by independent minds, the creature’s fingers, which were each at least a foot in length, scurried and groped impatiently around the revolving surface. Whispering was coming from within.

The words seemed random: she thought she heard “bus,” “wolf,” and “cable,” but they were so fast and hushed that they could have been anything, and they had a strange effect, bouncing from one direction to another rather than traveling straight to her. They were completely drowned out as more hissing came from the craft, from within the shell below the visible portion of the face. The thing was very much organically alive, but it seemed strangely dead simultaneously and unaware of her as far as she could know. She didn’t know. She thought the fallen alien might very much be seeing and feigning ignorance. The hands fell to the ground and began scurrying across the floor, arms extending more than a meter, nails scraping and dragging. As the shell disappeared completely, she noticed a fixed smile beneath its churning eyes, stretching across the skull’s underside.

She was frozen. Her legs couldn’t move. The pod was fully open. This thing was perhaps six and a half feet in height and perched on a seat. She had a full view of the gray face, stretched and distorted. Whispers came from it, but the mouth didn’t move, and instead, it seemed its whole body was expelling sound waves. The fingers slipped on ink, which caused the arms to flail and jolt a little, spastically rather than intentionally, and the main body remained as motionless as hers.

Then the whispering started again, but this time flowed as one coherent sentence. She still struggled to hear what it was saying, but the sound vibrations seemed to come directly at her, as if her body were an antenna tuning into its frequency. The eyes seemed to spin faster, and its nose started to sniff. It raised its head, and she saw long coarse hairs in the nostrils. The smile dissipated, and the lips started twitching as it inhaled a scent it seemed to detect.

“Sooo long… so long… so happy,” the creature croaked.

She turned on her heel and ran. Her footsteps echoed behind her. She hurtled through the reception and out of the open doors. Where to now? She looked through the gateway. She wasn’t going into the mist. She ran to the left toward the apartment block where she saw the woman.

She went under the bypass and further out into the city. Ahead, a myriad of paths presented themselves. Left? Or left, left? Or straight ahead? Or right? Or up the ladder leading up to the balconies of the building? She didn’t like the idea of hiding in a room in there in case the woman showed, though she felt inside she was gone.

Whispering began to float up the road behind. It was coming. She ran ahead, scanning her surroundings. She didn’t want to run down a road or an alley between any two buildings only to find a dead end. She sprinted past the building and took a right, which led her past several more. This was good. The area kept wide and open, and didn’t seem to be tunneling. She ran through a short tunnel under a bridge connecting another layer of building structures.

She looked behind her. She couldn’t see anything or hear the whispers. She had come out into a park. The air was cold here. She needed a breath, and she sat down on a bench that was the only thing she could see that didn’t match the general color scheme. She desperately wanted to keep moving, but she almost felt she couldn’t. Only a moment had passed when the whispering came drifting through the air.

“So far… so far I’ve come.”

Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might explode or that she might simply pass out. She glanced back and saw the tall gray thing walking in the distance. Not really too much of a distance. She bolted through the park and past more buildings. Unnervingly, like the hovering of the mist on the road, the whispering didn’t seem to be getting any more distant.

She ran to what looked like a small apartment complex immediately to her right, went straight through its entry door, and closed it behind her. It had a single long corridor stretching far ahead. The carpet was green, and the doors were black. What was this place? It was like the hotel’s interior was being repeated on a loop, just in a different, smaller format. While the buildings were very similar on the outside, she hadn’t expected such similarities on the interior. This fake world had a nightmarish repetition to it. The whispering was getting very close.

“Come heeerrrrreeee………”

She didn’t dare turn back. She went straight ahead and started trying to push the doors open. They seemed locked. Oh no, oh no, oh no! This couldn’t be! She had reached the seventh door and was frantically rattling the handle in her sweaty palm before it opened, and she slammed it shut behind her, just as the whispering had entered the building.

“Jessicaaa… don’t run from meee…”

It knew her name? Its feet dragged to a stop down the corridor.

“Where arrrrrrreee youu?”

It made loud, horrible sniffing and snorting sounds as it moved from one door to the next. It moved closer, just a few doors away, and took a long inhale, breathing it back out. She turned and began to quietly but desperately tug at the windowsill on the wall behind her. It had to move. She saw it wasn’t locked. It had to! But it felt rigid.

The creature moved closer. She started pulling the window frame more violently and desperately. Screw the sound. It was going to find her no matter what, so she was willing to make noise. But it was still resistant. Another step in the corridor. She felt the frame move up, but it was aggravatingly slow, like those stupid red curtains moving back from a theater stage before an act. The creature had stopped.

“I hear you. Don’t run!”

The window was about a quarter of the way up now. Loud sniffing noises came from the other side of the door. She turned and saw a leather sofa close to the door, large enough to use as a barricade. She ran and pushed it from the end until it covered the door, and a standing light fell down with it. She went back to the window and caught it as it began to descend, desperately pushing it back up with all her strength. The door pushed, but the sofa’s friction stopped it from moving too much. But through the gap, she could see the spinning swirl. It hissed, and she saw a long human-like tongue flick at her. The window was moving faster now.

“Jessicaaaa……”

The eye seemed to spin even faster, but she would not look at it anymore in case it caused her to fall into it like Alice down the rabbit hole. A place she would never be able to climb out of, and strangely, she felt that was physically possible as much as psychologically. The creature smashed through the doorframe with its arm, sending wooden splinters across the room. The window was very nearly open enough. The alien flung the sofa and the remains of the door frame aside just as Jessica leaned through the window and used her hands against the outside wall to push her body out of it.

As she reoriented, she saw that in front of her was just a plain sidewalk with buildings to her left and right. She ran around in a circle, searching every which way. The creature reached the window and, to her horror, began to climb through it slowly. Its shoulders contracted in a strange way to let the large torso fit through the gap. Its head seemed still as it moved, the face gazing ravenously at her.

The smiling mouth exposed long, jagged teeth that even the vilest thing dreamt from a Dr. Seuss book couldn’t have imitated. The eyes! The sniffing nose that, if it had been any longer, would have looked like a carrot if not for being the wrong color! The odd motions. The insane, hypnotic face. The sight was too much for a mortal to stomach.

Then she saw, in the distance, the complex wall stretching out behind several buildings. She figured that if she followed it, she could get back to the road. She set off without losing any time, and the creature hissed in frustration. She knew even if it lost sight, its sense of smell would help it, and she worried it would be able to run fast. She ran past the buildings and down more roads. Now she thought she was changing direction and going out of the city rather than further into it.

But she could hear footsteps. It was running. It was near. Very near. She turned a corner and was suddenly back in the underpass near the reception building. Yes! This was it. She went running around into the courtyard. Now she couldn’t hear any footsteps, but she heard a hideous wail somewhere behind, which echoed over the rooftops. She ran to the end of the courtyard and stared at the empty gate frame. The mist beckoned. She stepped closer.

Her subconscious mind could see swirling, gasping faces and clasping hands. But those were just tricks. The mist was still and cold. She was now so close that she stood scarcely an inch back from it. Before, she had been so glad to have left the road. But the emptiness of the mist couldn’t compare to what was with her in this city that had now become a death trap. An enraged scream echoed from far behind her. It was trapped in the maze, hopefully going deeper in. She thought about the ominous woman who had warned her. This wasn’t somewhere she could stay.

Facing the mist, she took a step forward. Then another, and another. Within a minute, the wall of the cityscape was the faintest outline behind. The road, the road, where was it? She clenched her eyes as tightly shut as she could. Her feet walked on ground that seemed to have no texture. Like she was walking on nothing at all. And yet she was. She felt the ground’s dimension and realized her feet were walking along a flat plane at every step. Then suddenly, something hard.

The road was back. It stretched ahead, but this time took a right turn, and while the mist hugged either side of it, the picture of the road was clear. She set off walking, but the turn was so gradual she hardly noticed it as she changed direction. At least she wasn’t going back to where she was before. Neither the city nor wherever she had originally come from, which now seemed such a long time ago. She would go somewhere else, and the road would manifest it.

Anywhere had to be a better place than where she had been. Her arms were now completely drenched in sweat, but the pounding of her heart was beginning to fade.

Suddenly, behind her, she heard whispering echoing along the road. The words floated succinctly through the air, finding her. Her body was pulling them in. They were following her! Somehow being broadcast to her!

“Jessicaaa….. I’m coming.”

It couldn’t be! How had it followed her this far? Hadn’t it been lost in the city? She heard sniffing and the fast movement of feet. She set off running as fast as she could, but now she could hear its quick, heavy steps in the distance. It wouldn’t be long.

“Jessica, you called me, and now you want to abandon me?”

“Go away!” she screamed back.

But as she ran, she hit a wall. She was on the floor before she knew what had happened. Ahead stretched an almost colorless pale wall like the one around the city, but this time there was no entrance. The mist had now closed in very tightly on either side of her. She looked behind her in horror and saw a tall, looming figure. Now the mist covered the road, but she could see the eyes shining as its outline towered above her. The nose pointed out from the mist, and she could see the tips of its ears, though not the rest of the face or the hideous teeth.

“Jessica,” it said as it approached. The words were now more formed and didn’t drag. It almost seemed to have grown, and at its height, it may as well have been ten feet tall to her. “You called me here. You and I made this place together, and now you fear me? I’ve always been here, Jessica, at the back of your mind, watching, waiting.” It chuckled.

“Waiting for what?”

The demon grew even closer, and now she could see its face. Its steps slowed, but she could see saliva dripping from its razor teeth, which she stared at. She saw the claws that could shred her hanging by its waist. She refused to look at the eyes. Her arms had wrapped themselves around her body without her even realizing it. She felt pain and wouldn’t be able to stand if she tried. The fear was so much that it had turned into grief, which crippled her. Now nothing could be done.

“We made this place together. The road, the mist, the city. This is your mind. That is why you can never escape it. Look into my eyes.”

She didn’t want to. She covered her face with her hands.

“Look!” it hissed. It now hovered directly over her.

She resisted. Every fiber of her being screamed not to. But she could hear sweet music coming. It was the most eloquent melody she had ever heard. Though her past was faint, she knew music well and remembered many songs. But this was something else. A force from beyond the vale was pulling her. She had no power to resist, and against her will, her head rose to the chorus.

Accompanying the noise of a lyre, the most beautiful angelic voice sang from within the shining spirals. The eyes seemed to grow larger and larger until they were everything she could see. Time seemed suddenly meaningless, and she saw cities and worlds traveling down the spirals around her. Among them, the reptile and the mannequin tumbled. She was falling through black-and-white space. Deafening bells chimed. Millions of voices called out from the abyss, some ecstatic, others screaming and agonized. The singing had turned into the screaming of a banshee. She now knew the secret of the mist and the lights. But above all sounds, she heard one.

“You and I made this world together, Jessica. This is where you have always been and where you will be forever.” The two sentences repeated everywhere, faster and faster, spinning and intertwining in her sight, her ears, and her head.

She screamed. She couldn’t take it anymore—the disembodied senselessness, the tiredness, the fear. Her vision began to fade. She could now see an outline, a blurry face hovering in front of her.

“Jessica. Jessica!”

Two fists slammed on either side of her head. She was peering up over her crossed arms, upon which she had been dozing. Mr. Park, her math teacher, hovered over her. His nose wrinkled in disgust, and she recognized its coarse hairs. The tall face. Tall and broad. The alien had been her teacher all along, manifesting in her unconscious mind. His angry fists were resting on the desk.

“You fell asleep again. Were you even working for the last ten minutes, or were you writing one of your stupid stories? What an imagination you must have!”

Some of her classmates laughed. He snatched her notebook away. Ink was smeared on the open page, but this time the writing was legible. She noticed ink on her right index fingernail. It had been a dream. He flicked carelessly through the pages and snorted.

“Writing ghost stories might be fun for you, but they won’t help solve parametric equations.”

He scowled at her.

“But since class is finished in four minutes, you have permission to get out of my sight.”

He tossed the notebook at her. The students gathered their things and left the classroom. Outside, she met a group of her friends and her brother, Michael, as they left for the subway. The dream had been such an ordeal. She just wanted to go home, watch some TV, and be with her family again. The pages of the notebook could keep their secrets.

Tonight, she would take a break from writing. And tomorrow night as well. The day was cold, and a mist seemed to linger around the busy city. As they arrived at the station, taxi engines roared and the wheels of trains echoed as people bustled by. For a second, Jessica felt a chill. She snapped out of it as her friends laughed and pointed to a new graffiti mural that had been sprayed on a wall. Far away, without her knowledge, a pale woman with dark eyes stared down at them from her apartment window. She smiled knowingly as the mist slowly tightened around the skyline.