Wounds

The dark paralysed her. It had always been with her; its tendrils reaching into her fragile mind, encapsulating her in a world of terror. Another wave of pain. She screamed a silent scream.

Cass was fifteen, an average girl from a small town in West Virginia. She’d had bright blue eyes the colour of the afternoon sky, and wavy brown hair, cut uniformly at shoulder-length. School had dominated the vast majority of her life up until this point, and she was looking forwards to reaching the finish line.

Then her world had been turned upside down, thrusting her deep into a nightmarish hell. She never really could recall what had happened, but she remembered her parents’ shrieks and the two gunshots which followed shortly after, ending in laughter which seemed to emanate from inside her, immediately silencing her reality as she’d known it.

After that, she’d cried for weeks, nobody checking up on her, or the two rotting corpses on the kitchen floor. Starvation was imminent, she ate very little and her throat felt dry at all times. 

That was when the nightmares had started. 

Horrors filled her disturbed mind, taunting, reminding her of that despair and helplessness she’d felt. Every night, every second, she’d be tormented. She’d wake up screeching, panting, yelling for help, for anyone.

It never stopped, it would become routine, an endless cycle. A cycle which broke when she didn’t wake up.

Stuck in a nightmare. No apparent escape. The monsters. Real. She saw them; talons, blood-red eyes, with deformed features and shapes, wings sprouting from their backsides. Run, she told herself, but her legs were bricks, cementing her to the black abyss that appeared to be the ground. A terror-inducing scream escaped her.

The world changed. She found herself in a room containing nothing but a door on the eastern wall’s face. She tried to move, and was surprised to find that her legs obeyed her. Cass’s hand rested on the doorknob, and she hesitated for a swift second before unceremoniously yanking it open. She got blasted back, and it slammed shut.

There was a monster. The one with the tendrils, the one with its hooks in her mind. It approached her, and she felt a sense of despair indulge her as she stared into its hollow eyes. She felt rather than saw the creature lunge, talons extended, preparing to impale her frail being. This was it. The opportunity to get past it, to get out. She ducked as the creature flew over her, leaving it to crash into the western face with an ear-piercing crunch. The door was open, inexplicably. She made a mad dash for it, lunging into it. The darkness melted away.

She woke up to find herself in a pool of blood. Blades filled her vision. The blades that had stabbed her, the blades that stuck out of her chest. She was the monster.