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Max sat wearily at her desk, her body only beginning to recover from the overuse of her powers a few hours earlier in front of the dormitories.
“I barely managed to save Kate from committing suicide, and my head…it’s still pounding like a drum.”
The girl was now at the nearby hospital, resting and recovering from the trauma she’d suffered. Kate was safe from the monsters who had caused her so much pain, and Max felt a tiny bit of peace in knowing that soothing fact.
Nightfall was encroaching upon the Blackwell campus, and outside her window, Max saw students clustered together, weeping, whispering, all visibly shaken by the tragedy that could’ve come about, if Max hadn’t been able to miraculously reach Kate in time.
The tense meeting in Principal Well’s office still weighed heavily on her, as Max pondered if she’d truly made the right decision in marking Nathan Prescott as the likely culprit for Kate’s near-suicide attempt.
“Obviously, Nathan’s a twisted bastard without any remorse. And I’m positive that he drugged Kate at that Vortex Club party. But…would he really have the malice and sadism needed to push somebody to suicide?”
“Not to mention…was it really just the party that made Kate want to die? There has to be more to this than I’ve found so far. Maybe Chloe can help me dig up the dirty truth on this nightmare.”
Her eyes felt heavier and heavier, and as Max heard the distant, mournful call of that train echoing on the soft night wind, the sinister text she had received from Sean Prescott flashed through her memory.
“That bastard…what if he’s the one really pulling the strings?”
On her computer, the browser showed a site filled with dream symbolisms that Max had been scanning through, desperately trying to find some understanding on her storm nightmare. A few entries above the lengthy entry for “Storm” was a sinister looking section on “Sirens” that Max couldn’t help but be morbidly enamored with.
“Sirens”
“In eras of war and nuclear threat, sirens were used to warn the populace of impending danger. The use of those frightening horns has changed in modern years for use in times of natural disasters, such as tornadoes.
If you hear a similar siren in your dream, it could be a warning from your subconscious or, if you believe in the supernatural, an external source, that you yourself will soon be dealing with something equally dangerous.”
The monitor faded to its psychedelic screen saver, and without the bright light to keep her eyes open, Max was doomed to pass out. Exhaustion overwhelmed her, and Max’s consciousness faded away in an instant.
Immediately, she was back on that stormy forest hill, lightning flashing violently all around her as the howling wind pounded her and the surrounding trees with heavy rain. Max shuddered at the sight all around her, the chill of the storm seeping into her body.
“Not again!” Max whimpered, trying to shield her face with her hands as she looked around.
To her confusion, she could still hear the far away call of the train, the soft sound somehow managing to be heard amidst the roar of the storm. Whether it was an echo from the real world or something else, Max couldn’t discern.
Just as she was about to step towards the lighthouse up above, the one and only safe spot she could see, a hideous growling resounded from the trees to her left, and Max froze up at the sight of the creature that capered out in front of her.
A tall, lanky fiend wrapped in inky shadow and leering at her with a mouth full of razor sharp fangs stood before her, uttering a horrible guttural laughter that resounded across the forest. Scarlet orbs narrowed in bloodlust locked Max in place.
“W-What the fuck is this?!” Max stammered, and she raised her hand, willing her time reversal power to save her.
The luminous light that framed her vision during rewinds returned, but although the rain and wind reversed, the creature stayed in place, roaring with his demented laugh as Max realized that he was immune just as the spirit doe had been. She lowered her hand and ceased her power, knowing that she was truly cornered.
“Get away from me!” she yelled, taking shaky steps back as the demon slowly advanced.
In the distance, the train’s mournful call was steadily rising in intensity, growing louder and louder, overcoming the howl of the massive storm as its pitch seemed to heighten. Max gazed at the sky in confusion as the previously soft sound warped into what was unmistakably the baleful wail of a tornado siren.
She had little time to ponder the disembodied oddity, with the demon walking towards her menacingly and snarling at her in garbled words that she couldn’t understand. Nobody was coming to save her, and without her time power to help her, Max was a sitting duck.
“What should I do?!” she whispered frantically, and then, to her shock and the demon’s terror, a brilliant white light erupted to their right.
Bounding out of the trees, glowing with that immense light and dancing gracefully as she attacked the monstrosity was the spirit doe, far more aggressive than Max had ever seen her. The demon before her was shrieking in horror and fury as his spectral opponent charged at him, her head lowered and the aura surrounding her expanding harshly.
In a mere matter of seconds, the demon’s form was utterly shattered by the doe’s light, and all around them, the siren bellowed ominously, drowning out the wind as Max’s vision began to go black once more. The doe turned to face her, standing still and elegant as Max wearily collapsed to the ground in relief.
“You…are you…?” she tried to ask her savior, as darkness fell over her completely.
When her sight returned, she was suddenly back in the main hallway of her dormitory, the walls adorned with bizarre and disturbing monochrome photographs of girls contorted in disturbing positions. Max was in the arms of a girl with a willowy figure, and she gasped in alarm when she realized who it was.
Rachel Amber, robed in white and gazing down at her with a solemn expression on her beautiful face, walked slowly down the hall towards Max’s room as the baleful siren droned on and on.
Max couldn’t make herself utter a single word, taking in the sight of the missing girl and the disturbing photos lining the hall. Rachel passed Kate’s now empty dorm room, and paused so that Max could see the writing on her board.
I WANT TO DIE
“N-no!” Max managed to choke out finally, still in shock at the rapidly changing series of events.
Rachel continued walking, and the door to Max’s room swung open by itself, granting the mysterious girl passage. The window in the room showed a pitch black campus, devoid of any wandering students. At the desk, Max saw herself slumped in front of her computer, and she couldn’t help but shudder at the notion that she was having an out of body experience.
Max felt Rachel’s arms disappear from below her, and she gawked at the sight of herself floating in the middle of her room, Rachel watching her quietly as her dream-self floated towards her sleeping body. Just before Max merged with her physical body, she heard Rachel finally speak up in a velvety smooth voice.
“Don’t let Kate Marsh become his next victim.”
“Kate!”
Max bolted upright, looking around her in bewilderment, seeing that she was now alone in her room, without anybody else with her, and without that ominous siren echoing all around her. Her phone was lit up, showing a message from Chloe demanding that they meet up on the campus asap.
“Was that really Rachel Amber?! And what did she mean by Kate becoming the ‘next victim’? Are those two somehow connected?”
She shakily got up, grabbed her things and walked out her dorm room, seeing that the darkened hallway was now devoid of the disturbing black and white photographs she had seen only moments before. When she turned on her phone light, it illuminated the whiteboard next to Kate’s door, filled with hypocritical “get better” messages from the bitches who had nearly pushed her over the edge.
“When the doe intervened, I tried to ask her if she’s really Rachel. It’s been a whimsical thought I’ve had since seeing her in that first nightmare, and in the junkyard too. Was I right all along? And who…or maybe, what was that demon?”
“And those photos…what the ever living fuck was that about?”
With determination in her heart to get to the bottom of Rachel and Kate’s seemingly intertwined tragedies, Max bolted from the girls’ dormitory, setting off for the main part of campus where Chloe lay waiting.