Lyra
Someone’s been tapping on something near you when you’re about to sleep. A window. It sounded like dripping at first. Someone is tapping. You can’t find them.

Your chest is too warm. Someone has been sitting on you while you sleep.

Your hands are wet, covered in soil. It’s under your fingernails, too. Cold, brown soil on your palms tinged faintly red.

Your legs ache. Your lungs burn. You’ve been running, you’ve been running so hard and so long.

Your eyes ache. You realize you fell asleep without ever closing them.

Late in the night, you rush to the sink without quite realizing why. Heat surges through you, up your throat and out of your mouth in a thick, red gob. Blood, turned thick with what might be mucus. Tears stream down your cheeks. Through the blur, somewhere in the red morass, you notice the brassy glint of a key.

You are woken up by the sound of your phone ringing. You don’t recognize the number. The moment you pick up, the voice of a young woman fills your ears. She’s asking you, frantically, where she is. She implores you over and over, ignoring your attempts to reply. You can hear running water behind her. The line goes dead after a few seconds.

Your arms go out as you jerk awake. You open your mouth to assure her that, yes, you’ll be her friend. You’ll be there for her, you swear, not like everyone else who ran away. A dry gasp escapes your throat. Tears run down your face- it feels like you’ve been crying for hours. Nobody is there. The memory of where you were a moment ago flits away from your grasp.

Thelsa
You jerk awake. Your ears are ringing. Your vision is tinged a dull red, pulsing with a faint impression of throbbing, fat canals.

You notice someone watching you from a window. It takes you a moment to realize that there isn’t a house attached. The figure behind the window shuts the blinds.

You scratch madly at yourself. You can’t sleep. Every angle is wrong. Slightly acute, slightly obtuse; how do the doors stay open? How do you stay still? The world is spinning so fast, so fast…

You’ve learned a secret. [Rumors Thread pdf]

You wake to hear someone whispering in a guttural, lilting tongue you don’t understand. As you look around, you slowly begin to register the subtle movement of your lips.

Something hard and firm has been growing in your arm, like fingernails but firmer. Trying to tear it out hurts like hell. It’s studded, segmented like a crystal, woven together with keratinous strands.

Tilt your head into the light just right, and you can see the shadow God casts on the world. So many writhing little legs and tendrils…

A lanky, nude form of an unfinished human congeals out of the air and reaches pleadingly towards you. Before you can react, it fades from view like a trick of the light.

You start to notice that every time you turn around, it takes everything you weren’t looking at a half-second or so to start moving.

Horace

You notice something black emerging from beneath a couch, segmented like the leg of an insect. It’s a hand, severely burnt, reaching out towards you.

Each and every night, you wake up so hot you can hardly remember what cold is. Your hair is blown back, your eyes stinging as if from a great flash.

Animals act in a strange, spasmodic, nearly puppet-like manner around you. Their eyes go wide and their tails go stiff, and they move robotically to bite at whatever of themselves they can reach for as long as you’re nearby.
You dream that you wake up alone. The room you are in is the same as the one you fell asleep in, but in a state of advanced disrepair. The cloth on your bed is rotten, the frame rusted nearly to powder, and it seems as though the place had been abandoned long ago. The window nearby is boarded up quite thoroughly, and the knob on your door is absent. It’s just as well, a slip of paper nailed above it reads ‘DO NOT GO OUT THERE’ in handwriting you almost recognize. You can still taste dust in your throat when you wake.

Running water that touches your hands comes away red. You can’t seem to get them clean.

Don’t pick radio stations anymore. When it’s not screaming, it’s languages you can’t understand- broadcasts from after bombings, killings, and worse things still.

Your phone rings. “-ease stop. Please stop. Please stop. Please stop. Please stop. Plea-“ Click. Was that Grampa?


M

You didn’t even realize you were writing. Why you would write “get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head” until it fills an entire page is a mystery in itself.

You didn’t believe the gash in your side was really moving until late one night, when you heard it talking to itself in a wet, gravelly voice.

It’s getting hard to read when passages of text are ham-fistedly replaced with orders.

'What about a story?’ said Christopher Robin.

' What about a story?’ I said.

'Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?’

'I suppose I could,’ I said. 'What sort of stories does
he like?’

'About GOING TO THE PIER AFTER CLOSING TO INVESTIGATE THE MATTER OF THE MISSING CHILDREN.’

'Oh, I see.’

'So could you very sweetly?’

'I’ll try,’ I said. So I tried TO GO TO THE PIER AND COMPLETE THE TASK SET BEFORE ME AT ONCE.


At first, you were worried your heart had stopped beating. You aren’t sure how to feel about having two syncopated heartbeats.

You don’t bleed anymore. Whatever’s going on under your skin is deep maroon and has a consistency like jello mold.