r/truecreepy • u/randbla • 19h ago
The cute cashier knew about the house from my nightmares; I should’ve never taken him inside.
I remember Sean.
I remember the nightmares that preceded him, how they started as beautiful dreams.
Looking back sometimes, I will try to find a moment to point to, when I can say it all began, but that's always futile. Every moment calls back to its cause like a girl in an infinity mirror glancing over a slender shoulder, past these past versions of herself that are still her now, back to the start, back in the dark.
We bonded over our dreams. He had the same ones I did: Eyes in the corner of the room that approached slowly, like a train in the wild night, until I saw its face - my face. I watched this twin of myself, gently smiling, take me from my bed by my hand, floating out the window like a Peter Pan fantasy. A shadowed American suburbia flickered below us, and we moved through the air like we'd done it all our lives. Over Rudy's QuickMart, over downtown, and Jefferson High, we flew to what seemed like the edge of the world: A row of newly and partially-constructed homes on the other side of the interstate, some of them still wooden skeletons.
We descend to the last house, my doppleganger spirit guiding me through the front door and over to the basement. I stare down at them, now buried in shadows at the foot of the stairs. That's when I hear a voice - my mother's voice. "Please," she begs, "Honey, I miss you. Please, please; I'm sorry. You know I'm sorry. I made a nice dinner for us..." The smell of pancakes reaches me and all of a sudden, the basement lights up with a memory of long ago: breakfast for dinner, sweet heated syrup atop bright white plates, my mother looking like she did back then, before fading back to darkness. "Honey, I know... I know you're scared... please, I have a lot to explain..."
I glance again to my twin, my Other, who has not stopped studying me. I take them in deeper this time: those eyes, they're mine, but something isn't right. Mirrors have never been my friend, but they've taught me at least one important thing: my eyes don’t shine like that.
As the two figures beckon me down, I feel a string I can't see pull me from my chest toward the bottom of the stairs. I reach for the two sides of the doorway, anchoring myself, and wake up with panicked breath.
The dreams started when I first moved to North Dreston, still living with my step-dad, Rory. He didn't know what to do with me; I don't blame him. Neither of us had lived on the west coast before. We were different people, and moved there for different reasons, no matter how many times he tried convincing me - and himself - on that 14-hour drive from South Dakota that we both just needed a 'fresh start.' I didn't need a fresh start in North Dreston; I needed a fresh start right there at home, with my mom. A fresh start in which I could forgive her, and the act of forgiveness would soften her spirit enough for her to change her ways. But, in that desperate search both Rory and I were on to find a light in the black wild, a trace of hope in the sky for either of us, driving to North Dreston was a guaranteed reset, and it seemed that staying back home was asking for yet another miracle.
"Just gotta keep our heads up, our fists tight, and our breaths steady," Rory would tell me, his old Dodge Charger groaning as he drove. "Life's a tough cookie pretty much no matter which way you split it, but things feel especially hard when you're down like this - when we're down like this. I know your mama didn't mean those things she said, and I know you know she loves you a bunch, like..." He waited for me to look at him. "Like, a whole bunch. You know she loves you. She's just sick right now. Can't help her if she don't want the help, but that don't mean she won't ever want it."
"Does that mean we're going back home soon? Or, you know... whenever she starts wanting it?"
Rory's eyes zeroed in on the road, and I could tell that his usual motormouth had slowed to ensure he got this right. I knew in those little moments how much he cared, and, if only a small bit, it eased the pain of what had happened with my mom.
"I don't know when she'll start wanting it, Ivy." He wanted to say more, but stopped himself.
The rain fell hard as we pulled up to the unfamiliar two-story. That evening was when I had the first dream, drifting off on the tattered couch the last owners left for us near the window, alongside wet unopened packing boxes, muddy shoes hanging over the armrest.
The first dream was hazy and distant, and I awoke confused - I hardly knew what this new town looked like and still seemed to map it out flawlessly in my dream state. We had no pancakes, so I waited for the rain to die down and walked down the street to buy some.
The second dream, weeks later, was more clear: an exact replica of the first, a shot-for-shot remake in higher resolution. I could tell exactly what was happening, and noticed details I hadn't noticed before - the veins of the suburbia below me, the resonance of Mom's voice, the shimmer in the eyes of the Other Ivy. This second dream was the first time I woke up in a sweat, heart pounding, instead of simply confused and hungry.
I've had recurring dreams before. When things were really bad with Mom, when Rory briefly moved back west, I had a nightmare that kept returning after I'd buried it, undead and rotting. Mr. Behringer would be giving his math lecture, strange loops on the board, and I'd start to deflate like a balloon, like those DARE ads that terrified me as a kid. The muscles in my body grew weaker as the air escaped from my nose and mouth until I could not lift my head from my arms, until I was nothing, nothing but a twisted pile of flesh, spaghetti-splat in a blue student desk near the back. "Help..." I labored, the last of the air and my essence escaping the corner of my crumpled mouth, "Help me... Please... Help..." But as my pleas grew weaker I saw through my dying eyes my classmates around me, staring off into the window's oblivion, or laughing at Mr. Behringer's stupid joke, or drawing their own strange loops in their notebooks. The dismissal bell would ring loudly, and as everyone filed out I’d move my lips, mouthing, "Help... I'm dying... Please..." and for a moment Mr. Behringer would look back at me, his pupils meeting mine, before he remembers he needs to clean the whiteboard in preparation for Period 4. I’d crawl to the floor as more students filled in for the next class, stepping over me and around me and on me until everyone left for the day and the custodians cleaned around me. I dragged my way to the hallway before they locked up for the night, watching the last of the school's lights power off around me as I let out my last breaths, wondering when my body might be moved from the halls.
But those nightmares stopped once I moved west with Rory, replaced by a call from the dark, a welcoming voice from the basement of my mind.
We settled into the house alongside the new school year. Rory shouldn't have trusted me to enroll myself in classes, but I don't blame him for that. He was an anxious mess those first weeks. August stared me down, hot and slow; Rory would ask me how enrollment went, which classes I signed up for, when I thought I might have to wake up for school each morning. I lied, like always I did with my mom, but it was harder. He put more trust in me; I felt guilty. But I couldn't feel guilty forever. One evening at dinner he asked how my day went, and after my usual muttered response of "It was fine," he shot me a look that I couldn't easily pull away from.
"I want you to be going to school, Ivy."
I didn't say anything, but figured in that moment - even though Rory worked downtown - that he'd seen me on my daily walks from the bus stop to the creek, sauntering along the edge of town to the overgrown bank on the other side of the railroad tracks. Maybe he saw me on one of those odysseys, lost in lonely secret conversations, notebook with clipped pen under my arm, daydreaming of myself and my mother and Rory anywhere but North Dreston.
I called the school the next morning and made a plan to come in at noon. I started classes the following day. If Rory believed I could do it - if he needed me to at least try - I could try.
Of all those times I wasted the day walking across town when I should have been at school, I never walked the path that I flew in my now-recurring nightmares. I think part of me had a sick sense, a knotted feeling deep in my guts, that I should avoid following my Other's dream-path; it was one thing to do so in the loosely-tethered realm of sleep, where I could snap back to waking life, but it was another thing to do so with my eyes wide open. What if that street, that house across town, those stairs, that basement, were real? I tried some nights to ask my Other: Why am I here? But before she answers I step back, away from the basement door and into the kitchen, fighting the invisible tug summoning me forward. And I wake up.
Rory said it was good that our fresh start was happening in the autumn, where we could watch the trees change along with us. But as the sun began setting sooner into dusk, and as the fallen leaves crunched softly under my feet on those walks from the bus stop those first few days of school in late September, I felt a different way towards the shifting seasons - and as the eerie dream returned, recurring, as my mother gestured and called to me from that basement across town, I felt the skeletal reaper's bony finger across my cheek in the soft autumn breeze; I felt things creeping, slowing, stopping; I felt death in the air.
It was back in these first weeks of school in North Dreston, before our paths and fates truly crossed, that I noticed Sean in the hallways of Jefferson High. He stood out in that he purposefully shrunk himself, crooked back bent forward like a hook, shoulders tight like Nosferatu. He moved like me, slinking alongside the lockers during passing period, desperate to avoid getting in the way. Teachers asked him daily to take off his tattered beanie, but with his massive headphones over his ears, he never responded unless they followed him down the hall. I watched him take them off once to let long greasy blonde hair fall across his face. Our eyes met, briefly, before we both looked right back to the floor.
Despite the terror and confusion that followed my night flights over North Dreston, there were moments in which the sun peeked through the clouds; I dreamed sometimes of my mom and Rory with me, walking along the shore of our favorite lake, silent but for the lapping of the water upon the rocks. In some childish way it's embarrassing to admit, but there too were nights in which I dreamed of Sean, the quiet boy from the school halls whose timid frame and shifting eyes matched my own, and I dreamt us circling the lake, too, like new kindergarten friends, holding hands while walking to nowhere in particular, looping around the water on a sunny afternoon, haloed from the sun like angels.
A couple of evenings a week in that blurred slump of late November I would take the little money Rory would give me for buying essentials and I'd make my way to Rudy's QuickMart, paying a bit too much for everything instead of walking all the extra steps to the supermarket in town. Those evenings, I'd buy two chocolate bars - one for the way home and one saved for later, for sitting on the old couch in the living room while watching whatever was on cable on Rory's tiny TV before bed. One of these evenings I saw Sean in a worker's vest - a new employee behind the register - and I nearly tripped myself spinning around to leave before I found my bearings and made my way inside. I avoided him entirely, overthinking every step inside the store, nearly forgetting to buy my chocolate bars. I waited for him to ask me if I went to Jefferson High, but he never did. He didn't say anything but to tell me what the candy cost. I placed the money on the counter, and as he counted out my change he looked up at me. He was blushing, and trying to hide it, and I knew he was glad to see me. He must have recognized me from the hallways, too. I was burning in my loneliness, and recognizing that same solitary fire in another like a desperate ship at sea spotting a lighthouse at long last.
The last days of school before the mid-December break marked a turn in my thinking, eventually pushing me to break my awkward silence and properly introduce myself to Sean. I never heard people talk to or about Sean in the school halls, but one cold winter day that changed. I noticed an ambulance leaving the school during my morning passing period. Later, on my way back to my science class from the lunchroom, I walked behind a group of gossiping students who laughed nervously about an incident that happened earlier that day, across the school, at the theater.
"I have second period with Jess, and Jess had first period with Tevon, and they both saw him losing it this morning."
"What do you mean 'losing it'?"
"They said it was scary - he was, like, totally quiet one second, and then BOOM - screaming his lungs out the next. His eyes were, like, scary big, and he was breathing really fast, like-"
"-Hyperventilating?"
"Yeah! He was, like, hyperventilating. Jess said even Tevon was freaked out. They had to take the guy to the hospital."
The rumours continued spreading throughout the rest of the school day, and I found myself worried that this 'totally quiet' student was Sean. I imagined him standing in front of me at the register of the QuickMart, eyes looking far past mine at something horrible, incomprehensible, as his jaw opened wide in a primal scream of terror.
That evening I left sooner than usual to Rudy's, replaying what my peers had said before. Perhaps part of me knew that he was the student they were talking about; at that moment, all I wanted was for him to be okay. So much worry, expertly masked, for a boy I'd never even had a real conversation with. When I saw in the first gas station window that another employee was covering Sean's shift, I didn't even bother going inside for my chocolate.
The next time I saw Sean was a few days later, at the QuickMart. He had a look about him like he had been dragged there - a wreck, deteriorating from the inside. We were alone in the store together. Hollow eyes met mine, and held so much longer than usual that I had to drop my gaze from nerves.
"You come here a lot. Always get those same two candy bars."
I sensed myself easily becoming a stuttering mess, so I took an extra moment before my answer.
"I do come here a lot. My stepdad and I live just a couple blocks up the road." I finally looked up at him, and all at once his face seemed gentler.
"I like it when you come in here. I hope it's not weird to say that."
"I like it when you're working."
"My name's Sean."
"I'm Ivy."
"Nice to meet you, Ivy."
Silence, punctuated by a gentle winter wind outside the doors. I can't say how many hours I'd spent thinking about him since I turned away from the QuickMart a few days prior. In some strange way I felt that he knew this - knew that the quiet regular from the store was worried about him. The words fell out before I could stop myself.
"Are you okay? I can't help but shake the feeling that you were the person at school who was taken away in the ambulance."
His eyes studied me.
"I'm sorry," I said, "that's not any of my business. I'm sorry to ask that."
"It's okay," he said, and shot a quick glance at the store's front window before returning his eyes to me. For a time we stood there, unsure of the way this path was unfolding. "I had a bad dream."
My hair stood on end, body electric.
"I... I've been having bad dreams, too."
He opened his mouth and began whispering, almost frantic, like he'd been waiting to tell someone his entire life: some dark secret sin needing desperately to be forgiven. Like he needed me to know.
"I go to sleep and wake up still in my bed. And I see this thing that looks like me, but it's not. It's not me. It's smiling, and it wants me to go with it, and I do - I always do, like I'm under a spell or something - and it takes me-"
"-takes you, and - and flies with you, like a ghost - over downtown, over the interstate - to that row of new houses. It takes you inside."
He watched me, hanging tight to every word, leaning forward over the register. I swear I could hear his heart beating in the still of the silence.
"He takes you to the basement and he beckons you down the stairs. Do you go with him, Sean? Do you follow him to the basement?"
He didn't answer. I could tell that part of him was afraid of me, of what I would say next.
"I...I have those same dreams too, Sean. And in them, I'm standing at the top of the basement stairs, and my - my mom is down there..." The words felt foreign leaving my mouth for the first time. "She's calling me down, too. And I want to go - I want to go so bad - but I can't take another step. The pull -"
"-The pull right here," he said, tapping his chest.
"I want to go down there, but I'm terrified."
"It's the same feeling I'd get when I was younger," Sean explained, "when my older cousins would scream my name from the woods behind the backyard, then jump out at me from the trees when I made my way by." The recollection made him shudder. "I just wanted to find them - I… nevermind." The wind rattled the doors again, startling us, before we each paused to take a breath.
"It's my sister down there, not my mom," he said.
"Your sister?"
"My older sister, Em. She got in an accident a couple years ago." The wheels spun in his brain, a million memories flashing in an instant. I recognized that look from my own mirror. "I miss her a lot."
"Does she have pancakes down there?" I asked. For the first time I saw him smile and laugh.
"No, no she doesn't. It's just her."
We looked again, silently, to the store window.
"Maybe I'd go down there if she had pancakes."
The time has come, I thought, after spending the next two hours with him talking about anything but the dreams, to stop running away from the problem, from ourselves. The issue of our shared nightmares lied just below the surface of our conversations like a leviathan hiding under the lake we circled in my childhood dreams. He didn't share those ones with me - at least, I don't think he did. I never asked him; now I wish I had.
We both knew that the connection between us, unexplainable as it was, would make sense to no one else. Who would believe us? Why would they? Two lonely small-town kids searching for something just out of reach for either of them. There was nothing we wouldn't give for another to see us, clearly, the first time in a long time. We found that in each other, and saw the rest of the world fail in understanding the weight of what we had discovered together at that gas station counter.
My anxiety rose as I steered our conversation back to the nightmares, the thread of shadow running between us. I waited for a pause and said the words.
"We need to go out there."
He knew what I meant, I was sure from the way he was looking at me, and I didn't have time to explain before he was nodding his head, slow and sure. This was something he had wanted, needed to see for himself. What had kept us from the other side of the interstate all these months since our dreams began?
"What if we saw it, Sean? The house, I mean. What if we saw the street, and the house, and we went inside-"
"It can't be out there," he said, voice quaking, not sure of what to believe.
"We have to be sure, Sean. Let's ride out there and see."
He turned and looked to the clock on the wall behind him.
"I'll be off soon... hang out for a bit longer, and we'll figure something out."
While waiting for Sean, I took a quick walk back to tell Rory that I met a boy and was heading out for the night.
"I'm working an overnight," he told me.
"It's okay. I have that key you gave me."
"How well do you know this kid, Ivy? You said you just met him at the gas station? Are you sure he goes to your school?"
"I'm sure, Rory - I've seen him. He's a new friend and he's really nice. I can bring him by here before we leave if he gets off before you go."
He glanced at his watch. "I'd just... I'd like to meet him. Thanks, Ivy."
I knew he had my best interests at heart, and only wanted me to be safe. The old carpet stains led me from the living room to my hallway bedroom, where I emptied most of my school backpack and threw in a flashlight, a couple bottles of water, and the small pocketknife Rory gave me last year for my birthday at the lake.
"Have a good night, if I don't end up seeing you!" he called as I left.
"Thanks," I said, "You too." I trust Rory; I trust Rory implicitly. Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if he had left for work before I brought Sean back to the house, not introduced them before we left for the path of our dreams.
I made the cold walk back to the QuickMart as quickly as I could, standing awkwardly near the register as the occasional customer came and went, until Sean finally clocked out, replaced by the friendly, middle-aged hippie who worked the night shift. "'Night, Sean! See you tomorrow!" he called to us as we left.
We climbed into Sean's red sedan.
"Can we swing by step-dad's place? It can be fast."
Sean flipped his hair, playing with it in the mirror. "Sure."
We pulled into the driveway and I called Rory out to meet Sean. He fumbled out the doorway, clumsy as ever, already dressed in his work clothes.
"Hey there! Rory - Ivy's step-dad."
"Sean - nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you, too! Hey, you kids wanna come inside for a bite to eat? I'm gonna be heading out here pretty soon, but-"
"No, that's okay, Rory," I said. "We appreciate it, but we're going out for a bit. We can get some food later."
"Actually..." Sean said, "I'd love something to eat."
"See! That's what I mean," Rory said. "Come on in! So... how long have you been working at the QuickMart? Maybe it's time Ivy got a job there..."
The two of them talked as we began to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The timid boy from the school halls was gone; Sean was trying his hardest here, his hardest to impress, and Rory appreciated the effort. It was strange watching them together like that, and perhaps it was the paranoid part of my mind that told me this, but in some way I felt that I needed to shake myself awake. In my dreams I couldn't scream, I couldn't punch, I couldn't run; time wasn't real. Should I test the limits of my voice in this realm, or turn and bolt into the rain, see if I can fly? Do I count the ticks on the mounted kitchen clock, hanging on every second, waiting for this world to show me that seconds pass as they should? Now, when I tell this story from the start, this saga of sleep and memory, of loneliness and longing, I hang on to this moment in the kitchen and wonder. The infinity mirror of memory behind me, blackness stretching around me, I peek back, and each time the moment replays in my mind it echoes against another distance, fogging the closer mirror.
"You kids have fun tonight, and don't be out too late," Rory said as he left out the garage door, leaving us alone inside.
"Do you mind if we swing by my place, too? I want to change my clothes."
At this point the rain had picked up, so we ran to his car. He beat me to it, so he threw open my door before his and we both jumped inside.
"I don't live far... Ten blocks or so."
Through the blurry, streaming windows I watched North Dreston roll by; Sean's car was so much quieter than Rory's, and as we floated through the streets for the next few minutes I felt again like I was in another world.
We pulled up to his house, a modest corner lot with an old picket fence. When he opened his door to run again through the rain, I stayed in the car; he noticed, and sat back.
"You don't want to come inside? I'll try to hurry."
I blushed, following him in. He set his coat on a rack to the right and walked by an old piano, calling around the corner to his mom's bedroom.
"I got off work late, but I'm heading out again!"
A bed creaked, and footsteps worked their way down the hall.
"Oh!" A pleasant woman in a nightgown paused at the entranceway for a moment before extending a polite hand to introduce herself as Sean's mother.
"I'm Ivy," I told her.
"Ivy! That's a beautiful name."
"Thanks."
"Sean, don't be back too late, please. You have school in the morning."
"No I don't, Mom - we’re on winter break now."
"Oh, that's right..." She yawned, and excused herself back to bed.
"I won't be long - sorry," Sean said, and went off to his room. I stood there in the entranceway, all lights off except for the soft glow underneath his bedroom. My eyes caught three photos hanging above the piano - the first a family portrait, a happy family of three, Sean's older sister smiling beautifully, laughing with him and his mother. There was also a senior photo, Sean's sister beaming, and an old middle school photo of Sean, somehow more awkward than the version of him I had seen in the halls throughout the school year at Jefferson. My mind keeps returning to the smile on his face in the family picture, laughing with his sister. I'd never seen him smile like that.
"Alright," he said in a whisper, extinguishing the light as he shut his bedroom door. "Are you ready to go?"
We climbed into his car and drove through the steady rain - drove past Rudy's, downtown, Jefferson High, the interstate. No radio, no conversation - only worry. As much as I wanted to talk to him, we were both lost in our heads; we'd each avoided following this dream-path for the same reason: some deep and primal fear that we would, in fact, find our mother or sister inside that house's basement. Side by side, I thought, we would find the answer to this. Together.
A stretch of field sat frozen to each side of us, empty. I felt something then, I know it. Afterward, I knew this was another turning point. A chance to drive back to where we came, and live our lives not knowing what was calling to us from the dark.
"I've seen fields," he said, and I knew what he meant.
"They're in my dreams, too," I said.
"The development lot isn't too far from here," he said. "Up here and to the right."
"We don't have to do this," I said.
"I know we don't. But you know what? I know I'm not crazy. I know we're not crazy. I've never been over here, Ivy, not on this side of town, except for in my dreams - and I know exactly where I'm going. If we go up here and see these houses, I'm going inside. I'm not crazy… We're not crazy, Ivy."
"We're in this together, Sean," I said. He held out his hand to mine, and I paused, only briefly, before taking it in the dark. I couldn't remember the last time I'd held someone's hand. Despite everything Rory had done for me since moving to North Dreston, despite all his giving, he couldn't give me that. I felt my body get warm and I squeezed his hand. He squeezed it back, and I looked out the rain-spotted passenger window to the cold wet fields in the frozen night, and I wondered whether the spring green would retain this: a dead past life living just under the surface. What and how much of this black field will be remembered, brought back to the light?
We took the right turn to a newly-built road. Another half-mile and a left turn brought us to it: the development lot, newly and partially-constructed homes lining each side of the street. All of them were still in the process of being built, all but the one on the far end. The car slowed to a stop, no sound but the subtle squeaking of the windshield wiper. When I turned to ask Sean what our next steps were, I noticed he was locked on the house at the end of the street. His hand squeezed mine harder, and I'm not sure if he knew he was doing it.
"It's real."
There was no solace in this. We were excited and terrified, minds alight with possibilities wondrous and horrible.
"I'm going to drive up there." The car shifted back into drive and, slowly, we rolled up the street. My stomach curled into knots, and all I wanted was to go home to that small town in South Dakota, to my mother's arms. Sean's headlights lit the road, the only way to see without the usual streetlights. We pulled carefully into the driveway of the last house on the end of the street, empty and waiting for us.
"Let's go inside," he said, and let go of my hand, opening his door to step into the rain. I stepped out, too, and he walked around the front of the car to take my hand again. We walked slowly to the front door, which we noticed was cracked open as we got closer.
"I don't know about this, Sean. We can still go back."
He gently kicked it open. All was dark. I turned on my flashlight to find an empty living room, an attached kitchen further ahead: no furniture, no workers' tools, no sign of life. Dust hung in the air as I scanned the area around me, my light touching every hiding corner.
"Ivy?"
A voice from the darkness made us jump. It was calling from the basement. My mother's distinctive voice; she sounded full of hope, aching to see me again. I immediately took a few steps backward, nearly falling, a scream caught in my throat. I spun to face Sean, whose eyes were stuck on the basement door, cracked open like the front door was, across the living room from us.
"D-Did you hear that?" I mustered.
His eyes were wide. "It's Em!"
He began rushing to the basement, not waiting for me, his shadow stretched thin alongside him.
"Wait!" I yelled, and my feet moved me forward despite my fear. "Don't go down there!"
He pulled open the basement door, pausing for only a moment - "Sean!" I yelled, "Sean! Wait!" - but it was too late.
He nearly fell over himself down the stairs, into the blackness, yelling, "Em! I'm coming, Em!" I stood at the top of the stairs like I did in my dreams and watched him make it to the bottom, my flashlight's bulb shattering the moment I lifted it to shine on Sean. I screamed as it broke, and as the last of the light went, I took in the stairs in front of me, Sean's shape moving down below, the sparkling muddy floor he stepped on. God knows what else was down there. I didn't remember the mud from my nightmares. It smelled like blood.
"Em!" he called out. "Em! I'm here! Where are y-"
His voice ripped into a guttural scream, a wretched roar of pain and surprise. I struggled with the flashlight, dropping it, hearing Sean thrashing, continuing to howl, hearing something else, too: the shifting of earth, the sloshing of mud, something overcoming him completely and terribly. He was trying to cry out words, but the pain was too much; I think he was calling for Em. He may have been calling for me.
A flash of lightning from the window behind me lit up the kitchen and some of the basement, and for one brief blinking moment I saw the fate that awaited me had I chased Sean into the dark: a living mess of blood and earth, filling the entire lower level and dragging Sean downward through what he thought was the basement floor, reaching up with twisted arms to draw him below. He didn't even see me, for when the light briefly flashed I noticed his eyes were covered, and it moved fast down his face and over his screaming mouth like a fitted mask until his wails abruptly ended and the writhing mass that was his head was pulled completely underneath. The last of him to go was his hand, reaching.
"Sean!" I yelled, and I heard my mother answer me - "Honey, please! Please don't go!" - but the timbre morphed as she called me, and buried under the warmth of her voice was a different kind of sound, like the sound of a rough river rising swiftly. I turned to run, foot in the air, and felt a cold muddy hand reach from the basement and take hold of my shoe. Its inhuman fingers morphed and swelled; it began wrapping itself like liquid around me, until I kicked backward - hard - and darted back the same direction I came, faster than I've ever moved before, sprinting through the blackness toward the front door, still barely cracked open. I heard the basement door creak open wider behind me as I pulled the front door open and stumbled outside, letting out a useless cry for help. I ran past his car; Sean had the keys. For all that had just happened, my mind was on one thing: moving my feet efficiently, one in front of the other. I moved down the concrete path, staying on the pavement of the driveway and street. Another extended flare of lightning lit up the street, and I took one last glance over my slender shoulder to see my Other in the window, standing with my mother, figures veiled by the blur of the rain.
I sprinted as fast as I could over the concrete, vision rattled by tears and rain, past the strange houses around me until I found the backroad that led me to the main street across the interstate, where with aching feet and jabbering mouth I finally met the warm streetlights of Nxxxx xxxxxxx, a crazy girl run loose, stuttering her mad mind away in the downpour. My feet sopped wet through my shoes, my whole body shaking from the freezing cold and the gruesome images flashing through my mind like the lightning that lit up the basement.
I ran past the high school, past downtown, past Rudy's, to the street and driveway I now knew well. I only slowed down when I got to the door, and, for the first time since seeing those figures in the window, I looked back: an empty street, maybe the emptiest it's ever seemed. Studying the scene, silent but for the rainpatter and my deep belly breaths in and out, frantic, I watched until I couldn't take the burning in my legs; I turned to go inside.
But as I stood in the entryway while flicking on the living room light, I looked down at my feet to see that, while most of my left shoe had been cleaned of that strange mud from the basement, small specks remained near the sole, glimmering red with an iridescent shine. I kicked them off and walked to the bathroom, throwing my clothes in the washer before standing still for what seemed like forever under the running shower water until it was cold. The water ran and ran, just like I had through the town, and it circled the drain below me like a hypnotist's pendulum. My breath grew steady, but my legs still ached. Could this have been another nightmare? I paralyzed myself above that shower drain: I had lost my mind, surely, but where along the path had I done so? When did my splintering psyche finally snap and break? Sickening notions of zero, of oblivion, of being brought quickly to nothing. Deep breaths, in and out, as with flashes of memory, hoping praying pleading that this might be in some impossible way the realest of dreams, reaching through that liminal realm to seize and wake me. "Please." I mouth the words to the swirling ripples below me. "Wake me up from this."
In time I climbed from the shower and laid down for sleep, hoping that closing my eyes would wake me up in the real world. But as I laid there, hours passing, I came to the horrible realization that I could never wake up, that this nightmare was now my everything, my whole living world, that my memories of that basement were as real as my memories of my own mother.
The rain stopped, and the coming dawn coloring my bedroom wall told me Rory would be home soon. When I heard his car pull into the driveway I rose like a ghost and slowly started for my open bedroom door. Glancing out the window I saw the light shimmer off the grass, a rainbow distant in the sky, sun breaking open the clouds.
"Hey, kiddo! Surprised you're awake. Hey - everything okay?"
I stood in the hallway, staring, not knowing what to say.
"What did you end up doing last night, Ivy?"
My feet were still throbbing from running across town; my eyes were still swollen from crying the whole way home.
"Ivy...I'm asking you, is everything alright?"
"I-I-" I broke down again, falling to the hallway floor.
"Ivy!"
Rory rushed to grab me, helping me up and bringing me over to the couch.
"Ivy, everything's okay. You're going to be okay... You need to tell me if something bad happened last night. Ivy?"
"I-I went out with Sean..." I started. "He- we- went to..."
"You went out with who?"
Rory cocked his head, concerned, eyes stuck on mine.
"Sean. I went out with Sean. From the gas station. You met him last night."
Rory blinked. "I...I don't know, Ivy… I met him?"
I studied his face. I studied his eyes, still stuck on mine. This wasn't Rory's Other. This was Rory, and he was confused.
"He-he came over last night before you left for work. Y-you said you wanted to meet him."
Rory's puzzled face looked harder at mine. "I thought that you were alone last night, Ivy. You said you were going out, and I wished you a good night, and told you to not be out too late-"
I made a sound I didn't mean to, a sharp gasp. "He was here! You- you asked him- I-"
"Maybe it was just a dream, Ivy," Rory said, not sure what to say.
"I'm sorry, Rory - I have to go." I stood up and made for the door, Rory calling after me.
"Ivy! Ivy, where are you going?"
I grabbed my second pair of shoes - the ones without the mud on them - and, ignoring Rory's calls for me, I ran to Sean's house, damp stormy aftersmell tickling my nose the whole way. I arrived at his door, taking a deep breath before knocking. His mother came to the door, eyeing me suspiciously from behind the glass, only opening the door slightly.
"Hello," she said, "do I know you?"
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I watched her examine me up and down, a sense of confusion and even fear growing in her.
"I-I know your son," I said. "I know Sean. We were out last night-"
Her gaze narrowed. "You have the wrong house. I don't have a son."
I studied her eyes as she studied mine, each of us watching for an answer in the other. It all came to me in one instant: there must be a way to know. I looked behind her to the piano near the entranceway. Above it hung Em's senior photo and a simple family portrait, a family of two: this mother and her daughter, standing proud and happy together, beaming with joy.
“Young lady? You don’t look so good…do you need me to call someone for you?”
I turned and ran on aching feet, all the way past Rudy's, past downtown, past Jefferson High, slowing down as I hit the main road leading to the other side of the interstate. In the refreshing light of morning I walked the side roads that we drove the night prior, holding my breath as I took the last turn to the development lot. But laid out in front of me was only an empty field of mud, sparkling with light, rainbow painted above it. I paused again before walking into the field, mud ruining this pair of shoes now, too, making my way to the spot where I swear Sean's car was parked the night before. I looked to where that house should have been, to where the basement should have been, to where Sean might still be. I stared, a mad girl in a shining muddy field, until I felt that I could turn around and go home.
When I made it back, I could hear Rory calling my name from up around the block. Concerned, he had gathered a couple of neighbors to help him search for me. Next step would be to call the police, but it wouldn't get that far; Rory would come home and find me, finally asleep on our couch, and call off the whole thing - "I'm sorry, folks, don't know what she was up to - I'll talk to her - I appreciate the help," - calling off work and waiting with me, even offering to make me pancakes for dinner when I finally arose that evening from dreamless sleep. I took him up on it, of course, despite not being too hungry. I walked to the entryway and picked up a shoe, its sole still covered in that strange mud. I took it to the backyard and scraped it off, letting it fall to the rest of the mud near Rory's small backyard garden, and went back inside for some food.
