Page 169 of In Somnis

Does Nevan have a brother?

Okay, so maybe not quite right, but adjacent to right, like I got the general direction and slightly missed the target.

Something shoves me.

Hard.

From behind, with no warning, flat-palmed between the shoulder blades, and I stumble forward three steps before I get my feet under me and spin around, ready to ditch another tarot card paper plane, but it’s an older woman standing a few feet away from me.

Long silver hair streaming behind her, crystals everywhere, around her neck, on her fingers, in her hair. Blue eyes that are wide and furious are aimed at me.

She’s moving fast, faster than makes spatial sense, closing the distance between us while she’s screaming. “Leave! You are not allowed here!”

Her hand connects with my chest, flat-palmed, and the force of it knocks the breath out of me. The dreamscape tears, and I’m pulled backward through the membrane of sleep itself like being yanked through a wall, and I brace for the hard landing, but instead, I land softly on my back.

I lay still, breathing, with the distinct impression of a hand still flat against my sternum. “What…” I pant, “… the actual fuck was that?”

I try to get my bearings and register that I’m still somewhere because it has texture, smell, and the quality of light that means a dreaming brain made it.

I look at my hands.

Left one has seven fingers. Right one has eleven.

Still dreaming, just somewhere else.

I sit up, looking around as I stand.

It’s a classroom.

The fluorescent-lit institutional misery of one of Vernonia’s high school classrooms that smells like dry-erase markers, anxiety, and someone’s lunch from three hours ago. Rows of desks, a blackboard at the front, windows along one side, and every desk is occupied.

Teenagers. Dozens of them, all facing forward, and they’re laughing, the collective cruelty of a group of teenagers who have identified a target and decided to make it someone’s worst memory.

I follow their gaze to the front of the room.

And there he is. Nevan Shaw.

He’s standing at the blackboard in only his underwear. The floor in front of the board is moving as if it’s a conveyor belt, and Nevan is walking on it, trying to stay in place, one hand gripping a piece of chalk.

I step forward through the rows of desks without deciding to, passing through the noise like it isn’t there, until I get close enough to read what he’s writing.

Stupid.

Except not quite.

SPUTID. SUTPID. STIPUD. STPUID.

Over and over and over, three hundred iterations of the same word, each one wrong in a different direction, the chalk scratching on the board, the floor moving, and the kids laughing, and Nevan’s voice barely audible under all of it.

“It has to be right. I have to make it right. It has to be right…”

He’s so deep inside his nightmare that he doesn’t even notice me standing next to him.

Shit.

I write horror, so I know horror. I know how to build dread from pacing, and the wrongness of familiar things made unfamiliar. I’ve spent years with my hands in the dark parts of human imagination, and I’ve come to something like peace with it.

But this isn’t the horror I write. This isn’t monsters, darkness, or things that chase you through forests. Psychological horror is the kind I never touch. Too close to the bone. Too real.