AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But I heard nothing. I smelt nothing. So I turned.
And found myself face-to-face with the blood-red being.
It had no eyelids, it had no lips. All its skin was pulled back and it loomed over me, like a spider over a fly. It reached out with three long, knobby red fingers —
I gasped, jerking upright, panting as I looked around. I wasn’t on the shore; in fact, the lake was nowhere in sight. Neither was the dock, or the house.
I was underground, in a narrow dimly-lit tunnel. Water dripped slowly from overhead, and the smell of damp dirt and fungi heavy in my nose. I was in the mine.
I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut tight. No, no, no, this was impossible.
“Juniper…”
Laughter followed the whisper, and I opened my eyes. Darkness waited for me in either direction, completely impenetrable. This was just a dream. Just a dream, nothing more. I must have passed out. That creature must have knocked me unconscious.
But how? And why? I’d never seen anything like it before —
Shlop...shlop...shlop…
I stared into the dark. Something was coming. Something was taking slow, heavy steps through the mud. I had no weapons. I had no light.
“Wake up,” I whispered softly, digging my fingernails into my arm. “Come on, Juniper. Wake up.Wake up.”
“There is...no...waking…”
The voice hissed out of the dark. It was more than an echoing whisper now, more than a mere breath on the wind. It had form, it had weight. It was real. It washere.
Deep in the darkness, a strange shape was lurching toward me. There was a sound like something slimy sliding over the wet ground. I took a step back, and then another, terrified to run into the dark at my back, but too fearful to remain here.
Thick gray tentacles reached out of the shadows. They were coiling outward from the strange shape, which was slowly morphing before my eyes. It shrank and grew, burgeoning outward and then collapsing into itself, as if its form wasn’t solid. Icy fingers wrapped around my heart, squeezing, the cold aching in my ribs.
“I’ve found you, Juniper. I’ve found you at last.”
I began to hyperventilate. I couldn’t wake up. Why the hell wasn’t I waking up? This was all in my head, I had to remember that. It was all just in my head.
The tentacles were coming faster. They were nearly at my ankles. The shape in the dark came into the dim gray light.
It was a human, but It...wasn’t. It was a being beyond beauty, so horrifyingly exquisite that one physical form alone could not contain It. It was made of light and darkness, flesh and bone, an ever-shifting amalgamation of air and energy. Its tentacles were so long that they wrapped around the mine shaft’s walls, coiling toward me.
Eyeballs blinked over every inch of Its skin, and they were all staring at me.
I shook my head slowly. “You’re not real,” I whispered, the words trembling out from between my lips. “This is a dream. Just a dream. You’re not real.”
When the God spoke again, it was with a thousand voices all in unison. A thousand voices, barely masking a thousand screams.“You think this is not real, and yet, you don’t know where you are.”The being smiled, Its lips pulling back from rows upon rows of teeth. I was still backing away, but I had no idea what lay in the dark behind me.“Where are you, Juniper? Where does your body lie? In the woods? In the dirt? On the shore?”Its smile widened.“Are you in the water, Juniper? Are you drowning?”
It was right. Where was my body? Where the hell was I? Had I managed to walk back on shore, or...or had that red creature dragged me under?
What if I wasn’t waking up because I...couldn’t?
Panic gripped me. I had to run. I had to —
My back hit a dirt wall. I was at the end of the tunnel. I had nowhere else to go.
“You can’t take me,” I whispered desperately. “My soul isn’t yours. It’s never been yours.”
The tentacles coiled around my ankles and wrapped up my legs. The God stood back, Its face half in shadow, Its numerous eyes blinking at me.
“I cannot take your soul...but I can take your mind.”
