42
Salem
Follow the Light
W e lay in our fort all day. We ate slowly and greedily, mounds of syrup, butter, and jam on everything we pleased. We licked cream off each other’s fingers and lay naked on the pillows, touching and kissing.
We napped off and on, waking when we wanted and shuffling to the kitchen wrapped in blankets for our lunch and dinner. Anxiety crept up on me as the windows grew dark, but I took another one of the pills Dr. Hale had given me, and it tempered the worst of my fear.
We lay in the fort, our hands interlaced, trading stories of our lives in quiet voices. We listened to Chelsea Wolfe and TV Girl, and I laid my head on Rayne’s chest as she sang, losing myself in the echoes of her voice.
When I slept, it was soft and dreamless, and for hours I lay just on the edge of awakening.
But I must have slept deeper than I believed.
A cold chill woke me. For several moments I lay still, eyes closed, trying to sink back into peaceful slumber. But despite Rayne laying close beside me, Loki at my feet, and the blanket covering me, I was so cold I began to shiver.
The world was washed of color when I opened my eyes. Everything was in black-and-white, from the blankets to the walls. Even Rayne, lying sound asleep beside me, had a strange pallor to her face, and it made my heart lurch.
“Rayne. Rayne, hey, wake up.” I shook her shoulder vigorously, but she didn’t move. Her breathing didn’t change from the same slow and steady pace. “Rayne!”
Nothing. Not so much as a twitch. Scrambling out of the fort, I tried Loki next. But the dog didn’t move either, no matter how much I shook him.
“I’m dreaming,” I said suddenly, and the weight of those words made a little color come back into the world.
The Christmas lights. Someone had unraveled them from around our pillow fort and dragged them out of the room and around the corner. They twinkled, their colorful glow the only illumination in the hallway.
The strand was moving, as if something was lightly tugging on the end of it.
Despite the cold trepidation washing over me, the feeling that I should follow the lights needled me until my feet began to move.
The hallway was pitch-black: All I could see was the colorful lights, leading away into the darkness before they twisted out of sight.
The floor was strangely damp beneath my bare feet.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I turned on the flashlight and stumbled back in horror.
The hall was covered in thick, muddy sludge that reeked of rot.
The beautiful filgreed wallpaper was flaking away from the walls like ash in the wind.
It wasn’t wood beneath; it was bone-white metal, crusted with rust.
The crash of the ocean waves was impossibly close, as if they were beating against the house. A buoy clanged as if in a storm, and the crying of gulls filled my ears. Water lapped over my feet, cold and sticky with salt.
As I reached the ruined foyer, I finally laid eyes on what was holding the other end of the strand of lights. I barely swallowed my scream.
Driftwood and seaweed were tangled over the deathly pale body of a woman, who was gripping the lights in a frail, bloody fist. She was naked, drenched in the blood pouring from her sliced throat.
Her body was unnaturally twisted and broken, as if she had fallen from a great height and landed in a heap.
She was looking straight at me, with eyes that looked so eerily like Rayne’s.
“Melanie,” I whispered. “Are you... Melanie Balfour?”
A rattling groan emanated from her throat, and the lights began to flicker.
“Help... me...” she croaked. “The bones... my... bones...”
It wasn’t only driftwood piled around her. It was bones . Misshapen, cracked, and etched with strange symbols. They surrounded her like a cage, pierced into her flesh.
“Please... I can’t... stop... help me...”
As I stepped away, horror shivering through my veins, the woman’s cries grew more frantic and her eyes bulged. “Help me! Please! ” The sound was so terrible I covered my ears, my stomach churning, eyes stinging. She writhed in the bones surrounding her, shrieking as if she were being burned alive.
“HE WON’T LET ME GO—HE WON’T—WON’T—” Her voice distorted more with every word. It became thick and deep, harsh and grating. “Find me—he won’t let—”
With the vile sound of ripping flesh and cracking bone, the woman transformed before my eyes. Her skin burst open, moist sinews engulfing the etched bones. Extra limbs grew; black claws distended from long, gnarled fingers.
The angel rose up, jaw unhinged, maw of grisly teeth gaping at me. It screamed, rotten spittle flecking my face. Adrenaline flooded me but it was like my legs were knee-deep in tar. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
My head swam, my world tumbling. The beast stood over me, two flesh voids staring into my quivering soul. Its spine crackled as it bent down to look into my face, and from its dark throat came a choked woman’s voice: “Destroy me—before—I—kill her.”
I closed my eyes, breath frozen in my lungs, certain I was about to die. I braced for pain. I imagined what Ruth might have felt in her final moments and thought I might be sick from the fear.
But only silence came.
“Salem? What are you doing?”
Blinking rapidly, I looked back. I was standing in the lounge, and Rayne was looking at me sleepily from the entrance to the fort. There was no water on the floor, no rusted walls. When I turned back around, breathless, neither the angel nor the woman was there.
A box of Christmas decorations was spilled open at my feet. Shattered glass ornaments sparkled on the floor, heaps of tangled lights flung about. Rayne came to stand next to me, rubbing my back slowly. “Were you sleepwalking? I heard a crash. Be careful, there’s glass everywhere.”
“I had an awful dream,” I said breathlessly. “I think I saw your mom. She said...”
Her wide-eyed expression silenced me. She stared, and so did I, as we both realized at the same moment what had been buried at the bottom of the box, beneath all the old decorations.
A VHS-C tape, labeled simply For Rayne .