Chapter Four
She knew she wasn’t fully asleep anymore. But it didn’t feel as if she was awake, either. Everything felt soft-focus and sort
of distant, as if she were watching it through a camera. The candle flickering down to nothing on the windowsill in front
of her wasn’t the one she’d left burning. That arm dangling over the brass frame of the bed didn’t actually belong to her.
And there wasn’t really a man in the corner of her room.
She was dreaming; she was just dreaming. All she had to do was give it a second, and he would dissolve down to nothing. But
somehow a second went by, and he was still there. Another second, and he seemed even more solid than he had before. She made
out broad shoulders, a hulking body.
Then just as she was thinking that was madness, he moved.
Some part of his body shifted, still in shadow enough that she couldn’t make out what the part actually was. She couldn’t
tell what was happening, until something seemed to abruptly glow in the darkness. A deep orange ember, bright enough that
it illuminated a small circle around itself.
Then she saw teeth.
Fingers.
A hand.
And she knew. Whatever was there had just kissed a cigarette to his lips. He had taken a drag, slow and deliberate. Now he was exhaling smoke in a steady plume that she couldn’t quite see.
But could definitely smell.
It was too sweet to be tobacco, too strange to be anything of this world.
Even though she knew it shouldn’t be. The use of Underneath ingredients as intoxicants is strictly prohibited and may result in expulsion, she had read.
But obviously whoever this was didn’t care.
He took another drag as she watched, even lazier than the first
one. And this time he didn’t let the cigarette leave his lips.
He clamped it there, as if he was about to do something he needed both hands for. Though somehow, she didn’t really imagine
he would do anything at all. Dream creatures had to stay where they were, after all. They couldn’t really harm you; they couldn’t
really do anything to you.
Unless of course you had done something the welcome pack told you not to.
Never fall asleep anywhere except your bed, she remembered laughing over. Because of course, it had seemed funny then; it had seemed ridiculous. As if I’m going to drift off in a library seething with ghosts or a lecture hall that might at any moment slip into another
dimension, she had scoffed.
But she couldn’t scoff now.
She was still sitting in the window seat.
And she felt pretty sure the window seat counted as somewhere else.
In fact, she knew it must. Because as she sat there, frozen, the thing in her room lifted one impossibly long leg and simply
stepped over the frame and onto her bed. As if it was no more than a footstool or a doorstep. Then it just started walking
across the mattress toward her, in that same slow, effortless way.
As if it knew she couldn’t move.
She couldn’t even scream.
The Complete Compendium of Creatures had told her to make loud noises if something otherworldly approached her. But even though this thing definitely fit that
definition—even though it looked like a shadow and moved like one, too—she couldn’t get out a single sound.
And now it was upon her.
It stood over her, so tall she had to tilt her head back to look up at its no doubt terrible visage. But not for long, no,
not for long because after an endless and terrible moment, it started to lean down. Its hands—tipped with claws, oh god, it
had claws—reached for her. This won’t hurt, she thought she heard it say. Though she knew it lied. The coldness of its hand burned before it even laid it on her.
And then it did, and finally it happened.
She screamed.