The Curse of the Sleepwalker

1. Night Sky

Night Sky

“You grow up thinking the dark is just the absence of light. Then one day, it moves.”

The dark has eyes.

She’d never seen them, but she could feel them staring back at her from the shadow of her coat in the corner of the room.

The shadows only moved when she blinked, only flashed their teeth when she turned away.

But their steps creaked the old wooden floorboards, and their breath tickled her neck as the cold breeze crept through the windowsill.

Mom says there’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light. But things feel different when the lights go out—like the quiet comes to life.

Flora peered out into the festering shadows and gulped.

“MOM!”

After a few moments, Mrs. Fray’s eye peered through the crack in the door. “What?” she whispered in a raspy tone. “What? You okay?”

“Can you turn the hallway light on?” Flora murmured, hiding under her pink, flowered blanket. “It’s dark.”

“Right.” Mrs. Fray exhaled. “Okay, sweetie. Love you.”

“Love you, mama,” Flora mumbled sweetly, tugging her comforter up to her nose.

“I’ll see you in the morning.” Mrs. Fray peered through the crack of darkness, where sparkling eyes looked back at her. Through a tired smile, she whispered, “Sweet dreams.”

Cold.

Her bare toes were cold in the water. Flora yelped, splashing out of a shallow pond.

With soggy fabric clinging to her ankles, she looked around in bewilderment at the sudden change of scenery.

A firefly-green light danced across the ripples of the pond, and the wreckage of a wooden hut was keeling over, its bones protruding from the muddy earth.

In every direction, a dark and ancient forest choked out the night sky.

Frogs croaked. Bugs clicked. And she was all alone—far from the safety of her pink, flowered blanket.

“Mom?” Flora cried out.

But only the echo of her own voice came in reply.

Flora began to panic, each new breath smothered beneath the dense humidity.

Desperation in each clumsy step, she turned and sprinted away into the darkness.

The sparkle of dewdrops on wildgrass flew by like shooting stars at the edges of her narrowed vision.

Nighttime animals chattered from every direction, their calls rising up one after another into the thick fog.

Her heart beat louder, her footfalls drowned by the sounds of the forest.

“What’s that?”

Startled, she slipped on the boggy grass. The unfamiliar ground crumpled beneath her like tissue paper as she fell, coarsened by winding vines and thorny thicket. Flora whimpered, holding her hand against the right side of her forehead as she felt the sting of a fresh cut.

She had fallen into the setting of a horror movie.

Or, at least one of those animated Halloween specials.

No, she thought. This was worse. This was more like that one time when she got really into dinosaurs, so Flora convinced her parents that she would be cool if they let her watch a cute little movie about dinosaurs, Jurassic Park.

She was not, in fact, cool.

A black leaf crackled beneath her frame as her eyes darted up and down.

Towering trees surrounded her like watchful skyscrapers, their frames vanishing high in the fog.

Dark and twisted, their bark was split like scars, oozing with the scent of wet rot and copper.

Monstrous leaves curled up against the charcoal trunks all around, suffocating the tall grass and hiding whatever horrors lurked below.

Little Flora fumbled to her feet, shuddering as she felt a pair of eyes at her back. Her small hands trembled as she wiped back a tear. She rubbed the goosebumps on her forearms, her breath clinging like a fog as she scanned for the source of the mysterious voice. It was so cold.

Wake up. Wake up!

There was a brief crackle of leaves from somewhere nearby.

“Shh! I think it can hear you!”

“Hello?” Flora called out into the petrified trees. The silence hung heavily in the nighttime air. Dull but constant, she heard a buzzing just behind her. Ever so slowly, Flora turned around.

Waiting behind her was no more than a patch of flowers, with lotus-like forms that glowed with greens and blues. Flora breathed a sigh of relief.

“Who are you?” boomed a voice, startling Flora into a hop. The words echoed through the void, ephemeral and without a face.

“Florabelle Fray,” she replied.

She followed the voice up to a lonely, leafless branch. A boy stood on the creaking wood, his head cocked, barely more than a silhouette peering down with harsh, distrustful eyes. The boy hopped down only a few feet before her, crushing a glowing flower beneath his boots.

“Noec Eldon,” the boy said, stepping slowly closer with his eyes locked on Flora. He squinted and tensed his jaw, slipping a hand into his brown leather bag. “Look at me,” he commanded.

Flora closed her eyes and covered her face, tasting a tear in the corner of her mouth. Her heart pounded in her chest.

“Noec, we need to run.”

“It’s too late to run.”

Teary-eyed, Flora looked up.

The boy was just before her now. He wore an olive jacket, five years too large, overtop an exhausted white shirt. Away from the sour light of the flowers, his messy hair might have been an ashy blonde. He blinked.

“Oh no,” he murmured.

“What?” Another pair of eyes peeked out from behind him, bright and aware. A girl had been hiding behind a tree just a few feet away with tight lips and braided, chocolate-brown hair. She could’ve been eleven or twelve at most.

The boy took a new angle and studied Flora. His shoulders relaxed, and he exhaled a shuddered breath. “I think I made her cry.” His harsh expression softened into guilt. Slipping his hand out of his bag, he called back, “It’s okay, Nia.”

“Are you sure?” the boy’s companion whispered.

The boy glanced back to Flora for a second. With the violence stripped from his voice, he replied, “Yeah. I can see them.”

He took a step closer; Flora slid back. Noticing her hands shaking in front of her, he stopped.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, almost timid now as he put a hand on his forehead. “We scared you worse than you scared us, huh?”

Flora remained paralyzed and uncertain, shivering from her knees to her teeth.

The older girl slowly emerged at her friend’s side, draped in a heavy velvet cloak that buttoned at her ribs over a long dress. Her clothes were of a completely different caliber from her friend’s attire, and she was an unusual, almost feline sort of pretty.

“Apologies,” she said, “We thought you were… something else.” Stiffly extending her hand, she introduced herself. “My name is Aonia Marketh. You can call me Nia, though.”

“Hi.”

Flora looked down nervously at the girl’s hand, but she didn’t move her own. Aonia’s smile faded with disappointment as her hand fell at her side. She smoothed her hair down and sucked in her lip.

Flora rubbed her arms as chills crept through her bones. She couldn’t fight the fear lurking in the back of her mind. She couldn’t fight the panic that left her feeling starved for air. “Where am I?” she whimpered, her knees growing weak as more tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Hey, hey, don’t cry!” the boy, Noec, begged softly. “Don’t cry! You’ll be fine!" Carefully, he guided her hands away from her eyes. In this light, his eyes were a haunting sort of green, with golden glimmers like lightning in their frame. “You’re in Night Sky,” he explained. “Night Sky Forest.”

He tilted his head, concerned by her puzzlement.

“Noec, she’s lost,” Aonia said. “Maybe we should take her to Heron.” She swallowed, peering off to where the dreary luminescence faded into shadow. “Before we get ourselves lost as well.”

Scrunching his dark brows, Noec protested, “No, Nia. Heron will kill us both if he finds out we were here.”

“Who?” Flora murmured.

“No, he’ll just kill you.” Aonia swung her hands to her hips defiantly. “Which is fine by me, unless you plan to leave this little girl alone out here.”

“I didn’t say…” He huffed. “Come on, Nia,” he whispered harshly, “I don’t understand why Heron needs to–” Noec paused, catching Flora’s terrified eyes below. He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. “Okay,” he conceded. “You’re right.”

The two strange children looked Flora up and down, their reluctant feet hesitant to take the first step.

“It’s cold.” Flora shivered, her voice barely making its way through the dense air. “And dark.”

“Here,” the boy said. He spun around, looking like he was in a fight with his jacket. When he finally managed to pry it off, he offered it to Flora.

Cautiously, she took it. “Thanks,” she said sheepishly. She wrapped the jacket around herself like a blanket, and with a cozy shudder, she melted like butter.

“You’d think it really was nighttime out here,” the boy remarked with a cautious smile.

Flora tilted her head. “It is night,” Flora replied, confused as the busy hum of the woods sang through the shadows. She gestured up to the black, moonless sky.

Flora broke away from the boy’s sharp eyes and looked to the girl for guidance. She merely blinked back in puzzlement.

“It’s actually day,” Aonia began to explain. “The trees and their leaves are so thick that no daylight gets through. Like a cave made out of paper. You’ll understand once you’ve seen the Forest from the outside.” To Noec, she added, “Seems like she’s not from around here.”

Off in the distance bellowed a twisted, metallic caw, as though the night itself were being torn apart.

It was a sound so piercing and discordant that it seemed to warp the air before it struck.

The sound repeated, on and on, as though it were carried away on a hundred voices.

As the echo trailed off into the endless rows of trees, the three of them held their breath.

Aonia turned to Noec, straining to flatten the terror in her expression. “Let’s head back to the village. And never do this again.”

“Right.” Noec gestured for them to follow as he began walking. “This way.”