There was a scream.
Somewhere far in the dark.
She scanned all directions to find nothing
Anna walked at a snail's pace in the blackened halls. Her weak phone light doing little to pierce the all encompassing walls of darkness that seemed to reach out for her. She could feel it. A stifling presence on her skin. It was choking her. Her skin crawled with unease. A passive anxiety that swelled in her throat and forced her to take panicked, heavy breaths.
Her most recent memory before this place was of falling, then she awoke here. Halls upon halls of old peeling paint and broken furniture covered in dust and rubble. Outside one of the few windows she could find, a silently raging storm tore apart a familiar land and not but the void on the horizon. She wished, oh god she wished for thunder and lightning. Anything to stop the monotonous sound of her own panicked heart in her ears.
Occasionally, just often enough; something would move. Just out of sight. A cupboard would creak open. An old ceiling fan would spin ever so slightly. In another room, she might hear "someone". A sound. Just barely human in nature.
Just then, she felt it. A spike in passive presence of something beyond her comprehension. She froze her movement. Like a deer in headlights. Her animalistic instincts screamed at her to run while her conscious mind was overloaded by her fear. She held her breath. She would stop her own heart if she could. The hammering in her chest was almost enough to drown out the sound of long, dragging footsteps creeping closer.
The sickening, dusty humidity that she had known of this place dropped.
A curdling chill rested on her bones.
On the edge of her dimming light.
A footprint appeared in the thick dust on the floor.
Then another, closer.
And another.
A noise grew in her head. A noise akin to radio static amalgamated with human noises. Laughter, crying, conversation, whispers. A disgusting, twisted medley of noises flooded her ears.
She felt it, right on her skin. She felt it. Muted tears flooded her eyes.
The noise passed just as it arrived. A snailing presence that faded away behind her. She was left standing there, wide eyes full of tears and terror. She didn't know how long she stood there before falling to her knees and then to her side. An intense sense of relief washing over her as she grasped the fact that she was unharmed. Her phone made a light beep, signaling its coming end.
A cold claw gripped her heart.
Her only light.
She choked out a sob as something in the distance; something far, far different from the previous presence made itself known to her world. It sounded far away. Its harrowing moans struck a lethal tempo. A promise of something worse than death.
She shifted her phone in every direction as the passive presence of less harmful beings fled. A familiar cold rested on her skin. Terrifying but frustratingly familiar.
She felt something on the back of her neck.
Like air made of needles digging into her skin.
It was tall. Too tall. Not naturally so. Like something had taken someone her height and forcefully pulled until she stretched a few feet taller. Skin and flesh hung loosely from popped, bloody joints. A broken neck hardly clung onto a head that fell upside down and backwards on its chest. Tortured skin stretched over a face racked with horror and malice. The head drifted up with a series of sickening cracks and creaks from the neck until it was upright. The eyes opened. Long dead and shriveled. Eyes that have seen horrors beyond horrors but she somehow couldn't mistake those blue eyes.
Her light winked out.
"Elsa?" anna asked on quivering breath through chattering teeth.
In the dark of the halls.
There was a scream.
written and edited by - Philily
I'm only the Beta.
