Alice sat up bolt straight, sweat seeping through her thin cotton nightgown from the shock of her latest vision.
She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in her hands, willing the premonition to drift to the back of her mind. A distressed sob broke through her carefully constructed silence.
A thin ray of moonlight filtered through the curtains, pouring across her bed. The beam traced patterns across her thin hospital sheet, giving her terrified face a ghostly aura. She climbed swiftly over the bed's cold metal rails, dropping onto the even colder floor soundlessly. She padded across the concrete, her tiny feet shuffling quietly.
She slid open the small dresser drawer that held her few belongings. All the way in the back, folded and crinkled, was a photo.
A photo of her family.
It was the only thing that could offer her the slightest amount of comfort after one of her painful visions.
But she didn't want their comfort.
They had sent her away.
Sent her to a mental institution.
She was only six years old.
She'd cried and pleaded with her mother, telling her it wasn't her fault that she saw things. That she didn't ask for them to sneak up on her, pulling her from her happy present and throwing her forcefully into a violent future.
And it was always violent.
Once she realized she couldn't block them, she prayed that once, just once, the vision would be a good one. She wanted blissful pictures, like the ones in her coloring books. But all she got was terror. Shadowy visions with dark forms lurking behind hidden doors. Sharp toned commands, hate filled eyes, and blood.
Always blood.
But, even though she didn't want comfort from people who didn't want her, she couldn't stop it from coming. She wiped the last lingering tear from her cheek and kissed the picture gently before refolding it and pushing it to the back of the drawer. She climbed back into her bed, curling into a tight ball.
And slowly, so slowly, she fell asleep, the pain in her head subsiding until the next waking nightmare.
12 years later.
Alice traced patterns in the thin layer of mist that had settled on the bus window. She put her finger to her lips and sucked off the droplets of water. Then she leaned her head against the window, dampening her short hair.
The bus rattled along down the nearly empty country roads, a discrepancy in the calm atmosphere of the surrounding forest.
Just like me.
Alice thought, a melancholy haze tinting her mind. Alice didn't have anywhere to go. Heck, she didn't even have anywhere to come from. She'd turned eighteen yesterday, and she'd checked herself out of the mental facility.
She'd been a good little girl, taking her medication and lying. Because that's what the doctors wanted to hear.
Lies.
They didn't want to know the agony Alice was going through, or the deep depression that pulled her under every now and then. They wanted to hear that she was improving, that her "visions" were going away, chased out of her system by the many brightly colored pills. And that was what Alice told them. They didn't bother to hunt for the truth, to make sure she really was okay before sending her into the public.
She was just another splotch on the canvas of civilization.
She didn't have any family that wanted her, so they just let her go.
Alice spotted a barn out of the bus window, and she jumped up, yelling to the driver to stop there. She shuffled down the isle and off the bus, the moisture from the blades of grass seeping through her tattered sneakers. She blinked and squinted through the rain, it was coming down hard. The barn was rotting, dilapidated, and absolutely deserted.
Alice smiled.
She scampered in out of the rain and found a spot where the roof wasn't leaking. Then she curled up on the soft dirt and slipped into a light sleep, sighing in relief that she'd gone the whole morning without a vision.
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She woke to the sound of crickets.
The barn was pitch black.
She listened to the sound of nature's musicians, smiling softly. She had missed that sound for so many years. She'd always replay it in her mind in the hospital, trying to lull herself to sleep, but she didn't do it justice.
But then she froze as a sense of foreboding washed over her. She waited in tense apprehension for the accompanying vision, but it never came.
She let out the breath she'd been holding in a big whoosh.
But the feeling was still there. Like someone was watching her.
She silently crept out of the barn, looking around nervously. She prayed it was just an animal.
Then she felt breathing on the back of her neck. A tingling feeling of pure terror spread through her small body as she gasped.
She started to scream, but a rough hand clasped over her mouth, abruptly cutting off all sound.
She whimpered.
Whoever was behind her started to drag her forcefully across the meadow as she kicked and thrashed. As they began to enter the woods, she felt something pinch her upper arm, then everything went black.