(This is a story, that was inspired by the song Balloons. ^w^ Enjoy!)
The snow drifted to the ground slowly, coating the world in a thick blanket of white. The sun's warming rays were hidden from sight, making the day seem gloomy. Streets were empty, no passerby dare go out into the cold.
She couldn't return to her sweet slumber, the feeling of loneliness washing over her. Why she felt this way, she knew not.
"Giselle...Gisellee…"
She sat up and there was Celeste, perched at the foot of her bed and waving. Giselle felt her throat tighten and a burst of pleasure at seeing her old friend but this time she seemed to feel a prick of fear, too, as if Celeste had come with some darkness hidden behind her back. A jar of wasps which when released would sting deeply.
She slumped forward in the bed, her hands resting laxly against her thighs. Her chin sank onto her chest. Then there was a dim, painless tug as part of her got up and went towards Celeste into funneling darkness.
"Giselee-"
Now the darkness was shot with swirling whiteness. A coughing, growling sound and bending, tortured shadows that resolved themselves into fir trees at night, being pushed by a screaming gale. Snow swirled and danced outside her window. Snow everywhere.
"You can't," Celeste said from the darkness, and there was a low tone in her voice that made Giselle's heart stop. "You can't save them."
Those words! Those horrid words she knew all too well, the day she watched her friends die before her once innocent eyes. She had escaped the horror, to see another day.
"You've lost," Celeste hissed from the floating darkness. "He's coming." She understood none of this-but got a sense of all, and a dreamy terror floated into the dark hollows of her body like light brown spores that would die in sunlight.
Celeste faded. Now she was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark. Snow spattered against the windows like thrown sand. Her mouth was dry, her eyes like hot marbles, her heart triphammering in her chest. Outside there was a hollow booming noise, like a dreadful door being thrown wide. Footfalls. Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in red and that word was: IT'S ME.
The room faded. Another room. She knew this one. An overturned chair. A broken window with snow swirling in; already it had frosted the edge of the rug. The drapes had been pulled free and hung on their broken rod at an angle. A low cabinet lying on its face.
More hollow booming noises, steady, rhythmic, horrible. Smashing glass. Approaching destruction. A hoarse, robotic voice, the voice of a madman, made the more terrible by its familiarity:
It's me. It's me, Giselle. You've lost now.
Crash. Crash. Crash. Splintering wood, pristine floors bathed in blood. A bellow of rage and satisfaction. IT'S ME. Coming.
Drifting across the room. Pictures torn off walls.
"No," she whispered. "No, Celeste please-"
And, before her very own eyes, four bodies. Limp. A pool of blood forming beneath each pale body, seeping into the once pristine tiles.
In the darkness the booming noises grew louder, louder still, echoing, everywhere, all around.
And now she was crouched in a dark hallway, crouched on a blue rug with a riot of twisting black shapes woven into its pile, listening to the booming noises approach, and now a figure, a man turned the corner and began to come toward her, lurching, smelling of blood and doom. He had a large knife in one hand and was swinging it from side to side in vicious arcs, slamming himself into the walls, cutting the silk wallpaper with the glimmering blade of the knife.
You can't, Giselle. You can't save them all.
The man advancing on her, reeking of that sweet-sour odor, gigantic, the knife blade cutting across the air with a wicked hissing whisper, then the great hollow boom as he crashed into the wall, sending the dust out in a puff you could smell, dry and itchy. Red eyes glowed in the dark. The monster was upon her, it had discovered her cowering here with a blank wall at her back.
Darkness. Drifting.
"Celeste, please take me back, please, please-"
And she was back, sitting in her dimly lit room, her hair tousled and sticking damply to her face, her body bathed in sweat. She could still see those limp bodies with blood pooling beneath them, and those inexplicable words so much more than any of the others: IT'S ME.
And now sunshine. Real things. Except for Celeste, now in the doorway, simply standing there, her voice faint and high and sweet. "Be careful, Giselle…"
Then in the next instant, Celeste was gone and Giselle was left just sitting in her bed, the harsh sound of the wind in her ears and Celeste's soft words in her mind.