The darkness exploded with such a graceful yet somehow disturbing feel, chilling the air and blooming like a spring rose into a gaping mouth of black. Time stopped, sound ceased to exist in the sudden stillness.
It was as if someone had grabbed his throat and proceeded to strangle him, managing to remain unnoticed in the sea of night. He could do nothing but gaze wide-eyed at the creature of obsidian haze that had swallowed him and his surroundings up. He could breathe, but something had ripped his vocal cords out of his throat like they were damp shreds of paper clinging to a hard surface. Metaphorically, of course. But, however hard he tried, however much oxygen he ran by them in huffs of exhausted breaths, they wouldn't make even the slightest squeak.
Strange thing was, he wasn't scared. This must be the oddest of all the absurdly impossible things happening around him, the glowing orbs of ominous blue light or the drifting stones and boulders occasionally floating by didn't compare to the fact he remained undaunted. He had a tendency to be the definition of skittish and nervous. Not only that, but he was probably so ignorant and awkward that he didn't notice the deep growls coming from somewhere twenty feet behind him.
But how else could any of this actually be happening? It must just be a dream.
It wasn't truly a nightmare. In a nightmare, you were actually fearful or worried, sad or angry. He was more bored than anything else.
Bizarre dreams came naturally to him. It was as if he was a sort of magnet for the strangest realms of reality in sleep. Just last night, he witnessed a gory murder of a sort of white horse by a grizzly bear, while chasing pixies in a field of marshmallow dragons, their jaws snapping menacingly close to the heels of his feet while he attempted to get back his glasses from the bug-winged humans. How tiring of a dream that had been!
Oh, how he longed for these dreams to leave him be. At first he had found them fun and quite entertaining, but now it was like he had experienced every scenario his mind had to come up with. It was always "been there, done that". Was there nothing new to explore? Surely the world had much more to offer than the pitiful predicaments he found himself in nightly. In the waking world, he was always overwhelmed by the constant flow of recent discoveries and unknown mysteries, the plethora of odd creatures and non-sequitur themes of stories and old books found in libraries, where a myriad of breathtaking fictions and poetry lay.
Why did he never have a dream about a library? That would offer countless tales of adventure and tragedy, love and horror. He had always loved them when Chell would take him to one, he would spend hours upon hours staring at the spines of books, deciding which one to read, taking one out to read the back or inside when he found one of interest.
A dark whirlpool of black water tugged him under its unbreakable current suddenly. He gasped, having regained control of his ability to speak, and flailed around helplessly as the liquid carried him deep under the surface of an ocean of ink. How long had there been a sea under his feet? Did it just appear out of nowhere?
Well, it was a dream, now wasn't it? And who could say what was to happen in a dream? He certainly couldn't, despite that it was his own mind this was happening in. One could not imagine how aggravating it could be, not being able to conjure up his own thoughts for once. It was like someone else was in control of every little detail in his dreams. It reminded him of Her.
If he could, he would have shuddered at the thought. To have to do anything with Her and testing again would undoubtedly be the end of him. Even the thought of Her cold, computerized voice and charmingly cruel ways sent frightened shivers down his back.
The rush of water dragged him along with cold, icy claws, reaching out to grab him and bring him down to some unknown abyss. It filled his ears and mouth, flooding him with a creeping frozen feeling, starting in his chest, working its way up to his head. His eyes unbearably stung like fire; a black, cold fire dripping of ink.
Then, with a loud bubbling, the water evaporated, leaving him to fall helplessly down back onto the ground. He lay there for a moment, winded, eyes tightly shut and working hard to regain his lost breath. His hands scrabbled on the tile-like surface of the land. He could hear the echoes of his heavy breathing bounce back to him, as if he was in a large room of some sort. Except for his own sounds, all was dead silent. That is, if you didn't count the soft rustling of paper just at the edge of his range of hearing. His body felt frozen, as if the liquid had turned his insides to ice.
Eventually, his eyes heavy with drowsiness, he blinked them open.
A blindingly bright light entered his retina, his pupils contracting sharply to the sudden flash of whiteness. His vision fogged, wispy blue hands of mist clouded his surroundings that were currently invisible to him.
The sound of pages turning grew louder, more clear, like the absence of a good sense of sight had strengthened his hearing tenfold. It grew louder and louder, until the noise was right by his left ear, so high in volume that it pummeled his eardrums. It sounded like someone was very violently tearing pages out of a book, then crumbling them as loud as possible and tossing them across the room onto a pile of other balled-up pieces of paper. But, seeing his current position of lying sprawled on the floor, that was impossible, unless the person doing it was right next to him. He reached out with a bony hand, as if to make sure there actually wasn't anyone there, and only managed to feel more marble flooring and air smelling of decomposing cloth. How strange of a scent, it was.
"Ugghhh..." he moaned, closely followed by him coughing up more unnaturally black water from his tired lungs. Judging by the bitter taste to the water, it probably wasn't exactly safe for human consumption. He made sure to get all of it out of his system, which took a good five minutes of exhausted hacking.
"Wheatley..."
His head jerked up, blue eyes wide and mouth tightly shut, unlike before. He felt something in the back of his mind awaken, clicked like he should do something. Or know something. Anything than just stare blankly ahead at where the child-like voice had come from, penetrating the mist like an arrow through the skin and flesh of a deer. He sat up slowly, cautious of who or what had said his name.
This was... Odd. He usually was fearless in his dreams, opposite of what he was in the waking world. But that voice... It had a tone to it, each sound dragged out in a longing sort of manner, soft, yet menacingly familiar in an everybody-knows-this way. It should have been quieter, he knew, the voice should have sounded more far-off. Which it did, but it had enough volume to cause him to slightly cringe. It sounded like something straight out of a horror movie. He had never had a taste for those, even the simplest ones sent goosebumps rippling along his spine, but he had watched enough to get the drift of most of them: A dead four year old child had been turned into a zombie, bloody eye sockets, hair dripping red fluid, calling out to whoever it could to gain attention, so it could terrify its victims even more so before it ripped their heart out or tore their bones apart. He obviously was not happy to hear something so similar to the things he had seen on that screen. Then, he had Chell to tell him it was all fake, none of it could hurt him, but now he wasn't even taking it into consideration that this was just a dream. It sent his own heart into a fit of skipped beats and pounding against his ribcage, as if afraid that it would be torn out of its owner's chest.
He propped himself up with his arms against the floor, waiting with baited breath for something to happen.
"Wheatley..."
There it was again, this time higher-pitched and more like a taunt than a call. He blinked once, twice, as if doing so would summon the source of the voice to his limited line of vision.
Curse this bloody fog, he thought. For all I know, that-that THING could be directly behind me! It sounds like it's coming from everywhere at once! That's not possible, right?... Oh, blimey, where's Chell when you need her?
"Wheatley!"
He jumped, head hitting the roof of the car with an unsettling THUMP.
"Ugh- GAH! Bloody hell! What happened? How long was I out? Where's the floor at?" he exclaimed loudly, knees coming up to his chest and arms momentarily flailing around, knocking over a box of mint Tic-Tac's in the process. The seatbelt around his waist managed to twist itself in loops from his neck to his left leg, pinning him in a particularly uncomfortable position. His right arm was somewhere above his head, stuck on some shelf in the ceiling. He attempted to pull himself free, only succeeding in bending his wrist in a painfully backwards style.
"Right I'm awake! I'm ready! I'm- wait, where are we, exactly?"
Chell was already the the silver car door, untwisting the seatbelt from around his left forearm. He pulled it free with ease, partially relieved by the absence of pain on at least on part of his body, partially because he wasn't actually sopping wet with some unknown liquid that smelled disgustingly sour and looked like someone had drenched him with a water balloon full of squid ink.
The next thing he knew, he felt a painful snap as his ankle was popped back into place by a lack of pressure from the whole of himself leaning stupidly on one foot. He yelped, still a bit wary from the echoing of the child's voice embedded in his head.
"I see the moron has gotten himself into quite a fix. As usual." an unearthly voice droned.
He pushed Chell away for a moment to see the slender shape of Her staring disapprovingly down at him. Her white hair glistened almost blindingly in the sunlight, yellow eyes as dull and emotionless as ever.
"Tell me when your years of getting him to stay still is over," she yawned, pulling an infuriating look of boredom.
His ears went red as he realized for the first time exactly what he must look like. A tall, lanky man trapped by a gray strap of fabric probably looked as if it would take months for him to get out of the position he was in.
He put on an equally disappointed scowl, turning his head away with an abstracted air. Pride wasn't a personality trait of his, but he certainly had a good sense of it. Especially when he was trying to avoid getting insulted even further by an unforgiving and stubborn lady with an addiction to "Science".
She snorted. "I'll be inside." And with that, she disappeared into the undergrowth of the forest-like garden behind her. The leaves rustled, brushing against low-hanging branches of small trees and ivy creeping its way up their trunks.
He raised one eyebrow suspiciously. "There's a house in all that?"
Chell looked behind her casually like it was no big deal, then turned back to him and nodded. Judging by the expression on her face, the jungle wasn't something to get too obsessed over.
He blinked at her absently, then spoke again. "Where are we, exactly?"
Chell just continued unwrapping the seatbelt from him, not even opening her mouth to respond. Her eyes were as dull and expressionless as ever. He had no idea how he had ever gotten used to such a stoic gaze.
It had taken thirty minutes at the least to get him completely out of the car- which he had just stupidly realized he had no memory of even entering the vehicle- and regained complete blood flow to all his body parts. He must have stood on one leg for over a year, or at least it felt that way.
Chell dragged him unwillingly by one arm into the woods that was supposedly a garden, his feet squashing countless weeds making their way across other plants and rocks that dug deep into the muddy earth.
"Wha- wait! D-don't go in there! You saw Her go, it's a trap! A bloody trap, I tell you! Since when did you trust that psychopath? Are you mad! You really do have brain damage, don't you! Or are you just tired of old Wheatley always going on about nothing? That must be it, isn't it! You're with Her on this one, aren't you!" he continued his arguments, most of which did not even reach his friend's ears because he was either facing the opposite direction or had his face buried into some strand of ivy dangling down from a tree.
She had to practically make sure she led him through things that would get him stuck; deep mud, tall grass, bushes. Anything to keep him from bolting off back to the car. But as if he could get any farther than that. He couldn't even get the microwave to work without setting something on fire.
"Hey! See you brought the moron with you," a deep voice called out somewhere to the far left of them. Chell turned to see a man with jet-black hair, wearing a brown leather jacket and heavy-looking boots. A black strap of fabric stretched from his shoulder to his waist, although the point for the strange accessory was unknown to her.
Wheatley stopped struggling behind her momentarily at the sound of his voice, narrowing his bright blue eyes at the man.
"Oh, hi, Rick," he said in an almost moan-like tone.
Rick flashed a overly-cheery smile at the both of them. "Glad you could come. Honestly, I don't need help. But it's nice to know a pretty lady like you is concerned enough to stop by."
Chell made the same loathing face as the tall man she currently had an iron grip on. "I came because She told me to, Rick."
The tan man didn't seem to be put down by her abrupt remark. "Heh. Can't go against Her, now can you? Anyway, come on. It's best not to keep you-know-who waiting. And I do mean she's as bad as that snake guy from those wizard books."
"Harry Potter, and you mean Lord Voldemort," she corrected him.
He shrugged. "Yeah, whatever."
Rick turned and trudged through the brush, signaling them to follow with a waving hand.
Once he was hidden completely by the foliage, Wheatley turned to his companion. "What was that all about? Help?"
Chell looked at him, and nodded. "She said there's something in his house that would be, and I quote, 'The perfect environment for observations of human fright and adrenaline reactions'."
Wheatley gave her a quizzical expression. "Observations? Oh, please don't tell me she has a new 'test'."
She nodded again, and he swallowed.
Still keeping her grip on his arm, she walked towards the place where Rick had vanished and tugged him through countless thornbushes and overgrown flower beds.
A white house came in view, seven figures standing impatiently up on a patio near the rear of the structure. Even the stones that surrounded the area were cracked and filled with both live and dead leaves, and it looked on the brink of falling down altogether.
"There you are. We've been waiting for such a long time now."
She stood, hand on one hip, at the front of the crowd, which was now recognizable. Morality, Anger, Fact, Space, Rick, Her, and Curiosity were all glaring down at them with eyes of all colors.
"I'd like to let you know that this house of Rick's is haunted."
Hi! I case you're wondering, I'm not entirely sure what compelled me to write a story with another author, but I'm sure glad I did! Topaz18 is one of the nicest people out there, patient, too. Oh, and this first chapter was written by me. I came up with the idea, mostly because I love ghosts, but I think Topaz18 will be the one that's putting more work into this, because I am the laziest person on earth, despite the fact I'm always busy. Oh, and unlike my other stories, all the characters are human this time, and living "normal" lives for some odd reason I cannot explain.
If you see a mistake, please point it out. It was some early hour in the morning when I last ran this over, so I'll no doubt have missed something.