AN: Catching up on old things I wrote forever ago. This is my first attempt at horror while remaining in my comfortable writing style. I hope you enjoy, and reviews are greatly appreciated! I'm also running out of characters to write about; any suggestions of Yume Nikki characters to highlight would be welcome. I love requests. Thank you!
The house in the middle of the Pink Sea was impeccably clean and comfortably cool, but the girl inhabiting it was completely oblivious, Madotsuki had decided. No matter how much she poked her or waved directly into the girl's face, she didn't even blink. She spoke not a word, and it was less unnerving than it was irritating. Usually, Madotsuki was capable of getting a response out of the inhabitants of her dreamworld, be it aggression or just a sound. The bird-women that she was afraid of would chase her, and the people in the 'mall' would hiss and distort, but do nothing further. But this girl, Poniko as Madotsuki somehow knew to call her, was deathly silent and repetitive in her actions. She did things in cycles, paced the floor and stared emotionlessly at the wall, on perfect time schedules. Madotsuki watched for quite some time, sitting on Poniko's bed, since she didn't seem to mind very much.
Things got boring quickly, though, and so Madotsuki stood to leave. There was nothing to be seen in a room inhabited only by one unresponsive person. She bid Poniko farewell, though she got no answer, and strode disappointedly to the only door. Poniko watched her go.
Madotsuki wasn't sure why the lights went out. Perhaps she had brushed against the switch, or the yarn of her sweater had gotten stuck on it. Perhaps it was a common thing, a technological mishap. But they went out. There were no windows, either, and so the darkness that followed was complete save for a thin strip of pinkish-red light from under the door, the color of the sea's sunset. And when the darkness slammed down on the room, the screaming started.
What a terrible sound the screaming, crying, begging sound was! Madotsuki whirled from the door and drew her knife, holding the mundane weapon out like a pistol, pointing it straight at the source of the sound. Her fingers shook with how hard they gripped the wood. Her legs wouldn't stay stiff and supportive, but wobbled and wanted to collapse. She bit her lip to keep from screaming as well. She couldn't see very well, thanks to the darkness, but she could make something out, just barely.
She could see Poniko. She was writhing, twisting… reaching a hand to Madotsuki, fingers white and grasping, and in her eyes was real fear rather than that blankness from before. The reaching hand clawed at the air with manicured nails, and the other dug slender fingers into the wooden floor, delving between cracks to drag herself just a little closer. But what was hurting her? Madotsuki leapt closer on pure instinct, crouching beside the fallen girl and brandishing her knife, but she saw nothing. There was nothing. But Poniko was clutching at Madotsuki, and crying, now, burying her face in the pink sweater before her. Her whole body seized and convulsed, curling up into a pained little ball of the girl it had been. And slowly, as though in a dream within her dreams, and without letting go of the knife, Madotsuki wrapped her arms around the girl, knowing her from somewhere now that she was alive and not empty of all emotion. Maybe they had been friends? Had they met before?
Poniko's stunningly blue eyes looked up at her, oceanic with tears, and they focused on her intensely rather than staring through her like a wall. Sweaty blonde hair was dripping into her eyes like gold, and her skin was absolutely pallid, like a person dying of sickness. And, unlike any of the beings of Madotsuki's dreams, she spoke.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered, and then choked, gasping harshly. Even as Madotsuki pulled her closer in a vain attempt to hear more, for the voice of any other human being, Poniko shook and exhaled once more. Madotsuki could have sworn that she smiled. "Wake up," were the last words that would pass her lips before she was gone. The brilliantly blue light faded out from her eyes, and Madotsuki felt nothing. It wasn't the empty carelessness of watching a character die in the few old DVDs she had in the real world, which she had seen a million times. This was the quiet shock that numbs the mind for hours at a time. She was too ceaselessly tired to even think about what had just happened.
The room was cold and dark, and as empty as it had been when Madotsuki had originally entered to see Poniko standing obliviously in the center. But now, there was a more horrible and foreboding feeling to it, one so chilling that she clutched Poniko closer and squeezed the handle of her knife tightly, wanting badly to back away from something she couldn't even cast a worried glance around the room, noting silently that the posters on the wall had changed to feature large, staring eyes, all empty and glazed. One set had a smiling, curling mouth of a nightmarish appearance. Madotsuki looked down immediately, curling up slightly in the overwhelming atmosphere of icy fear. Her eyes found Poniko's face, and she immediately jerked back with a shriek, letting go of the girl's body and jumping back to her feet with knife in hand.
Poniko's face no longer looked like her. It didn't even look human. Her skin was stark white, not the tone of a sick person but more akin to paper, and her eyes… Her eyes were twisted and black, mismatched voids torn into her skin like ugly scars. Her mouth was no different, an unsettling tear in what had been her face, gaping open with no end in sight. Grinning. Laughing. One eye looked constantly like it was winking. It wasn't Poniko.
As Madotsuki tore her gaze away and struggled to run, grabbing at the doorknob and twisting in a fevered fury, she could hear the thing moving, a slithering sort of sound. She shrieked in fear and frustration as the doorknob refused to turn. She flicked furiously at the light and was punished with a brilliant flash that blinded her for several seconds, but ultimately, the darkness remained complete. She repeated the process several times for lack of anything better to do, and each time, that painful flash of white scalded her eyes and left her vision blurry. The thing was still watching her, she knew. She could feel that horrible stare in the depths of her soul and every fiber of her body. She pressed herself to the wall and dared to look.
The horrible face had left Poniko's form; in fact, Poniko was gone, seemingly no where to be found. The floor was empty and flawlessly clean, sterile as a hospital, but in the center of it, staring, was the face. It was little more than a formless blob of black, difficult to pick out of the already dark room, but that stark white face was impossible to miss, bleeding out of the shadows like poison. It was smiling. Laughing, grinning, teasing. Crying from its smiling face.
The creature wasn't moving, though, and so Madotsuki figured that she was relatively safe so long as she hugged the wall. She kept her knife with her all the same. The knife made her feel just a bit safer. As she carefully skirted the room, the face didn't turn to follow with its eyes the path she was taking. That was odd. Certainly a predatory creature would do that, or at least one that objected to being stabbed. Madotsuki crouched low and slid forward on her path, her footsteps quiet, stalking toward the creature's back- or what she assumed constituted a back for a shapeless blob. Maybe she'd get out of there if she killed it, and she could be on her way. She positioned herself like a cat ready to pounce, and leapt with her knife outstretched.
It took only moments for Madotsuki to realize her mistake; just fractions of a second after she had jumped, the face had turned. It hadn't even looked like it- like the horrible eyes and mouth and paper-skin had suddenly materialized on the other side, rather than slowly turning. It was still screaming, a sound that Madotsuki suddenly realized in some shady part of her mind hadn't died with Poniko. Dark wonder drove her curiosity to ask herself why she hadn't noticed. It was loud, painful, torturous and she couldn't stand it.
The mouth opened further as she landed clumsily mere inches from it, pulling her knife back. She had been wrong to assume that it was empty and nothing but a void; inside were teeth the likes of which she had never seen. Fangs and long, quivering spines lined the maw's inside with rings of the same papery color as the mask-like face, moving in waves toward blackness beyond them, making a hissing sound as they brushed up against each other that was almost drowned by the screaming. The eyes didn't change when Madotsuki dared to look at them, still smiling and winking. Madotsuki backed off several hurried paces, swinging her knife in a warning. The blade rang harshly through the stale air, and gave her courage; it only ever took one stab to kill just about anything in her dreams. Why not this thing? She stood straighter. She drew the blade back. She stepped forward boldly and stabbed right at the middle of the thing's forehead.
The knife stuck where it hit, lodging itself a few inches up the blade like she had stabbed straight into bone and not an illusion of her mind. Slowly, with twitching motions, the face distorted into an even more unnerving expression, slowly melding itself into a new form. The knife would not come free no matter how Madotsuki struggled, and then her hand refused to budge from the hilt, leaving her pulling and pulling at an unyielding monster. And that monster was coming closer. Sliding forward even as the knife sank deeper in, it came close enough that harsh and whistling gusts of breath brushed at her hair, and she could see every fang and claw-like spike. In a sudden movement, even as she struggled, it just… engulfed her. Tooth and void slid harmlessly by in a rush of screams, and then silence reigned. Light struggled in, harsh and red, from beyond Madotsuki's eyelids, and she felt liquid swaying in a stagnant pool around her, up to her waist. She hardly dared to look, but fear and the love of survival forced her to. She wasn't in Poniko's room anymore.
She didn't know where she was. It was like nowhere she had seen in the dream world; sharp mountains rose in the distance, gleaming white and dripping, and a many-limbed beast climbed over them effortlessly, a shadow with glinting red eyes that far excelled the size of the mountains it walked on. It looked at her with a grin, but did not pursue or investigate further. Blood dripped from the mane-like hair that rested on its back, never seeming to stop flowing as Madotsuki watched. Eventually, she turned around, and was face-to-face with the face again, still distorted and horrible, but no longer screaming or moving. It seemed to stand on the surface of the white sea that surrounded Madotsuki, simply watching and not interfering as she struggled to walk through the milky liquid, to get away from it. She succeeded for a while; she had left it behind after walking for several minutes, her limbs growing tired from the exertion, before it appeared some distance ahead of her once more. An endlessly looping world. It had trapped her again.
Madotsuki closed her eyes, trying not to let the tears that burned at her eyes and set her throat on fire fall. How was she supposed to get out with that thing staring at her?
Wake up. I'm so sorry.
Poniko had said that, Madotsuki remembered. A clue, perhaps? An apology for what had undoubtedly happened? She dismissed the knife effect, raising one hand to her cheek and pinching hard as she so rarely had to do to leave her dreams. And the world faded slowly, and then all at once, and everything was gone.
Madotsuki woke up bleary-eyed and on edge, realizing that she had been clutching her bunched-up blankets like a lifeline as she dreamed. Slowly, she let herself relax, reaching out to her desk to fetch her dream diary, her only company in the lonely room. As she clicked her pen thoughtfully, she found herself missing Poniko. Odd for a shut-in to miss people, but those split seconds of horrifying interaction had been real life, not a dream. A reminder of what she had had once. She clicked the pen once more, set the tip to the paper of the nearest open page, and began to record her memories of the sweet Pink Sea, balloons floating over magenta-cresting waves, and a girl she would try to talk to again.