A/N: Once upon a time, I wrote a series of one-shots for the horror television show, Harper's Island. The one-shots were written to show each of the twenty-five "suspects" at some point prior to the start of the show, just living a normal day in their pre-wedding event lives. My goal was also to make mention of the upcoming wedding in some fashion in each one-shot. I liked how it came out and I've wanted to do it again. Enter Rose Red. I went with a friend to a couple of Shakespearean plays recently and there was an actor there who reminded me so much of Julian Sands that I decided I wanted to watch Rose Red. This has always been my favorite haunted house story and after watching it again, I decided I wanted to venture into Rose Red fanfiction and I wanted to start by writing a sequel series to my Harper's Island one-shots by doing the same for Rose Red. I tightened the timeline by limiting it to the day, or evening, before they arrive at the house. There's no rhyme or reason to the length of each chapter; I simply wrote what I felt compelled to, so some are short and some are longer.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters or ideas created by Stephen King. I borrowed them for the entertainment and amusement of my audience.
SUMMARY: Once upon another life, I would have passed Rose Red by.
GENRE: Horror
RATING: PG-13
::~*~::
Pam sat on the toilet seat in the bustling public restroom, trying to ignore the sounds of lively laughter from the gaggle of girls applying makeup at the mirrors. She silently cursed her friends for dragging her to the club in the first place. She should never have told them where she was spending the weekend. They immediately became convinced she was going to die there and so they insisted on her enjoying her last night of life. Apparently they didn't know her well enough to know that she despised the club scene. After they had left her alone at the bar while they hit the dance floor, she had gone to seek refuge in the bathroom, hoping to find comfort in the silence she had expected to find. After holing up in a stall, she hadn't been there for ten seconds before the rather loud group of girls had come prancing in. Rolling her eyes in irritation, she waited for them to leave.
Five minutes later, they finally returned to the dance floor and Pam was left in absolute silence. Burying her face in her hands, she groaned. Pulling her feet up onto the toilet seat, she wrapped her arms around her legs and sat her chin down on her knees.
She knew her friends had meant well and they had only been joking when they mentioned her imminent demise, but to have someone else vocalizing one of her deep-rooted fears about this whole excursion had only made things worse. Since they wouldn't drop it until she agreed to their plans for a night out, she had finally relented, despite having no desire to. She wondered if she should fake a headache just so she could bow out of the rest of the night. Of course, pretty soon she wouldn't have to fake anything.
Her biggest problem with large groups went all the way back to her special gift. She had the ability to glean information from objects simply by touching them. What most people didn't understand is that that gift sometimes extended to human beings as well. It didn't happen as frequently as her contact with inanimate objects, but the impressions, when they did come, were just as clear as what she saw when she touched objects, sometimes even more so. In the sixty seconds it had taken her to travel from the bar to the bathroom, she had determined that there were at least three guys and four girls presently cheating on significant others, two people were suicidal, and one guy was absolutely head over heels for the girl he was dancing with and, considering the way she had eyes only for him, she suspected his dance partner felt the same way about him. That last encounter tended to make her gift more bearable when, most of the time, all she saw was pain and anger.
Finally, she decided she'd had enough. Glancing at her watch, she was stunned to see it was already two in the morning. She was meeting the group at 9AM sharp, and she still had a thirty minute drive back to her apartment. She decided that she would just sneak out of the club and deal with the consequences of her abandonment of her friends in the morning, or, better yet, on Monday afternoon when she returned home.
She put her feet back on the ground and put her hands on the walls of the stall to push her to her feet. The impression that assaulted her senses was immediate and overwhelming…and truly terrifying. Bursting out of the stall in horror, she so startled a young woman applying lipstick that a long red mark stretched from the corner of her mouth, almost to her ear. Mumbling her apologies, Pam quickly quit the bathroom. The vision of the mutilated body of the young woman who had been murdered in that stall swam before her eyes as she hurried back into the main part of the club. Her breath coming in ragged gasps, she held her hand over her mouth as though she were about to be sick and practically ran to the exit. Suddenly, she wasn't so sure she could handle Rose Red.