Bit of a dark chapter here, folks, but still hope you enjoy!
Doug bid Evie, Jay, and Carlos goodbye and watched them go before moving to put away the books they had pulled from the shelves. He was saving the librarian work since she had left early due to a family emergency. Her absence hardly mattered though since the library would magically lock itself at eleven.
Going over countless worries regarding his friends going to the Isle, he carried a stack of books around in one arm and replaced the volumes on their respective shelves with his free hand. After traveling through several aisles to find the next slot for one of the books, his shoulder and arm holding the stack of books aloft were cramping. He readjusted them, shifting the stack to his opposite arm with a grunt. As he did so, he thought he heard a footstep behind him.
In the millisecond it took him to hesitate before his instincts could even begin to tell him to look around for the source of the noise, a thin cord slipped around his neck and pulled taut. He choked, and the books toppled from his arms. Several fell on his right foot, and the pain made him recoil. His back hit something solid, and even in his stressed and adrenaline rising state, he could tell it was a person.
"I warned you," a familiar voice hissed in his ear. Ben's. So, that meant...Blaine.
Doug tried to force a finger under the thin cord constricting his airway. Already, he was seeing spots from the combination of lack of air and surge of panic. This quickly resulted in confusion and disorientation. He was an academic, not an athlete. He knew nothing about self-defense, and even if he had, his panic and fear at the moment would have likely made those lessons leave his head immediately.
Doug grunted painfully, losing what little air was left in his lungs when Blaine shoved him against the bookshelf in front of them.
"I really had hoped we could be friends. I could have made you into something great when I'm fully in control of this body," Blaine said with a laugh, making his sarcasm obvious. Blaine only moved his hand to wrap the yo-yo string around Doug's neck several more times and pulled it even tighter.
Doug struggled against Blaine, but it was weak. Black ringed the edges of his vision, and his limbs felt heavy and limp. The increased pressure from the layered cord made it impossible swallow, impossible to draw breath. His knees buckled, and the cord cut into his skin as he fell to the floor.
The world went black.
Mal hadn't kept track of how many doors she had opened in her subconscious's corridor, but she was sure it was somewhere close to three hundred, or maybe five hundred. She wasn't sure. Either way, she was running out of time. It seemed impossible that she would be able to find a door leading back to her consciousness that would allow her to wake up.
She almost wanted to just sit down in the hallway and wait for Blaine to come get her. She wasn't sure how she was still sane. Her subconscious was every bit as evil and frightening as Blaine had said it would be. Most of the doors she had opened had revealed scenes of death, whether this was herself, her friends, or Ben. Seeing her own death, typically by her mother's hand or drowning, was bearable. She could check that she was still alive. As for Evie, Jay, Carlos, and Ben, her mind was starting to make her think some of these things could be real. Maybe she was really witnessing their deaths.
Scenes of Ben's deaths were the hardest, in part because they were the most plentiful. Sometimes, she killed him with her magic. Other times, he was hung, beheaded, disemboweled, eaten, crushed...
Mal shut the door on another scene of Ben and slumped back against the door. If it were possible to throw up in her subconscious, she would have done it many times by now. Instead, she had to settle for squirming feeling in her stomach as if she was about to puke but never got the satisfaction of emptying her stomach. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the unnatural bent shape of Ben's body from that door. He had been twisted into a position that wasn't physically possible without breaking several bones first, including many ribs and vertebrae.
Mal swiped her hair back from her forehead. For some reason, it was impossible to vomit here, but she could sweat and cry endlessly and not pass out from the resulting dehydration. It was strange and frustrating, but she hardly noticed it anymore. She could no longer tell what was sweat and what was tears from the combination of panic and sorrow at the scenes her own mind was subjecting her to.
"One more," she murmured to herself and pushed off from the door. This had been her mantra for the past hundred or so doors. She had to believe that the next door she tried would lead to her awaking up and, in turn, her freedom. But it was difficult to force this belief into her feet to make them move and carry her forward to the next door. But she had to. If she stopped moving, she would simply lie down in the middle of the corridor and curl into a fetal position.
Body shaking and palms slick with sweat, she opened the next door in the hall.
Wrong again. The scene behind this door revealed Maleficent advancing on Evie, Jay, and Carlos. Mal recognized the interior of their old loft on the Isle. The boys tried to shield Evie from Maleficent, but one swift swing of Maleficent's scepter sent Jay crashing to the floor. He did not stir again, and Mal thought she saw where his skull had caved in from the blow.
As with all of the previous doors, Mal found herself unable to look away from the scene until it finished. It was as if someone stood behind her, forcing her to stand in place with her face forward and her eyes held open.
Once Maleficent had killed Evie and Carlos as well and turned to grin at Mal triumphantly, Mal felt movement return to her limbs. She shut the door instantly.
She dragged the back of her hands over her eyes, trying to clear her vision of tears. Her chest felt hollow and brittle, numb. But she forced herself on. "One more," she whispered, the words nearly a plea to her treacherous subconscious.
But as she passed under the purple glow from another torch on the wall, a blob of white smoke materialized in front of her. For a moment, Mal wondered if her nightmares were beginning to tire of waiting on her and had decided to spring free of their doors and hunt her down themselves. Or maybe it was Blaine. She was so exhausted and emotionally broken at the moment that she would have gladly followed him out as long as she woke up outside of this place.
"Doug?" Mal blinked slowly, both from fatigue and the want to make sure she was seeing clearly. Maybe it was a hallucination.
"Mal!" Doug was panting as if he had just run a long distance. "I'm so glad to see you. I wasn't sure it would work."
Mal severely wished he had just kept talking and explained instead of pausing to await her response and inevitable questions. She didn't want to speak. She wasn't even sure how she had managed saying his name after her voice had grown used to only muttering the words 'one more' over and over. In truth, she didn't want to speak more than that. Her throat was raw from crying and screaming. Trying to form her mouth into any other sound than those or those two words was like rubbing sandpaper over her vocal cords. But, Doug wasn't a mindreader, and she didn't have time for him to guess all her unspoken questions. She didn't have a choice - she would have to speak. "How are you here? How did you get past Blaine?"
She had quickly decided he couldn't be a hallucination. Her mind still had plenty of methods left to torture and kill her friends and Ben before it resulted to less close friends.
The faint smile that had been on Doug's features instantly vanished. "I didn't." He swallowed. "Blaine killed me, Mal. I'm dead. My soul was pulled by some invisible force to Skull Island, and it took everything I had to resist the pull to get on that boat. I only made it back by concentrating so hard on Evie. But I came to you. I thought that maybe this would work now that I'm...well, yeah."
Mal blinked at him. "I...wow. I'm so sorry, Doug." She was stunned, and she thought she sounded a bit unsympathetic. But she supposed that was because she had witnessed hundreds of deaths and the truth of what Doug was saying hadn't truly sunken in yet to penetrate the numbness in her chest.
Doug nodded, and a look of despair seized his features. "Evie doesn't even know yet. She's still on the Isle with Jay and Carlos."
"What?" Mal's voice broke when her surprise attempted to increase its volume. She swallowed, even though there was no saliva to help wet her throat. "Why are they there?"
Doug quickly filled her in on the plan to access the library at Dragon School. "But, that was almost two weeks ago. They're still not back."
Somewhere in the numbness in her chest, Mal's core turned to ice. "What do you mean two weeks?"
"I tried to get here as quickly as I could, Mal. I really did. And I'll try to help you in whatever way I can," Doug said.
"Get to the point!" Mal barked even though it felt like she was ripping her throat to do so.
"Mal...your wedding is in two days."
Mal's head spun, and her legs buckled and folded neatly underneath her, sending her to the floor in a sitting position. If Doug spoke to her, she didn't hear it. All she could think of was how in two days she would have lost Ben forever. Blaine had promised that by the time the wedding came, Ben's soul would have been ejected from his body. Since Blaine hadn't come back for her yet, she could only assume Ben was not gone. Yet.
Tears streamed down her face, mingling with dried tears from hours earlier and old sweat. Ben would be gone soon. And Blaine would find a way to make her do his bidding. After seeing what she had in all the previous doors, it would be so simple for Blaine to force her to marry him, or do anything really, if he threatened any of her closest three friends. There was much more on the line here than she had thought. Her whole world hinged on what would happen in the next two days, and those days would pass in minutes in her subconscious.
She had to do something. Had to stop it. Had to wake up.
Now.
This chapter was so fun to write, even though I had a setback of losing half of the chapter at one point with a technical problem. Leave a review to tell me your thoughts! I'm eager to get feedback on this update!
Foarrin
