She wandered in a world of light and shadow, a world of dreams, images, thoughts, and feelings. The pressure from her distressing day did not abate, here in this unknown place. A part of her told herself that she was dreaming, but it she could feel the all-too-familiar prickle of fear in the very depths of her being, the most primal instincts brought to life as she faced the unknown in her sleep.
Christine tossed and turned, unaware in her restlessly slumbering state that a smudge of dirt marred her porcelain cheek. Her hands clenched involuntarily, the knuckles whiter even than the pale skin of her hand, around the ripped and dirty article from the Époque, its edges fuzzy from the constant nervous perspiration of her clammy palm. Curled up in a fetal semi-circle, her dress scattered in musty folds about her, Christine's slow and heavy breathing was the only thing that proclaimed her slumbering. She moaned softly, her chapped lips moving in half-formed words.
Disjointed feelings and senses assaulted her. Our dreams, though lacking coherence, can retain a disturbing reality. The stuff of our dreams is not communicated through our visions of them, but more through the knowledge, the sense that they are there. This feeling, this indescribable knowing, makes any nightmare all the more frightening: that we know that out there, there really is our worst fear, lurking. We can imagine its face all too clearly though we can never see it.
It was this that she felt. It was that creeping fear that the unknown was lurking out there. It was the fear of visualizing the face of her fears, for worry that seeing the thing of her nightmares would give it substance, and it would strike…lunging for her throat and ripping the life out of her. Nonsensical though our fears may sometimes seem, in the dark they are more than real: our belief in them give them enough substance to make one turn tail and run.
Christine rolled in her restive sleep, the hand that did not hold the clipping from l'Époque flaccid and clammy as a corpse's. Her hand flopped and brushed the grave dirt by the little well, and in her semi-conscious state, she withdrew her hand as if burned.
She was in a box. The fresh pine wood was rough against her fingers. She could not breathe.
It was a coffin. Fear surged like a bitter tide in her stomach.
Her bloodless lips sagged open, saliva glistening in the corner of her mouth. Christine moaned, and jerked violently, her eyelids fluttering like errant butterflies. Her outstretched arm trembled, and she drew her knees tighter to her chest as if to present a smaller target to whatever was staring at her from the darkness, pricking pins and needles in her shoulder-blades.
She was no longer in the coffin, now, and the breakwater of relief halted the bitter tide of panic that had surged within her. Christine watched the jumbled images and feelings and senses of her dreams rush by like watching flotsam rush past in a swift river.
She was wandering in a curious field filled with overgrown grass and broken bits of stone. She wandered inattentively, nudging the strangely shaped, broken pieces of marble and plaster with a slippered foot. Time passed in strange dollops as time will do in dreams. The dandelion of the sun set in a violet sky, and ginger clouds scudded ominously across the heavens, colliding with foreboding storm-clouds of a vicious mauve. The bloody sunset faded quickly and Christine could barely see in the deepening cobalt dusk.
She wandered, unable to stop the pacing of her feet. The vicious thorn of doubt began prickling in her belly, but she couldn't stop those elegantly slippered feet from pacing, pacing, and pacing further across the strange grassy field.
Fear made itself known, like a punch in the stomach, and she almost awoke. Unknowingly, her little pink nails dug into the back of her hand, leaving white crescent moons that shone palely in the eerie light of the underground, and then faded away.
Her dreaming self felt that it was cold in the unknown meadow. She wanted to stop. She wanted to go home.
Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Christine drew a deep, shuddering breath.
The clouds raced at a farcical speed across the blue sky, speckled with cirrus vapors like watered silk, and flocks of ravens cawed overhead. She took a rattling, trembling breath. As her feet continued to draw her along the never-ending turf, Christine noticed a monument of stone, standing where all the strange stones had fallen. A skeleton, clothed about in flowing robes, clutched a sickle and grinned at her with a mouth full of glinting teeth. The horrid light of the aberrant sky bathed the grisly monument in a chilling shade of red-brown – the sunrise begun too early. The grass glowed red as if bathed with blood, and still Christine's feet pulled her on, until she was staring up at the looming memorial, and she knew with chilling certainty that she had been traversing a tremendous graveyard.
Her treacherous feet walked on, and the bloody grass became rough stone, and her feet dragged until she fell and landed in a tangle of lace and choking sobs. The monument loomed over her. Engraved at the bony feet of the skeleton was: CHRISTINE DAAÉ.
Christine recoiled with a strangled cry, covering her eyes.
With a shriek that echoed horribly across the grave-yard, she drew her fingers away from her face, fingers that were only horribly glowing, white bone.
Her gravestone began to laugh, the death's head suddenly a real skull, instead of carved stone. It opened its jaws and began to laugh, a horrible sound, like the rattling of chains, the screaming of horses.
With the eldritch keening reverberating in her ears and a scream on her own lips, Christine awoke.