Excerpt: What Happens at The End

Julia lay sleepless- mindlessly, wretchedly awake, glaring at the pock-marked surface of her dorm room’s cottage cheese ceiling. Processing little but the noise of grinding teeth inside her own head, she felt the minutes grate by as if metal blades were abrading the surface of her tired skin & eveer-increasingly frayed nerves. Staring at nothing between crusting lids and drying eyes, Julia’s raw and irritated attention turned toward something at her left when a soft, mewling noise came from the shadows nearby. Keening pathetically under her throat, her roommate Shayla lay not six feet away, tossing and turning in some tumultuous nightmare that had besotted her more and more regularly these days.

Every day that Shayla had woken up from one of these episodes, Julia had been made to sit and listen empathetically to her roommate’s tear-stained, gory details of these dark, dismal meanderings; while she grew more and more certain that with each dream, Shayla’s poor, decaying mind would surely break from the mounting pressure they put on her weakening, fragile system. Her mental state was deteriorating visibly as the days passed on, while the dreams she’d been having wore at her like a dog gnawing ever-vigilantly at a bone it just couldn’t seem to crack. Having seen her share of mental breakdowns as a temporary psych student, Julia had to admire the strength with which the smaller, paler girl had withstood these night-time assaults. But no one, given a continuous onslaught of stress with no surcease or professional treatment could keep up a strong front forever.

Although the majority of the details wavered drastically from one scenario to the next, there were always one or two main details that connected each of these episodes, making them all seem part of one, big interlocking system from a single, nightmarish series. The mainstay of each episode was always the idea that Shayla was dying, and in doing so was being tan sported to a strange new alien world similar to but not precisely like our own. Sometimes the new realms she journeyed to were fantastical and wondrous, while other times the landscapes were filled with purple and black skies, dusty terrain and the ever-present screams of countless dead like terrible ambient noise. Sometimes she journey with people or alone, sometimes amazing, magical things happened and others she was stolen away to dismal places and torn apart by ravenous, decrepit creatures with tearing hands and gnashing mouths. No matter what, it was like someone was scripting Shayla’s night terrors, with one intertwining plot that connected all of them like a long-running horror series- on one of those old, specialized cable channels. First someone was dying- beit in their sleep or from some horrendous car accident or terrible murder, and then she was falling or dissolving, and then lying in some strange world she didn’t recognize.

Problem was, unlike those old b-grade horror flicks and low-budget series where the cheese practically dripped from the screen and you always knew that the stories they told were fake because of the bad acting and cheap-o makeup, these night terrors always took Shayla completely undertow with their reality, clarity and intensity. She’d always wake telling grisly stories of this and that, speaking of how wretched characters and elements hopped from one dream to the next, about how she could sometimes “surf” on “white lines of webbing to get out of one dream and into the next,” and about how things could appear distinctively real one minute and deceptively unreal the next. And all of this while grabbing horrific, real-world details from Shayla’s own, daylight life- not to mention the lives of everybody else…