Nightmare

There were four of us. I only remember that we were doing this because bad things kept happening. People kept dying. It was myself, two other girls and a boy. It was the middle of the night and it was pouring rain. The area was forest-like but lined with a sidewalk so clearly a domesticated area. The trees were pine trees and they towered over us and formed a circle like clearing. The ground was covered in slippery grass and littered with pinecones and broken off branches and tree limbs. It was unusually dark. The sky was a deep pressing black, with almost no blue to it at all. And there were absolutely no animal sounds or animals anywhere to see. We collected four long sticks, big enough to not be twigs but still small enough that they could be broken by human hands or a human amount of exert-able amount of force. Four sticks for four of us to each break off two sides each. We had to tie the sticks into a snowflake pattern. We tied it together with beige kitchen string, the kind you would use when you put a turkey or chicken into a rotisserie oven.

One girls name was Leah. I knew nothing else about her except that she had long blonde hair. The boys name was Brian, and I don’t know anything else about him. The other girls name never came to me. Leah bound the sticks while I held them in place, and I remember her long hair over her shoulder hid her face. Brian yelled at us to hurry up, and his voice was panicked. The other girl was standing off to the side, she had shoulder length brown hair and her eyes were blue, and she had a look of complete fear on her face. She didn’t speak the entire time we were putting this thing together. She just stood with her arms crossed. I remember she was wearing black boots, black pants, and a blue denim jacket.

We finished tying the sticks together and formed a circle. The rain started to come down even harder. Whatever was causing all the bad things to happen clearly didn’t want us doing this. I was soaked and cold. Whatever we were doing had to start with Brian. He snatched the snowflake from me and snapped the first side of his stick easily. A huge clap of thunder sounded and made us all jump. The brown-haired girl went next, then me, then Leah. The rain started to turn to hail and the wind whipped our hair around and pasted it to our faces. We went around the circle again. Brian, Brown haired girl, me, and then it was Leah’s turn. We had moved closer to the sidewalk at some point, and our circle was not really a circle anymore.

Bright white lightning and thunder and hail and rain cracked and crashed around the clearing. We had one more side to break and it would all be over. No one had been able to do this. Ever. They always died before all the sticks were broken. We were all yelling at Leah now, as the hurricane whipped around us. Then, everything happened at once. A chill ran up my spine, and I stopped yelling. I could hear Brian and the other girl still screaming as Leah tried to break her last side. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Leah was taking small steps backwards, closer to the sidewalk that now seemed to glow silver grey, even though there was no moon. I turned my head to the left side of the clearing, to a line of thorny bushed and tall pines, and there They were. Even through the darkness I could see them perfectly clear. Clear enough to count that there were 34 of them in total. I knew it deep in my gut why they were there. They were there to watch us lose. To watch us die. Tall to small, they all looked the same. Black hooded cloaks and white masks. They didn’t move, except one. The smallest one, so small it had to have been a child, at the far-right end turned its head to look at the sky. I followed the direction it looked and saw a glob of red slush/ice falling to where Leah would eventually step and connect with the concrete sidewalk.

Everything seemed to speed up again. My head whipped to the child figure, and then back to Leah, the red glob still falling. I tried to yell at her to stop walking but my voice was gone. She couldn’t hear me. I tried to run to her then, but my feet were stuck to the ground, being held there by something I didn’t know. The other two didn’t know what was happening and they just kept yelling at her to finish it. Leah took one last step, and the icy red glob landed directly where she planted her foot, causing her to slip and fall backwards onto the concrete. Her head made a sickening crunch when it collided with the sidewalk. Blood flowed from her head, pooling around her, deep, deep red.

The storm stopped immediately. I turned back to the clearing and the hooded figures were gone. I knew they were coming for us now. I turned back to the other two and a scream escaped my chest. I yelled at them RUN! We all took off in different directions. My feet pounded on the wet pavement down a dark street. I tore up the driveway into my grandparents’ house and stopped at the garage door. 34 was written in dripping red. I barreled through the front door and locked it and killed the lights. My grandpa was sitting in the corner of the kitchen, the window shades open, and the lights on creating a warm yellow glow. I sat on the floor between the island and the cabinets and fumbled with the light switches that were on the face of the cabinets (which I thought was a weird place for them). The lights wouldn’t turn off! They would find me! I felt panicked. I ran to lock the back door. The living room was dark. My grandpa didn’t help me, he only watched. I saw movement out the back windows, and then a flash of movement by the front door.

Lily (new dog) came out from another part of the house with some other pug looking dog and a roll of bright blue tape. They taped the bottom of the back door, and then the pug dog walked through the wall and disappeared. I tried the lights again, and this time they worked. The house was pitch black. No sound except my own breathing. It hadn’t started raining again but the lightening was back. The air pressure changed behind me, the hair on the back of my neck stood up on end. As I turned around, lightening flashed and the last thing I saw as I let out a scream was a white mask.