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Vanära

“Anita?”

Cole found himself among a nearly endless patch of dirt, tree, and rock. There was someone he desperately needed to find.

“Anita? Hello? Where are you?”

His heart began to race. He walked, ran, sprinted around, trying to find who he was looking for. He yelled, louder and louder still, yet there was no response. The farther he seemed to go into the forest, the more similar everything began to look. That is, until he saw her.

In the middle of a large clearing was a single rock cairn, and sitting near it a young woman. As Cole approached, he began to realize who the young woman was.

“K-Kat?”

It was just loud enough for her to hear. The girl turned. She was wearing a plain white mask, a simple rough face etched onto its exterior. She slowly stood up.

“Kat… where is Anita?”

It took a few steps, closer and closer, faster and faster, to the point where the boy realized that whatever it was had nothing to do with who he initially thought. He dashed away just as the figure sprinted forward, giving a guttural scream which shook the forest and sent chills down the boy’s spine. Racing, faster and faster, he came down on that forest, the umbral clouds began to darken, figments of his past came reigning down. From the spoke of the rock he saw another, one he recognized, a figure of past or present or future, some caricature of light, malformed, fragmented, resentful, twisted, screaming and howling. The whole forest howled, the whining of an old dying dog, how Cole was not just in that moment but in some moment past, a place and time he could not remember because he was too busy running, running, his throat breath stuck in his mouth, destined to run and hide. He was afraid, but strangely it wasn’t because of the figures. He knew they weren’t real. He didn’t feel it consciously, but there was something else. He saw smoke across the horizon and ran towards it.

There was a clearing. Dark ochre mud and grass. Something you’d seen in those travel magazine images of Scotland. Perhaps he had seen it, too. The source of the dogs were revealed to him. They weren’t dogs. There was a crowd of older women all huddled together under their hoods and babushkas, weeping. Cole ran into them in an attempt to get away from his demons — ebb and flow of the crowd waved him downstream, towards the center of the clearing. The center which all the crowd had been surrounded around, watching.

There was a car. It had been obliterated, a smoldering remain of blackened ash and bent metal. Out of its thrashed interior jutted out what the boy initially assumed to be a corpse — a burnt, disfigured body slumped to the ground. Yet as he got closer he noticed the figure continued some belabored breathing, its chest forcefully struggling up and down as a raspy sound of breath came from under the mess of gore. Suddenly Cole felt himself pushed by the crowd, closer and closer, until he was right next to the body. Cole tried to push himself back as he saw the figure suddenly raise its head up. It was only then that he realized why the whole thing seemed so familiar.

It was a disfigured, mutilated version of the woman whom he kept a photo of in his wallet.

It pushed itself forward with some force, the remains of its legs torn off and lodged into the metal carcass of the car. The figure turned its head to stare at Cole, then took a crooked, broken finger and pointed it in his direction.

“You,” the figure spoke out in a guttural voice. She spoke in a language Cole did not recognize, yet he did understand. “You have… forsaken me. I gave unto you my love, my hope for the world… and you dashed it against the rocks. You are a failure, a dark stain on your father and I’s legacy. You are not my son, you are an abomination. An abomination that deserves to die. Why haven’t you died, Cole? Do it. Die. Die! DIE!”

Cole quickly turned back and sprinted into the crowd, trying hard to ignore the tears down his cheeks and instead focus on his own survival. The women did not try to stop him, but rather continued standing in place, weeping to themselves. Eventually he broke through the mass, and ran as deep down into the woods as his legs could take him.

When he finally ran out of breath, he found himself at the foot of a creek. The creek bed seemed to go on the right past any visible field, a continuous roaring of waves against rock. At the left, however, was a small waterfall that served as the lead-in for the rest. Strangely enough, the waterfall was connected to a large cliffside. There was nowhere for water to come.

He heard a sound from behind him. It was faint, but got louder as it approached. It sounded almost like a windchime, or a flute, or some other softly whistling instrument. Fearfully, Cole turned his head.

It was Anita. But it wasn’t the Anita that Cole had remembered. She was wearing a white dress, covered in dirt and stains. Blood trickled down her legs and her arms were covered in bruises. Her face was beaten and bloodied to the point where it was nearly unrecognizable. There was a leaf in her mouth, which she blew on with chapped lips, and created the sound in which Cole heard. She didn’t look at him — rather, she stared off at nothing in particular, eyes wide and dead.

Cole felt his heart nearly bursting through his chest as the apparition stumbled slowly past him, towards the creek. When the girl hit the rim of the creek, she leaned forward and fell in. Except she didn’t — there was no splash, and there was no sound. Cole got up and looked into the creek bed only to find that it wasn’t a river at all, but rather a perfect mirror, a mirror which reflected onto him a true image of himself, not the image that he appeared to others, but the deeper image, the image which he kept hidden down where it stayed dormant, waiting to finally come out…

…

Cole was throttled awake. Sweat drenched the couch and his entire body was shaking. His hyperventilation awoke Maria, who had dozed off on the armchair. She rose up in concern.

“Cole, are you okay?”

As the boy came back to his senses, he put his head in his hands and nodded. “I-I’m fine. It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“Did you… did you have that nightmare again?”

Cole hesitated in speaking. “Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Cole’s answer was blunt, and walked out of the room before Maria could make any other response. She considered chasing after him, but her better judgment took hold and she left him alone. 

Cole walked into the bathroom, and washed his face in the sink. He looked up. It was the face he recognized. The one he showed to others. He breathed a sigh of relief.