Haunting the Halls
Marina feels like she's stuck in a dream.
She didn't use to dream, she knows this. Her nights were once an escape from all the issues in her life, sweet oblivion for a time before they came back with the rise of a new day.
But now... it is almost like all those issues are gone.
In their place, she now freely wanders the halls of her house. She hears her father playing the piano in the living room and smells her mother's cooking coming from the kitchen, but their presence is distant. Never do they tell her to go to school or, worse, ask how it's going.
So she's content to explore the hallways of her house, always finding a new room, a new curiosity.
(Was the house always so big, that she could forget the number of rooms within? Surely, for if it wasn't she wouldn't be exploring. Houses don't just grow extra rooms.)
Sometimes she finds some places better left unexplored. A room whose door crackles with heat, a hallways with darkness far too ominous. But that's how exploration is supposed to go, is it not?
(Is it? Is her house not supposed to be safe? Maybe she should tell her parents?)
And then, on rare occasions, it is like her endless dream turns into the worst of nightmares: the wallpaper around her tears apart and the wood under them rots away, she hears monsters whispering just outside her sight and all lights turn off. Strange people, their clothes torn and their faces gaunt, sometimes pass by her running from something unspeakable she never sees. Sometimes they even try to drag her along with them.
(In the nightmare she remembers her crime. Remembers giving her classmates to the demon in her basement. Is this her punishment?)
Surrounded by horror, she always does the same thing: she curls up in a corner and cries. Cries for her help, for her parents, for her friend Valgavoth.
(Why don't her parents? Can't they hear her? Did they leave the house when she wasn't looking?)
Val is always there, comforting her. He tells her that he would never let anything harm her. He sings her sweet lullabies and assures her that all she needs to do is go to sleep, that when she next wakes up all of the horrors will be gone.
She always does, and wakes up to new dreams.
(Is this her fault? Is she the one that made the horrors that now haunt her?
In the smallest, most hidden recesses of her mind she wonders if Val is truly her friend, is actually keeping her safe…Or if she is just a cherry on top of the cake, being saved for his final meal.)
