𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 - 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐎𝐧𝐞

[Friday, March 22nd, 1986. NOW.]

It had already been there when you'd woken that morning, that strange, nagging feeling in your gut, like a silent shadow in the corner of the room. Dread. A sense of something being...wrong.

The feeling in your guts had started to grow when Robin had climbed into the passenger seat, and by the time you'd reached Forest Hills to pick up Max, it had spawned into a dark, sinking premonition.

"Holy shit, what the Hell's happening here?", Robin gawked at the sight unfurling in front of you when you steered the car to the side of the road, yellow police tape fluttering in the spring-breeze.

"Do you think something happened to Max?", your friend gasped.

The trailer park was abuzz with police.

In the flashing red-and-blue lights of the police cars painting eerie patterns on the walls of the nearby trailers in the blushing light of dawn, cops whirred around the place like a swarm of flies over a rotten carcass.

And the dark premonition morphed into panic.

"No," you breathed. "Not to Max."

You didn't hesitate a single second, didn't wait for the officer walking up the gravelly road to reach your car

With Robin's surprised call piercing the early-morning-air behind you, you burst out the door and broke into a run, ignoring the warning shouts of the officer right on your heels as your feet carried you across the crunching gravel, the haze of panic buzzing like static in your mind, turning your surroundings into white noise and blinking lights.

The gravel beneath your feet turned to dry patches of grass, and you reached the trailer, the crackling static of RT units and shouts filling the morning air around you, all blurring beneath the thundering of your heart, the rush of blood in your ears.

For a fleeting heartbeat, time seemed to freeze.

There was the door you'd walked out of for the last time on a freezing winter night three months ago, the blue paint chipped in places to form a familiar pattern that hit you like a punch in the guts.

The door was ajar to reveal the heap of fabric on the floor – and it took a moment for you to make sense of what you were seeing. To realize that strange shape sticking in the air like a zombie's hand reaching out of its grave in a horror movie...was a hand. A real hand. But something was wrong, because the fingers were sticking out at the most grotesque angles, as if they'd been snapped like twigs, one by one.

It wasn't a heap of fabric. It was a person.

Don't let it be him.

"Miss, you can't be here!" The voice was far away, blurry and dulled as if you were under water. Sinking deeper and deeper.

Don't let it be him. Please, please, please don't let it be him.

Hands grasped your shoulders, pulling you away from the trailer's door.

But you'd already seen enough.

When they led you away, away from the horrid, disfigured hand stretching towards the ceiling and the dead body it belonged to, two things shattered the numbing daze of shock clouding your mind like stones hurled through a window.

Relief, because the broken body on the ground of the trailer...there had been no mess of unruly dark curls, no flash of tattoos, no ripped denim or worn-out leather.

And shame, because of the relief you felt even at the sight of the familiar scrunchie, a rich pine-needle green on strawberry blonde hair.

[Friday, September 6th, 1985. THEN.]