The End of the Dream

Chapter 5

The darkness was not content to remain outside. It seeped into the van, leeching through the seams in the windows and doors. It pooled like a thick black fog, heavier than air, until the floor of the van was saturated with it. The tide rose steadily as a flood.

You scrambled back against the wall, but there was nowhere to go.

The darkness was cold as ice, seeping into your bones and numbing your flesh. A thousand fingers of static clawed at your skin wherever it touched.

It felt different to the dark presence around the Manor—though that was hardly consolation. The whispers had been replaced with a new pressure against your mind, an angry, high-pitched ringing that wormed its way into your skull and rattled your teeth. The van creaked and groaned as though the metal would buckle at any moment beneath the pressure.

You slammed your fist against the door. "Let me out!"

Getting crushed, were the van to crumple like a tin can, was not high on your list of pleasant ways to die. It felt more like a death trap than an escape now.

But maybe you would be the one to buckle under the pressure first. The ringing only intensified, and the sheer weight of the darkness surrounding you forced you to drop to one knee. You couldn't even see the interior of the van anymore. Only a black as endless as the void, deep and absolute.

You weren't sure the van was even there. Though your arm felt leaden, weighed down by an ocean atop you, you reached out to bang again, maybe scrabble for the interior door handle. Just moments ago, it had been right in front of you. Now your fingers met nothing but empty space.

You could hardly breathe. It was crushing your chest, the inexplicable, inescapable pressure. You could hardly think, with that goddamn ringing shrieking like a siren in your mind.

It was not the same malice as the Manor; that had been something sickly, corrupting, poisonous. This presence felt angry. A cold, detached rage.

There were flickers, glitches. A flash of colour amongst the darkness; in front of you, then to the side, then fleeting through your peripheral vision, never quite long enough for you to make sense of what you were seeing—if you were seeing anything at all—before it warped and disappeared again.

"What do you think you are doing?" a voice asked icily. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, same as the ringing and the creaking. It wrapped around your mind, as unyielding as iron yet tempered by a velvet softness. Deep, reverberating. Otherworldly.

Terror flared in your chest. You thought you'd been caught escaping the Manor, but—no. It didn't feel like Mark. Didn't sound like him. Nor did it feel like the presence of the Manor and the barrier that had surrounded its illusion.

This was someone—something—else.

Without any context of who you were dealing with, nor what you had supposedly done wrong, you had no way to answer the question. If you had even been able to. Your tongue was heavy and useless in your mouth.

Finally, you saw him. Or, rather, just his shoes at first—you could barely lift your head.

A pair of black dress shoes stepped into your field of vision, separated from the rest of the darkness by the red and cyan chromatic aberration that outlined them.

Your gaze dragged upwards, almost by a will not your own. Neatly pressed suit trousers gave way to a tailored jacket, worn by a broad-shouldered man with sharp cheekbones and handsome features. Dark hair fell across half his face, near enough obscuring the eye on that side; the other eye was split into sectorial heterochromia, red and cyan like his auras. He wore closely cropped facial hair and a sneer as he looked down on you.