Gravitational Phantoms

Chapter Sixteen

Like I said, on the computer. Kind of a gross chapter. I do have a quick question: how many of you would be interested in a quick profile of the characters from my original book, or at least the ones that I have so far?

Thank you my dragonlings!

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Danny was trapped. The hybrid was stuck in a box, one with white walls. They sparkled and shone, unblemished by dirt and grime. To most, they might have been beautiful. But to Danny they meant death, pain, and heartbreak. 

A bright light outlined a door shape, and it swung inward. Four people walked in, and they were the faces from Danny's dreams.

Sam, Tucker, Jazz, and Danielle strode in, ugly sneers on their faces. But they weren't alive; they couldn't be. Sam's face was torn apart, her skull grinning in the false light. One of Tucker's eyes was gone, as well as both of his hands. They had been replaced with bones, and they had long claws sprouting from his skeletal fingertips. Jazz's ribcage was split open, and her insides were spilling out. Dani was melting, and the clone's lower body seemed as if it had been mauled by tigers. All of their clothes were filthy and torn.

Danny tried to lean away from the awful four, but chains clinked around his wrists and ankles. Sam sneered, and a whip appeared at her hip. She picked it up and unfurled it, green sparks dancing along its length. 

"Now, now," she crooned. The former goth's voice was twisted by her decaying features. "Lets not be hasty. I thought that you loved me?" 

Then her face contorted. "Or at least, that's what we all thought. But you left us to die, didn't you? You claimed to care about us, you claimed to love us, but you murdered us! YOU COULD HAVE SAVED US!" 

Sam snapped the whip against Danny's side, and it tore through his cloths and bit into his side. The ghost boy bit back a cry of pain and surprise. 

Dani lunged, pinning the boy that she was copied from against the wall. "You promised. You promised that you would always help me, but you let me die! You let the agents take me away and experiment on me!"

"L-liar..." Danny managed to croak. "Th-that wasn't you. I-it was just a fake."

Tucker pulled Dani away and lifted up his shirt to reveal a gaping hole where his heart should have been. His lungs were torn apart, and his intestines were leaking out. 

"Does this look fake to you?" He hissed. "You left us to die! You never cared about us at all, did you? We were just a way to keep your secret, an ends to a mean. Did you ever even love Sam? Were we ever even friends? You're just a monster that doesn't have feelings, a piece of scum."

The four people other than Danny watched as he started to thrash, and ectoblast starting to build in his hands. His irises glowed green and blue beneath his eyelids, and a sickly emerald light leached faintly from his mouth.

"What's going on?" Dipper asked. Mabel gasped as a faint frost began to grow on the walls. The air started to chill. 

Ford ran to the Halfa's side. "I don't know. But I don't think that it's good."

Stan charged out of the room, and came back with several pairs of handcuffs. He shoved them into his brothers hand. "Use these. It might keep him from hurting himself."

Mabel wrinkled her nose. "Why do you have those?"

"Don't ask," her great uncle muttered.

Ford clipped the cuffs around each of Danny's wrist, holding him to the almost non-existant bedposts. Then he secured them around the hybrid's ankles, and looped them around the edge of the mattress.

"That will have to do for now. But one strong pull and he might be able to rip it up," Ford warned. He started to pace in the small room, and the other three moved out of his way. The man frowned and rubbed his chin.

"Ecto...ectoradium. It might work to restrain him and neutralize his powers, but we would need a diluted strain in order to prevent it from burning him. And where would we get it? It's so rare, I don't know how the Guys in White got their hands on it. Where could we find some..."

Dipper leaned over Danny, ignoring Ford's musings. Danny's eyelids were were twitching, and the twelve-year-old knew that he must have been dreaming. His own eyes widened. 

"REM" He murmured. 

"What?" The other three asked.

"Rapid Eye Movement," he explained.

This only served to confuse the others more. Ford knew what it was, but not the point of why he was saying it. Dipper sighed.

"It's a form of deep sleep, sometimes associated with lucid dreaming."

Mabel shrugged. "So what?"

Dipper started to pace in the same way that Ford had. "Bill did something in his mind, the same way that he tried to get the code to the safe. We could use that spell and follow him, but that might cause long-lasting damage on his mind."

He took out the third journal and flipped to the page on Halfas. "It says here that they sometimes have a split personality with their two sides. It also says that they may have two personal Mindscapes, one ghost and one human. But if they were to merge, what would happen?

"We don't know, because it has never happened. Most people don't even know that they even exist. But Bill did. Could he launch an attack on both simultaneously, even though normal ghosts don't dream?"

Ford frowned. "I don't know. He could, but it would be hard to maintain a pair of separate attacks on both sides of the mind. Even if the dreams were the same, it would still be more double the effort of a normal dream or nightmare."

Dipper snapped his fingers. "Exactly. Which is why he's not. Bill is only giving him the nightmares on his human half. That's why his powers are reacting in the physical world."

Ford realized what he was getting at. "They're trying to wake him up."