Hunted

Creak.

I sat up in my bed, looked across the room and saw him, hands folded, watching me with an impenetrable gaze.

I smiled. "How did you get in?"

He gave me a smirk. "From inside your head, of course."

I asked him something I had wanted to know for a while, now. "Are you real? Or are you just a figment of my imagination?"

His response was nonchalant. "Why can't I be both?"

*******

The story begins in Luce's room, where her nighttime visions are recorded in her diary. A rabbit is found dead on the banks of the river, strange voices haunt the forest behind her school, and a dark, mysterious boy stalks her dreams whom she seems hopelessly drawn to.

Yet her fantasies are nothing but real. Soon the children in her neighborhood develop a bizarre habit of wandering into the woods, her cat is found in the same manner as the rabbit, ancient markings appear in her house, and she realizes that her dreams - and her - might be at the root of it all.

In which a girl learns to tell apart truth and lies, normal and abnormal, and, most importantly, real and surreal.

Highest: #222 in Vampire