Kye awoke, not with a gasp, but with stillness.
His back was flat against something soft, yet untrustworthy. Velvet? No. The texture was wrong. He opened his eyes slowly.
A ceiling of mouths stared back.
Not faces. Just mouths.
Dozens of them, embedded in a gray flesh-like surface. Some whispered nonsense. Others chewed nothing, lips wet and slow. One yawned, revealing rows of rotting teeth arranged in a spiral.
Kye sat up, heart punching his ribs. He was in a long room, dimly lit by flickering bulbs attached to wires that moved like worms. The air smelled like burnt rubber and antiseptic, as if someone had tried, and failed, to clean something unholy.
He blinked. Once.
The walls had changed.
Now they watched him.
Each section of the room bore fragments of his old school: the door to the staff room, the faded green of the science lab tiles, the vending machine from the hallway, but twisted. Melted. Like someone had remembered them wrong.
He stood and nearly tripped over a pair of shoes, his own, still untied, crusted in blood and mud. They hadn't been on his feet. They had just appeared.
A sign flickered into view ahead, handwritten in red chalk on a crooked stand.
"CHOOSE TO KEEP YOUR EYES."
"What?" he whispered.
Below the sign, two buttons. One green, one black. No labels. Just buzzing.
"Is this a joke?"
Silence.
Then a soft, mechanical voice from somewhere above him:
"CHOICE DETERMINES WAKEFULNESS."
The green button glowed slightly.
Kye stared at both.
His hands trembled.
He reached, Pressed the black, The lights cut out.
Everything went pitch-black.
Then a piercing, sharp pain bloomed across his forehead. Not external. Inside his skull. He screamed and stumbled backward, hitting a wall that was suddenly breathing, pulsing like lungs filled with static.
"Kye..." came the voice again.
Not Luca this time.
Not himself.
It was his mother's voice.
"Kye, come downstairs. We're having fish."
His knees buckled. He hadn't heard her voice in years. Not since…
He forced himself up, panting.
There was a hallway now, stretching ahead, lined with glass panels. Behind each panel:
His teacher crying alone.
Luca, covered in cuts, writing I'm sorry repeatedly on a wall with his fingers.
Himself, from some memory that didn't exist, standing over a corpse with blood on his hands.
The hallway whispered as he passed. Words he didn't understand. Or maybe just couldn't admit to knowing.
He reached a door at the end.
It read: EXIT MEMORY
He pushed it open.
Inside was a mirror. Just one.
He walked toward it, heart racing.
In the reflection, he didn't see himself.
He saw the bus.
Everyone asleep.
Him, slumped over, mouth slightly open.
But something was crawling across the ceiling of the bus.
A shadow with too many joints. No face. Just a long slit that kept widening into a smile that never ended.
It looked right at him through the mirror.
And it whispered:
"You're almost ready."
The mirror cracked.
And a hand reached out of it, grabbing his throat.
He tried to scream.
He couldn't.
The glass began to fold around him like liquid metal, dragging him inside, into the bus, into the smile, and then, Darkness
Kye woke up in darkness.
Not the kind he knew. This one had weight. Like it pressed on the skin. Like it listened.
The only sound was his own heartbeat.
No birds. No wind. No crunch of branches beneath foot.
It was the kind of silence that knew you were there.
He sat up slowly. The grass beneath him was damp, but too soft. Mushy, almost. Like flesh pretending to be nature. His hands ran through it—and pulled back wet.
Not water.
Blood.
Kye choked on air that didn't taste like air. It was too thick. Each breath felt like sipping tar through a straw.
"Okay..." he whispered, voice cracked, "...this isn't the hike anymore."
He stood. His legs wobbled but obeyed. The forest around him was... still. Not peaceful. Dead. Like someone had drained all motion from it. Trees bent at wrong angles. Shadows formed geometric shapes that didn't follow any light source.
His last memory before falling unconscious was running. Tripping. That thing in the bush with his voice. The sprint through the dark, the brief relief.
And then something sharp entering his back.
He touched his spine now. No blood. No wound.
But a hole was in his shirt.
What is this place?
He took a step—and the ground whined. Not a creak, not a rustle. A human whine. High-pitched. Desperate.
He froze.
The grass beneath him twitched.
"Don't move," a voice whispered.
He spun around,
And saw her.
Nomsa.
But her skin was pale. Eyes too wide, veins webbing under her skin like cracked porcelain.
"Nomsa?"
She put a finger to her lips.
"Shhhh."
The wind picked up. But it didn't rustle the trees.
It hummed. Like it was trying to mimic music.
"Why are you here?" she asked quietly, voice trembling.
"I—I woke up here. I was running, and then"
"You weren't supposed to wake up yet," she said.
"What?"
Nomsa stepped forward. Her fingers were twitching at her side like a spasm.
"Some of us...we broke the rules. We died wrong. We didn't go back to our bodies. We stayed. Became stuck in the echo between places."
Kye stared. "You died?"
"In the dream. That's enough," she whispered. "If you don't kill, you risk staying. If you kill too soon, you wake up wrong. There's a balance."
"Nomsa, what the hell are you talking about?"
Behind her, a shape moved. Crawled.
She stiffened.
"I can help you escape," she said, fast now. "But you need to listen. This place is made of what you fear. The longer you stay, the more real it becomes. The less of yourself you keep."
She was crying.
"I don't remember my full name anymore. Please, Kye, don't forget yours."
The crawling shape behind her stood up.
It looked like a teacher.
Mr. Langford.
But stretched. Hands hanging too low. Smile too wide. Eyes stitched open.
Kye backed up.
"Don't look at it," Nomsa said quickly. "It only moves when… "
Her sentence never finished.
It snapped toward her.
One motion.
She screamed as it grabbed her face and peeled it forward like a hood. Her scream stretched into a second pitch, something inhuman, something too sharp to come from a throat.
Kye ran.
Ran harder than he had the first night. The forest blurred. Shapes moved between trees, too fast to follow. He ducked under a swinging limb, hurdled a pile of twitching vines that whispered his name.
Every part of the forest tried to touch him.
He kept running.
And ahead, he saw a light.
Faint.
Circular.
Glowing like a spotlight on a stage.
As he got closer, he heard voices.
His own name.
Whispers.
He slowed down.
At the edge of the clearing, he dropped to his knees and crawled forward.
And saw Himself. Standing.
Staring at the same glowing light, one hand outstretched, the other holding a knife.
His knife.
The one he kept sketching. Blue flame down the blade. Bent hilt. Carved initials in the handle.
It was real.
The other Kye looked up. Smiled.
"You're finally catching up," he said.
Kye tried to move, but the ground was pulling him down. Like it was trying to make him kneel.
"What are you?" he asked.
"I'm the one that survived."
"...what does that mean?"
The figure tilted its head. "You're not supposed to ask that yet."
Kye opened his mouth, but everything in the clearing began to peel upward, like the sky was just a curtain and someone was yanking it away.
Behind it, an eye.
Huge.
Red.
It blinked once.
And the other Kye whispered:
"You're not dreaming anymore."