Book Nine, Chapter 49: Ramona Interlude Part Three

All Ramona Mercer knew was that one moment she closed her eyes, lying on the floor of a cabin, and then opened them again as a child, a preteen in a room during a slumber party.

Did she dare look around?

“Ramona,” she heard someone say.

She didn't recognize the voice because it came from a young girl, but when she looked up on the bed and saw Celia looking down at her, even though she was much younger, she knew who it was.

“Do you need a glass of water?” Ramona asked, because she was in a dream and didn't have complete control over what she said.

“Ramona, do you mind closing the window?” she said. “It's getting cold.”

Ramona looked at her strangely. She didn't remember this part of the dream. To her recollection, she always woke up to find that a girl had gone missing right before Riley barged into the room.

Reluctantly, she looked around and saw that there was no missing girl. Every sleeping pallet was filled. Sidney, Geneva, and two or three girls she didn't recognize slept soundly.

Wasn't one of them supposed to be gone?

It didn't matter because, even though she didn't want to, her dream self stood up from her sleeping bag and walked over toward the window, intent on closing it.

And then she looked outside.

It felt like she had done it dozens of times. She knew what was going to happen. In fact, she expected it to be exactly like the last time, when she only saw an entity in the sky and a dark figure at its command.

So when she looked outside and looked down...

She saw him staring up at her. Highbrow Hew. His head was bent at an extreme angle so that he could look directly up. So much about him looked normal, but none of it looked right. She could see his face. It was an image from a nightmare, a face that her mind refused to let her comprehend and could only report to her in the form of emotion.

Then and only then did the ringmaster, the man who looked up, Highbrow Hew, disappear. Her eyes shot toward the sky, where she knew she would see two sunken holes, like they were bored straight into the fabric of reality that stared down only at her.

“There you are, Ramona,” its voice said from nowhere. What was this? One of Hew’s nightmares? It felt so impossibly powerful. How could it be a minion?

In a way, she was thankful because the man who looked up was gone, but that momentary reprieve ended as the thing in the sky, beyond description, said something else.

“Fetch her for me.”

And a dark shape obeyed. At once, a creature was standing where Highbrow Hew had been moments earlier. It was pure black, almost without three-dimensional form to Ramona's eyes, but it carried the shape of a human, roughly, a human with long hair and chains wrapped around its neck and arms.

When it reached for her, the distance between where she stood on the second floor and the ground that it occupied seemed to disappear. Its hand enmeshed with her shirt and pulled on her.

She could hear the girls behind her screaming. She could hear herself screaming, and as she was torn from the window, she realized all too late why there was no missing girl in the room when she awoke.

Because it was her. She was the missing girl.

-

But it was all just a dream, wasn't it?

She awoke at once, lying back on the floor of the cabin. She was safe. The dream had stayed a dream. She almost didn't believe it.

The others awoke right along with her.

Celia cried as Sidney jumped from her bed and quickly lit the gas lantern.

Stolen from Freewebnovel, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“What the heck are you guys screaming about?” Ace said as he rose from his pallet. Though he didn’t acknowledge it, tears were streaming down his face.

“Oh my god,” Ramona said, overcome with emotion. “It felt like it was real.”

“You weren't there last time,” Celia said. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know.”

Everyone was emotional.

“What in the world is going on?” Oscar asked. All traces of humor disappeared from his voice.

“Did we all just have that dream?” Tommy asked. “I swore I heard a scream upstairs, and I walked up to open the door, and...” He looked over at Ramona. “You were missing.”

“What the heck is going on?” Ace asked louder than he had been before.

Everyone started talking at once. It would seem that everyone who had been in the dream remembered it. It was a shared event. Ace and Oscar claimed that they had no idea what the others were talking about, but Ramona suspected that they were in denial.

This was all but confirmed when Oscar was the first to notice the window.

He got up from his place on the floor on the white fluffy rug and backed up toward the fireplace.

“Where did that come from?” he asked as he pointed out toward the back of the cabin, right next to the door that led out onto the deck overlooking the lake.

His voice cut through all the bickering and emotion. Everyone followed his gaze and looked to see that there was an open window by the door.

“What the heck?” Ace said, tripling down on his contribution to the chaos.

Celia couldn't see the window at first because there was a wall behind the bunk bed, but she could lean off the end and stare down the short hallway.

The others had to get up and see for themselves.

The window next to the door was unlike any other window in the cabin. It did not have a screen over it, and unlike the others, it didn't have shutters. Instead of swinging out, it opened and shut by being raised and lowered. They had seen the window before.

It was the very same window from their shared dream. Ramona would recognize it anywhere.

“Was that there before?” Tommy asked.

When no one answered, he repeated the question louder.

And there they went Off-Screen.

Ramona simply waited, terrified, for what was supposed to happen next. She waited for the paragons to at least start having a conversation, to continue talking about this very strange event of a window appearing out of nowhere when, as far as she remembered, there wasn't even enough wall there previously to put a window.

But the paragons said nothing, and eventually she realized that this wasn't just a moment of silent reflection.

She stared around at them, and the way they looked at her, she knew what had to happen next.

“But why would I go to the window?” she asked. “My character would be terrified. I would never walk over there.”

Hooded Lord, she was embarrassing herself. She saw pity in their eyes, and she knew that they had all been through this before, that whatever fate waited for her was something that they were used to.

“It's okay,” Tommy said. “When you wake up, your friends will be there.”

“We'll be right here with you the whole time,” Sidney said.

“Don't worry,” Ace added. “Wherever it is you're going, we'll be right behind.”

“But aren't you going to be there when I wake up?” she asked.

“That isn't up to us,” Geneva said.

Ramona nodded. It would be up to her friends then. If she was going to wake up, it would be up to the players. Riley would determine her fate by doing what he did best.

But before he could play his part, she would have to play hers.

She stood up.

On-Screen.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “We're all just spooked. We're imagining things.”

Everyone took turns playing the skeptic. This time it was her turn, and it wasn't going to last very long.

She walked slowly over toward the window, expecting, as she had experienced in the dreams, to look down and see something, a face she couldn't comprehend, or maybe a figure of darkness.

But she didn't see any of that. As soon as she was in reach, instead, the black figure jumped up into the open window like it was trying to crawl inside, but all it did was grab onto her arm and pull, forcing her outside the window as the paragons screamed behind her.

Its chains clanged against the wood as if they were far heavier than they appeared.

She didn't know where the creature was taking her, but she felt herself falling. She didn't land on the deck. The logistics of it didn't make sense. The window should have led directly out onto the deck, but instead she overshot that and fell off the side of the cliff, hitting her head on the way down.

But somehow she was all okay when she got to the bottom. She stood up and stared back up the cliff, where her new friends had all run outside and looked over the edge with horrified faces and screams.

Suddenly, she noticed that the pure black hand was still wrapped around her arm as the dark figure pulled her away so fast she felt like she was flying. And when she looked back, she saw her friends standing around a body on the ground… her body… and then she understood.

She might not have been dead, but alive felt like an exaggeration.

The dark figure, whose name she couldn't even see on the red wallpaper because it was so powerful, pulled her out across the lake, but there was no lake anymore, only grass. She was walking somewhere familiar, but she couldn't remember where she might have seen it. Her mind was fuzzy as she looked at the large tents and booths set up around her. There were massive hand-painted signs hanging from the sides of a hastily constructed wooden wall.

“The Living Shadow,” one advertised, a painting of the creature that pulled her portrayed with as much spectacle as possible. Another poster advertised “The Rat King,” and still another held the words “The Haunted Scarecrow.” Then there were more posters on more walls, with booths and tents that went on forever.

Ramona, not quite herself, had wondered when the circus would show up, but now she considered whether it had been there the entire time.