Unspeakable
Hmm, why am I not getting notes in the new chapter? Oh, I see, I put this in the drafts, not the queue.
The horror really starts in this chapter. Warning for death by burning and facial horror. Thank you @harperhug for writing the nightmare and ironing out the timeline!
Her blond hair shakes over her face from the force of her sobs. The trembling motions run down arms that are wet with both water and blood, making ripples in the pond where she’s holding down…something.
“Hello?” you walk toward her. “Do you need help?”
She turns around to look at you, but you can’t see her face past all the thick smoke. You take a step back so you can breathe easier, but you’ve barely moved before you hit something. When you turn around, you see a gray and green skirt, worn by a body swinging from a tree branch. You start to look up, but all you can see is blond hair before your attention is stolen by screams coming from the burning cabin to your right.
You know this cabin. You know the man who lives – lived? – inside it, and you know he’s in trouble. While the screams don’t sound like him, you have to help whoever it is. But once again, no sooner have you taken a step before you move places again. This time, your feet hit the cracked tile floor of your high school band room, your hands flexing nervously around your soon-to-be swollen stomach.
You look around to see if any of your classmates have noticed, but it’s hard to tell, since no one has facial features. The one person who’s been paying attention to you is still talking animatedly about going to the Avatar movie marathon with their grandmother this weekend. Your mind wanders to the crack forming on the crumbling wall, then to ways you could convince your own grandmother to take you. The nostalgia factor, perhaps – you vaguely remember her telling you about seeing the second one on opening night in the first movie theater in her hometown. But your friend’s still talking. Guiltily, you turn your attention back to your classmate, who luckily doesn’t seem to have noticed your lapse in attention.
“Hello,” you think someone tries to say underneath the floor. You lean forward to hear better, but you just end up falling out of your chair and onto your bed instead.
It’s exactly not your bed, even if it’s comfortable. Nor is it your bedroom, really. The trees outside the window might look familiar, but you’ve never seen these nine horrifically burned girls around the bed before. When they open their smoking mouths and scream, you scream too.
The sound of wood splintering wakes you up.
Rhett’s broken through the door, both arms raised up high. He’s holding a knife in one hand and, for some reason, a garishly purple dildo in the other. It’s such a funny sight that you burst out laughing.
He doesn’t seem to mind, letting out a quiet, “Oh thank god,” as he leans against the ruined doorway. The dildo flops out of his hands and lands on the floor with a sad thunk, and you laugh even harder, the nightmare almost forgotten.
“Did one of the high schoolers leave that here,” you say when you catch your breath, “or is it one of yours?”
Rhett hides his head behind his hands, giving you a clear view of his neck turning beet-red. “Oh shut up,” he mutters. “Obviously, one of the kids left it behind.”
“What were you even going to do with-” your memories of last night snap back into place. “Holy shit, we went through the floor into like…was that some kind of hell dimension?”
Rhett shrugs. “It’s only happened to me once,” he says, lowering his hands and sitting at the foot of the bed. “I was doing laps in the school swimming pool, and it was like the bottom of the pool cracked open, but none of the water ran out, just me.”
He bites his lip and is silent for a long time.
“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” you say, throwing your clothes from where Rhett had placed them last night and throwing them into a bag in lieu of a hamper.
“Oh, no! I just don’t know how to describe it without sounding crazy,” he shrugs. “I mean, I went from the swimming pool to the front of the school in a flash, and the flag was hanging at least nine feet over the top of the flagpole.”
Nine feet. “You’re sure about the distance?”
He flashes you an irritated look. “I know I don’t have five different degrees, but I’m not stupid.”
“That’s not what I meant!” The affection dissipates, leaving you cold. “And I only have two degrees, and…. Anyway,” you shake your head, “I know you’re better at estimating distances than I am. I just meant that the number nine keeps coming up, and I think that’s significant. Get out of here so I can get dressed.”
Rhett nods stiffly and walks out.
So he really did start to clip through the bench and the ceiling back at the sheriff’s office, and you really did see a girl hanging in the air. Whatever’s going on, it’s clearly nothing that can be explained by your current understanding of physics, which means you need to get in contact with the office like, yesterday.
But you don’t have anything substantial to report yet, besides to confirm that there is an anomaly, and you can’t do that without talking about the way the anomaly affected you, making you see the girl hanging from the sky and pulling you and Rhett through the floor. And if you do that, you’d have to talk about how he nearly disappeared and about the girl you saw hanging-
He’d called the girl a cheerleader. You were so freaked out that you hadn’t noticed at the time. Fuck.
You dig out some jeans, a shirt, and a jacket to cover your gun holster, but as soon as you walk into the kitchen, you wish you’d packed something hardier. The morning chill bites through the cloth like it doesn’t even exist, and you find yourself shivering before long.
Rhett notices, because of course he does, and he immediately takes off his jacket and wordlessly hands it to you. In front of him is a pile of wires, which you can’t make heads or tails of, so you don’t bother.
“When you mentioned Rebecca earlier, you said she was your sister-in-law?” A chill sweeps through the room despite your borrowed jacket. “Can we talk about it?”
Rhett curls his hands into fists when he meets your eyes. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!” he snaps. If looks could kill, you’d be six feet under. Again.
You raise your hands up in surrender. “I know you didn’t,” you say as soothingly as you can. “There are too many people with very little connection to you who’ve disappeared.” Not to mention the fact that he’s disappeared, or nearly disappeared, twice now.
Rhett looks down again, drawing his arms across his chest. “Well, you’d be the first,” he mutters.
You lower your arms. “Has someone said something to you?”
Rhett’s eyes flick up a few times, but he never quite meets your eyes.
“Did she disappear or did she…you know, disappear, like we did?” you accompany the word with a significant look down.
His arms tighten around his torso, and he’s once again quiet for long enough to make you uncomfortable. Before you can say anything, the sound of the phone makes you jump.
You look back down at the wires Rhett put on the desk, still not able to understand it, but it’s got to have something to do with the satellite phone he must have set up for you.
“This is Deputy Sheriff Hawk,” says the voice on the other end, after you introduce yourself. “We spoke yesterday about a string of disappearances you’re investigating, and I think I found something interesting. When and where should we meet to compare notes?”
You cringe. “I don’t really have notes, but I am following a potential lead. Can you meet me at, uh,” shit. You slap yourself in the forehead before covering the speaker. “What’s the name of the high school?” you whisper to Rhett.
“B.G. Hoadley High School,” Rhett doesn’t even try to keep his voice down.
“Wow, that good of a night, huh?” Sheriff Hawk’s smirk is audible.
Goddammit. “Can you meet us at Hoadley High School?”
“Sure, would you like me to bring you some con-” you hang up before your face can turn any more red, but not before Rhett smirks at you. Goddammit.
“Why the high school?” Rhett asks.
“It all comes back to the school, the band room, specifically,” you hope you sound not crazy enough. “The cheerleader wore the uniform of that school, you disappeared to that school, the kids from that school fuck in this cabin – hell, that’s probably why we both had the nightmare – and I’ll bet you my life savings that Rebecca went to that school too. Was she a cheerleader?”
Rhett’s jaw dropped. “She was,” he says when he stops catching flies. “You put that together because of a pond and the fact that we shared a nightmare?”
You’re already half way out the door. “It’s my job. Now, drive me there and we can start putting this whole thing to rest and hopefully find out what happened to your sister-in-law.”
But he doesn’t follow. “It was my fault.”
That stops you in your tracks. “What do you mean?”
“I took her and Amy to the rodeo. She didn’t want to go because it was a school night and she wanted to put up some shelves with Perry, but Perry and Amy both wanted to go, so I took them,” Rhett confesses. “I took my eyes off them for a second while Perry was in the bathroom, and when I looked back, I swear, Rebecca’s hand was reaching out from the bench. I don’t know if she was reaching out to me or Amy, but I blinked and then it was gone.” He swallows, eyes misting. “She was gone. It was like a bad dream.”
“I’m sorry,” the words feel inadequate, but they’re all you can offer.
Actually, that’s not true. You can put your hands over his, and squeeze. “So, speaking of bad dreams,” you begin, hoping you can distract him.
“What happened to you last night?” he looks closely at your face.
“You mean besides you?” The moment the words come out of your mouth, you know they were the wrong ones to say.
“I hope you’re not saying I gave you the bad dreams, darling,” While his tone is flippant, his expression is anything but. Goddammit, this wasn’t what you wanted to do.
“I am giving you the bad dreams.”
“Maybe I gave you the bad dream,” you interrupt. “Maybe whatever is doing this knows I’m here to stop her, so she’s trying to freak me out by making me see her holding something under that pond, or hanging from those trees,” you gesture out the windows. “And then the high school band room.”
“And then the high school band room,” Rhett mirrors your frown. “Something about it felt off.”
“Was it the faceless classmates?”
He smiles. It’s small, but it’s there, and he’s meeting your eyes. “You think you can figure this out?” he asks softly.
God, you hope so. “I promise you, Rhett, I am going to get to the bottom of this,” you extend your hand.
He takes it without a second of hesitation.
“Alright, you,” the smirk gets wider, and you can’t help but smile back. “Come on, I want to see what’s wrong with the band room.”
What’s wrong is immediately apparent when you pull up to the parking lot and see the construction.
“It was the old band room in the dream, right? Not,” you gesture to the construction site with the hand not holding your soda.
Rhett sighs and rubs his face with the hand not holding his burrito. “I should’ve remembered,” he groans. “Last year, there was a bake sale to raise funds to tear down the pool room to build a band room. I even had to clean up after Amy ate too many donuts. God, how did I forget that?”
“Because she wanted you to forget,” but the excuse sounds weak, even as you say it.
“Hello.”
