Ground
Callum’s eyes flashed open as he struggled to catch his breath.
His skin was tacky with sweat.
The old Neil Young t-shirt he wore as a makeshift pyjama top was clinging slimily to his body.
An icy shiver passed over him.
He blinked and refocused his eyes on the bedside table, reading the glowing green display on the alarm clock.
It was flashing 00:00.
“For f-” he groaned softly to the dark hotel room as he went to move his hand up to rub his eyes, before stopping himself abruptly mid-word.
His eyes darted downwards.
“What the..?”
He couldn’t move.
He tried again, to bring his hand up to face, but there was no motion to match the impulse.
It was as if his arm was being held tight with invisible restraints.
But it wasn’t just his arm.
It was both arms.
And his head.
His entire body in fact.
He was fixed in place, with only his eyes able to move, darting desperately in their sockets to assess the situation and understand what was happening.
His eyes darted back to the bedside table again.
The green light from the alarm bathed the surface in an eerie phosphorescence.
His phone, wallet and watch were all still there - only an outstretched arm’s length away, but still tantalisingly out of reach.
He tried to move again.
Nothing.
Again, harder.
Still nothing.
He puffed out a chestful of stale air at the exertion.
A wave of calm lapped over his body.
“OK, OK, this is all OK,” he thought to himself, before adding out loud, “It’s just a dream. Just a bad dream. After everything that happened tonight, it’s-”
A moment of quiet and then, just outside his field of vision, at the foot of the bed he heard it.
Soft, deliberate and unmistakably a footstep.
Involuntarily he held his breath.
Panic swiftly coursed through his veins, carrying with it a tidal wave of fight-or-flight chemicals with nowhere to go.
He felt his body tremble at the first sip of a cocktail made from adrenaline and cortisol.
At first he resisted, but his eyes couldn’t help but flick to his right side, looking down over the crumpled tangle of duvet covering his prone body, down towards the yawning darkness and to where the noise had broken the artificial silence of his hotel room.
Straining at the extremity of his peripheral vision, his eyeballs pushed tight against the fine angle of the sockets, distorting his vision and giving it an otherworldly hue in the stagnant darkness.
“H-hello?” Callum offered softly, hesitantly, before clearing his throat and mustering his voice, “Hello? Who is there?”
Nothing.
Silence.
And then, as Callum afforded himself a breath, he heard it.
Another soft, deliberate footstep.
His eye widened and strained.
And that is where he saw it.
Stood there.
Despite the darkness, the outline was unmistakable.
A figure.
Still and silent.
Callum couldn’t make out any detail, but he could sense where its eyes were and he could feel them staring back at him.
“H-hello?” Callum stammered, “W-who is it? What do you want?”
Silence.
Staring.
All Callum could hear was his own heartbeat.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
A pulse of frustration and indignation overtook him.
“Oi, who is it? What have you done to me?” he growled, “Let me go and you’ll soon see who is…”
The figure leant forward and hissed.
Callum’s blood froze.
In the shadowy gloam of the room, the sickly flush of the clock display struggled to pick out any detail, but what could be discerned made Callum’s stomach tumble and churn biliously.
The simple features of the face, such as it was, were muddy and indistinct in the sparse light, as if hacked and hewn from the thick, heavy clay of the surrounding countryside. They seemed to constantly shift, with the soft compressions of rich, earthy soil under foot, gathering together and forming and reforming with each passing moment.
Callum realised his own breathing had stopped and he gulped greedily at the air.
It tasted dank and dense, the geosmin must of a woodland floor rich with ancient decay and countless lifetimes turned to dirt.
The flood of primal soil was met with a burning acid reflux in Callum’s throat and it was all he could do to stop himself from retching.
He coughed, gagging down the vomit.
It was the same smell that filled his lungs earlier that day.
And lingered on the clothes he had had to throw away.
And that had been stubbornly ingrained under his nails, even after an hour of scrubbing under a scalding, spluttering shower.
And every time it filled his lungs he had the same reaction.
A deep, uncontrollable rise of bile, trying in vain to expel the memories of what had happened - away and out of his body.
He hadn’t meant it to happen.
And she shouldn’t have done it.
It - well, he just went too far.
Too far.
Too far.
His eye flicked back down to the foot of the bed.
The figure was stretching its arm forward towards him, its finger unfurling slowly like a rotten flower head, until it pointed straight at his eye.
Callum watched as the remainder of its fingers uncoiled and the figure’s hand dropped onto the duvet with a heavy wetness.
He wished he could move or run away or kick out, but he remained frozen in place, his eyes darting desperately around the room for any kind of escape.
Then he felt the weight shift on the bed.
Looking downwards he could see the figure was now hunched over, with both hands planted deeply into the duvet. Its face loomed closer and the features were lifted with a growing definition out of the fragile green light.
Its breath rasped with the tone of bones sawn ragged as it dragged itself upward towards where Callum was fixed immobile in the bed.
Each grasp of its tightly knotted fingers dragged it closer.
Each exhalation wheezed a heavier draught of thick petrichor into Callum’s face and now he could hear the body dripping damp soil onto the bedclothes.
More and more of Callum’s view was obscured by the fetid bulk hauling itself up the bed.
More and more detail crept out of the darkness as the electric green light washed over its countenance.
Features.
Recognisable features stirred from the dark recesses of the face and leapt out at Callum.
The face.
One he knew so well.
One he would never forget.
Her expression as the first shovelful of dirt covered her.
Maria.
Callum could never mistake it for anyone else.
But the eyes.
The eyes were insufferably milky, crystalline and dry, unblinking and dead.
By now Callum could feel the breath on his cheek, as warm and stale as brooding compost.
He could see the lips tinged in putrid green, curling to reveal teeth, dark and thick, elongated and unnaturally sagittate.
As it drew up closer towards Callum’s head, the figure’s own twitched sideways, birdlike, as if assessing what laid prone beneath it.
The faintest twitch of a smile fluttered across its mouth before it stretched inhumanly wide, with its spindly, sharpened teeth aimed squarely at the exposed throat.
It lunged forward and down, plunging each jagged point deep into the bristly flesh of Callum’s neck.
“No! No, no… NO! I’m sorry!” Callum burbled bloodily as its teeth sank in.
He squealed and shuddered as the figure lapped at the wounds.
“Maria, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Maria!
“MARIAAAA-”
Callum’s eyes opened wide as he took a deep breath, mid silent scream.
He was alone in his bed once more, his mouth dry and sticky, and his skin soaked with a thick, salty sweat.
The rhythmic breeze of the hotel room’s air-conditioning made his skin prickle with a brumal bite.
He blinked and, steeling himself, looked up towards the bedside table.
The alarm clock grinned back, verdantly flashing 00:00.
And as his heart sank again, the familiar smell filled Callum’s lungs and he strained to look down to the foot of the bed.
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