Run to You Part Five: Fifth Touch. Clara Kensie

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      I let my gaze linger on it. “See that, Jillian? I’m in Lilybrook, Wisconsin,” I murmured behind my textbook. “Come to Lilybrook. It’s safe here.”

      It was becoming hard to concentrate. Everyone was on their way to that pep rally, all walking and talking. So loud. The mass grew bigger and denser by the second, everyone chattering. Brian Edes plodded along. Susie Berkowitz and Tamara Yonkers rushed past him. Girls in acid-washed jeans, boys in brown leather jackets. Junie Lyons. Ben Guntherson.

      The bell rang but the hall wasn’t emptying. Girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes passed by, intermingling with scruffy boys in flannel shirts.

      Poodle skirts.

      That wasn’t right.

      The students in the hall weren’t really there. They used to be there, but they weren’t now. Now they were visions.

      The pep rally flyer wasn’t there either.

      The fog. I’d lifted it too high.

      Dizzy, woozy, I stumbled to the row of shiny lockers, leaning against them for support. Big mistake—the wall forced more visions into me.

      Rochelle Mellon in bell-bottoms and sporting big, feathered hair.

      Darren Szostak wearing a royal blue T-shirt that boasted LILYBROOK HIGH CLASS OF ’88.

      Tristan Connelly, in a hockey sweater and walking with a worshipful Melanie Brunswick to his left and a short-haired, laughing Nathan Gallagher to his right, just two years ago.

      The visions of Tristan and Melanie continued past, but Nathan’s stopped. Stayed. Stared.

      “N-Nathan?” Was he real?

      No—just a vision. He disappeared, swallowed up by other visions, more and more visions, crowding the hallways, shoving and clamoring.

      I tottered away from the lockers. But the visions were still there, multiplying, growing denser and louder.

      I had to bring in the fog. I had to bring it in now, before I lost control and the visions became solid, and I started spiraling into nothingness.

      I pulled it in, but it wasn’t enough.

      I pulled it in lower. Thicker. Lower and thicker again.

      The visions were gone, but I could see nothing but fog. I breathed in fog. My muscles turned into fog.

      No sight. No air. No strength.

      Why didn’t Tristan call? He didn’t call to warn me—

      Then everything disappeared.

      * * *

      Blackness. Absolute and all-encompassing.

      But even in the blackness, there was something. Something gleeful and threatening.

      My Nightmare Eyes, darker than even the black fog surrounding me. Watching me. Dark as a starless night and black as a cavern of coal.

      I could not move. The eyes kept me paralyzed. Their rage burned through me. They wanted to keep me in the black fog forever.

      Something twinkled. Something silver.

      ~killers’ spawn

      I heard the words, booming through my subconscious, low and rumbling, as if they were spoken aloud, or perhaps whispered in my ear. I struggled to escape from the hateful words, from the eyes’ hateful glare.

      A knife. Long and sharp and silver. Its blade glittered and glimmered, sparkled and glowed.

      I had to get away. I had to get away from the ominous eyes, from the glimmering silver.

      I had nowhere else to go except deeper into the fog. With a desperate heave, I pulled the fog in closer, darker, thicker. It came, quick and solid, and it consumed the glimmering, glittering silver, it consumed the Nightmare Eyes, and it consumed me.

      * * *

      I found out, after I woke up in the APR’s clinic with Tristan holding my hand and begging me to come back to him, that a security guard had found me. Unconscious, alone and crumpled on the floor of the СКАЧАТЬ