Chapter One- Emily

September, 2001, 2:00am

Emily dreamed, and all around her she saw the turning of some hideous black machinery, wet and organic somehow. She stared across a vast expanse of emptiness and saw Laura, her body shining in the dark like a pale candle. In every dream her form was wrong, frayed around the edges somehow and hard to focus on. She usually appeared as a child, the age she had been when she disappeared, but this time she was the older version of herself she never had a chance to become.

They stood together now, and Emily did not remember closing the distance between them. They were identical except for Laura’s hair, which had turned white in the months before she disappeared, and was now so long it looked as if it had been growing for all the years she’d been living inside Emily’s dreams.

Emily put her arms around her sister and felt the terrible fragility of her body, soft and pliable as if nothing under her skin was where it was supposed to be. She clung to her as if she could hold tight enough to bring her out of the dream with her. She felt her absence as a deep pit in her center, a polished obsidian mirror which reflected only the spiraling void inside of her.

“Where are you?” She cried into Laura’s hair, the soft curls smelled of sickness and something else, terrible and sweet like milk.

Laura did not reply, and when Emily pulled away to look at her, her face was gone, replaced by a ruined mound of gore, and her body began to dissolve and fall away in ribbons of flesh.

She awoke with a choked scream, the scent of something antiseptic lingering in the air around her as if the dream had followed her into her bedroom. The smell triggered some far away memory of a doctor’s office, but the thought disappeared almost as soon as it came. She was dimly aware of another smell, a sour metallic stench that she didn’t want to think about.

She sat up in bed, sweaty and disoriented.

Putting her hands over her eyes, she tried to remember the last time she slept through the night.

Her nightmares began In 1989, the night Laura disappeared from their bedroom without a trace. At age five, the first dream was disjointed and hazy; A flash of empty houses under a strange moonless sky, the silhouette of a tall figure in front of a wall of flames, the feeling of hands pulling her apart, of something under her skin. 

Now it was 2001, and at sixteen years old the dreams had worsened over time into a vivid and sinister spectacle. 

She sighed and picked up the corded phone on her nightstand, lit a cigarette, and called Elias .