Narrative: Motel
Who: Marie J Where: her room at the Motel What: Seeing things When: Early hours of Monday morning Ratings: violence, fear, fire
The heat woke her. It jolted her out of a dead sleep, crawling across her skin and making the hairs singe. Her nose, too sensitive now, filled with smoke, with the acrid smell of burning, but not just the curtains in the room that had been set ablaze. It was worse, a darker, more sickening smell.
The moaning drug her eyes away from orange and blue flames slowly taking over the room, to the opposite corner, where flames licked along the walls, peeling at the cheap paint and making it melt off the walls. That wasn't what Marie was staring at though. The moaning form had her attention, skin burned and blistered, blackened in some places. Her hair was half gone, burned off one side of her head, where the other fell in perfect waves, so like Marie's yet still different, darker maybe.
Nora.
The ghostly figure stepped forward, one hand reaching, fingers curled like claws, like talons ready to attack, all the while aimed at her throat. The wolf in her growled, but Marie was too much the girl, too far away from the full moon to take over, too buried deep to do more than raise Marie's own fears. It was going to get her. Nora was going to get her.
She'd let them take her. She hadn't been there when Nora almost died, she hadn't gotten to the fire in time to keep them from taking her sister. She still wasn't even sure that Nora was alive beyond the fact that she didn't want her to be dead. That she felt like she'd know if something had happened to her.
But the form in front of her reached, fingers closing around Marie's throat as Marie was rooted in place. The flesh was sticky, melting away, the face disgusting. The smell of burning flesh was too strong, making bile rise in Marie's throat, but she could barely breathe with the way the fingers tightened around her neck.
Her own hands reached up to stop it, sinking in to burned flesh, watching parts of it ash away with horror. She'd done this to her sister. She'd been too weak to help Nora, which mean Nora took care of her. She'd been too scared to do more and now she'd let Nora be disfigured, not to die, but to burn alive.
The monster screamed at her, breath full of death and dying, right in her face, as the flames licked closer, burning the bedsheets, the carpet, everything. Just as it inched close to where she was pinned down, just as her breath left her, the screams finally woke her from the hallucination.