Re: log: dahl/connie at B&B
Boots crunching lightly across the frozen floorboards, Dahlia stopped again as Connie's voice--or some approximation of it--rang out from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Judging by the frustration in her voice, she was quickly losing patience--to the cold, to her nerves, to whatever fuckery her friend was up to. "Then just tell me where the fuck you are an' I'll come get you unstuck!" she shouted back, at nothing. Why was Connie making this so fucking difficult? This wasn't fucking rocket science.
She was, of course, still assuming Connie's location to be physical, lodged somewhere behind one of these doors. Her focus was so narrowed in on finding her friend and everything else that didn't fit in line with that was, rather fascinatingly, rationalized away in her head. With her back turned to the pulsing doorway, she didn't see anything climb out of a shadow until it was too late. Much too late. Then she heard something wrong, so she glanced over her shoulder and--
She--she must've blacked out. Just--lost a few seconds to the screeching white noise of panic in her head, because she was suddenly on her knees and pressed into a corner of the hallway with no memory of how she got there. Except it wasn't walls behind her, it was a...tree? Dizzily, she touched the cold...gravel? she could feel under her legs. Suddenly she had no idea where she was. No idea how she got here. She remembered--running--big doors--talking to Connie?--but it felt like ages ago. Disoriented and looking one way down the hallway-become-road, she spotted the distant headlights, then turned her head in a dreamy daze, looking in the other direction and--pain paIN PAIN--
--ears ringing--doubled over in the middle of the road--clutching her stomach, feeling sick--so sick--like someone had turned gravity over without warning--
Dahlia was dimly aware of someone, somewhere, screaming in feral, animal-like pain. She didn't realize it was her.
There was something standing there, behind her. She couldn't bring herself to actually picture it--her brain wouldn't let her, threatening to shut down again if she so dared to look--but she knew what it was. What it looked like. The men--the things from her nightmares. Human-like but wrong, their faces all washed out. This felt like a dream, but all her dreams felt so very real. It was there. It was coming for her. Going to take her away. Going to take her to the room. Again.
Something roared. An engine. It was at that point that her brain, rather belatedly, registered she was apparently kneeling in the middle of a road, with oncoming traffic barreling down on her. Dahlia stared into the approaching headlights. Just. Let it hit her. If it meant not going back to that place--the room with the lights, the room with the not-men, the room where they touched and tore and pried into her with their ugly fingers--let it.