A towering dark figure stood between Annabelle and her desk as she cowered on her bed before it. Shaped like a human being but neither looking nor feeling anything like one, the figure was pitch black from head to toe as if made out of solid shadow. The only part about it that was a different color was its eyes – a pair of blood-red, unblinking eyes staring menacingly at the quivering teenage girl with the utmost focus.
Annabelle was filled to the brim with pure terror at what she was witnessing. The way this thing stood absolutely motionless with all eyes on her made it seem like it might spring into any sort of malicious action if she so much as moved an inch, or looked away for even a second.
Yet at the same time, Annabelle knew what had to be done, no matter how intimidating all of this was to her. With every bit of courage in her she could scrape up, Annabelle clenched her eyes shut and turned away from the shadow-man, or however she could describe it, and began to repeatedly mutter to herself as if casting an incantation, “It’s not real, that thing’s not real, it’s just in my head again, it’s not real, it’s only my head playing tricks again, it’s not real, it’s not real, it's not real…”
For how long Annabelle helplessly lay crouched on the bed repeating those words, she had no idea. All she did know was that when she cautiously opened her eyes again to turn them in the direction she’d been looking at, the shadow-man was no more. There was nothing in front of Annabelle that didn’t belong. There was now only her desk, and a small plastic pill bottle with her name on it.
With a relieved sigh, Annabelle let out her pent-up anxiety in a burst of hot breath. She then rushed forth to seize the bottle, from which she frantically emptied a few pills out into the sweaty palm of her hand. Another sigh of relief escaped her after she’d downed them with a gulp of water from a glass she’d also kept on her desk.
Annabelle sat down in front of her desk to calm down from what just happened. Or rather, what her sick, ill mind just made her think had happened. Once she felt her breathing and heart rate return to normal, she then pulled out a thick notebook from her desk drawer.
Opening it to a page filled with her own handwriting, Annabelle grabbed a pen from the side of her desk and went on writing from where she’d last left off. And as her hand wrote, her mind drifted off gradually into a place of her own.
A place called her imagination.
A place where even if for just a moment, her state of mind could be at peace.
***
“Anyone mind if I turn on some tunes? At this rate we might die of boredom before we even arrive.”
Annabelle suddenly awoke to the sound of a familiar voice asking this question. The place she had awakened was the inside of a car being driven along a mountainside road through a forest. The aforementioned question had come from a young man no older than twenty who was driving the car. He also took a brief moment to glance in the rearview mirror in front of the windshield at the three passengers – which included Annabelle.
Hearing no objections from the three others in the car, the driver fiddled around a bit on the radio. And the next second, the sound of music began filling the vehicle.
“Nice one, Henrik.” A young lady sitting in the passenger seat beside Henrik grinned as she nodded her head slightly to the beat of Alice Cooper’s ‘The Man Behind The Mask’, before jokingly adding, “Fitting song with our destination, too.”
“Yeah, except I’m most certain the camp we’re going to doesn’t have a reputation tainted by a kill streak courtesy of a hulking mass murderer in a hockey mask.” Henrik joked back. “Trust me Luna, I did my research.”
Wanting to join in on the laughs, another young man sitting in the back seat behind Henrik said, “So what if a slasher villain really is there? Based on the horror survival rules we all know from Scream, we should all be safe, considering nobody here’s ‘done the deed’ yet.”
“Malcolm!” Henrik snapped, but not without a laugh from both him and Luna, while Malcolm replied chortling, “Sorry, what I meant to say was that nobody here does drugs or alcohol…”
Listening to this silly exchange going on between her friends, Annabelle just silently glanced at the scenery speeding past her gaze outside the window, thinking to herself, “Not one of those dreams again, especially on such a good occasion like this… seriously, can’t my brain just already let go of those old days long after I’ve gotten over them now?”
Annabelle Deckard and her three college friends in the car had recently finished half of their sophomore year to rather satisfactory results. So in light of this achievement – as well as to treat themselves to, in their words, “a well-deserved break from their hard studying” – all four of them had agreed with one another to a camping trip on their third week of summer vacation. While all of them had equally prepared the necessary things for the group, so far Henrik was the only one in the quartet who had a driver’s license, so it was agreed they’d all take his car to their destination.
And even though the car ride to the camp up to this point had been admittedly very boring (there was only so much four friends could do to entertain themselves with their rear ends stuck to the car seats for well over two hours), this couldn’t dampen Annabelle’s high spirits a single bit. After all, how could a little boredom get in the way of her excitement over getting to have a good time with her closest friends? A good time which came partially as a result of a proud performance at college, no less.
Which was why Annabelle felt as annoyed as she was at her own mind for making her dream about such things while she’d dozed off during the ride. As she continued to get lost in these thoughts, Annabelle abruptly came back to earth when she heard one of her friends call her, “Annabelle? Hey!”
For the first time in a while so long that she lost count, Annabelle turned away from the window to face her friends. “Oh, excuse me, I kinda spaced out for a bit…”
Luna laughed, albeit in the friendly kind of way, “A bit? That’s an understatement, I don’t think I’ve heard you talking in a long while.”
Now that Annabelle’s attention was back to them, Henrik said, “No big deal, we were just wondering if you’d fallen asleep or something, since you’ve been so silent up to this point.”
Not wanting her subconscious mind's blast-from-the-past from earlier to soil the mood for the rest of them, Annabelle managed a small grin and replied casually, “I did, but I’ve been awake since not too long ago as well, so yeah.”
“Been lost in your own thoughts again as usual?” Asked Malcolm. “Classic Annabelle.”
Trying to keep up the fun atmosphere from when the others had been joking around, Annabelle playfully replied to that, “Hey, at least you can’t say it’s not a good way to get my creativity rolling when I need it to. How do you think I aced all those assignments for my literature or writing classes, aside from just being a good student and paying attention?”
Malcolm chuckled with amusement, then said, “Fair enough. Can’t argue with that logic when we’ve all seen for ourselves how well you write your stories and such.” To which Annabelle uttered a flattered laugh. Being a major in literature and writing, several of the classes Annabelle had attended so far required her to write mostly things like stories for assignments. And when she had to come up with material for any story, one of the best ways for Annabelle to do so was simply space out and let her imagination run wild until her mind latched onto the best idea. Then it was time to get moving with either a pen or a keyboard.
As for how Annabelle’s friends knew she was a good writer, she had a tendency to show her assignments to others such as them or her parents before submitting to her professors. Wanting her work to be as well-written as she could manage, she did this as a way to receive feedback, as well as see what parts worked nicely or if there was any room for improvement. Not that her friends minded either, since they enjoyed reading Annabelle’s stories almost as much as she did writing them.
“Oh, speaking of which, when we arrive,” Luna piped up, “How do you guys feel about exchanging some stories around the campfire at night, for fun? I know there’s gonna be a campfire, otherwise y’all wouldn’t have packed the kind of equipment you brought.”
Malcolm laughed in agreement. “Ain’t no better camping activity than a campfire and campfire tales.” He replied, before glancing at Annabelle and adding, “Bet Mary Shelley here would definitely love that, amirite?”
“Oh, stop!” Annabelle joined in the laughs, also in agreement. This reference to Mary Shelley first conceiving the idea for ‘Frankenstein’ during a shot at who could come up with the best ghost story was also a reference to how much of Annabelle’s written works were horror stories. This was also why her friends greatly enjoyed them, as they were all huge fans of the genre, hence the nature of the jokes they’d exchanged earlier over the song on the radio.
However, while her love for horror was a big part in the reason she mostly wrote in that particular genre, Annabelle had another reason for it as well – a reason not only vastly different from the ones her friends had, but also a reason she wasn’t ready to let anyone else know just yet.
A reason that also had something to do with her dream.
To sum it up, before meeting her three friends at college, Annabelle used to have something of a rather troubled past involving a mental illness of sorts. By now she was doing better with the help of things like family support, meds, and therapy that she was grateful for consistently receiving even to this day. Back then, however, she had much worse days that she did NOT enjoy looking back on in any way. During those days, she used to lose herself many, countless times in her own imaginary land, which she expressed to herself through written words on paper so as to better envision it to herself – a habit which would eventually develop into her love for writing stories.
Her imagination from back then used to help her cope with what she was going through in ways different from what therapy or prescriptions did. She used to consider it as something similar to people cracking open a book, turning on a movie, or playing a video game as a form of escapism; when things got too much for her, she sometimes found herself indulging in her imagination, where things were far less tormenting. Where she could be free from her mind’s pain even for just a short moment. Where even the most fearsome monsters, ghosts, demons, or killers she could make up stories about were nothing compared to the much more fearsome thing she always had to face – reality.
Those were the days in which even thinking about literally dancing with the devil was no more terrifying than her own devils constantly haunting her from within her mind by making her see and hear things in real life. Things such as the shadow-man in her dream. No matter how much she could build herself a world within the pages of her notebooks where she was the final girl who’d escaped the wrath of a slasher villain out for her blood, at the end of the day there was absolutely no escape from the clutches of the real world out for her sanity, as well as the utterly harrowing hallucinations it brought out to her in its sick state.
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That said, none of that mattered anymore to Annabelle, despite still having dreams of them every now and then against her will. Those darker days were now behind her, and she only looked forward to better ones lying ahead. Better days in which those memories of her past could no longer haunt her, even in her sleep (though she’d prefer it if they didn’t show up at all).
Better days in which she could enjoy life with those closest to her. Like right now, as Luna turned in her seat to joke, “I look forward to what kind of spine-chilling tales from the dark side you’ll come up with.” to which Annabelle replied just as playfully, “Not too spine-chilling, I hope – you guys do need to sleep when it’s all said and done.”
Another laugh out of that later, nothing too eventful happened for a while between them. Annabelle went back to looking out the window at the passing scenery. On an unrelated note as she let her mind drift off again, she couldn’t help but think how nice the scenery felt when there were no cars on the road except theirs. This was because it gave her a clean, unobstructed view of the mountains they were driving through. One time she saw a falling rock sign on the side of the road, but paid it little mind. That was when she noticed the battery on her phone seemed to be in need of charging, so she asked Henrik, “Excuse me Henrik, but do you have an adapter or something that I can use? I wanna charge my phone until we get there.”
“Yeah, sure.” Replied Henrik, and asked Luna to look in the glove compartment for one. Annabelle temporarily put her phone back in the pocket of her jeans while she watched Luna get an adapter and plug it beneath the radio, before Henrik glanced at it and said, “No, not that one, that one’s busted. Damn, I keep forgetting I need to throw that thing away already!”
Luna unplugged the broken adapter and rummaged again in the glove compartment, until she found a second adapter. Once seeing this one, Henrik said, “Yeah, that’s the one. Plug it-“
As Henrik was speaking though, for a very short moment Annabelle had the weird feeling of hearing something in the distance. A muffled, rumbling kind of noise. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what exactly the noise sounded like, only that it seemed to be coming somewhere from their left. However, even within the single second Annabelle noticed this and her eyes rolled in the direction she could hear it coming from, something else abruptly occurred that gave her no time to make sense of anything more, or even ask, “What’s that sound?”
“HENRIK, LOOK OUT!” Luna suddenly let out a piercing shriek at what she saw before them, making Annabelle, Malcom, and Henrik all jolt in their seats and scream in shock. But their reactions had less to do with Luna’s outburst, which itself had to do with a couple of huge boulders falling from somewhere above the mountainside on their left – right into the middle of the bare road in front of them.
“Oh sh-“ Henrik slammed on the brakes and violently jerked the steering wheel around in an attempt to stop the car from crashing into the fallen debris. Instead, much to everyone’s horror, the car ended up swerving off the road entirely, breaking through the rails on their right, and down the slope beyond it.
Annabelle felt the entire vehicle shake like a building in the middle of an earthquake, coupled with the harrowing sensation of her body descending quickly even as she remained strapped securely by her seatbelt. She couldn’t even see what was happening outside the car windows. All she knew the next moment was an earsplitting crash of bending metal and shattering glass, and after that, darkness.
***
“Uuurrgh…” Annabelle grunted herself awake eventually. Every inch of her body was in pain, and she couldn’t see anything. Pitch blackness and utter silence surrounded her. Despite all that, she could still feel she was miraculously alive. And the direction of gravity seemed to suggest the car was right side up even after what it had just gone through.
Annabelle felt around in her jeans and found her phone thankfully intact inside her pocket. She turned its screen on, and realized the reason she couldn’t see was because it was night. Judging by how it seemed to be very late in the afternoon before the crash – almost early evening, in fact – it was baffling to see everything so dark now.
“How long have I been out for ever since we crashed…?” Annabelle thought, which immediately brought to mind another matter – were her friends alright?
She turned the LED light on the back of her phone and shone it around the inside of the devastated car. Every part of the vehicle was severely wrecked, with even the front passenger seat having gotten pushed very tightly against Annabelle’s legs, so she couldn’t move even if she unbuckled her seatbelt. Most of all, Henrik, Luna, and Malcolm could all be seen remaining motionless in their seats. However with the small light in her hand alone, Annabelle couldn’t properly tell through the darkness whether they were just knocked unconscious, or…
“Guys…?” Annabelle nervously called to her friends, refusing to expect the worst-case scenario. “Malcolm? Henrik? Luna-“
Then came a sudden painful groan from somewhere next to Annabelle, and she gasped. “Malcolm! Malcolm, are you alright?!”
Uttering another groan, Annabelle heard Malcolm mutter as she shined her phone light in his direction, “If by ‘alright’ you mean alive, then yeah…”
Another noise came from the driver’s seat, and Henrik’s voice replied, “What happened? Did we crash off the road?”
“I’m afraid so…” Luna’s voice came last. “Can anybody get out of the car right now?”
Annabelle explained her own situation to Luna in response, while both Malcolm and Henrik said their seatbelts appeared to be broken, as they wouldn’t budge.
“I was afraid of that…” Luna muttered. “My seatbelt’s just as stuck as you two’s, what luck…”
Malcolm groaned again, this time in frustration, and added, “At least we’ve a phone to call for help...”
Knowing he was talking about her own phone, Annabelle glanced down at it. To her horror, she then realized something she hadn’t had the time to notice in her initial pain and shock upon regaining consciousness; the phone’s battery was almost dead.
Explaining this to her friends, Annabelle asked in a rising panic, “Are any of your phones still working?”
There was a second of silence, then Luna replied weakly, “I don’t even have mine with me right now, it was in my hand while we were driving and I think the crash flung it out of the car…”
“Same with me.” Said Malcolm, and Henrik added, “Mine’s definitely broken…”
“Oh, god!” Annabelle moaned. Her phone was their only hope of calling for help and it wasn’t expected to last much longer. On top of that, considering how empty the road had been when they last saw it, there was also an extremely slim chance that someone else would witness the scene of the accident while passing by and call help for them. The fact that they’ve remained crashed down here more than long enough for the sun to set, as well as Annabelle’s phone battery to drain as much as it had, was proof of that.
“Make a call before the battery dies, hurry!” Henrik frantically urged Annabelle, who didn’t waste another second in doing so. But as soon as she got done explaining to the operator the exact name and location of the road they’ve been on and what their current predicament was, Annabelle heard the call cut off right out of the blue.
“Huh?!” Annabelle pulled her phone away from her ear to look at the screen, just in time to see it shut off. The low battery had finally given way.
Feeling extreme anxiety-filled hyperventilation rush up from within her lungs at the sight of her phone screen going as dark as their surroundings – and possibly their situation too – Annabelle screamed at the now useless device in her hand, “No, no, NO, NOOOOO!!!”
Despite presumably being in just as much fear and pain as she was, Annabelle immediately heard Henrik and Luna offer kind words of help to regain her composure, “Annabelle, listen, calm down! Your body’s already in a bad state from crashing, you might make it worse if you panic!”, “You still managed to tell them where we were driving through and what kind of accident we got in, that ought to be good enough for them to find us! Don’t get so worried just now!”
This did stop Annabelle’s screaming, but it wasn’t enough to reassure her that help would be here soon. So many fearful uncertainties regarding their situation, from whether she really had properly gotten the word across to the operator, to what kind of injuries they could’ve potentially sustained that they couldn’t feel right now, were plaguing Annabelle’s already scared mind.
As she was rapidly panting into her hands that she’d cupped over her nose and mouth, Malcolm spoke to Annabelle in the calmest voice she’d ever heard from him in spite of everything, “Annabelle please, listen to us. It’s like Henrik said, they heard all they needed to hear before your phone died. Also, panicking like you are right now isn’t gonna change our current situation. The only thing we can do is wait patiently for help to come.”
“You’re scared, we know.” Henrik added. “We’re all just as scared as you are. But at the very least that’s one thing we can actually do something about.”
“How?” Annabelle wheezed inbetween her panting, to which Luna replied, “Don’t let your mind drift to the things making you scared, don’t think about anything else right now. Try to instead keep your mind busy by talking to us. Pick any topic for a conversation except this accident. Let’s just all keep talking and distract ourselves from imagining any worst-case scenarios.”
Momentarily there was a brief silence as the others including Annabelle glanced at Luna while contemplating the suggestion, during which she added, “Or hell, maybe we could even do it to prevent passing out or something. I ain’t no medical expert, but we don’t know what kind of state the crash left our bodies in, so I’ve got a feeling we’d best stay awake at all costs just to be safe. We continue this, and we’ll be able to help get each other’s minds off things until we’re rescued, as well as stay alert so as to not succumb to any potential injuries we might have.” She then turned back to Annabelle and asked, “You think you can do that for us like we’re doing for you?”
Annabelle nodded, but it was more of a halfhearted response than anything. She couldn’t think of what she could talk about that could possibly distract them well enough from their predicament, no less for however long it would take for help to arrive. On top of that, her uncertain assumptions on keeping themselves alert as a precaution for possible injuries they couldn’t feel just yet weren’t exactly the most reassuring words either. She knew Luna only meant well with that suggestion, but still...
As if she knew exactly what Annabelle was thinking, Luna spoke again, “Tell you what Annabelle, how about you preoccupy all of us including yourself with what you do best?”
Annabelle stared at the dark behind of the front passenger seat pressed against her, asking, “Huh?”
“Tell us some of the stories you got.” Luna explained. “You remember me suggesting we tell each other stories around the campfire when we arrive at the campsite? How about doing that right now, just to preoccupy our minds like I just said?”
Malcolm and Henrik agreed to the suggestion. “That’s a great idea Luna, we can only go so far by telling each other to not think of anything negative for god knows how long-“
“Malcolm!”
“Sorry, I was just getting sick of us continuing to talk about our situation by suggesting we do the opposite of exactly that… I too would really rather think about anything except when the hell we’ll be able to get out of here.”
After hearing all of that, Annabelle thought her friends did make something of a decently convincing point. She did indeed tell the operator enough information for them to send help now that she thought about it. It was just that her mind kept coming up with all sorts of “what if” scenarios in light of the accident. Scenarios she didn’t even have any bit of certainty as to whether they’d happen for real right now. That attitude in return continued to fuel her uncertain fear, which likewise kept bringing up the “what if”s in a vicious cycle of paranoia.
Not only that, but Annabelle additionally remembered this wasn’t the first time her mind had let itself into dark places while she was suffering from a difficult situation. Back in the days of her ill mental state, there had been countless days in which Annabelle couldn’t bring herself to do anything other than simply be stuck inside her own mind due to the pain it kept conjuring up. Doing nothing just because her mind made her feel like it had never once helped, Annabelle thought. If anything, since Annabelle didn’t do anything to interrupt the flow of her own internal torment, it only drove her godforsaken mind into darker places than before. This, as a result, enabled it to conjure up more of the damn hallucinations she would’ve given anything to never see again. Either that or more self-inflicted mental anguish which further fueled the rainclouds over her mind in, again, a vicious cycle. And it wasn’t like she could ring up her therapist every time that sort of thing happened as well, as much as she would’ve liked to.
As she had brief flashbacks to those past days, Annabelle likewise recalled how when she had such moments back then, a lot of the time it used to result in the aforementioned indulgences of her imagination. As momentary as the activity may have been, it had still always greatly helped her mind distract itself from going deeper down the rabbit hole of her own darkness. Or at least, distract her mind long enough for until it was time to take her daily meds.
Perhaps something similar could be said for the situation Annabelle and her friends were in right now; perhaps it was indeed possible for her to use her imagination as a means to continuously talk their minds out of drifting towards any negative “what if”s related to the accident. Either that or, as Luna theorized, slipping out of consciousness – just long enough for all of them to be found and rescued.
Coming to this realization thanks to the words of her friends helping to finally clear her mind, Annabelle felt her panting slow down until she was able to breathe normally again. She then said, “Alright, all of you… I’ll do it. Thanks for trying to help me like this, what would I do without you…”
“Don’t mention it Annabelle, you’re doing the same favor to us even as you’re speaking right now.” Luna replied. “Now how about those tales you have in store?”
With that, Annabelle nodded, and gradually began the first story that came to mind.