The stone lion charged toward Amelia. Gargantuan jaws yawned wide, strings of saliva hanging down, he pounced. Claws ripped through her jeans. She screamed. Blood seeped through her clothes, covering her legs, her hands. She thrashed and slashed with her arms and feet against the lion’s raging attack.

Finally, she landed a solid hit on its nose. Stunned, it stumbled back.

She sprung away from it. She was in a dark space with no details and no boundaries. She was illuminated by an unseen light, and so was the lion. She crawled away, then thrust herself back to her feet. As she ran through the void, there was a sound coming from her lips that was a mix between a scream and a sob. The lion dragged her back easily by raking its sharp nails into her back, catching her like a baby gazelle. It flipped her over on her back. Its hulking shadow swallowed her whole. It roared so loudly that her hair was blown back. Amelia crossed her arms over her face, bracing for the killing bite.

The lion unhinged its jaw as if to devour her whole. When its jaw had opened so wide that it grazed her legs, it paused with its great mouth open, panting.

Amelia trembled, unable to move. She could only stare.

A sour smell emanated from its mouth and a wet, sloshing sound came out of its throat. It gagged, as if it were coughing up a giant hairball. It did this for several moments, seeming to struggle with the thing in its throat. Amelia could see the dark shadow of something emerging. The unhinged, panting mouth began to give way to something round and hairy. A head crowned from the mouth with yet another gag from the lion. Then the thing in the mouth revealed itself fully. It was a woman’s head covered in spit and yellow bile. The woman had wet, black hair and gray, glowering eyes that she leveled at Amelia as she emerged.

In the woman's pale gray eyes, there was blatant loathing. Her unblinking eyes bored into Amelia. In this moment, Amelia would have gladly surrendered to the jaws of the lion rather than deal with this terrifying thing coming out of it.

As much as she wanted to run, Amelia was frozen. As if blown by a storm, the black hair around the woman's head began to rise and undulate like a pile of frenzied snakes. The lion collapsed behind the woman and split open like an overfilled bag of grain. Impossibly, raw meat and blood squelched out from the stone body. From the bilious red pile, the rest of the woman's body emerged, slick with gore. The woman’s gingham dress was soaked with blood.

Coming back to her senses, Amelia rolled away.

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"What do you want from me?" she screamed at the woman.

The woman easily caught up to Amelia, seeming to glide across the dark expanse. She towered over her and growled two words.

My house.

Her hands reached behind Amelia's head and her icy cold fingers snaked through her hair. Then they curled into fists as she slammed Amelia's skull into the ground.

The pain made fireworks appear in Amelia's vision. She could no longer speak. No longer think. No longer try to get away.

The woman's jaw hinged open like the lion’s had, but instead of another creature emerging, a putrid waterfall of blood and organs slopped over Amelia's face. Amelia squeezed her eyes shut and screamed through the deluge. An inhuman, gurgling screech from the woman answered her cry.

When she opened her eyes, she was back in her bathroom, splayed out on the tiles. The lion, the gore, and the woman had all vanished, but Amelia still felt an excruciating ache on the back of her head. One of the bulbs above the mirror flickered and then went dim. The dream must have been her mind's terrifying way of making sense of her injury. Her head hurt right where the scary woman had banged Amelia's head.

She took a few deep breaths before pushing herself back up to sitting, even though the action made her woozy. As she waited for her stomach to stop flipping, she used her fingers to explore the back of her head. She winced and found a sticky patch of blood. Cursing, she stood and grabbed a hand mirror to reflect the back of her head into the bathroom vanity. It was bleeding, but it didn't seem too bad. She dismissed the idea of going to the doctor. She still didn’t have a job to make ends meet, and she didn't have health insurance either. It was better to just wait and see if the wound would get better on its own. Otherwise, she’d have who knows how much medical debt to pay off on top of her mortgage.

"Shit," she said under her breath. She ran to the bedroom and checked the time on her phone. It was almost time for Gianna to pick her up for the car rental. She returned to the bathroom and tried to put the phone on the counter, but her hand was shaking too much. It landed on the floor instead. She reached for it.

As she bent down, the swift tail of a dark shadow swept over the shower wall. It was a barely perceptible flicker in her peripheral vision.

She snapped her eyes to the source of the motion, but it was already gone. She touched her fingers to her head again, thinking that she must have been seeing things because of the fall.

She wished for a moment that her ex was there to reassure her that it was nothing. But she knew deep down that she didn't really want that asshole back. She just didn't want to be so alone. It was easy to confuse the two feelings sometimes.

She gingerly put her foot down in the shower. It was dry now where she could have sworn it was slimy before. Wasn't that why she'd tripped in the first place?

No matter. She would shower, get dressed, and go with Gianna to get the rental car just like they planned, even with the head injury and the terrifying vision she’d had. Suddenly, she found herself quite giddy with relief to have a reason to get out of the house for a little while. She’d have to come back eventually, of course, but that was a problem for future Amelia.