Cassidy was well aware that she should close her eyes, lay down, and wait for the migraine to pass. Anything else she might do was only likely to exacerbate and prolong her pain. As soon as Ethan left the room, she laid down in the bed further from the door where he’d sat her and closed her eyes. And kept her eyes closed. And kept her eye closed. And kept her eyes closed…

Fuck this. Cassidy was convinced that the deafening sounds of silence and her own mind would be much worse for her migraine than anything she could come up with to do in a mostly dark room. Anything with a screen was unfortunately out, and most things had screens these days. Still, Cassidy couldn’t deny that despite the blue light filters than came standard in almost all devices, the concentrated light from the screen would make things worse. She used her phone only long enough to set up a nightlight app that projected a glowing holographic ball over the device. She set the light soft and low and placed it on the bedside table.

For a while, she tried to sketch. That was usually what she did when she couldn’t sleep for one reason or another. Still, she was never thrilled with how the drawings she did in the dim lighting conditions she set for herself came out. The details were always off. That was why she mostly stuck to sketches at times like this, and insisted to herself that they didn’t have to be her finest works. As time went on, however, it became clear to Cassidy that her mind was on one subject in particular. She sketched the crime scene. She sketched the desk where she’d found the key. The closet where she’d found the diary. Despite the point of the sketches being relatively low-pressure creativity time, she found herself entranced by trying to recreate the strange distortions that had appeared in her vision. Normally, when her migraines affected her vision, she saw flashes of light and color. Sometimes, she experienced blind spots. What she had seen this time though, areas where the world seemed completely leeched of light, were the opposite of what she was used to. Cassidy couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t normal. That something was wrong.

Her head didn’t hurt that badly anyway. It was the visual distortion that got to her more than the pain. At least, that was the rationale Cassidy gave herself as she discarded her sketchbook, turned her light up a few notches to just barely tolerable, and pulled out the diary. It appeared, at first, to be a perfectly normal little girl’s diary. It was pink and covered in fake fur, and it had a squish to it not unlike a stuffed animal. The tiny padlock on the side of the diary was something Cassidy could’ve easily broken. Still, she was glad to have the key. Cassidy wasn’t sure that this was something that would ever make its way back to the murderous girl (though ultimately that would be up to a state appointed therapist), but it still seemed wrong to break it.

What seemed more wrong was the strange sensation that started to leech into Cassidy’s eyeballs. It was a heaviness at first. A strange tugging. It was a sensation that felt like it should come from her eyelids, but was instead focused in the whites of her eyes. As this sensation intensified, the edges of the journal blurred. The little padlock that Cassidy had classified as fundamentally penetrable seemed to become something else. It was a shadow. It was invisible. It was a fortress. It seemed to beg Cassidy to take up the key.

There was no real reason, to Cassidy’s mind, not to. It was what she had set out to do, after all. She ignored the shadows that seemed to cling, an annoying aftereffect of unintentional caffein intake, and opened the little diary. For pages and pages, it was utterly normal. The girl’s name was Miley. Miley had many plans for herself. She was determined that, by the end of the year, she would catch herself a unicorn. Or maybe a dragon. Or, perhaps, she would catch both and then find a way to make a dragocorn. Miley had a crush, for a few weeks, on a little boy in her class named John. Her affections, however, were fickle, as were the affections of most children her age. A few pages later, Miley was infatuated with a little girl named Amy. She was going to be a pirate, or a princess, or a veterinarian. Maybe all three. These pages were utterly, completely normal. There was no hint in them of the tragedy that was slowly stalking her family, even then, Cassidy was somehow sure.

Cassidy turned a page and flinched. Quick as a flash in her minds eye, there was an image of the closet and the sound of a scraping, eerie laugh. There was nothing strange about the page, other than that Miley was less verbose than she had been. Little Miley was clearly an avid journaler, committing pages and pages of her thoughts at the end of each day. This page was a brief, concise summary. While there were longer entries still, more and more of the journal entries were quick and concise. They had less of fantasy and more of reality to them, until, for a good while, they were nothing at all.

Again, Cassidy turned the page. Again, a strange image. Miley’s bedroom completely devoid of color, painted in hypnotic greyscale. The childish scrawl described, in clipped tones, nightmares of nothingness. It was like Miley was sleeping without dreams. But, despite the lack of dreams, she was aware of herself, aware of being somewhere that was nowhere. She experienced periods of blackness with no real sense of time. In those dreams, Miley feared she was nothing.

Time jumped in the journal again, another month passing between the dates on one page and the next. With the turned page, Cassidy saw another flash. This flash was longer, more complex. A feeling of fear, like there was something under her bed right there in the inn, a sensation Cassidy hadn’t had since she was a young girl and discovered better things to fear than the idea of typical childhood monsters. An echoing laugh, and white eyes in the nothingness. It wasn’t clear from the descriptions in Miley’s journal where the line was between dream and reality, and it wasn’t clear if Miley perceived this change as an improvement from the nothingness she had experienced before, or something much much worse.

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Cassidy stopped perceiving the journal altogether. The pages meant nothing between her fingers. She felt Miley’s pain, and her fear. It wasn’t clear if Miley was afraid of something else, or afraid of herself. Sometimes, the thing she was afraid of seemed to be in her closet, and sometimes it seemed to be under her bed. Daddy said there was no such thing as monsters. Momma said the monsters were no match for her anyway. When her baby brother started imagining monsters in his own room, her parents’ patience thinned, which Miley didn’t think was very fair. She was scared. She was sorry if it made Adam scared too. She didn’t want her baby brother to be scared. But it didn’t mean Miley should stop having to be scared altogether.

Miley was getting more and more tired. She tried not to sleep any more, even when Momma read her a story and Daddy made her warm milk. Her dreams seemed wrong. They seemed real. Sometimes she saw things from her dreams when she was awake, like the white eyes peering at her from her closet, or under her bed, out the window, really anywhere that gathered shadows. Sometimes, the color started to run away. Just out of one or two little things. Daddy would pour cereal in her favorite pink bowl, and she would watch it turn light grey. Her orange juice was a dark grey, almost black. The colors from the rest of the world suddenly seemed too bright. It made her feel nauseous, and she pushed her breakfast away.

School was getting harder too. Miley was still doing well. She made sure she still got good grades, so she didn’t think anyone really noticed, but she was tired all the time from trying not to sleep. Her parents kept saying she needed to sleep, and at this point she really understood why, but she just couldn’t. Sleep was making it worse. The more she slept, the more Miley felt like the color was going to go away. Eventually, she feared that black nothingness from her dreams would become her life.

At school that day, Miley fell asleep. She knew she fell asleep at her desk in history. History was Miley’s least favorite subject. Her teacher was really boring about it, and they were learning about the American Revolution which seemed to be the only thing they were allowed to tell you about in history class, and she was so tired. She fell asleep at her desk. She knew she did. And then she spent some time in the dark place. And when she came back, she was in the bathroom with the school nurse leaning over her and telling her everything was going to be fine. When they called her mother to come get her, Momma told them she hadn’t eaten that morning, and hadn’t been sleeping well, and Momma should’ve realized Miley was sick.

Miley wasn’t sick, but something was very wrong with her. Somehow she knew that whatever it was, she wasn’t going to be able to fight it anymore. Her parents insisted when she got home that she should go straight to bed. Miley made a quick stop at her journal. She wanted to write a lot, like she used to, but the words wouldn’t come anymore. Something she used to be, she wasn’t any longer. All she could manage was, “I give up. I’m sorry.” Then she changed into her pajamas, slipped under the covers, and let herself become nothing.

A gentle touch to her shoulder and a soft, deep voice woke her up. Cassidy jumped, surprised for a moment to be herself. She followed the hand on her shoulder up to the warm, concerned grey eyes of her partner. The color made her flinch. For a moment, she was reminded of how the color had leeched out of Miley’s world, and felt like something else should show in Ethan’s irises. But no, her partner had always had those soft moonbeam eyes that turned down with a frown at her flinch. He took his hand off her shoulder and took a step back. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, fine,” Cassidy told him, making an attempt at a reassuring smile. “Weird dream, sorry.”

Ethan waved her off easily. “I wasn’t sure if I should wake you, but it’s been a couple hours and I thought you might want some food.”

“Yeah, no, good choice. I’m starving. What do you want for dinner?” Cassidy stretched, feeling the ache in her limbs, coming back to herself. The journal she had apparently fallen asleep reading fell off her chest.

“Little bit of light reading to get to bed?” Ethan sounded like he was trying for joking disapproval with a hint of honest disapproval, but all he could manage was concern.

“Yeah, I’ve never been the best at sleeping it off,” Cassidy admitted, “but apparently sleep caught up with me.”

“I brought us pizza,” Ethan told her, gesturing to the box on the little table.

“You didn’t have to do that.” Cassidy put the journal on the table between their beds and joined him regardless of the protest. “Dinner was supposed to be on me.”

“You weren’t feeling well.” Ethan smiled as Cassidy sat across from him, handing her a napkin. “You can get dinner tomorrow, and I don’t think it will make a difference.”

“Alright, thanks.”

The partners ate in relative silence, though occasional bits of polite conversation drifted through the room. Ethan was still worried about Cassidy, and didn’t want to ask too much of her in the wake of her migraine. Cassidy’s mind was still turning over what she had seen in, apparently, her dream. It had seemed to vivid, too real, even for a dream influenced by the words she’d read. Ethan gave Cassidy the first shot at the bathroom to get ready for bed. After, while he was taking his turn, she acted on a strange, churning feeling in her gut and picked up the journal. Based on how the journal had been sitting when she’d woken up, Cassidy had only been about three quarters of the way through. There was no reason she should know what was written on the last page. That was the page she opened it to.

There it was, in the childish scrawl Cassidy had become so familiar with, had seemed to watch flow from her own hand in her dream: I give up. I’m sorry.