Sleepless: Chapter Ten

Searchlights [In the Parking Lot of Atlantis]

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Margo was on a beach.

Correction, Margo was seeing through the eyes of someone on a beach.

It was an important distinction.

There was an unnatural clarity to it all — the feeling of water pooling around her ankles and receding back into the ocean with every wave that crashed ashore. The sound of wind rustling through the pines and how the mist clung to her arms and clothes. But these arms were not her arms. These hands were not her hands. These eyes did not see the world the way she did.

She was all at once there and not there, present in that moment and yet merely an observer. This was not her body. She couldn’t move it or make it speak.

There was something wrong. Some kind of pit in her chest that felt familiar but had no words to describe itself.

And she was not alone.

Something was behind her in the water.

Something tall and impossibly thin loomed out of the water behind her.

She could feel it inches away. Could taste its sour breath in the air.

She couldn’t turn. Couldn’t run. Couldn’t move or blink or scream. But she didn’t need to see it to know it was there. She didn’t need to see it to know that even now, it was reaching one spidery finger out towards this body and—

Margo shot up in bed, covered in a film of cold sweat and coughing profusely. She didn’t spit anything up, but it left her mouth tasting strangely salty all the same. Still, her hands and eyes were back to being her own. The world looked normal again, though it was of course pitch black at the moment.