Among the Spider Lilies

I was weightless, suspended in a pale blue cloud. Panic set in when I realized I couldn’t touch the ground. The fluid around me was heavier than water, requiring concerted effort to move with my flailing arms. I tried to kick upward, to reach for the surface of the pool. My fingertips strained, but failed to break the surface. Terror gripped me as my lungs started to ache. Was this all just a ploy to kill me? Why make such an elaborate scheme when they could have just slit my throat while I slept?

My jaw popped open when the need for air got too great. The fluid surged into my throat, my lungs. And then I was gone.

It might have been seconds, or it could have been hours, but I woke up lying flat on my back. There was dark stone beneath me run through with veins of silver. Above me was a sky of murky grey clouds, thick and ominous. I sat up, running my hands over my body, heart pounding. Relief coursed through me: I was alive.

My mind shifted gears after determining that I was not only still alive but unharmed. I noticed that I was wearing my cat pajamas again, the same pair I wore when I arrived in Wosurei. The cotton was soft to the touch and the cats were vibrant, playfulness oozing from their endearing poses. I was neither hot nor cold, the air around me perfectly neutral in temperature.

“Rin?”

My head snapped up, looking around to see where the voice had come from. Apart from the clouds above and the stone below, there was nothing around me. No plants, no animals, no buildings, nothing. I waited, glancing this way and that to see if the voice would speak again. Seconds ticked on.

I stood up and rubbed my temple. What had I been doing just before this?

“Rin.” I could feel breath on the back of my neck.

I spun around so fast I nearly lost balance. No one was there, but the world had changed. The black stone had been replaced by an endless field of scarlet spider lilies. They swayed in a wind I couldn’t feel. In the distance was a door, white with a black knob. The need to open that door seized me, overriding any other thought.

My steps were on unsteady feet as I trudged into the spider lilies. I sank into fetid earth, the stench of rot hitting me like a blow to the face. Pearly bits of white poked through the grime here and there. I knew without needing to look closer that they were bones. I learned quickly that if I lingered too long, I’d start to sink deeper into the earth. Animal instinct, usually kept in the lower part of my brain, rose up and forced my feet forward. To linger was dangerous.

“Rin!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a figure standing in the lilies off to my right. It was a woman, maybe around fifty, dark hair cut in a severe bob with bangs. The bangs obscured her eyes, but enough of her face was visible for me to know who it was.

“Mom,” I said, my voice cracking. A new urge, to run to her, to hug her started to crawl up and attempted to take over my need to open the door. I slowed my walk, glancing back and forth from the door to my mother.

“Rin, where are you?” my mother called. Her words echoed around me like we were standing at the bottom of a canyon. She sounded frightened, though her face was blank.

“I’m here, Mom, right here,” I shouted. My path shifted as I began to move at an angle, drawing closer to both my mother, and to a lesser extent, the door. “Walk forward, I’m right here.”

Despite my cry, she didn’t move. “Rin, where did you go? Why did you leave us?”

Getting closer now, there was an odd quality to my mother. Her height was all wrong, she should have been quite short, yet even from this distance I could see she was a head taller than me. Red lipstick covered a dry and cracked mouth. She breathed so loudly, so labouriously, I thought she might keel over.

My body reacted before my mind could, changing course back toward the door. The urge to go to her had dimmed as my lizard brain had uncovered a simple fact: that thing was not my mother.

As if sensing my hesitation, the thing threw its head back and screamed. Adrenaline shot through me and I did my best to speed up, though the muddy terrain sucked at my feet enough to make running impossible. Answering screams came from off to my left. Two other warped forms were coming closer to me, arms outstretched.

I choked on a sob. “Dad, Haru.”

My father and brother were eerily tall, their limbs so long they resembled spiders. I couldn’t see their eyes, covered by shadows. The worst part was how fast they moved. The mud was no impediment to them as they rushed towards me, lips pulled back to show jagged teeth.

The door was close and the mud was getting deeper, drawing me down with a vengeance.

This isn’t your family was my mantra as I threw everything I had into getting to that damn door. Snarls like rabid dogs drew closer and closer, joints clicking and teeth clacking. The door loomed ahead, so tantalizing. I was a hair breadth away from grabbing the knob when fire exploded across my scalp.

I cried out as my momentum halted, my hair held tightly in the grip of the thing masquerading as my mother. The shades of my father and brother weren’t far behind. Pain sang from every follicle, making me tear up. I reached up and tried to prey her fingers off, fruitlessly digging my nails into her cold flesh. Her iron grip didn’t ease, not even when I broke the skin and oily green blood oozed out.

Her face came in close and I could see how her skin hung off her bones all wrong. Her breath stank of rotting meat, burnt hair, and blood. I pulled my arm back and launched the heel of my hand right where an eye would be.

She screamed and the sound was like nails on a chalkboard, so vile that I wanted to throw up. I managed to rip away from her grasp, leaving a chunk of hair twinned around her fingers and grabbed the door knob. The second my hand made contact with the door, the monsters disappeared. I didn’t stick around to see what else might be coming after me, so I threw the door open and rushed inside.