Waking

Irritable taps echo around the hollow house.

A light, warm bubbling sound, underlays those cold, sharp raps.

Andi presses her palms firmly onto the countertop, pushing all of her weight onto shaking arms, and hoping, praying, that the circles of pressure on each hand could stay constant and grounding- painful, but real. Tapping out that futile rhythm again, and again, despite her numb fingers. She focuses on that sound, ever onwards, that high pitched knocking of overgrown finger nails on smooth granite. The bubbling grows louder. Oh, of course, that’s why she’s in the kitchen. Mustering up all of the strength that she’s able, Andi lifts one drooping eyelid after the other, granting herself blurry sight.

The kettle emits a light blue, electric light. Andi shudders, it’s chilling. Like the colour of an unnatural ice, it sends sharps japs of frost into your chest, spreads into your lungs; its icy needles dig and burrow into the crevices of your heart. That, or it’s the complete opposite. The colour of the most searing flame, the very tip of a fire- mesmerising, striking, beautiful- its colour burns into your mind, just as it burns and scars your skin. Andi looks at the square of blue patterned over her right arm, mimicking the light of that kettle. She’s sure the colour lights her face also, making the pallor of her skin all the more unnatural. It undoubtedly makes shadows and marks of fatigue set themselves deeper, digging trenches of past torment and restlessness into the bags of her eyes. That’s the only light in the room. In the house even. In the whole world, for all Andi knew. After all, the kitchen window is behind her and the kettle in front. Her hands are moulded to the worktop, with the tapping of her fingers stopping her from sinking into its depths. And she wasn’t moving. Therefore, any and all darkness, or lack thereof, was ambiguous and wasn’t real.

Not real. Wrinkles fold into whitening skin, as she furrows her brow and squeezes her eyes shut, trying to keep the images at bay. Taking deep breaths, Andi makes herself steadily count.

One-

Two-

The kettle whistles. Andi flinches. The sharp noise shoots into either side of her temple, like daggers, nudging under her skin and caressing the bone with increasing intensity. The whistle continues. It sounds like a wail. A scream. Andi feels like joining it in that screaming. She’s pulled back to the memories and trenches of her skin, her waking mind dragged into the depths and horrors of her sleeping one mere hours before.

--

She’s walking in a forest. She’s calm. She’s terrified. She’s skipping. Running. The birds are singing. Screeching. Sweetly. Calm and dreaming. Spinning.

She falls. The world tilts. She lands on moss.

The moss smells like rot and curdled milk. Her hair smells like tulips and lavender. Its longer than it’s been in years, not since she was a little girl. It drags across the green, felty floor as she stands on her bare, cut ridden feet. “They’re mucky.” She announces to herself. Or perhaps to the moss. Maybe even to the expanse of blinding white and cracking blue light around her. “Auntie Lou can’t stand it when I get my feet get too mucky. I trek blood all over the house. I must go home and wash.” At that, young Andrea treks her way through the moss and goes ever onwards- “Ever onwards, my darling. That’s what mother used to say.” She announces again to the moss. Only its not moss anymore.

Andrea is now in a marsh, or swamp of some sort. The hem of her white dress is dripping with the sticky blood of the murky water and the little girl lets out a frustrated groan. This is her favourite dress. The little pink flowers on it make her feel all grown up. Now she’s gone and got blood all over it. “Auntie Lou really won’t be happy with me now.”

Andi thought of that white dress often, it would always appear in her dreams- dreams which were almost always night terrors. She fondly wonders where it had gone, before remembering reality. Perhaps some things are best left unremembered. If only she could tell young Andrea that.

Now the little girl is skipping in circles around her year five form room. Her dripping dress makes scarlet spirals on the blue patterned carpet.

Andi knows this classroom. Mr. McDormand, her form teacher, was a kindly, older man that couldn’t afford retirement. The room was a safe haven for Andi that year, as he let her sit in it and doodle whenever she got overwhelmed. She remembers how McDormand brought them all sweets at the end of each term, he had promised to bring in something extra special for the end of the year.

The children are seated around her in circles. They all rock their feet in unison and raise their hands, shouting out random, unintelligible answers. Andrea sings her happy song.

“Lavenders blue, dilly-dilly, Lavender’s green,

When I am King, dilly-dilly, You’ll be my Queen.”

Sammy Thompson was sat on the front circle. He got up to dance with her, waving his arms around like a lunatic and hooting enthusiastically over Andrea’s verse.

“Who told you so, dilly-dilly, Who told you so?”

--

“I told myself, dilly- dilly, I told me-“

Andi’s head knocks against the countertop and instantly ceases her sleep-deprived mumbling. She grips her hands tightly on the surface and forces herself up. Blearily blinking, she shakes her head slightly, so as to sway both the night terror and the short strands of hair from sight and mind. Andi looks to the cooling kettle in front of her. The exhausted thirty-year-old huff as frustrated as a child and makes herself a cup of tea.

She steps lightly from linoleum to carpet on bare, clean feet. She carries her only remaining mug to a coffee table. Andi perches on her thrifted green sofa and wraps her still-numb fingers around the cup in front of her, shaking like the girl she so often remembers herself to be. Her nails pick at the surface cracks on the cup before her, thumb trailing the flowery ‘25!’ that patterned both sides. She made a mental note to buy more mugs. “Maybe plastic ones.” She mumbles to herself in the darkness. “That way I’d stop dropping them when I freak out or fall asleep.” The exhausted woman sighs in something akin to defeat, feeling twice her age whilst still trapped in the mindscape and terrors of childhood.

Picking up her drink and leaning back on the creaky loveseat, Andi rests her legs on the even creakier table. She sips at the under brewed drink with disinterest. A dismal and not yet yellow light peaks through the blinds of her window, making Andi feel as exhausted and ashen grey as the morning clouds outside.

She thinks back to Sammy Thompson. Andi doesn’t think she’d ever talked to the kid, but she supposes brains can be weird like that. She does remember thinking about him at times. Andrea had always been lonely, choosing to watch other children rather than approach them. It had been easier that way, safer. Still was, in many regards. She’d never been like them and hated pretending. Sammy was no exception to that habit, but rather was a keen focus of it. Andi remembers thinking that she had a lot in common with him. Not, as an obnoxious, back talking trouble-maker who yelled at Mr McDormand every day and threw rulers at other pupils. No, of course not. That was rather the opposite of quiet, loony Andrea- head too far in the clouds to ever be pulled back down again. It was more in the lapses of quiet that she felt akin to him. Sammy would sit, ramrod straight, not working and just staring, at nothing. He always looked so lost. So hopeless. It reminded Andrea of her reflection. Sometimes when Andi looks in the mirror she still feels the same.

The only specific moment of Sammy that she can recall, was the last time she’d ever seen him. This was just so coincidentally, on the worst day of her life. This was during the school day however, so nothing so awful had happened yet. Before the night time, with its fire and frost.

Sammy was always yelling, so no one wasn’t paying much heed to his shouting during History. That is, not until he threw a chair out the window. The cover teacher made a high pitched, sort of squealing sound that reminded Andrea of a pig mixed with nails on a chalkboard. She raced out of the room, and the rest of the class were left to watch in silence. Sammy was always loud, but in the name of mischief and chaos. Sammy Thompson was never to be taken seriously- always with a smile on his face and something up his sleeve. But were tears on his face instead, and his sleeves were dotted with blood, from the shattered glass.

With cold, furious eyes, Sammy Thompson looked to each of us in the room, daring anyone to say a word. When we didn’t, he got angrier: “WHAT?!” He had yelled. Something horrid was sinking in Andrea’s stomach.

“WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?! THEY WERE BURNING THERE WAS A FIRE THEY WERE DYING I HAD TO GET THEM OUT IT WAS COLD I WAS HOT I WAS FREEZING IT HAD TO STOP!!” He flipped another table and punched a cupboard door. “It- It- I… I had to stop. There was… There’s too much blood. Too much. Why would he-”

Some on-site staff had ran in and escorted a dazed looking Sammy out. The class had gaggled round the broken window to watch until he was out of sight. Then the lesson got moved to a different room and that was that. The other kids were whispering about Sammy’s episode for the rest of the day, calling him ‘crazy’, a ‘psycho freak’. Andrea had just been happy they weren’t calling her that for once. Andi remembers the teachers muttering about it too. She remembers everything from that day. In all too much detail.

She’d heard that Sammy didn’t go back to the school after that incident. Andrea wasn’t sure of course, as neither had she. She actively tries to avoid thinking of what that troubled boy had bellowed out that Thursday afternoon. She knows it was just an awful coincidence, an awful coincidence at that. Or perhaps even worse- Andi didn’t think her mind above purposefully misremembering what he’d screamed, altering his words just to make that evil day even worse.

Semi-broken cup now empty and perfectly aligned with a coffee stain, Andi’s hands are free to rub at her eyes and face in exhaustion. “God, I need therapy.” Glaring at the mug, she added, “If I could afford bloody therapy.”

With nothing else to do for the three hours until she has to get ready for work, Andi thinks back to her nightmare. She knows better, than to dwell on the malformed metaphors that plague her every night. But still… there’s something there. Something more. Sniffing in sharply, Andi smells flowers and blood. She releases a breath, and thinks back to the spinning girl of her dreams.

--

She was laughing, dancing, singing. “If your dilly-dilly heart, feels a dilly-dilly way,”

Another voice had joined in, slightly deeper, more sombre, mourning. Oh, Right! Sammy! Sammy was there too! Andrea laughed. “And if you’ll answer yes, In a pretty little church,”

Sammy was there dancing too! Hooting, howling and… growling.

He was growling and- no.

They weren’t in the classroom anymore were they? Little Andrea’s hands squelched with blood that felt all too real for the fallacy that Andi knows it to be. Her entire white frock was covered in the horrible stuff. The red, squishy, viscous liquid. Andrea huffed in annoyance. Everything itched, coated in the foul, crimson stuff. Andrea felt the weight of it coating her long, mossy hair. It smelt like tangy iron and lavender, shaping around her face like a makeshift hood.

Sammy Thompson growled again and the dark chasm around them morphed into a darker still cave. The coldness emanating from the jagged stones tickled the back of Andrea’s neck and fluttered down her back. She shivered, despite the warm blood stuck to every inch of her skin. There were light spiderwebs of frost over each rock, giving them all hats for the coming winter. It reminded her of the craggy rocks she used to play around, near the old blue house! They used to be such a comfort, such fun! She would always play make believe, imagining herself to be all types of fairy tale characters, singing and dancing the hours of the day away and going long into the night.

“Today,” Andrea said to the nearest rock, in all the seriousness that the young girl could corral. “I shall be Little Red Riding Hood.” She gave a confident nod that shook the cave-world up and down. It made the blood around her head slosh. Andrea’s mind spun and Sammy howled again, appearing before her.

A big, dark wolf with glowing blue eyes of ice. He was so loud, Andrea felt she had to whisper. “Oh... The Big Bad Wolf.” Sammy snarled his teeth went right for her bloodied face. Andi recalled the terror that she felt in that dreaming moment. Her adult self was semi-conscious, paralysed in that smothering darkness and thinking herself dead.

But then there was light. Sky blue paint peeling off a cheery but weathered house in the middle of the woods. Andrea grinned at the sight. She didn’t stop to dwell on the terror and the wolf which just engulfed her. Instead, much like the child was, she shrugged and skipped along to the front door of the peeling house. “I’ll be wed, in a dilly-dilly dress of blue…” She reached the house far faster than should have been possible. “Wow! Skipping is so much speedier!” Little Andrea exclaimed excitedly.

Only, she wasn’t so little anymore. Andrea saw that the doorbell was now level with her chin. She was taller! She looked to her hands and saw that they were bigger too, still bony, but all grown up. She wasn’t Andrea anymore. “No…” Andi murmured, “I guess I’m not.” Andi didn’t touch the bell, why would she? This was home, after all! No matter how old… or blue. Young Andrea giggled beside her at the thought. ‘Maybe she’s always been here’, Andi thinks to herself. They held hands and walked into the house.

They walked into fire and screams. “MUM!” The girl in the blood white dress screamed, racing to a woman that was whistling like a tea kettle. Andi watched them both. The fire wasn’t very hot. In fact, Andi was quite cold. She squinted through the growing flames and spotted a coat on some pegs by the door.

“Ah.” She calmly stated, walking over to put the coat on. Once zipped up, she turned back around to check on little Andrea. Only she was gone. The woman was gone too. There was just a burning dress and the continued hiss of boiled water.

“Andrea!” A man was in the flames. He was coughing. His hair was all sooty. And his big moustache was sooty too. Andi giggled at the sight. “Andrea, where are you sweetheart?!” The man saw her laughing and went over to her.

His moustache was clear and bushy eyebrows, but his eyes were all blurred, like fog, misting over a window. Andi went to rub the fog away, but stopped when she saw that her hand was small and bloody again. “I’m sorry.” The man hoarsely whispered. “You weren’t supposed to be in here my sweet.” Andi felt like running, but the man had grabbed her in weird sort-of hug, squeezing her too tight. The blood squelched in his grip. The fire was starting to feel hot now, she had too many layers on. She was suffocating. Andi felt her eyes closing, maybe it was… a good time to sleep now.

A loud snarl woke her up again and the man wasn’t holding her anymore. There was a large wolf digging into the moustache man’s throat, more blood splatters got on her charred red dress.

Suddenly, it was outside and snowy. She had a blanket over her but she was shaking. It was all dark. She was on the floor. There were flashing blue lights. People were shouting. She was alone and her ribs hurt. She stood up and dropped the blanket.

“Well… best get back to Auntie Lou.” She told the snowy forest as she began to walk into it. “She’s going to be so mad at me, hates it when I make a mess.”

--

Andi jolts back awake to the sound of her alarm. Ugh. “Another day of work… Just, keep going Andrea. Ever onwards and all that.” She mutters to herself, trying to forget the terrors, but unsurprisingly falling short. Picking up her phone to silence her alarm, Andi feels her eyes widen an increment. “Three text messages?” She was now wide awake, “And four missed calls? No one ever messages m-“

UNKNOWN NUMBER-

Delivered 04:42 am:

Hi there Andrea… I’m not sure if you remember me, but this is Samuel Thompson. We used to go to school together? Sorry, I know this is out of the blue, but I need to talk to you, urgently. Could you please call me back on this number when you can?

Delivered 05:03 am:

It’s about a black wolf, if you can believe it! Does that mean anything to you??

Delivered 05:04 am:

Sorry, just realised how crazy that sounds, but please, do call me back whenever you can. :)

…

The blue light of a phone screen lit up Andi’s sunken face. She typed a response.