Darkness

Terror

As they reach the next door, Oscar looks to Paige miserably. "Last level. This is the only psych field I'm completely vulnerable to."

"What does this one do?" she asks him, concerned.

"Brings out all your worst fears..." he tells her distantly.

"But...if we know it's a hallucination, we can get right out of it...right?"

He shakes his head, a few tears leaking from his eyes. He gasps before speaking. "You have to go through a minute...doesn't sound so bad, but it's hell, Paige..."

Seeing him now, scared and crying, Paige knows that it must be serious...He's done this before, clearly, she thinks. Poor wee man. She wraps her arms around him, and strokes his hair a bit. "You'll be fine..."

"For God's sake! Just get going!" Coby demands, moving towards the door.

"Calm down," Zach says weakly.

"If I calm doon, you may well bleed to death. I willnae calm doon, dinnae be so stupit!" Coby orders. Zach's dejected whimper brings him to apologise repeatedly.

After a few seconds, Oscar is ready. Hand in hand with Paige, they both go through the door, as does Coby with Zach in his arms.

The room's walls are entirely navy blue, and it perhaps five metres square. Tiny.

For a few seconds, nothing. Paige smiles as convingingly as she can at Oscar. And then he disappears from her vision entirely. It is black. These are much stronger than the last ones, she notes. 

Paige is a brave girl. She is not fearless. And she knows exactly what's going to happen to her here. But only one minute, surely she can handle that?

She tries to take comfort in the fact that she knows  for sure this is not real. It just doesn't work, because her instincts are going mad.

She stands in a dark room. A sole candle sits in the middle of the floor, illuminating the walls of grey stone. They remind her of the kind of medieval castles they learned about in primary four at her school. And then, she hears a sound like a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Eerie giggles ensue.

No light.

Virtual blindness.

But the giggles are still there behind her, and the sound of swords being drawn, so she knows she has to move...or rather, she just cannot convince herself to stay put. She darts forward, only to hit a wall hard. Her head hurts and her thoughts are a little cloudy, and when she touches her forehead it is hot and sticky- with blood, no doubt. She starts to run again, hands in front of her this time, and finds herself in a corridor.

She runs through the corridor, flame torches on the wall light up as she goes by. She passes sinister looking doorways with big locks on them. Unwilling to even try to pry one open, she keeps going and going and going until...

Dead end. She turns around to go back up the corridor, but she feels some unseeable force holding her back. The torches start going out, two by two. She closes her eyes, even though she is shrouded in absolute darkness anyway. It gives her a sense of comfort.

She feels the wind rushing in her hair, and opens them again, looking around, alarmed. Where am I? she thinks, but her question is quickly answered as she looks beneath her. Thousands of feet up in the air, she is falling to Earth with no parachute. Accepting it as reality now, she scrambles about frantically, not wanting to splat on the ground and die. She looks up at the clouds and then down again. The land she was going to hit has morphed into water. 

Closer.

Closer.

She hits it hard, and immediately finds herself in a net underwater-unable to get out.

Soon she can't hold her breath any longer. Her lungs start to fill with water as she gasps, looking for oxygen. Just as she thinks this is the worst, a shark appears. It opens its jaws wide.

Closer.

Closer.

It's chomping away at her legs. She's been half-eaten already. 

Three quarters.

She is gone.

And that is precisely when she finds herself lying on the blue floor of the room. She is shaking, but she pushes that aside. Oscar is crying his eyes out right beside her. Coby sits groggily against the wall, cradling Zach in his arms. She can't tell how the boy is taking it, but she doesn't care. Right now, she just wants to make sure Oscar's okay. She shuffles over beside him and pulls him close, and she just keeps hugging him for as long as it takes for him to stop crying. Then he looks up, and she presses her forehead to his.

"What did you see?" she asks him gently.

He swallows. "Them," he tells her.

"Who are...they?"

He shakes his head, but Paige decides not to pressure him any further for answers. He clearly doesn't need that right now.