SPECTRAL.

† S I X T E E N †

     THE AFTERNOON HAD LULLED ME INTO A KIND OF STILLNESS I HADN'T FELT IN DAYS. I'd been sitting cross-legged on my bed, textbooks open but unread, the hum of campus life faintly audible through the dormitory walls. My eyelids grew heavier than I intended to allow them, the lines on the page blurring until I finally gave in and let them close. Sleep didn't arrive gently—it seized me, dragging me downward as though unseen hands were clutching at my ankles.

     The first thing I became aware of in the dream was silence. A silence so complete that it pressed against my eardrums, almost painful in its absence of sound. I opened my eyes—or what I thought were my eyes—and found myself standing in an endless dark expanse. There was no ground I could feel beneath me, no air I could draw in fully into my lungs, only an abyss that stretched outward, swallowing every trace of dimension. The darkness wasn't just around me, it was inside me, heavy, invasive, suffocating.

     "Hello?" My voice cracked as it left me, desperate, uncertain. I turned in circles, searching for any break in the black void. The sound traveled outward, but instead of fading as normal echoes do, it lingered unnaturally, curling back toward me like a whisper at the nape of my neck.

     No response.

     I tried again, louder this time, the anxiety in me tightening. "Is anyone there?"

     That was when I heard it.

     A chorus of whispers, faint at first, then swelling as though rising up from beneath the floorless abyss. They weren't voices I recognized, but they were voices all the same—slippery, overlapping, impossible to distinguish as male or female. They spoke in fragments, sentences fractured, words curling over themselves like smoke, and though I couldn't decipher them, I felt, deep down, that they were not meant for comfort. They were calling me, luring me deeper into the dark.

     I spun around, my heart hammering. "Stop it! Who's there?" My demand cracked like brittle glass, dissolving into the void.

     And then it shifted.

     The ground beneath me, invisible moments ago, hardened suddenly, as though the darkness itself had congealed into a cracked asphalt road. My breath snagged in my chest because I recognized it instantly, it was the same road I had fled down that night of the party, the same road where the figure had appeared weeping.

     And she was there again.

     Only this time, she wasn't pleading for me not to go, sobbing, or whispering. She stood a few feet away, her body still and rigid, her head bowed so low her chin nearly touched her chest. The way her hair, tangled and lifeless, cascaded forward obscured her face made her seem more grotesque than human.

     I froze, terror pinning me in place. My rational mind begged me to turn, to run, to do anything but stand rooted like prey awaiting the predator's strike.

     "Help," I called out weakly, though there was no one to hear me.

     The figure stirred. A faint tremor rippled through her shoulders, and then, with a slowness that burned every nerve in my body raw, she began to lift her head.

     My breath caught.

     At first, her face was still shrouded in strands of wet, matted hair, but gradually her features came into view. And what I saw seared itself into the deepest part of me.

     Her skin was mottled, pale to the point of translucence, stretched taut as though waterlogged or long rotted beneath the soil. Hollow sockets stared at me, not empty but filled with something far worse, blackness that churned like ink in water, alive and hungering. Her mouth, when it peeled open, was impossibly wide, her jaw unhinging in a grotesque stretch, exposing rows of jagged, broken teeth that looked more like shards of glass than anything human.