Chapter 5: I Am Chased By Crazy Chicken Ladies
The days at camp flew by. On the first day, Daniel showed me around a bit more, and he, not very surprisingly, was a much better guide than Nico. Apparently the Hermes kids had rules about pranking newbies, mostly because of a prank that hadn't gone well before. I didn't get a bucket of paint over my head, but I had the creeping trepidation that it would in fact happen someday, making me more desperate to move out of the Hermes cabin. Unfortunately, two days had passed without my dad claiming me.
Daniel told me that all I could do was patient - the gods were forgetful at times. They were also waiting, abiding for the perfect time to claim me. I decided that my dad, whoever this jerk was, was just lazy and wanted an excuse to not claim his much-a-disappointment daughter.
It was the third night sleeping when the nightmares started again. I had only started to adjust to camp life, and waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, and waking everyone up in the Hermes cabin (which was about twenty people) didn't seem to be the best ways to make friends. That would make them hate me. I wished that I could be claimed soon, at least I would know whom my half brothers and sisters were. At least it'd be more comfortable around them.
As a child, at seven, I had gotten nightmares for weeks, the same one, repeating over and over again. My mom had given me warm milk and some pills every time, and they soon faded away. She claimed that it had been a 'period of my life,' but that didn't explain why it was happening again. Especially not so shortly after the incident with the Silver Fire and the faeries. That couldn't be a coincidence...could it?
In the dream, I was sitting on something cold and hard. A rock, I assumed. It's a rock. I was blindfolded, but I could still tell that my surroundings were dark. My hands seemed to be bound together at my back, by some kind of material that sent burning pain dancing up my arm when I struggled against it. My ankles were tied together with the same kind of thing, but the tips of my feet touched something -- the fast, cold feel of moving water. I tried to flinch back, but I couldn't move.
I hated water. Despised it, especially moving water or large bodies of water. I had a huge fear of water. Even swimming pools terrified me to no end. But fast moving, possibly deep water? That was the scariest yet. I didn't want to think what would happen if I leaned forward a little too much, even if it was only a dream.
The air was chilly, and I seemed to be wearing my sleep attire: shorts and a tank top. The chill bit viciously into any exposed skin, leaving my shivering with cold. My teeth were chattering, and the rock was like a chunk of ice where my thighs were pressed against it.
Then I heard her. I hadn't heard her voice for years, not since I was seven. She never came back after that, taunting me about my possible death and things I hadn't understood back then, as a seven year old. War. Unfairness. Prejudice. How my death would balance things out. How my mother had done something to her, and I was the leverage for that being balanced out.
Clarissa Hunt. Her voice reverberated around me, sending tremors down to the bone. It seemed to echo in the cavern, or room, wherever I was. It has been a long time, do you still remember me?
I felt my teeth gnash together. "What do you want? Why are you back? What did I ever do to you?"
It was a snarl now. Justice. Revenge. Payback. Unlike her, I will wait to take my sweet time. I have patience.
"On what?" I yelled into the dark. "What did 'she' do to you? Who is 'she?' I told you, my mom didn't do anything to you!"
I could feel her presence beside me, now. When she spoke, it was a gentle whisper on my ear. Fingertips trailed down my cheeks, cupping my chin up. So delicate. So breakable. You mortals are like flowers. You look so pretty yet you die so soon. Little things break you beyond compare. The gods live in a moment, I live in a thousand. They have only ever thought about what to do for one day. I plan for a hundred. What have the gods ever given you, Clarissa, that you would choose to side with them?
The taste of blood invaded my mouth when I bit down on my cheek. "I didn't side with anyone," I protested. "My dad's a god. I never chose this."
Your mother made the choice for you when she turned away from her family. Her voice seemed to come from everyone.
"My mom would never turn away from her family. My grandparents are dead!"
There was a laugh, but she didn't speak. "What do you want with me?" I shouted at a random direction. "Show yourself!"
Hands on the back of my head. The blindfold was lifted. For a moment, still in the dark, I wondered what kind of monster awaited me. These nightmares, as a child, I had never been able to see the woman who was speaking. It had either been too dark or I had been blindfolded, like this time.
There was a flash of light and the silhouette of burned against my eyelids. A woman, tall, a dress pooling around her ankles. Wings protruded from my shoulder blades. For the half of a second, I could see her face. Cold, terrifyingly beautiful. I heard a whisper, this time so faint that I thought I had imagined it. We are real, Clarissa. Very, very, real.
Then hands, pressed against my back for a moment, shoved me forward and I tumbled into the dark water, scream dying in my throat when my mouth, nose, ears were all filled with cold, unforgiving water.
***
I sat straight up, breaking into a cold sweat. My forehead felt sticky and clammy. The relief that came to me was unexplainable when I realized that I was still in the Hermes cabin, and not drowning in the cold water, in the horrifying dream. At the movement, I could smile if somebody really did pour a bucket of paint on my face.
Then came the fear and the horror. What was she doing in my dream? Why was I repeating childhood nightmares? Was this a sign of something? When I had nightmares as a kid, my mom had given me pills and warm milk every time I got them. Eventually, after about a month, they had faded away, though I had never quite forgotten them. It had been horrifying, repeating the same nightmare over and over as a child, though it wasn't quite the same. The woman had said different things each time, and unlike most dreams, I remembered everything clearly. Nevertheless, I had been seven years old at the time, so when my mom had consoled me about being normal for children, I had believed her. The nightmares never came back.
Until now.
Suddenly not feeling very sleepy, I pulled my legs out from the sleeping bag, and groped blindly around in the dark for clothes. It was still dark, very, but I didn't feel like I could still sleep. Not after the nightmare, not with the fear that she would come back.
I finally felt fabric, and I picked it up and stumbled towards the general direction of the washroom. The ground was chillingly cold on my bare feet, which reminded me of the water. I shuddered, mind back again on the dream I was so desperately trying to forget.
Involuntarily, I tried to sort out things on my own. I shouldn't have thought ahead on things I barely knew, but I couldn't help it. If the nightmares starting now was a coincidence, then I wasn't sure what wasn't. What had changed for me to have the nightmares? I had learned about the gods. Maybe it was contact with the Silver Fire. The pills that I had taken from my mom, gone.
Contact with the Silver Fire. Was that the reason for having the same nightmares I had had, freakishly same, as a child? No, I corrected myself. Not the same. She showed herself this time. And that was what scared me, from the wings that grew from her back to the face that I had caught for the half of a second. And the whisper.
We are very real.
All of this screamed SKETCHY! at me, but I could connect the basic dots. Daniel had reassured me about the faeries, laughing them off about their existence, telling me they didn't exist. But this mysterious woman in my dream. She had wings. And just after I had seen her, she had told me that 'they' were very real. It couldn't be a coincidence.
I stepped into the washroom, closing the door behind me and flicking on the light. The suddenness of it made me squint, but it felt reassuring and a good break from the dark. I sat down on the toilet lid.
There were so many things I wanted that I never got. I wanted to live a normal life. I wanted to grow up, marry a sweet guy, have children. I wanted to be claimed. But at the moment, all I wanted was answers.
I thought about the previous day, my thoughts. What if faeries were real? What if Daniel was wrong? What if I was right? What if something was happening, something had happened, something we didn't know about? It couldn't be that impossible, not when one lived in a world of Greek mythology.
I had dismissed my doubts and creeping suspicions as paranoia and hallucinations, and maybe even possibly coincidences. Daniel was a much more experienced camper than I was, there was no way I would know more than him simply after one day. But it wasn't impossible; he could be wrong.
Turning on the tap, I splashed water over my face. The feeling was refreshing and helped cleared my mind...though not by much.
I pulled on clothing and discarded my pajamas, before running a brush through my hair. It came out in tangles, but at the moment, it was the least of my worries.
I carefully picked my way through the Hermes cabin towards the door. I wasn't sure where I was going, though a walk seemed to sound nice especially after the dream. It was still nighttime, and hopefully the cool air would help clear my head a bit.
It was very cold when I exited the cabin, but when the door closed behind me, I realized it was too late to turn back to grab a jacket or sweater of the sort. Judging by the ruckus I had made getting up and all, I had probably disturbed more than one person's sleep. It wouldn't be fair to them if I went back and continued walking around like an elephant, tripping every two steps.
I wasn't sure where my feet were leading me, but I let them take me where they wanted to go. Not very surprisingly, I somehow ended up sitting on the beach of the canoe lake, staring out at the horizon. The moon still hung at a decent height, and I couldn't only guess that it was maybe about three or four in the morning. I pulled my knees towards my chest and rubbed my arms, hoping to keep warm.
The surface of the lake was calm, moonlight falling onto it. The sky was clear tonight, with just a couple of clouds that drifted around lazily. The lake captured all of it, from the moonlight to the clouds to the trees at the side of the lake. For a moment, just a moment, the feeling of peace and serenity was reachable. The moonlight was reflected on the water, a silvery kind of light that reminded me slightly of the Silver Fire, though I tried not to think of it. Could I not think of anything without relating it to faeries which most likely didn't even exist?
As soon as the thought touched my mind, a part of me immediately argued back, But they do!
If I had felt peace a moment ago, it was gone.
I tried to think about other things, important things that didn't involve me going crazy. I tried to think of Greek god names, preferably ones that started with an E, though I couldn't think of any. After confronting both Daniel and Nico about the E, they claimed that they didn't know. Nico, though, had flinched at the letter. But Daniel had cheerily explained that the E may have not stood for my dad's name, and it was possible it didn't start with an E.
It was weird, how I had been imagining normal names that started with an E a couple days ago. Back then, I thought maybe my dad's name was Ethan. Emmanuel. Edward. But now, there was no name that I could think of, now that he was a god.
A pretty damn lame god, if he can't even claim me, I thought bitterly.
I tried to be patient with my father, whoever he was. Told myself that hating him wasn't going to help anything. That he was my father, and I couldn't just hate him. Maybe I should just give him time, instead of seeing him as some villain. But there was that deep satisfaction that felt good in a bad way when I thought about how much I hated, despised him. He didn't deserve my mom. He didn't deserve her time. Who was he to leave her? Just because he was a damn god didn't mean he could just--
Suddenly, sitting by the lake didn't seem to be a good way to cool off and sort my thoughts out. I pushed myself to my feet.
Not much time had passed, but I suddenly felt rather tired. Maybe if I slept now, there would be no nightmares. She had visited me tonight already. Once was enough, right? Nevertheless, I still didn't want to sleep in fear of what might happen, what dreams I would have if I did. Especially now my mom wasn't here to tell me what to do, I wasn't sure who to tell even.
I began making my way back to the Hermes cabin, trying to keep my thoughts from wandering back to the giant what-if that bugged me.
Halfway to the cabin, I heard a loud squawk. I could spot the Hermes cabin at the other side of camp, maybe about two hundred meters. Then, I followed the sound of the squawk to the direction it was coming from.
A woman stood at the other side of the clearing. Well, 'woman' wasn't the best way to describe her. From the neck up, she looked like a normal middle aged woman. She had mousy brown hair and hazelish eyes. Except from the neck down, she was a flying poultry.
All words escaped me when I saw her. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or run, and with a moment of hesitation, I chose laugh. Camp Half Blood was safe, right? She couldn't hurt me...could she? For some reason, fear wasn't the first thing that came to mind I saw her-- at least not until she whipped out claws and charged at me. My laughter abruptly faded into nothing when I realized that a) she was actually going to hurt me and b) there were four others like her behind that were all half flying, half running in my direction.
Frozen for a moment, I turned and sprinted away from them to the nearest cabin.
I was already banging away in the door yelling for help when I realized that it was still early in the morning and whatever campers that slept in that cabin would be pretty cranky with me. Nevertheless, I could risk some anger and hate if it meant not being killed by the chicken ladies.
The chicken ladies -- harpies, I remembered -- were getting closer to me. I hit the door once more, wishing whoever was inside would at least open up.
I thought I was doomed when the door burst open. Somebody -- the interior of the cabin was too dark to see who it was -- grabbed my arm and yanked me inside. As the door slammed, I caught a glimpse of the cabin number.
13.
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AUTHOR NOTE: Silver Eyes is published on Quotev, just look under my friend @GardenOfLies 's profile.