PICTURED: Isaac Mikhailov
"Gia, I-I'm calling an ambulance," I mumbled, my lips ice cold as I fumbled with my thumbs to unlock my phone screen.
"No!" she shrieked, the first sound to leave her mouth in the long few minutes I stood in the doorway. She leapt forward and knocked the phone from my frozen fingers, leaving a trail of scarlet over my pale skin and the echo of a shattering sound against the tile.
"Gia," I cried, and then the sobs started shaking my chest, shock overtaking my body as I stared between where my phone had landed and where my best friend stood. "Gia we need to get help - look at you! Oh god, Gia are you hurt? Where is - there's so much blood!"
"You can't tell anyone," she said, her voice a quiet whisper. "Nobody. Not even Bel."
"Are you crazy?" My knees felt as if they would collapse at any moment. "Why can't I tell them? What happened?"
She blinked, even her eyelashes sticking together with moisture. She was an absolute mess, dirt caking the skin which wasn't already covered in blood. "I don't know."
"We need to talk to someone," I said, my words slow, trying to make her understand. I reached out, taking her arm in some show of comfort.
"I just have to clean up," she muttered, and then she pulled her wrist from my grip and reached for the shower tap, turning on the hot water and igniting the sizzling sound of water in our silence.
"Gia," I repeated, as she started peeling off her shirt, tossing it to the ground. Her movements were robotic and quick as she shed her clothing. Underneath, her skin was smooth and clean. It wasn't her blood.
She stepped into the shower, as if I weren't there, and the water ran a tinted red as it ran down her naked body.
I stepped backwards, almost slipping on the wet tile. When I spoke, my voice was a plea, as if desperate for my only explanation to be validated. "Was it an animal? Is it animal blood?"
Gia tilted her head. She was facing away from me, and I couldn't read her expression. Her voice was clipped. "Yeah. An animal. We hit an animal with a car."
"Who's car?" I asked.
She was quiet.
"I'll go get some clothes for you," I said, my stomach knotting so tightly I thought I was going to throw up.
I waited outside of the bathroom for her to finish cleaning up. I should have called security. But she had been so intent on me not contacting them. What if she was in trouble, and she thought telling them would be dangerous? Gia was smart. I needed to trust her, at least for now.
But she took so long. I was sure at least an hour past as I sat outside of the door, guarding it in waiting, listening to the distant pattering of water droplets against the floor of the shower. Every other noise in the apartment had me jumping, and I kept rubbing at the place where Gia had spread blood across my wrist. Someone's blood.
Somewhere between stressing out about my best friend's horrific state and theorizing that the shadows around me from the furniture in the hallway were growing, I fell into a sleep filled with nightmares. Gia running through the forest, her clothes bloody and her hair matted.
I shouldn't have been able to fall asleep. I should have been so terrified and on edge that I checked on her, or called Isobel and confessed everything. Found someone to help. But I fell into a deep slumber, my body waking to find my cheek pressed against the carpet, sun streaming through the entrance to our kitchen.
"Aspen?" a high voice asked. My head raised to see Isobel, her expression confused at finding me laying in the hallway. She was frowning, still wearing her party dress and holding her jacket in her arms.
"What..." I said, the word lingering as I tried to work out what exactly had happened last night. I was struggling to pull apart what was real and what was not.
Then I remembered.
"Where's Gia?"
"What about Gia?" she questioned, her brows creasing at my tone.
But then my question was answered at the opening of the door next to the bathroom.
"Did you say my name?" she asked with a yawn, her hand cupping her mouth.
She looked completely normal. She was wearing cotton pyjama pants and a white shirt, her hair neatly combed and braided.
"Are you... okay?" I asked, searching her for any sign of distress.
She frowned in confusion. "Uh, yeah? Are you?"
I looked at where I'd spent the night on the carpet, confused. There was no way I could have slept for so long, especially after all I'd seen... Unless I hadn't seen anything at all, and it had somehow been a horrific dream.
"Yeah," I said hoarsely, rubbing at my neck.
"I'm going to make coffee," Gia said, her frown still deep as she stepped past me into the kitchen.
Maybe she was putting on a front because of Isobel, for whatever reason. Lamely, I rose to my feet, my joints sore from the way they had been cramped into a ball on the floor. Ignoring Isobel's concerned gaze, I followed Gia into the kitchen.
"You can't be serious," I said, cornering her where she was leaning against the bench top, pressing buttons on the coffee machine which took up almost half of our limited kitchen space.
"Serious about what?" she asked.
"About pretending nothing happened last night," I said, crossing my arms over my chest in some way of reassuring myself. Of holding myself together.
"Oh crap," she said, pressing a hand to her forehead. "I was a drunk mess, wasn't I? Did I do something embarrassing?"
I frowned. She really had no idea. "You don't remember... the animal?"
Gia frowned. "Are you okay, Aspen? You look a little pale. How much did you drink last night?"
I hadn't had much to drink. Surely not enough to hallucinate. But then again, I was so unsure of my limits with alcohol, maybe I had been drunk enough to mess with my memory. I thought back to walking through the forest with Isaac. That moment had carried with it an intensity that contrasted it to what had happened after. It was in perfect clarity.
But then everything that had happened with Gia was... dulled. Dulled in a frantic panic, the horror that had stung through my veins and pierced through my fingertips, willing to be relieved by a scream. I couldn't tell if it was the terror that made the images hard to hold onto, or whether it was because they'd all stemmed from my imagination to begin with.
"Don't worry about it," I said, my throat raw as I averted my gaze and stepped backwards. "Sorry."
"Aspen," Gia called. "Are you sure you're okay?"
I ignored her, my feet carrying me back towards the bathroom. I needed to know if it was real.
I opened the door and closed it behind me, pressing my back to its wood, my palms against its cool surface. My breath wouldn't come, and I had to steady the beating of my heart before I could exhale again.
The room was void of any traces of blood, or leaves or branches. The floors were clean, and I couldn't even detect the scent of cleaning products across the tiles. It was as if nothing had happened.
And maybe nothing did.
I turned on the shower, stepping under the hot water and letting it wash away as much of the fear I felt as possible. I really was going crazy. Especially if I was making something up that had felt so real at the time. I could still feel my heart racing, Gia's vacant tone purring in my ears, telling me not to tell anybody.
When the water grew cold, I didn't notice, figuring the scolding from whoever was yet to have a shower today would be negligible compared to the swelling fear already growing in my chest.
I returned to my bedroom, closing the door and putting on a pair of leggings and a sweater, and then I started googling. I looked up all of my symptoms. Memory loss, hallucinations, paranoia. They all lead back to Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, diseases which had me even more terrified. I shut my lap top, holding a hand over my head and my eyes closed.
Nothing was more terrifying than the way she'd looked at me last night.
I recounted the events, the way she'd grabbed my wrist, staining it in blood. It was gone now, my skin bare, if it were really there I'd have rubbed it away as I waited for her, or washed it away in the shower.
But she'd grabbed it for a reason.
Frantically, I felt around for my phone. I was such an idiot, I hadn't even checked it. I pulled the pants I had worn from the floor, finding the device in my pocket.
The cracked screen glinted under the light as I pulled it out, making my heart drop. I had heard the smash when she'd pushed it from my hands. Exactly what had happened between that moment and when it had returned to my pocket I wasn't sure.
My breathing was coming fast when I flipped it in my hands, examining it for any evidence of blood. But, like the bathroom, it was completely clean. Maybe I had smashed it falling over, or tossing my jeans to the floor. I couldn't tell, and it made me feel even more worried that I was now concocting stories to justify whatever my brain wanted me to believe.
I tried to track back in my head to when it had all started. I'd realised something was first wrong when I was speaking to Gia and Isobel at the cafe, when it struck me that pieces of my day were missing. Hour long events that were just blank, pieces of time where anything could have happened. I just didn't know.
And somehow, that memory lapse had led to whatever piece of my brain had been manipulated last night, to leave me with the visions of my best friend covered in blood.
The thing was, they didn't feel like visions at all. They weren't snippets of information, or frayed at the edges, they were chronological, each detail obvious, yet blurred at the same time. The feel of her cold fingers touching my wrist was still as clear as day, linking the memory to my reality as I shivered.
It had all started my first psychology lesson. The first time I'd blanked, when the lecturer started speaking.
Frantically, I went to my desk, pulling my psychology notebook from the stack and holding it with shaking hands. I didn't know how much longer I could continue to question my sanity. I was terrified.
I opened the exercise book to the first page, the lined paper greeting me with a terrifying tangle of handwriting that made my stomach drop.
The words were written so closely together that I had to squint to make out the message which my own hand had written out at least a thousand times. A single phrase written repeatedly over the whole paper.
I flicked through to the next page, and the page after that, the scribbled ink shooting freezing cold jolts of horror down my spine. The first half of my book was completely covered in the words I didn't remember writing.
The two words which carried with them a haunting plea.
WAKE UP