THE FALL DIDN'T end with a sudden, bone-crunching stop. Instead, it ended gradually, as though I was falling into a massive nylon net that stretched on for miles. I didn't even notice that I was coming to a stop. The deceleration and the acceleration blurred together into one smooth movement, and finally after an immeasurable amount of time, my feet gently touched the ground.
Heat radiated from an unknown source, searing my skin like I was standing too close to a campfire. I blinked my eyes. It was dark, but slowly they adjusted to the dim twilight.
I stood in a field. The waist-high grass brushed against my legs as I moved through it. It crunched like hay under my feet, but there was no sound. It was like I was in a vacuum. The stillness of the field crept up on me, and hot chills ran through my body. I knew something wasn't right, but I couldn't place what.
I plucked a strand of grass and spun the lifeless brown hay through my fingers like a pinwheel. As it twirled, it began to glow, like a hundred lightning bugs had hatched within it. It scorched my skin. With a soundless scream I dropped the ember. And then suddenly, the entire field was on fire. Flames erupted around me in a raging inferno. I drew in thick, heavy breaths. My heart slammed in my chest and my eyes stretched wide.
Thick black smoke billowed out of the field, hanging dense and heavy in the air. Suffocating. My lungs burned. I uselessly gasped for oxygen, collapsing onto my hands and knees on the scorching ground. I clasped dirt in my fists, and it turned to ash, sifting through my fingers. My feet melted from the heat. I shielded my eyes and face, praying the fire would go away.
I gasped one more time, expecting nothing but smoke and soot, but instead thin air filled my lungs. I opened my eyes, and the fire was gone. The field was gone. It was dead—burned to the ground—but warmth still permeated the air. It hung in it, stagnant and sick. Suddenly, the ground squished beneath me. Mud sucked my shoes in like suction cups, preventing me from moving or even standing. It crept up my ankles, seeping into my shoes and socks and crawling up my legs like slimy worms oozing across my skin.
Trees shot out of the ground around me—tall, ominous pines with branches that shielded any light from the glowing night sky—casting me into darkness.
I heard laughter from within the woods. I glanced around, my eyes darting from branch to branch in a panic. A shadow here. Rustling leaves there. And then a hand shot out from behind one of the pines, grasping on to the spiny trunk. My breath caught in my throat, and an icy shiver ran down my spine.
She emerged from behind it.
She wore no clothes, like a nymph in the forest as she approached. The girl from my dreams, the girl from the basement. Her skin was so pale it glowed a faint blue, and her indigo hair swirled around her head like it was caught in a whirlwind, but all the air was still.
And that was when I realized what had seemed so off.
There was no wind.
Everything was stagnant. We were in the eye of the storm.
The girl crept closer and closer. Fear welled up in my mouth like thick, viscous drool. I needed to be sick. I needed to get away, but I couldn't move. I could barely breathe, like a weight was pressing on my chest.
Suddenly, she stood right in front of me.
My eyes stretched wide. I couldn't move.
She squatted, putting me at eye level. Her eyes were completely white. There was no iris, no pupil, but somehow I could tell that even though she was blind, she saw me, with those unseeing, all-seeing eyes of hers.
Gently, she placed her hand on my chest, and she pushed me so I was lying on my back. My mind told me to run, but no signals went through to my body. She crawled on top of me, moving her face close to mine, and an unsettling and eerie calmness settled in. Her stomach brushed over my waist, and her breasts pressed against my chest.
And then she was kissing me. I breathed heavily. I felt her tongue inside my mouth, running over my teeth. She bit my lower lip lightly and moved her hands along my body—over my arms and my chest and then towards my waist. As if I was suddenly released from being frozen, my body moved. I placed my hands on her as well, feeling her warmth beneath my fingertips, electrifying me with heat.
Suddenly, with her mouth still glued to mine, her hands shot to my neck, and she squeezed. A wave of panic coursed through me. What was going on? I struggled to get her off me, but I was pinned down. I pried at her fingers, but my hand slipped uselessly, and she wouldn't release. I coughed, gasping for air but unable to find it. She pulled her face off mine and glared down at me, still keeping her hands around my throat. My lungs burned like they were on fire, and my eyes watered in terror.
"Harper!" she screamed my name without moving her mouth.
I choked and gagged. Splotches of black spotted my vision.
"Harper!"
Everything went dark.
Something shook me. I rolled onto my side. I gagged. A wet glob dripped out of my mouth. It rolled over my lips and slipped down my cheek. I coughed and spat.
"Fuck," a voice said.
I coughed again, spitting what tasted like bitter vomit onto the ground. I heaved a few heavy, wheezing breaths, and then I rolled back over to my back in exhaustion.
"Fuck you scared me."
I opened my eyes. Jeremey stood in front of me, shining the flashlight down at my face. I was in the forest again, not the forest in the eye, but the real forest. The one I fell through to get to the other one.
"What..." I started to ask.
"You passed out," Jeremey interrupted me. "You were choking on your own vomit." He paused. "I shouldn't have left you..." His voice trailed off as he got down on his knees and shone the flashlight on my leg. He winced and stood up.
Wind gusted through the trees around us, and they shook threateningly. My leg throbbed painfully. Nausea clenched at my stomach, but I didn't throw up again.
"I brought the car around," Jeremey said. "Come on, we need to get out of here."
I tried to push myself to my feet, but my body wasn't responding to the signals. I could barely get myself onto my elbows. Jeremey gave me his hand and pulled me up. He placed my arm around his shoulder and put his around my waist, and then I limped along as best I could as we walked through the forest.
"You're freezing," he told me, but I didn't feel cold. I still felt the heat from the eye of the storm, burning somewhere far beneath us.
My feet passed over sticks and needles, my vision faded in and out of focus, and then we were on a road.
And then I was sitting in a car.
Jeremey started the engine. I asked him to put the windshield wipers on. He told me it wasn't raining. I'd meant the headlights. I didn't tell him that, and he didn't put them on. We drove silently through the dark.
We got to the house.
Jeremey helped me limp inside.
He made me lie down on the couch, and then he went into the kitchen and came back with a towel. He pushed the leg of my pants up and looked at the bite in the light.
"How bad is it?" I asked as he wiped some of the blood away. The pale blue towel turned a deep red. A thin stream of blood slithered down my leg like a snake, replacing what he had cleaned.
"It's not as bad as I'd worried," Jeremey finally said. "There's a lot of blood, but it doesn't look like it's very deep." He pressed the towel against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding. "I should take you to the hospital."
"No, I'm fine," I said, trying my best not to grimace as pain pulsed through my leg.
"You passed out. You aren't fine."
"You said it didn't look so bad," I argued. "I'm starting to feel all right now." That was an exaggeration. I could make sense of what Jeremey was saying and respond, but my head was still in a fog.
"I said it wasn't as bad as I'd worried," Jeremey said. "I didn't say it wasn't bad."
I thought about the girl in the basement, about how she had begged us not to involve the cops. About how Joshua would kill her. I thought about the dream too, and a shiver ran down my spine. I tried to push those thoughts away. It was just a dream. I'd passed out and had a nightmare. That's what it had to be. "I can't go to the hospital," I finally said.
"Harper," Jeremey started to argue with me.
"They'll have questions," I interrupted him. "What will we tell them?"
"The truth. That you got bit by a dog."
"Please, no hospital." I couldn't risk it.
Jeremey groaned. "If it doesn't stop bleeding after fifteen minutes, we're going."
He didn't give me the option to argue further. He told me to press the towel against my leg, and then he got some rubbing alcohol and gauze from a first aid kit he kept around the house. He cleaned the bite, and I clenched my teeth together, pretending it didn't sting like it was on fire.
Finally, Jeremey wrapped the gauze around it. It bled through at first, but the red splotches slowly stopped growing, and the bleeding subsided.
Jeremey didn't say anything else to me. He went over to the chair across from the couch and sat down. He watched me for a bit longer. I tried to pretend the pain was more bearable than it was. Finally, his eyes drifted towards the window, and mine drifted shut.
My entire body felt heavy and weak. I tried to peel my eyes open, but I was too tired. The last thought on my mind before I fell asleep was the girl in the basement, and her ice-cold but beautiful blue eyes. As I drifted away, the vision of those eyes shifted to another—the white, empty eyes of the same girl, but from my dream.
The girl at the center of the storm.