For Nevermore Season 1

collapsing around her, but couldn’t. The candles flickered to black, and the crimson sheets turned hard as a computer appeared atop them.
    Something between her ears started to scream.
    “Wait!” she called once more. Dante was only half there, though his eyes were still clear and staring right at her. Eyes that stared into some part of her that nobody else had ever seen. Eyes that moved the world beneath her feet.
    The room went electric and the moon outside meant nothing. The closet door hung ajar, packed with boxes and rows of clothes hanging on hangers. The bedroom door flew open, and a giggling eight-year-old appeared on the other side.
    “I found you!” Tori yelled, pointing at Noella.

    * * * *

CHAPTER FIVE

    Later...

    Noella’s dreams spun in a loop, as if she weren’t dreaming at all, but rather watching the day’s events play out over and over.
    Her dream started with a replay of this morning with her waking up feeling late, then readying herself for school at a snail’s pace, then arriving just before the bell, in time to see the horror of Katie’s memorial, along with the cruelty of her fellow students.
    Noella watched as Sam and Becca walked hand in hand through the crowded hallways. She answered the same exhausting questions through the span of the same tired day, then sat on the same bus which dropped her a block away from her empty house, where she sat and watched bad television before the knock on the door that sent her across the street to watch the little girl who played in Sam’s room.
    Though it wasn’t really Sam’s room now. It was Dante’s.
    Every time she saw Dante, then heard the “Ready or not, here I come!” from the other side of the reality, she went back to the beginning, waking up feeling late, as though her mind wasn’t satisfied with what she had seen and needed her to see it all over again.
    Noella lost count of how many times she went round and round the circle. And while she couldn’t say she knew for sure what her brain was hoping she’d find, she felt as though she was right at the edge of discovery. But seeing the same things over and over, had become annoying. She wanted to just wake up, reset herself, and hoped to go back to sleep to dream something else. She tried to wake up.
    Tried. But couldn’t.
    A familiar panic crackled through her body. Noella’s hairs stood on end as she tried to fight through the fog. She twitched her fingers but they wouldn't move, then she tried to make a fist, but her palm stayed flat as a pancake.
    Noella was paralyzed, a marionette in her bed, with her eyes shut and the strings above her severed.
    An icy chill hung in her room, matching the freeze that held her in place.
    Why can’t I move?
    Noella wanted to scream, but her lips were sealed. She heard breathing behind her and suddenly realized she wasn’t alone in the room. Though Noella couldn’t see a thing, she could hear everything with a thundering echo, turning the rustle of fabric into a racket in the otherwise silent room.
    Oh God, who’s in here?!
    She tried again to twitch her fingers or move her limbs, but nothing happened.
    The rustling behind her turned into words. “She’s waking up again. This is getting regular.”
    Another voice said, “It’s okay. We’re prepared this time.”
    Four icy fingers circled around her right wrist, then held it in the air for a moment before dropping it back to the mattress. Panic swelled in her.
    What’s happening to me?
    But some part of her recognized that this wasn’t the first time she’d felt this sensation.
    “She may be surface dwelling,” said a new man’s voice, “but she’s not above ground enough to be a threat.”
    Surface dwelling?
    Threat?
    Must open my eyes.
    I have to see who’s in here.
    Must get away.
    Noella wanted to wake up and destroy the men who were terrorizing her in the sanctity of her bedroom. She felt one of the men draw closer, could smell the slight sour of his breath above her.
    Noella’s mind raced through a list of horrors the men might inflict upon her, then raced through a catalog of things in her room that could be used as weapons to protect herself . . . if she could just wake up.
    One of the men grabbed her by the face and turned her cheek roughly left and right. She screamed, but only in her mind. There were suddenly fingers everywhere on her, and Noella was certain she was about to die.
    There was nothing she could do to stop it. She begged her brain, but it continued