Realm Wraith (3 page)

It took several painful minutes for Rayne to force his eyes open again, but he didn’t feel that any time had passed. The fog once again permeated his mind and, for a moment, he remembered nothing, not who he was or how he got there. The feeling didn’t last long, as he began to remember his name, his past. Then he remembered his job, the presentation he had to give the next day. But, before he could even process that, he saw Levi’s face flashing into his memory, and with horror he realized how late he was. He jumped to his feet, and the world tumbled around him, like he’d been thrust into a blender. Nothing felt right to him at that moment, not even himself.

“My God, call an ambulance!” a woman shrieked.

Turning around, Rayne saw a woman rushing towards him. Other concerned passer-bys also hurried up to him, eyes filled with concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m all right, just had a dizzy spell.”

But the woman rushed right past him without a glance, as did everyone else. Rayne turned around to follow their movement as he saw a crowd gathered in front of a stopped car. There was a man, bleeding, fumbling for the driver’s side door holding him inside the car. Some people moved to assist him out, but others stepped forward to stop them.

“Don’t move him, wait for the ambulance!”

Rayne could already hear sirens, and the past few moments came flooding back. He remembered the car coming right for him, the shock and agony compressed in a single moment before he’d blacked out.

“What about the other one? I don’t think he’s breathing! What do we do?” Someone else yelled from the crowd.

“But I’m fine—” he started to speak before realizing nobody was looking at him. He gazed a moment at the crowd gathered in front of the car, and pushed his way through them to get a closer look for himself. He could see now the front fender had an enormous dent in it, smoke billowing out from beneath a twisted hood over a car engine still running. Below that dent lay a crumpled body, lying in a pool of blood. It only took Rayne a moment to recognize himself, and an intense chill filled his entire being.

“Th-that’s me—? I’m—I’m dead?”

The noise around him went silent, and the world fell away. Rayne struggled to rationalize the situation in his mind, but found he just couldn’t.

“Please, I’m still here,” he babbled, still dazed. “Somebody tell me I’m still here!”

Desperate, he reached out, waving his hand in front of the person closest to him. She made no visible reaction to his movements. He reached out and placed a hand on her face, and she shivered and backed away without acknowledging that she saw him. He stood dumbfounded.

“A dream?” he wondered, any alternative still too much to think about. “I fell asleep at the office. There never was a car, and I’m not really here.” He continued to think aloud. “But if it’s a dream, I wouldn’t know, would I? I’d wake up once I realized it was a dream, right? Shouldn’t I be waking up now?”

The sirens wailed even louder, and Rayne could see emergency vehicles pulling up at the intersection. An ambulance stopped right beside him as emergency workers jumped out and ran to the scene of the accident. One ran past him but the other one ran right through him, a horrible sensation, like his bones and blood had turned into custard. He felt like he no longer had substance, his existence nothing but raging thought, alone and unnoticeable. The frustration from before burned through him again.

“
Acknowledge me!
” he shrieked in fury, and he whirled and struck the man who had passed through him so carelessly. He felt his fist connecting, and to his shock, the man went bowling over backwards, sprawled out in the snow with a visible mark on his cheek.

The rest of the crowd gasped in shock.

“What was that?” several people cried out. The paramedic pulled himself up and shook his head.

“Are you all right?” his partner asked.

“I’m fine. It feels like somebody threw a rock at me.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

The man rubbed his cheek. “I haven’t got time for this, there’s a man dying here.”

One of the policemen on the scene scanned the crowd. “All right you lot, who threw that?”

Nobody answered. They all shuffled around and glanced at each other in confusion. The officer made his way into the group of spectators, searching for whatever unknown delinquent that saw fit to cause a disturbance.

“I am still here,” Rayne murmured in disbelief. “They felt me. I’m real. I am real.”

He muttered this to himself over and over again in a broken mantra. The people around him fell away, and the world became much more muted and colorless, full of disjointed forms casting dark shadows everywhere. The street melted, no longer looking like a real street, but a strange moving mass, like a waterless river. Odder still, an intense bright light illuminated the air, but brought no warmth with it. All around him, Rayne could now see hunched shades shuffling into the distance, where the strange, cold light shone the strongest. Recognition filled him.

“That light. Something terrible lies over there,” he whispered to himself. And, yet, he felt drawn to it, just like the figures around him. He resisted the pull for a time, as a feeling of dread stirred inside, and it only grew the longer he watched that light. But, at the same time, so did his curiosity grow, and he couldn’t help himself; he began to walk towards it. Yet, unlike everything around him, he did not do so in a mindless state, nor did he shamble, but rather he walked upright, steady yet cautious.

To his left, he saw another person. His face was pallid and his eyes dark, and he was hunched over, not upright, despite a youthful appearance.

“Who are you?” Rayne asked him. “Who are all these people? What is that light? Where are we going?”

The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even acknowledge Rayne had spoken, and kept shambling. Rayne saw another person further away, a middle aged man, sporting the same pale face and very dark eyes, with circles beneath like one who hasn’t slept in over a month.

“Can you please tell me what’s going on? Are we all dead? Is this supposed to be heaven? This doesn’t feel right at all!”

This man didn’t answer him either. They were like zombies, unaware of anything but the light they all shambled towards.

“You have to stop!” Rayne yelled at them. “That light isn’t heaven!”

Nobody paid him any heed. They ambled forward and disappeared from Rayne’s view. He ran towards one woman in the distance, and grabbed her by the shoulders to stop her. As he did so, the strange undulating ground beneath them heaved as it cracked apart into a gaping chasm, surrounded by jagged black chunks reminiscent of teeth. Beneath him lay absolutely nothing, giving Rayne merely a second to contemplate that he was standing on air before he and the woman plummeted down into the darkness.

A scream ripped its way out of Rayne’s throat as he fell deeper into the void. The air around him rushed and pulsated like a beating heart. Strange creatures flew past like shrieking fiends, and once they saw him they dove to tear at his flesh. In his rising panic he could not comprehend what was happening to him; his thoughts were overpowered by a blood-filled stench and the searing pain from the claw marks now carved out of his limbs.

Time slowed, and Rayne could no longer tell how long he’d been falling. It felt like hours, even years had gone by. The screaming imps once savaging him faded into the darkness, their shrieks disappearing with them, and he fell alone through the biting winds. Then, in a single instant, he stopped. He now lay sprawled on his back upon blackened soil. He’d felt no impact, no sensation of hitting solid ground. One moment he was plummeting, the next, he wasn’t. He rolled himself over, and ended up with his face pressed against strange earth. It seemed like unnatural ground, a lumpy, Stygian substance of neither dirt, nor ash, nor any other recognizable element. It felt ice cold to the touch, hard, a little slimy, and it trembled like living flesh.

Where is this
?
Rayne thought to himself. He couldn’t see, couldn’t comprehend, and he didn’t really care to know this place, only to leave and never look back.

He jumped to his feet, but had difficulty standing upright with the ground moving beneath him. He now saw how torn his clothes had become, and the jacket of his suit, along with his shoes and socks, had disappeared sometime during his fall. Dried blood stained his arms over diminishing claw marks, but the pain had faded since his landing.

He decided to pay less attention to what had become of him, and took closer note of his surroundings. Dim and hazy light obscured any recognizable landscape, and a heavy fog swirled at his feet, stretching as far off as he could see. Sparse blades of what looked like vegetation, possibly grass, poked out of the ground, but it was a deep rust color. Everything else, the ground, the air, what resembled trees and rock formations, it was all pitch black. Rayne couldn’t tell if the dying light created this murky tone, or if everything around him was actually this color.

He approached the nearest tree, his bare feet squishing the ground as he walked. Already tall at a distance, it became massive when he drew up beside it. He could see mottled ebony bark, with a gritty ashen-grey powder coating it in parts. Twisted branches spread up above him, their orange leaves standing starkly against the black sky. Curious, Rayne reached down and put his hand against the orange grass growing up against the tree roots, recoiling when a stinging sensation shocked his flesh. His hand burned, yet he felt no warmth. This frozen vegetation was the coldest thing he had ever touched.

“What the hell is this?!” he exclaimed.

Nothing about this realm felt natural, and Rayne refused to see it as anything more than a very lucid dream. He wanted nothing more right now than to wake up.

Against his better judgment, he ran past the tree and cried out as loud as he could. “Is anybody there!? Answer me! Get me out of this nightmare!”

He screamed and screamed until his voice gave out from the strain, but received no answer. Defeated, he sank to his knees on the cold ground. Behind him, something stirred, accompanied by a hollow creak. Rayne froze, sensing the presence of another right by him, and went numb as he understood that being alone might have been the better alternative.

The silent tree stood there. And yet Rayne could see it trembling, shivering with the same worming rhythm as the ground beneath him. Its branches wove in the black air. Without warning they descended, and the sharpened wood clawed at Rayne’s neck as the branches enveloped him. In the very trunk of the tree he saw a frozen face, a screaming eternal visage making no sound. Beside it another face mimicked the same expression, and still more faces appeared. Rayne gawked, but he was too panicked to dwell on what he saw. The more he struggled, the more sharpened points tore his flesh.

Thoughts flashed through his mind, the notion he could die again, or worse, simply cease to exist here in this horrible place. Frantic, he grabbed one of the branches with his hands and tried to pull it away from him, but his efforts failed. There had to be something he could do, he thought. He didn’t care how uncivilized it looked. He bent his head down and bit, sinking his teeth deep into his restraint. The strange tree let out a strangled shriek, and warm red blood gushed from the wound. The branches released their victim and began thrashing in the air, and Rayne knew he had to put as much distance between himself and this god forsaken plant as possible, running beyond its reach.

Faster, faster,
he told himself, trying with all his might to ignore the alien shrieks behind him. He did not stop running, even as the screams of the monster tree grew fainter, and he continued running after it went silent once again. He dared not stop running, hoping that maybe if he ran far enough, he could find a way out of this place.

But the ground gave out before he did, and he found himself suspended by nothing, and once again became a slave to gravity, with only a split second to grasp he had run right off a ledge of some kind.

“
Aaaaaugh
!” he shrieked, his head desperately repeating a desire not to die.

He didn’t fall far, though. Something dark shot through the air and wrapped itself around his ankle. His descent jerked to an immediate halt and Rayne hung in midair, upside-down with a strange tentacle constricting his ankle. Below him spread an absolute void with no bottom or visible ground, and he pondered the dizzying possibilities if whatever held him decided to let go. Blackness swirled above him, and he hung beside a solid wall of the same strange, black ground he’d been running across.

As he watched, the wall quaked, and a sidelong crack appeared as the shaking grew more berserk. With a crushing roar the crack burst open, and Rayne found himself staring at what could only be described as an eye, a hundred times larger than himself. It was a deep purple in color, swirling with a turbulent, glowing energy. In the center of the amethyst colored orb rested a single slit pupil, somehow an even deeper black than their surroundings. It was like staring into the depths of Hell. This was the very face of madness itself, and just looking into it, Rayne felt the psychotic whispers of a thousand demons tearing into his soul. A cold voice swept past his ears.

“What’s a mortal doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Rayne stammered, unable to form clear words in his predicament. “I don’t know where here is!”