The Dream Reaper

1

(Lillian Kemp)

The scarecrow was dead.

Soon, she would be too.

Bloodied fingers clawed at her stomach to stem the bleeding, fruitlessly clutching her lacerated skin as if to zip it back shut. A sticky warmth kissed her thighs as the scarlet deluge first devoured her midriff and then ran in sheets down the exposed skin of her legs at the request of the lashing rain doggedly striking her pale frame. From her hands, the crimson stream carved gentle patterns across her supple forearms until they reached the pinched skin of her elbows, fat beads of blood swelling until they could finally tear themselves free of her corpse and relinquish to gravity's alluring kiss, plunging through the air and deep into the greedy mouth of the soil below.

The meagre strength holding Lillian in a reclined position surrendered, and she fell flat onto her back. Skin, already stretched taut across her stomach, tore further, and she moaned as blood spurted with renewed vigour. The black spots hanging heavy on the fringes of her vision swam as the pain gripped her heart in an icy hand, ripping the breath from her lungs and freezing her veins.

But life, however fragile, continued to endure despite the agony. Soft and shallow, each breath, nothing more than wet pants vying desperately to suck oxygen into her bloodied lips, echoed gently in her ears. Her heart, thudding inside her chest, persisted nobly as if it could dredge her body from the ground and drag life back into her veins. Goosebumps from the wind blustering over her exposed skin crawled up her legs. Rain sluiced across her in sheets.

Before her, the corpse of the scarecrow lay face down in the soil. Talons that had once savagely ripped her apart now lay as fingers, reaching in death towards her. Eyes, only seconds before burning with fire, now lay extinguished; cold, black, and human. She could not free her gaze, locked with supernatural strength to the black holes deep within the grey irises.

Someone was holding her hand. Large fingers engulfed hers, shielding them from the torrent of rain falling from swollen clouds above. His eyes – the last she'd ever see – bulged wide and brown and concerned. They swelled in tandem with the words falling from his lips, words she desperately wanted to hear but were snatched by the three feet of rain howling between them. His hair, long, black and wavy, reached from his fringe towards her cheeks. Her lips yearned to smile, to laugh, to mutter a witty remark about how it was nought but a scratch, but the shuddering agony emanating in vicious waves from her stomach had risen through her torso, twisted around her spine, and seized her heart within its talons. Lungs refused to obey. Lips could only part gormlessly, a faded pant slipping through. She wanted to reach out and grab his hair – an impulsive action that served no purpose other than feeling the warm touch of a human one last time – but the muscles in her shoulders obeyed her mind no longer.

He was speaking again, but the darkness was closer now, brooding and pulling together in thick clumps on the periphery of her vision. Black clouds merged into a humanoid figure, a colossal pair of eyes locking onto her like a tractor beam and parting the rain. Shadows slashed through the storm as leathery wings unfurled. Talons shone despite the gloom. Death - in its rawest form - preparing to claim it's next child.

Unbridled fear consumed her – her left hand trembled under her dress; her right quivered against his damp fingers; ankles gouged muddy ravines as her legs bucked weakly, desperately vying to draw enough strength to stand, to defy, to live; her heart thrummed faster, a seamless blur of movement, racing towards the inevitable silence that was looming; a cold terror doused her veins as the realisation that she was on the cusp of plunging through the nether worldly portal and into the endless black struck her point-blank.

I can't die.

Then, with a blinding flash of delirious hope, she drew attention to the town clock, ticking relentlessly despite the maelstrom engulfing it, burnished white face bleeding long tears over twitching hands. How could she have been so stupid? Her urge to live, fight, and defy was now manifesting into tangible reality.

But she knew the consequences.

A flashback to a broken arm when she was a child – blazing pain paling compared to the hard-earned lesson that day out in the hills, back when she had been naive enough to assume her gifts hadn't been a curse in disguise. A single snap of her fingers – that's all it would take to reverse this. She'd be free, alive, and didn't she deserve that? To hell with the consequences if the alternative was death. Any life, no matter how constrained, would be better than none.

The world became a series of snapshots – brown eyes, peering at her; the sensation of his pulse crashing against her feeble skin; rain, unrelenting, dousing her sodden; townsfolk, surrounding her warily, no closer than ten feet as if her demise was contagious, staring hungrily at the scarecrow's carcass; she saw death brewing in the clouds, a demon of fire and shadow, descending to claim her – how can't they see it!?

Her heart quivered. Her final breath died in her mouth.

Live or die. That was the choice. And quite frankly, that was no choice indeed.

To hell with the consequences.

She clicked her fingers.

(All)

12:55:58. Two seconds to 12:56. The minute hand on the village clock had just clawed its way past the XI printed in black letters when, impossibly fast - faster than a human eye could discern, not that any eyes were watching, at least not in this loop - the hour hand flickered backwards. 11:56, an impossibility that was entirely correct.

Rainwater that had fallen over the last six minutes vanished. The caliginous tableau hovering above the town blinked from existence, instantly replaced by grey clouds stretching to the far horizon tainted ominously with the first shadow of the impending storm. The sodden soil of the village green, carved apart by the scarecrow's talons and bathed in Lillian Kemp's blood, hardened. Crushed grass rose erect. Streams of water running from the pavements vanished.

The two corpses disappeared.

Every bush and tree shuddered as they slid back in time; leaves ripped from tender stalks by the wind reattached; broken branches vanished from the dank undergrowth to appear instantaneously righted in their previous place. A dead pigeon – a bloodied mess of brains and broken bones, ripped apart and devoured, smeared helplessly across slimy leaves – was wrenched back into existence, skittering down moss-covered roof tiles as its penny-sized brain failed to recompute life flowing through its veins. Animals, even those that had managed to escape (a flock of six crows that not even twenty minutes prior had taken flight in a squawking protest, rising in terror from the scarecrow lumbering through the cobbled streets towards them), were dragged back helplessly as if invisible string had been wrapped around their ankles, now unknowingly trapped. Cows that had migrated for the last hour down the left side of Miles Jackson's farm reappeared within their cowshed in a disgruntled chorus of moos – feed, previously eaten, vanished from their stomachs; water in the troughs vanished; dispelled faeces returned to its prior lodgings. Barnaby, Edric Ramsey's ginger tabby, was brought scowling back into his garden. The bird he'd trapped beneath his claws vanished, even after he spun quickly in place in a desperate attempt to locate it in the long grass. The garden, just as it had been the hour previous, was quiet and empty, and any prospect of lunch seemed over the fence and down by the thicket. Displaying the same arrogant saunter as the first time around, Barnaby prowled over to the fence, scaled it in one huge bound, and began his hunt again.

Then came the people.

2

(Jake Harper)

A churning plunge; a weightlessness that lifted his arms and legs as he fell, limbs stretching from his torso and spreading as if that would abate the motion; blinding lights that spun around his eyes and bored into his brain; tumultuous nausea that wrapped its tight grip through his mind and wrenched his head back, dredging his breakfast from the depths of his stomach into his throat, rising, burning, building in the back of his mouth…

He crunched forward, face colliding with the centre of his steering wheel, cheeks scraping against the hardened plastic as his body wilted under the sudden effects of inertia. The horn went off instantly under the pressure of his forehead, a blistering sound rattling the cheap plastic coverings along the windows' edges and driving a silent scream across his face.

Hands, helpless under the reapplication of gravity, struck his legs and bounced off. His stomach, still roiling, flipped again, and the vomit in the back of his throat continued to rise, burning his teeth and tongue as it erupted from his mouth. Spluttering for air, he turned his head and spilt his stomach onto the passenger side chair, finally lifting his head from the dashboard. Aside from his wet, panting breaths, a deafening silence absorbed the car. Ringing echoed in his ears.

Disorientated, he tumbled back in his seat and shut his eyes, saliva dribbling from the corners of his mouth now wiped onto his forearm. The rancid stink of his vomit swam in his eyes, and a second wave of nausea overcame him.

Where was she? The girl in white… where did she go?

She'd been in his arms, dying, blue eyes locked desperately onto his as the final shadow had begun to slip across them, darkening the ice with its poisonous touch. He'd watched helplessly as they'd slipped away, detaching from his gaze and rolling upwards to the sky, pleading with the storm above to abate its advance and let her live. But Jake had felt the warmth seep from between her fingers – just as he had once before – and spied blood, once billowing in a crimson wave from her lacerated stomach, now beginning to ooze in fat purple rivulets, darkening her skin and clothes as her heart gave out.

She'd died. Oh God, why did you have to kill her? What could she have possibly done? Isn't it bad enough what you did already…

Stale air clogged his throat, choking him. His arms groped for the door handle, fingernails scraping along the cheap plastic interior veneer until they found the metal, pulled and…

...he was vomiting a second time, hunched over double, spewing what remained of his breakfast over the gravel parking lot. Bile burned the back of his throat. Without looking, he fumbled a hand for the half-drunk bottle of water kept in the car's front compartment, grimacing at the metallic tang of the liquid on his lips. He swilled his mouth twice and then spat clear of the car, groaning.

How was he here?

Sudden and inexplicable - an impossible fall, akin to being sucked into the ground. An abhorrent convulsion in his stomach and mind: confusion, fear, and something else. Unable to be remembered, like a dream that once woken from could never be pinpointed. The sensation of being watched, observed, by someone outside of himself. As if he were falling inside a test tube, gazed upon intently by bright eyes from something beyond the realm of his comprehension.

It was as if he'd been observed by a God.

Which was absurd – if God existed, Jake had long since been abandoned. Once a catholic, now a strong atheist, and yet deep in the back of his mind, he could not shake the lingering feeling, like a cold shower trickling down his spine, unrelenting.

Once his stomach had settled and his jellied legs had firmed into support strong enough to carry him, he clambered from his awkward position and out of the car, an aged blue Citroen parked precisely where he'd left it an hour ago, bordering a desolate village green.

Where is she? I don't understand... I saw her! She died in my arms!

Unless… it wasn't real?

The village clock ticked gently to itself. It was a brighter sky, fractionally, than it had been before. Cold air, bloated with impending rain, grew heavier as the darkness swelled to the north. It tasted bitter on his tongue – something instinctive, almost indescribable: it didn't quite smell new.

Then the clock chimed.

He'd heard it an hour prior, melodic metal vibrations echoing through the quiet town. Twelve chimes evenly spaced apart, each thundering through his core before strumming into silence. The first ring had seemed cute and quaint. By the twelfth, he'd grimaced at the depressive melancholy hanging in the air as a mist, a headache brewing in the delves of his mind.

DING…

The chime swallowed him whole.

At least I must only listen to it once.

He turned, mind detaching from the clock and moving onwards: it had been twelve, and now it was one, a natural progression of time embedded deeply into the interwoven fibres of every tissue in his body. His subconscious had started counting and, satisfied that the only bell had rung, had stopped, retreating into its sleepy hollow. He ignored his sixth sense, some deep precursory instinct that felt the change in the air, just before the ringing had entirely died, of the metal hammer beginning to move again, whistling through the enclosed space of the clock face and-

DING…

He felt a flare of confusion. He glanced at his watch.

Impossible.

A third chime, louder now, mocked him. A once melodic sound was now pealing in hysterical, demonic laughter. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, merging into endless white noise rattling around his head and rendering him mute. To outside viewers, he must have appeared as a glitch, frozen in time, eyes swimming, mouth dropping ajar in a splattered expression of terror. His fingers shook. The noise - a delirious guffaw that revolted his stomach, echoed off the buildings and sliced through his heart - rattled each of his fragile vertebrae.

Goosebumps rose along his arms. The cold water trickling down his back became a deluge – a fear so potent he felt his muscles convolve in protest, sliding over his bones like they were nothing more than liquid held in place by his skin, desperately trying to detach themselves from his skeleton and run.

It's nothing – just the damn clock misfunctioning.

Mercifully, the final peals droned into silence. Jake was left stunned, ears ringing twin screams, fingers clenching, and then relaxing at his side as he desperately fought the wave of nausea brimming beneath the surface. Eyes settled on the grass –

(She died holding my hand)

- now dry and unspoiled -

(I watched the life fade from her eyes)

- grass stems flouncing provocatively towards him in the growing wind -

(I had her blood on my hands, the scent of copper burning the tip of my tongue, the warmth of her life dissipating against the wet skin of my fingers…)

He vomited a third time, collapsing to his knees, fingers scrabbling in the gravel for purchase as his chest spasmed and his stomach heaved. Salvia and bile hung in long, clumped strands from the corners of his mouth. His eyes watered as his lungs retched. Breath, sharp, desperate intakes between gags, rasped in his ears.

Something drew him to his feet – it would be naive to call it strength or resilience, for at that moment, he felt none; his progress was comparable to that of a small ball bearing placed before a large magnet, an inevitable movement that could only be resisted for so long, drawn forward quickly no matter how hard it vied to remain motionless – and he stumbled towards the exact spot where he'd been moments prior, eyes fixated on the patch of grass where he'd seen her die the first time around. He crashed to his knees. There was no indication of anything untoward: blood that had lined his hands (they were now spotlessly clean) had vanished; the grass, trampled underfoot and flattened as the rains had begun to wash the mud into a quagmire, was restored; the storm had disappeared in a blink of an eye and-

The first time around.

A stray strand of consciousness rose and whispered the idea of a loop in the back of his head, but the logical impossibility of such an occurrence suppressed the notion before it could dwell any longer. Logic would prevail. He'd fallen asleep, or he'd hallucinated. Perhaps it was a divine warning from the Heavens for Jake Harper to intervene and divert the upcoming chain of events. At this, he scoffed – there had been no divine intervention when he'd needed it, and he was unbelieving that it would start now. Perhaps it was a manifestation of the tumultuous anger and grief that had wracked his soul for the past fourteen hours. In which case, he could understand, at least in part, the role that the girl in the white dress had played. But for it to be anything else was inconceivable. Logic and rationale always prevailed.

He grabbed his phone from his pocket and dialled for an ambulance in three quick flashes of his thumb, pressing the phone desperately to his ear as if that would make it ring quicker. There was a burst of static and then a long, droning peal of a disconnected line. No service.

Furious, he redialled the number and stood, hoping the additional four feet of height would somehow clear the signal from whatever had been blocking it, but he was met with the same result, groaning in frustration as white noise echoed back at him. Really?