Shining among Darkness

By
WingzemonX

Chapter 42.

Look what I did

While everything outside was in absolute chaos, the real culprit of that horror watched her work from the hospital security room with particular pride and satisfaction. Lily Sullivan was still sitting in front of the console, her hands resting on it. From her position, she observed everyone who appeared and disappeared from the monitors. Although, in reality, she did not need them to see all her current victims. But they were a good guide, as a small map so as not to get lost, since the number of people she had to reach was more significant than any she had previously achieved.

Lily created horrible visions in the heads of all these crazy people, altering them and letting their fears consume them and act on them. She made them see all other people as hideous creatures, with rotten skin hanging from their faces, yellowish teeth popping out of their mouths, and reddened pus-filled eyes. Of course, the reaction of all was of aversion, terror, and above all of the violence; a lot of violence.

The show was a real treat for her. So much chaos, so much confusion, so much fear... She was delighted, even intoxicated, by it all. Her father always thought that fear was like food to her; that fed on her and made her stronger. She never quite believed that statement, but at the moment, she was tempted to consider it. The sensation that ran through her body was exquisite.

Suddenly, out of all the frightened and confused faces that appeared on the monitors, one caught her attention in a particular way; one that she managed to recognize immediately: the hateful Portland detective who interrogated her and dared to lock her in that room (with everything and guard at the door). She knew immediately that it was him, and it took her slightly by surprise. What was that guy doing there? Was he looking for her? It did not matter because without knowing it, he had just entered the cave of the worst wolf he had ever known.

Lily smirked.

"Well, look who we have here. My old detective friend. Just in time for fun..."

All the ideas that had crossed her mind to do with that man as soon as she had the opportunity came to her mind. And this one apparently was being presented on a silver platter. Indeed his square and simple mind could not understand what he was seeing, and he was naively wondering why everyone was acting so... "crazy." Of course, he still wasn't able to see anything they saw. He was just standing there with his gun in one hand and barely managing to hold it as he moved on those crutches. Surely he wanted to have a clear target to shoot at, as it was what he did best: aiming and then "bang!" If that's what he wanted, why not help him a bit with it? That would surely make him feel better.

"What are you afraid of, detective?" Lily whispered, focusing most of her attention on that single individual.

- - - -

Vazquez and Cole kept trying to calm things down in the hallways, but there seemed to be no favorable resolution. It was all a horrible pitched battle of everyone against everyone. Faces were scratched, heads smashed against walls, and even hands, arms, or necks were bitten in desperate defense. Vazquez, due to his condition, was the one who had it the most difficult. Still, his stubbornness was much more powerful than his physical limitation.

Suddenly, the Portland detective stopped abruptly without Cole noticing at first. He stared at the crowd of people in front of him in puzzlement as his appearance began to change, little by little, with each blink he gave. The faces of patients and nurses alike grew emaciated, leaving in their place only dangling skins attached to their skulls. The detective backed away, stunned. In a second, all those hideous faces turned towards him simultaneously, and one by one, they began to approach him.

"Stay where you are!" He yelled loudly at them, raising his weapon towards them. "Back off now!"

Vazquez backed away in fear, stomping on his crutches and falling to the ground. His injured ankle ached intensely, but he made no exclamation. All his senses were focused on those faces with hollow cheeks and eyes, ashen skins, and stained and missing teeth. Those faces, they were all alike; they were all the face of...

"Deja de llorar, Roberto," he heard one of those faces pronounced hoarsely in fluent Spanish.

"¡Deja de llorar como una puta!" One more of them added, with the same voice as before.

They kept getting closer, shuffling step by step. One by one spoke with the same voice, pulled from some cold and forgotten corner of Vazquez's memory.

"Miren a la niña de mami."

"¿Vas a ir a llorarle a mami?"

"No, no, no," the policeman muttered, totally petrified. However, his right arm was still raised, and his pistol pointed straight ahead. The following words also escaped him in Spanish: "Tú estás muerto... Hijo de tu puta madre, ¡estás muerto!"

"Soy un viejo que se caga encima, y aun así sigues temblando al verme, niñita."

"¿A quién crees que engañas con tu disfraz de policía?"

"Eres un pendejo, un inútil, y un malagradecido."

"Sólo sabes responder a putazos, igual que tu madre..."

The one who was closest to him raised his arm in the air. From his perspective, his hand looked immense, as he saw it when he was just a six years old little boy trembling in the corner of the room. The face accompanying that hand was not yet consumed by the alcohol and the coca.

"¡No me toques!, ¡no me toques bastardo!"

Vazquez gripped his gun, his finger on the trigger.

Another of those creatures lunged at him with great speed from the side, grabbing his arm and deflecting the weapon upward. The gun went off, and the bullet hit a ceiling lamp just above them, creating a small explosion and shower of sparks.

"Vazquez!" Cole shouted while he struggled on the ground with the Portland detective, trying to take his gun away from him. "Whatever you are seeing is not real! Give me your gun!"

Vazquez wasn't listening to it. He was still kicking and roasting, spitting screams in Spanish that Cole couldn't quite understand. The gun fired once more, now hitting a wall. The nurses who were not prey to hallucinations had no choice but to leave the place scared. The affected patients, some ran in terror down the corridor too, but others remained in place screaming in terror and hitting the walls and faces.

From the control room, Lily was laughing more than happily. All of this was much better than she expected.

Cole kept struggling with Vazquez, trying to disarm him before he hurt someone else. But the despair and fear invading him had given him more strength than expected to defend himself. This guy was an annoying stubborn, but he was a cop like him, wounded in the line of duty. He was also hallucinating because of a third party, or at least that seemed to Cole to be the safest thing to think. The last thing he wanted was to hurt him, but he didn't have much choice in the end.

Midway through their struggle, he dug his knee hard against Vazquez's abdomen, knocking the air out of her. Vazquez doubled over, exhaling a deep groan of pain. Cole immediately withdrew his gun and threw it away from him. Next, he punched him hard in the face that caused the Portland officer to fall sideways to the ground, stunned but still defiant. Cole stepped over him and gave him one more blow, and it seemed to affect him even more than the last.

Vazquez remained on the ground, semiconscious and complaining of the pain that was indeed invading his body. Cole stood up, waving his sore hands slightly from the blows. Before he could recover, he dragged Vazquez off his feet into one of the open rooms; the cop did not resist at all. He was able to put him inside the room and locked him up; for his protection and the others.

Cole took a deep breath with some relief. He took a few seconds to try to digest it all, settle down, and then think of his following action. Instinctively, he raised his gaze to a corner of the hall, where one of the security cameras was located; it stared at him like a single accusing eye, the red light above it blinking every so often. He had a hunch that the telepath who was causing all this might be looking at them right through that camera. And therefore, in theory, he was staring into their eyes right now, him or her.

"So boring," Lily muttered from the other side, staring at Cole's angry face on the monitor. Soon after, the detective began to walk down the hall in a hurry, but not before bending down to take Vazquez's gun from the floor. "You come for me? Don't make me laugh. I could make you shoot yourself with that gun whenever I want." Her attention was diverted at that moment to another of the monitors, where she could see Esther walking stealthily. And right on the board to one side, she saw another person also wandering, but with more modest steps, dare he even say fearful. "But I think we won't be around much longer to see it."

- - - -

Samara wandered lost for a while among the hospital corridors, not knowing exactly where she should go. She hadn't come across anyone to that point, nor had she seen firsthand the havoc Lily Sullivan was wreaking on the minds of those present. However, the loneliness that was breathed caused her some confusion and anguish.

What had happened? And whatever it was, was it happening because of her? And who exactly was doing it? She couldn't believe it was caused directly by the Other Samara; she didn't have that kind of influence unless she allowed her to somehow.

She kept roaming for a bit longer. She was getting ready to go to where she seemed to remember the reception and the main door of the hospital was. She had been locked there for too long, and the exit door was not exactly a place they used to or even want to take her to.

A few steps to her right caught her attention. She thought for a few moments that it would be some nurse trying to get her back to her room. She thought fleetingly about what she would do if that was the situation. Would she give them a "push" like the one she gave Dr. Scott? Did she wish to go out so badly to do that? Samara turned slowly in that direction. The person she saw was not a nurse. In fact, it was a girl, a little shorter than her, with a backpack on her back and who was looking at her with some anxiety in her eyes.

"Samara," the stranger said firmly. "You're Samara Morgan, right?"

She looked at her carefully without answering her immediately. She was unfamiliar, and she was not dressed to be a patient here. And besides... there was something strange about her. She perceived it just when she saw her, but the girl could not identify what it was exactly. Something in her did not agree, and that caused certain distrust to Samara.

"Who are you?" She murmured uneasily, backing away a little.

"Hey, don't be scared," the girl whispered slowly, throwing her hands towards her. Her face abruptly softened, and she gave a gentle smile, which would perhaps be adorable if it weren't for the fact that it seemed totally fake. "I don't have time for long explanations, okay? Let's leave it in that my name is Esther, and I came to get you out of here. And I'm going to do it by hook or by crook."

Still smiling, the stranger subtly reached her left hand toward her backpack while her right was still up, perhaps in an attempt to distract her.

"I really don't want to hurt you. I'm your friend..."

Samara narrowed her eyes a little, still suspicious.

"Are you who she said would come for me?"

The girl became excited in confusion and slowly made her hand recoil from her attempt to grab her backpack.

"I don't know what 'she' you mean. But yes, someone sent me for you. A very handsome boy; I think you'll be pleased to meet him." She commented that last with a very notorious gossipy tone. "What do you say? Are you coming with me?"

Samara stared at her in silence for a moment, and then she raised her gaze just a little above the stranger's head. And there it was, that dark figure standing in the middle of that perfect white corridor, highlighted by its haggard and opaque state. She looked back at her; among all the sea of ​​black hair that hid her face, Samara could notice it, and as well that creature was slowly nodding her head with a sign of affirmation.

The girl hesitated for a few moments, but then she nodded in the same way too. The girl with the backpack seemed surprised, perhaps by how (apparently) easy it had been to convince her.

"Perfect, quick." Esther held out her hand to the girl to take it. Samara did, and in less than a second later, they started running. Samara was almost flying because that girl turned out to be stronger and faster than she looked, or perhaps she was much thinner and lighter than she thought.

"What is happening?" The young from Moesko murmured slowly, watching the orange sirens of the alarm as they advanced. "You did this?"

"Me and another new friend," Esther replied. "You'll also like her. Beneath her unfriendly mask, it's kind of nice."

Samara didn't understand what she meant, but she didn't think about it too much. She didn't know precisely where she was taking her but trusted her to know.

As they walked, out of the corner of her eye, Samara noticed a figure moving down another adjacent hallway they were going. She turned slightly toward it, and as soon as she saw that, she stopped, apparently applying enough force so that Esther's grip was dislodged. Esther nearly fell flat forward from the sudden change.

A woman with long black hair, a white patient suit, and a gray sweater over it walked forward, looking around, disoriented. Both of her hands were firmly grasping in front of her, seemingly holding something.

Samara recognized her immediately, and her heart leaped with excitement.

"Mommy?" She exclaimed loudly enough to be heard in the echo from the hall. Anna Morgan stopped advancing and turned quickly toward her, her eyes wide in amazement and confusion. Yes, it was her. "Mommy! Mommy!"

Samara, without thinking twice, began to run quickly down the hall towards her before the stranger who had come to get her could do something to stop her. For the first time in weeks, Samara's face lit up even a little, drawing as close to a joyous smile as she could get. Even the way she ran towards her mother was in stark contrast to the sleepy, absent demeanor that almost always characterized her. Now she was running, practically jumping with happiness, like a normal girl happy to see her mother.

The adult woman, by her side, remained standing in her place, watching silently as the girl approached her, having both hands still firm in front of her.

"I'm happy that you're fine, mommy..." Samara whispered, only a few steps away from her. And it was at that moment that as she took one of those last steps, she caught a glimpse of that same dark and gaunt figure from a few moments ago, standing just off the side of the hall as she ran past her.

"Stop!" The Other Samara yelled at her loudly, her voice echoing only in her head. "Don't get any closer!"

Samara turned to look at her for only a fraction of a second, confused by such a warning. However, as she turned back to her mother, the cruel reality of those words struck her head-on.

Anna quickly pulled out the scalpel she held hidden in her hands and waved it in the air, making a long cut across Samara's cheek. The girl backed away and fell to her seat in fear, clutching her cheek that was beginning to bleed.

"You did this, right?" Anna asked sharply, holding the scalpel in front of her. "You caused this chaos. Wherever you go, everything you touch is corrupted and destroyed. You are the Devil, the very Devil walking this earth!"

Esther looked alarmed at such a scene. She approached hurriedly, and by mere reflex, raised her weapon, pointing it at the woman. But at that very moment, Samara stood in front of her, preventing her from shooting.

"No, mommy, please... I didn't do anything... Please, mommy... I love you..."

Samara took a fearful step towards her mother, extending her free hand towards her. At that moment, Anna waved the scalpel again, now making a deep cut into her palm. Samara doubled over in pain, clutching her hand and backing away, groaning.

"I'm not your fucking mommy! Spawn of the Devil! I wish I had never met you! You just made my life hell!"

Anna Morgan's voice echoed loudly in the hallway, and so did Esther's own head, who was watching everything paralyzed in place. She had already raised her pistol at her again, her finger on the trigger, ready to blow her head off without the slightest hesitation. But those words paralyzed her...

"I'm not your fucking mommy!"

"I'm not your fucking mommy!"

"I'm not your fucking mommy!"

That scream was repeated in her head over and over again, creating a pain that ran through her neck and back. Her hand shook, and she was unable to shoot. She was unable to kill that woman. She was unable to kill her mother... again.

The ceiling lights began to flicker suddenly, and heavy air completely covered the corridor. The ground at Samara's feet began to corrode and break, taking on a dirty ocher hue as if a strong acid were starting to consume it. Slowly the girl raised her face back to her mother. However, her eyes were wholly filled with fury, totally oblivious to the jubilant ones from just now, and they were pinned right on the woman in front of her.

Terrified, Anna took only two steps back before being completely paralyzed and lost in the deep darkness that consisted of Samara's eyes. Those eyes... they were the same as that occasion, the one in which all those horrible and unpleasant images flooded her head, preventing her from thinking about anything else. But now, it was a little different. There were no images slowly consuming her sanity. Actually... there was nothing. Anna didn't feel anything; she didn't think about anything. She just seemed to be floating in a deep, murky sea of ​​darkness...

Without saying anything, Anna Morgan firmly took the scalpel in her hand, raised it to her neck, and then, before Esther's astonished eyes and Samara's angry gaze, she stabbed it directly into the right side of her neck, until depths.

Matilda had arrived in the hallway just at that moment, stunned by such an image. Anna pulled out the scalpel once and reattached it. Blood spurted from her wound, covering the wall and staining her white coat. She did it again a second time and a third time as if she could not feel any pain. But she did feel it; she felt it all...

"Samara! No!" Matilda yelled from the end of the hall and quickly used her telekinesis to snatch the scalpel from Anna Morgan's hand before she repeated the abominable act a fourth time. But it was late enough.

The woman fell to the ground, first on her knees and then collapsed on her side. Blood kept pouring from her throat and mouth, trickling down her body and staining the floor. Only then did Samara seem to react and realize what she had done. Her face softened, and she looked in horror at her mother lying in front of her.

"No, no, no!" She screamed in horror and approached her mother, hugging her and trying to place her hand on her wound. Samara's clothes were stained red, as were her hands. "No, mommy... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to..."

Anna stared at her with empty eyes as she spat blood from her mouth. She coughed a few times, her breath hitting a bit near the end, and then... she just went still... Her eyes kept pointing to her daughter, but they weren't really looking at her. They weren't looking at anything at all, and Samara knew it.

"No, mommy... Nooo!!" Samara yelled loudly, and the walls and windows rumbled. Then she hugged her mother's body tightly, beginning to cry uncontrollably and staining herself even more with her blood. Their screams rang out loud, drowning out even the incessant sound of the alarm.

Matilda was astonished for a moment at the horrible scene she had just witnessed, but gradually she forced herself to react. Then she approached fearfully towards her patient.

"Samara," Matilda whispered very slowly. "Samara, listen to me..." The girl lifted her face covered in tears and blood (hers and her mother's) towards her. "Nothing of this is your fault, no..."

"You told me you would help me, Matilda..." Samara whispered suddenly between groans. "You told me that you would help me control my powers! You said to me that I wouldn't hurt anyone else anymore! And look what I did! I killed my mom! I killed her!"

Matilda froze again at the image in front of her: the image of a girl covered in blood, embracing her mother's lifeless body. The same image she had seen four years ago when she entered into that house in Chamberlain.

Esther was in a state quite similar to hers. Also, that image brought a wave of memories and feelings that drowned her. Suddenly she felt something that she hadn't felt for a long, long time: the urge to cry... but she wouldn't, not now or in that place.

Esther started abruptly and without much thought to shoot Matilda. The first bullet hit the doctor in the right shoulder, knocking her out of her thoughts and knocking her to the ground. Esther shot her three more times, but this time Matilda could react, focus, and stop the bullets before they hit her. This did not surprise her attacker, and, in fact, she expected it to happen just like that.

"Let's go!" Esther yelled loudly, and then she took Samara by the arm and yanked her upright. Samara didn't have the strength to resist and just let her pull as she continued to let out bitter sobs.

Matilda shook the bullets off her and tried to stand. But as she did so, she felt a great stabbing pain in her shoulder that brought her to her knees again. The bullet had entered and left without touching bone or anything, but that didn't take away the pain or the bleeding that was beginning to soak through her blouse. She tried again to stand up, now with better luck. She stepped past Anna Morgan's body and ran after the girls, clinging her left hand to the wound as best she could.

As they ran, Esther quickly took out her walkie-talkie.

"I need a damn distraction!" She yelled loudly, hoping Lily would hear her from the other side. "The woman who follows me is very dangerous."

There wasn't as such an answer from Lily, but she hoped she had heard her.

The two girls turned a corner, out of sight of Matilda long enough. When the psychiatrist turned the same corner, she stopped for a moment and looked around confusedly because there was no sign of who she was chasing. In front of her was only a long corridor, long enough so that at least she could see them in the distance because she had not been so far behind. But from the shape of the corridor, they couldn't have gone anywhere other than to the front, so she started to dash in that direction.

Her shoulder burned, and she had started to sweat.

She continued down the lonely corridor until she came to an end... and it really was. There was no other adjacent corridor. Instead, it ended in a wall with a window, perfectly closed and impossible to open. But there was no sign of Samara and that woman, who she was sure was the same one she had seen in Portland.

She turned on her feet, gazing thoughtfully at the doors on the side of the hall, suspecting that perhaps they had been hiding in one of those rooms. A reasonable thought, but wrong. Unbeknownst to Matilda, the little one hidden in the security control room had gotten into her head. By the time she finished going through half of those rooms, she had realized that the long hallway did indeed connect with others that she did not see or rather could not see. And at that point, that would be too late.

- - - -

"Mission accomplished," Esther said, pleased from the radio she had left for Lily in the security room. "I can't go back there. You'll have to go to the van on your own. Can you do it, brat?"

"With my eyes closed," Lily replied sarcastically.

She looked back at the monitors. Little by little, she let the illusions she had caused dissipate one by one. It would be difficult for her to keep everything working while leaving that place without being seen (literally). The monitors showed the reactions of relief, confusion, and, of course, the terror that did not disappear completely. Even some of the fighting that had started seemed unwilling to die down anytime soon.

Lily would have loved to stay long enough to see how far this could take. Could she even have her little puppets burn that whole place down on their own like Emily had? That would have been fun to watch. But indeed, it was time to go.

She placed her hands on the console and pushed herself back slightly to make the chair roll away from it so she could lower herself more quickly. However, before she could get her feet low enough, something stopped her tracks. At first, she didn't understand it, and later... she couldn't either. She felt her wrists clench, holding them steady and motionless on the armrests. And looking at them, she saw that it wasn't just the sensation: her wrists were surrounded by thick chains of shackles that had come practically out of nowhere.

"What?" She exclaimed in surprise, and a second later, more of those chains emerged, tying her entire torso to the chair and her two angles to each other. The latter gave her a painful cramp, as her injured leg had stuck and rubbed with the good one.

What was happening? Who had done that?

The chair turned on its own a hundred and eighty degrees, making Lily's face look right at the door. Her captor, or who she supposed this was, was standing there staring at her with sternness and deep concentration through the transparent glass of her thick glasses.

"You must be Lily," Cody commented somewhat harshly, approaching her without taking his eyes off her. Lily was looking at him too, with a combination of confusion and mostly anger.

"Are you doing this?" She questioned sharply. "They are not illusions, are they?"

"They are, but not like yours."

Cody stood right in front of the girl, analyzing her carefully. He could see a little of the bruise still present from the blow her kidnapper had given her, showing under her dark hair that covered part of her face. Cody noticed as well as the crutches that had leaned against the console. The skirt she was wearing wholly covered her thigh and, therefore, the bandage that wrapped her not very pleasant wound.

The next thing Cody noticed was much more horrible, and it scared him so much that he couldn't understand how he hadn't seen it at first: the two bodies lying on the ground, each shot in the head. Both in security guard uniforms, both obviously dead.

He was tempted to look away. He didn't want to have those horrible images in his head; the perfect recipe for a good nightmare. But it was late, well the image of their faces stuck against the pool of their own blood would not be quickly erased from his head. He decided then to turn entirely towards Lily and try not to look or think of anything else.

"Are you here with Leena Klammer? Why are you helping the woman who kidnapped you?"

Lily was silent for a moment, but then gradually, her aggressive expression softened, abruptly changing to a look full of anguish.

"I didn't know what else to do," she whispered almost painfully as if she were about to burst into tears. "She is not a girl as she seems. She's totally crazy! I thought she would kill me. Please help me..." She cut off her words abruptly, letting out a deep snort of exhaustion and perhaps frustration. That supposed fear and anguish, which for a second Cody was very close to swallowing, was gone in just a flash. "You know what, Cody? I'm too tired, and possibly high for so many drugs that crazy woman has given me, to play that now."

Cody didn't get much of a chance to think about how rare that abrupt change in attitude was, even despite what he had read in the file about her that Matilda had taught him. All his attention abruptly turned to one thing: the way she had called him.

"How do you know my name?" He murmured, quite confused.

After seeing what that girl had supposedly done in the past, one of his theories was that she could possess telepathic abilities. With that, it would not be so strange if she discovered some information about him. But... he hadn't thought about her name at the time, or not unless he realized it. Also, wasn't he supposed to have a specially placed protection on his mind to prevent such things?

Cody began to feel nervous... and perhaps more than that.

Lily, for her part, smiled, satisfied with his obvious reaction.

"How do I know the name of the scary little Cody Morgan who's afraid of falling asleep? People's fears and worries are the easiest I can perceive, and both are screaming loudly from you." Her smile widened even more, drawing a rather wicked grin on that tiny, supposedly innocent face. "What exactly were you planning to do by coming here? You aren't a hero, Cody... You're just a bunch of insecurities and horrors..."

Had she said fears and worries? Cody immediately remembered from just moments ago his reaction to seeing the bodies of the security guards. What had he thought of at the time? What was it that bothered him when he thought about his nightmares...?

Cody felt at that moment how a long, heavy hand was placed on his right shoulder, squeezing it tightly. Next was the sound of heavy, painful breathing coming right from behind him. He turned quickly, and then he saw it: that tall, thin, dull-skinned being, smeared over his gaunt face without any trace of hair, with his eyes sunken as if they were only empty sockets, in whose darkness two small white eyes appeared devoid of any trace of humanity or emotion in them. The creature's wrinkled lips curved into a smile even more hideous than Lily Sullivan's.

Cody let out a small cry of terror and quickly backed away, staring in disbelief at the figure in front of him. The creature approached him with slow steps, hunching its torso to one side and its head to the other, still looking at him. Its long arms fell to its sides, writhing as he advanced. Cody could hear the sound of its bones cracking and thundering.

"No, it can't be," Cody muttered, noticeably panicked. Without noticing, he tripped over the body of one of the guards as he backed away, falling to the floor in a sitting position; in one of the reddish puddles. "You no longer exist, I eliminated you!"

The creature let out a loud screech at once, and dozens of dark moths flew out of its mouth and began to fly at it. Cody closed his eyes and raised his arms, trying to protect himself from the animals. He felt them collide with him, fluttering in his hair, and even seemed to feel that one of them was biting the skin of his hands. The monster abruptly lunged at him, crossing the distance that separated them in less than a second. He took him by the arms and pushed him to the ground. When Cody opened his eyes again, he found himself face to face with the long look from the worst of his nightmares, staring at him from above, still with that long and grotesque smile. That thing extended its face to him until it was right next to his ear.

"I am... always... with you..." It whispered in a hoarse, exhausted voice that left Cody petrified.

Then the creature wrapped her two long, slender arms around him and pressed its cold, rough body against it. And little by little, Cody felt himself sinking into that grayish skin, being enveloped by it little by little as if it were a pupal cocoon.

"No!" He began to scream desperately, trying to get the thing off him, but it was impossible to do so.

That was an illusion; that wasn't real. That image had been invented by his subconscious many years ago based on the appearance of his biological mother dying of cancer, something his young mind had not been able to understand. And in those moments, he had not created it, nor was he asleep, so there was no way it was there. His logical side knew it and was yelling it loudly at him. But even so, he couldn't help himself. He couldn't push the thing away. He, a supposed expert in illusions, could not get rid of one as strong as that.

And there he was, writhing in terror on the ground as if he were a nine-year-old boy again, without understanding what was happening to him. No monsters or moths were stalking him. Only Lily Sullivan, who a while ago had managed to get up from the chair because, before such a scene, Cody had been unable to continue maintaining the chains that held her. The girl stood next to him, leaning on her crutches, watching with amusement as he writhed, staining his clothes with the blood on the floor.

"I may not be able to make my illusions real like you, but I don't need them to be. I just need you to believe they are... Still, I am surprised to see what that woman told me was true. There are more like me in these parts." Then he snorted wryly. "Although, hardly a being as pathetic as you could be considering my equal..."

Her radio rang again at that moment.

"We're getting to the exit! Where are you going?!" She heard Esther's voice echo, pulling her out a bit from the luscious scene she was contemplating.

"I'm coming," she replied reluctantly, pressing the button to open the communication and then snorted in annoyance. "Apparently, we wouldn't have enough time to get this over with. I'd like to stay and talk, but I'm in a hurry. Have fun."

While Cody felt that he was wholly absorbed by that creature above him, being totally immobilized and with difficulty breathing, Lily began to head to the exit as the rhythm of her crutches allowed her. She would leave that illusion active until she was at a safe distance, and she would have to deal more with not being seen than with torturing this stranger. She was partly pleased with the idea of ​​leaving that individual alive for now. Perhaps they would meet again, and he could show her what else he was capable of, and she would do the same...

END OF CHAPTER 42

Author's Notes:

-The description of the creature Cody sees at the end of this chapter is from the Canker Man's monster, originally from the film Before I Wake of 2016.