OCTOBER 2011 PROMPT: Worst Nightmare

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OCTOBER 2011: YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE

This month's prompt is simple enough. They all have to do with your character's fears. Fun, right?! Remember to claim your points in the site shop for this after you've posted your entry. Remember - its points per player not entry, but you're welcome to make more than one entry.

[phephe]

OPHELIA FRANCES CARLYLE'S
NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET!

Sitting on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, Phe stared intently at the darkened doorway that lead into the rest of the house, her clammy hands locked together in front of her mouth, rocking steadily backwards and forwards, occasionally hitting her head against the wall behind when she rocked a little too far. It was amazing how a few days of complete insanity could reduce a person like Ophelia Carlyle to the rocking wreck she was right now. 'Insanity' was the only word she could think of right now that covered the events of the past few days and even then it didn't quite fit what had actually gone on, what was still going on. No one had believed her when she had first said that all the Elm Street stories weren't just stories. They were real, Freddy Krueger was real, so real, in fact, that the rest of her friends were dead. She'd only really survived out of pure luck, but she didn't know how much longer that luck would last for her. Even her friends hadn't believed her until they started to dream about him too.

She had tried to rationalise it all at first: that her overworked brain was just play tricks on her or that Freddy Krueger was just a representation of how she regarded work at the moment...but that was before the mysterious injuries, injuries she had gotten in her dreams that had somehow managed to appear on her physical being. Her brain wasn't playing tricks on her, Krueger wasn't just a representation, he was real. Everyone outside of her close circle still didn't believe her. The police were all set to arrest her until they came to her one day after a café owner called them, having had her 'flip out' and 'cut herself'. They thought she was just crazy, having run out of friends to kill and started turning on herself. It was because of the 'crazy' aspect that they couldn't arrest her, but they could commit her. Yeah, like she was going to risk that happening. If she left them commit her, they'd just try filling her up with drugs, drugs that would calm her down, drugs that would make her sleep and she definitely didn't want that, so she ran.

She froze as the shadows beyond the doorway seemed to shift, the light in the middle of the kitchen ceiling flickering. “It was just the light,” she muttered, trying to sooth herself. “Just the light playing tricks...” she added, all the while her body giving away that fact that she didn't believe herself: her heart was pounding like crazy in her chest, her eyes stung from trying to keep them open and straining to look into the darkness and her breathing was getting more uneven and agitated the more she thought about what was beyond that doorway. He'd said she'd have no where to run, that she'd be lead back to the house whether her conscious form wanted it to be there or not. That's how she had ended up on the kitchen floor of the house she had tried to escape. She had come back. She hadn't wanted to, the remaining shadows of the rational part of her mind trying to overbear the rest of it, although, having little to no effect at all. She rested her head back against the wall now, eyes fixed on the door. She had never had a worse idea before now...

Resting her head against the wall had given her a moment of relaxation, a moment Krueger took a thorough advantage of, settling her into a deep sleep almost instantly. Now, when her eyes snapped open, she was sat on the floor in the corner of the boiler room, Krueger's territory, his playground. She clapped her cold hands over her mouth just as a gasp tried to escape from her lips before scowling heavily and proceeding to slap herself in the face and tug at the various stitches that covered her body from fixing up the mess Krueger had already made of her. “Wake up...” she hissed at herself, whacking herself repeatedly over the head with her first. “He can't touch you if you wake up...” she continued to hiss, sounding a little more desperate the second time she spoke. “Oh...can't I?” Trying to wake herself up had somewhat distracted her from what was around her and she hadn't really acknowledged the tell tale footsteps and the scratching of metal on metal as Freddy rounded the corner up ahead of her.

“I really beg to differ, Ophelia,” he went on, a smirk settling on his scarred face as he made his way towards her, dragging his claws along the metal railing. “You've been a very...naughty...girl.” He accentuated the last three words with an extra loud clang of his claws against the railing. Phe shook her head defiantly as she got to her feet. “Shut up,” she returned, the hissing still apparent in her voice as she tried to cover up her fear. “Don't you remember? You killed all of your friends,” he teased, that perpetual smile of his still on his face. She doubled over and clutched her head as images flashed before her eyes, filling her in the spaces where she had watched Krueger get to her friends. She shook her head again, fingers wrapping tightly around the railing behind her as she straightened back up, seeing that Freddy was only a few feet away from her now, but seemed to have stopped approaching...for now. “That's a lie,” she rasped, her voice full of conviction. “It's all lies...” she added, her tone not as strong suddenly.

“That's the thing though, isn't it? You're just telling yourself it's all lies, trying to...make it all go away,” he oozed, imitating her desperate voice from before over the last five words. More images flashed through her head, causing her to yelp in pain and double over again, images that were only possible had she actually been the one to kill them. “No...” she breathed as she stared at the floor, still doubled over, shaking her head in disbelief as more images bombarded her subconsciousness. “I can't have...” She grimaced and lifted her head to look at Freddy once more, who was now only a foot away. Somehow, his proximity didn't seem to matter to her any more. If what she was seeing, what she was apparently remembering was true, she didn't want to exist any more. “I couldn't have...” It was then that Freddy closed the distance between them, placing his non-clawed hand under Phe's chin, making her stand up straight to face him.

“Oh, but you did,” he taunted, lowering his hand again, only to wrap his fingers tightly around her right wrist. “You and I are one and the same,” he observed as he lifted her hand, bringing the sight of her own clawed fingers into her view. She slowly started shaking her head before suddenly snapping. “NO!” she shouted, frantically yanking her wrist out of his grip and backing away quickly, not giving her hand a second look, only assuming it was an illusion when her cold, bare fingers gripped the hot metal of the railing that was behind her, stopping her from actually just falling to her demise. “Come now, Ophelia, don't be childish. You know it's true,” he teased, raising his clawed hand and wiggling his fingers. Without looking back and completely despite her better judgement, Phe bolted away from Freddy. She knew she couldn't get out of the boiler room. It didn't work that way, but she could at least try and put some distance between herself and her nightmare.

She was running along a different walkway now, her feet faltering slightly as she seemed to fall over herself. She swerved around corners, not looking back, not knowing where Freddy was, but not really caring at this point either. With every new piece of metal she touched, she found her skin starting to burn, one of the worst points being when she overshot a corner and one side of her face pressed against a heated panel, having to quite literally tear herself away from it. Finally reaching the end of the walkway, she jumped down, faltering again as she landed and taking the time to look up at the walkway above, checking around for any signs of Freddy. That was another one of her worst mistakes ever, comparably worse than the one that had meant she had wound up here in the first place. She hadn't thought in that moment that it would be the last mistake she would ever make. Eyes fixed on the walkway above, she didn't even start to correct herself as she began running again and flung herself round a corner...right onto Freddy's claws.

The cold metal had sliced straight into her abdomen with very little effort, something possibly comparable to a hot knife in butter, that she barely had the time to register pain, a slight gasp escaping her lips and an instantaneous numb sensation washing over her body as she stared at Freddy, through Freddy, her eyes falling briefly into the unseeing. She blinked slowly, trying to best to rid her sight of the grey fuzz that was starting to draw in from around the edges. In the haze that was quickly forming before her very eyes, Freddy's visage shifted between that of his usual scarred and burnt exterior to that of her own, smirking devilishly, her pale face spattered with fresh blood, even accounting for all the burns she had received on her way down here. “Goodnight...” he began, his voice and his image melding with her own, presenting themselves as one as the words formed in the air, shifting forward slightly so his mouth was beside her ear. “...sweetheart...”

* * * * * * * * * *

“In the early hours of this morning, some of the city's finest were called out to the residence of Miss Ophelia Carlyle, one of the main suspects in the investigations surrounding the recent mysterious disappearances and murders that have hit the city. The call, which alerted them to a very obvious problem, simply resounded the young lawyer's panicked mutterings of 'they're dead, they're all dead', followed by a harrowing laugh that officials say couldn't possibly be her own. Upon arriving at the scene, officers searched the house for any signs of Miss Carlyle, finding her lying in the middle of floor in the basement. Officials can't give any full statements at the moment, but it is known that they found the young woman with four large blades embedded in her abdomen, attached to a glove which was on her own hand. There are obviously many questions flying around at the moment, the police department seemingly divided as to whether Miss Carlyle did this to herself or if there was something they missed in the first place...”