Freebie Mondays: Limbo (Prompt Novel Chapter 6)

For 2024, I have decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 6, the prompt was: “One aspect of every dream a character has comes true the next day.”

I sneakily tried to account for this prompt ahead of time by showing at least one other time when an aspect of the FMC’s dreams potentially became real the morning after. But it was the central focus of this particular chapter.

I was actually delayed in writing this because the day I was originally hoping to stream it, my hard drive died. It was such a sudden, out of the blue thing, it really caught me off guard. I had turned on my computer and started my day, and all the sudden things stopped working. That’s why there’s a massive gap in stream dates between Chapters 5 and 6 of this project.

Given the extra delay, it felt immensely good to get this chapter on paper, especially since I think it turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. In the next chapter, it will be time for the two main characters’ stories to finally collide!

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

“It’s like all the other ghost stories,” Constance’s voice whispered in her ears. Ira tried not to hear it. But like all the other times her sister spoke of these matters, her voice broke clean and clear through all her attempts to dilute or divert it. “To summon the Mawor, you say his name three times.”

Her fingers gripped the desiccated, spike-sharp circumference of a thick bush branch, and she gritted her teeth, ignoring the way the rough bark bit into her flesh. Sound filled her ears, relentless and desperate, and it took several moments for her to realize that it was the huff-puff of her own breath as it alternately filled and fled her lungs.

She pushed the branch aside and threw her body forward. Though she ached with fatigue and wanted nothing more than to curl on the cold,  unfeeling earth and cry into the leaves that coated the ground, she must continue her mad flight regardless of what lay in her path.

Too slow would be to allow him to catch her. And that simply was not an option.

“You must have said his name three times already during the course of this conversation,” she informed her sister with a roll of her eyes. Why was Constance always like this? Why did she cling to foolish old child stories and even more ancient wives’ tales? Why couldn’t she be interested in the latest memes like the rest of the children their age?

“It isn’t enough to say it in a sentence,” Constance retorted with exasperation. “You have to say it three times in a row, without pause or words in between. It’s a spell, Ira. A chant. That’s what makes the magic work.”

The memory distracted her from her mad flight. Her foot hooked against the dip of a protruding root, and her body crashed to the ground before she could halt. Her shoulder scraped the rough curvature of the root, but she managed to catch her head before it slammed against the hard-packed dirt on the other side of the obstacle.

For a moment, she could do nothing but curl into a ball and pant to catch her breath. Her lungs burned, and a low moan escaped her throat.

But she could hear the rustling of the grass behind her. On a windless, moonlit night, nothing could cause that sound aside from movement. She wouldn’t hear a twig snap; he wasn’t careless enough for that. But the noise was a reminder that she had to rise. She had to keep going.

Otherwise, the worst would come to pass.

“I thought you said that summoning him was how you wake him,” her young, innocent voice chided her sister. She remembered crossing her arms over her chest and shooting an acid glare in Constance’s direction, challenging the inconsistencies in her stories.

“You can wake him just by going into his territory,” her sister informed her, and it was her turn to roll her eyes.

She had done that by accident the first time. Not on a dare like most of the rest of the teenagers that occupied her town. There had been no campfire truth or dare to drive her to the edge of the forest by the old windmill. She hadn’t even realized she was in the area until she stumbled free of the tree line to see the old building looming stark along the dark horizon.

Now she couldn’t seem to shake him, no matter how far or how fast she ran. His footsteps always haunted her wake. She could hear him hissing and growling, preparing to bear his teeth and claws.

It was that more than anything that drove her back to her feet to pelt among the crooked trees and wade through the sea of fallen leaves.

She would rather her heart burst in her chest than ever have to face him again.

“It’s once you’ve already awakened him. That’s when you summon him,” her sister declared smugly. “It’s the only way to negotiate.”

“You can’t negotiate with a monster,” Ira retorted without realizing just how right she would be.

She thought if she went into the bathroom and whispered the name in the mirror, he would appear as a dim, hazy outline. Just like the stories about the Candyman or Bloody Mary.

At least she assumed that was how those summonings worked. She had never tried. She had never felt a need. And she had always dismissed the stories of the supernatural.

All save one.

Her bruised shoulder caught against a tree. Once more, the impact knocked the air from her lungs even as it altered her trajectory, spinning her ninety-degrees to face in a new direction.

She didn’t think about it. She didn’t have time to slow. She simply pushed off the tree, stumbled a step or two, then kept running.

In a small forest like the one beyond the windmill, every direction led to the exit. So long as she didn’t pick the direction that led toward him.

“Mawor,” her sister murmured with an odd, smug light in her eyes.

“Constance!” Ira hissed in a warning tone.

But her sister never heeded her. Why should she? She was, after all, the younger sibling.

“Oh Mawor, hear us!” Constance threw her arms wide and lifted her head as if she were about to participate in a prayer at church.

“Stop it!” Ira insisted, her voice growing shrill.

But even grabbing her sister’s arms hadn’t made her stop.

The sharp sound of a twig snapping filled Ira’s ears. It couldn’t have been the Mawor, so it must have been her, giving her position away with a carless placement of her foot.

But maybe he was taunting her. Maybe he wanted her to know how close he had managed to get when she altered her trajectory.

Panic made her pause and turn in a small circle, scanning every direction for the proper path. Even with a full moon hovering in the sky, and even with the trees bare of leaves, she had only the dimmest illumination available to her. It was strong enough to distinguish between the darkness of the trees and the darkness of the sky, but not enough to allow her to pick out a well worn path.

Especially not in a place so trodden by the curious that footprints could be misleading.

“Mawor,” her sister’s voice murmured mockingly.

“No!” she countered, as if she could interrupt the spell by sheer force of will.

Her heart leapt into her throat and pounded with such fury, she thought it might escape through her gaping mouth.

“Mawor!” her sister taunted.

“Constance!” she shrieked.

But it was too late.

Pick a direction! Any direction!

She froze. She couldn’t remember which direction she was facing when she started, but she had a strange sensation her pursuer was somewhere to her right. She shifted to the left and forced herself to move at full speed, heedless of the pain it caused her.

“Mawor,” her sister’s voice whispered in the vaults of her mind, completing her ritual.

Nothing had happened of course. No creature had appeared in the attic where they often spent the long summer afternoons of their youth. Nor had Ira seen any sign of the strange beast when she peeked into the mirror for the next several days.

But he heard well enough. And the summons had been successful, even if it had taken time for the creature to reveal himself.

Ira stumbled through a pair of tree branches that blocked her path. She tried to raise her arms in time to pull them aside, but she mostly just flailed her way through the veil.

The clouds must have shifted in the sky at the same time the bare branches parted. Because by some cruel twist of fate, the light grew brighter as she crashed into the clearing, illuminating the scene that waited for her in her memory as if it happened in the bright light of day.

Her sister had always described the Mawor as half-man half-tree beast. But the thing in front of her had feathers and scales. It was hunched over a heap on the far side of the clearing with its back facing in her direction.

Drawn by the starkness of her breath, or perhaps the sound of the tree branches snapping together in her wake, it lifted its head and turned.

Its body was tall and lithe, sinuous and muscular without a hint of fat. Its skin stretched taught and grey along its twisted form. It would have looked like a dead thing if not for the black feathers and glistening scale patches that protruded from the arms and backward legs.

It almost seemed as if it spread wings when it spun to face her.

Its head was shrouded in shadow, but its eyes were two, brightly glowing orbs, and its long ears flattened against its head as it opened its beak wide to hiss at her.

Ira jumped backward before she realized there was something more terrifying in the clearing than the beast.

The clouds shifted again and the moon glinted off of long, white shapes scattered across the leaves. In her soul, Ira wanted to believe they were stones, polished by steady rainfall and bleached by the sun. But the shapes were too familiar, too distinct to be mistaken.

The bones the beast was standing over had been picked clean. Ira wasn’t sure if they would have been more terrifying if bits of flesh still clung to their contours. But the exposure made them impossible to mistake.

A scream froze in her throat as the beast hissed at her again. Throwing its head backward, it sent a howl-screech toward the sky before it pointed its talons and fangs in her direction and lunged straight toward her.

*   *   *

Ira woke screaming.

She was glad Delmar had already departed for work. There was no one to witness her flailing or hear the desperation in her voice before she finally managed to silence the sound flowing from her throat. She would have felt terrible if she disturbed her husband. If he had to start another day weighed by her sorrow and despair, she didn’t know how she would make up for it.

He had been a saint lately, her rock through the roughest of storms.

But she couldn’t keep relying on him. Somehow, someway, she had to find the ability to stand on her own, even if she couldn’t put this whole sorry mess behind her.

When the mad panic calmed and she had straightened the bed sheets disturbed by the violence of her awakening, Ira checked the bandages wrapped around her feet. They were still pristine white on the outside, and that was a relief. But she expected to see her flesh caked with dried blood when she peeled them away.

Often the mere act of changing the bandages re-opened the wounds carved into her soles. Gently wiping with a damp cloth caused fresh blood to ooze from the barely knit flesh, and she could feel the pins and needles digging into her throughout the day as she tried to move about the usual client tasks without paying the past any head.

She tried to tell herself it was the day to day wear of movement, constantly standing on her feet, wearing the highest of heels and forgetting to tread lightly that kept her feet from properly recovering from the time she spent searching the woods for her missing nephew. But it had been several weeks now since her return – most of a month, as a matter of fact – and she knew there was no reason the scratches should still be so fresh.

It seemed that every time she saw the thing in her dreams, every time she tried to run from it, she woke to a fresh round of wounds.

So her heart was pounding in her throat and temples with such force, her relief was palpable when she peeled back the white gauze and found only the dull red slashes of scabbed flesh staring back at her.

Perhaps Delmar was right. Perhaps she was overthinking things.

She had almost convinced herself the old memories were just fresh trauma and old swirling at the point that they overlapped when the phone rang.

Ira dreaded to answer it; she had ever since she returned from the search. But she couldn’t hesitate or delay, especially since the caller ID blazed with Constance in big, bold letters.

If her sister was calling, it could only be news.

She held her breath after she said hello, waiting for the words to pierce her soul and send her spinning over the edge into the abyss.

But she wasn’t ready for the revelation her sister spoke. A hundred days of preparation wouldn’t have allowed her to soften the blow.

“Are they sure?” she breathed when her sister fell silent. To speak any louder would cause her voice to crack, and Ira was certain Constance would shatter if she heard even the slightest hint of weakness in her sister’s voice.

“They found them in the exact same spot, Ira,” her sister replied with a terse strain that made Ira shudder. “They’re talking about a serial killer and some potential for a dump site.”

“In the woods by the old mill?” Ira retorted, and her voice rose an octave. She wanted to say that no one went in there; but every child that grew up in her home town went in there at least once. She had. Her sister had. And Wendell clearly had at some point as well.

“Did I stutter?” her sister growled with some hint of the sarcasm she usually used to communicate with her sister. “They found the bones in the exact same clearing you found the others. They were laying in a different spot, but that doesn’t seem to matter. At least not according to the FBI.”

“And were they Wendell’s?” Ira was certain she disassociated when she asked the question. She felt a sudden distance from her body, as if she had drifted away and was looking down at her pale body clutching the phone as she held it to her ear.

She didn’t want to hear the answer. She wanted to time to freeze here and spare her from ever knowing the full brutality of the truth.

“They haven’t been able to identify the victim yet,” her sister replied, her tone mechanical. But Ira could tell that she was terrified of the same awful truth.

“Weren’t the bones we found back then adult?” Ira protested, searching for anything that would allow her to refute the awful potential reality now lurking on her family’s doorstep. “Don’t serial killers usually stick to the same demographic?”

“The skeleton you found was seventeen when it died,” her sister replied. Again she sounded terse, as if she had spent far too much time repeating the details of this case and wished to simply allow it to slip through her fingers.

“Wendell’s too young,” Ira insisted.

“Teenage is a wide range,” Constance retorted, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Ira could feel the pain in it across the empty miles and it made her wince. She closed her eyes, trying to dispel the desperate sorrow that welled in her gut, but it was impossible to stop hearing they found another set of bones echoing through the vaults of her skull.

“Do you need me to come up there?” she demanded. “I can be on the next flight out of here, Constance. I can be at your door by nightfall.”

“No,” her sister insisted without hesitation. She didn’t even pause to consider it. “There’s nothing you can do right now. Not until they make the identification. Open the ground of the clearing. Get some clue that allows the investigators to take real action.”

So we continue to wait, Ira translated silently. We stay in this damned limbo until someone finds something that jolts us out.

And the longer they waited, the more time that passed without news, the less likely they were to receive the good outcome they had all been praying for from the start.

“I’m here,” she said, uncertain what else she could possibly say. “Whenever you need me, all you have to do is say the word.”

“I know,” her sister whispered. Then she hung up.

Ira held the phone to her ear until the beeping filled her skull. She was still listening to the rapid tone that indicated a hang up when the front door to her house opened and her husband strode through.

For a moment, Ira was certain she had spent the entire day listening to that empty tone beep rapidly just to keep her sister’s words from playing on repeat in her brain. Her stomach rumbled, a stark reminder that she hadn’t ever eaten anything. But then she glanced numbly between the clock and her husband and realized that it was only noon. Lunch time. Lunch break.

Delmar gently peeled the phone from her hands and returned the device to its casing on the nearby table.

That was Ira’s cue to move. She uncurled from the ball she had formed during the conversation and breathed for what felt like the first time in hours.

“News?” her husband asked, his voice like a breath on the wind, as tenuous and uncertain as hers had been when she asked the same of her sister.

“Maybe,” Ira replied, but she sounded far away when she said it, as if she occupied the other side of the continent.

Her husband stared at her for a moment as if she had grown a second head, and it took far too long for her to realize he was waiting for the update, waiting to know what her sister said. By the time her lips started moving again, it looked like he wanted to shake her. But he was as patient as ever, staring at her in silent dismay until she managed to murmur, “They found bones.”

“In the same place as last time?” Delmar exclaimed.

It heartened Ira that he had the exact same reaction. It anchored her, made her feel distinctly less crazy than she had since the moment she picked up the phone. And this time, all she needed to do was nod to confirm her husband’s suspicions.

“Apparently they think it might be some kind of dump site,” she managed after a moment, numbly repeating the words and phrases her sister shared with her.

“They’re not Wendell’s?”

Ira noted the phrasing of Delmar’s question. His mind had already rejected the possibility that their precious young nephew could have been reduced to a skeleton.

But it has only been a few weeks, she reminded herself. Though given the place where they found the body, nothing would surprise her.

“They haven’t been able to identify them yet.” Part of her hoped they never would. Eternal limbo seemed like a better option than confirming Wendell’s death.

She wondered how long she’d continue to feel that way.

“Do you need to go?” Delmar asked without hesitation. “I can call the airport and get you a flight right now.”

Ira shook her head. “Constance doesn’t want me to go yet.”

Silence settled in the wake of her statement. Delmar likely didn’t know what to say. This had been a stressful situation for all of them, and hovering on the outskirts of it hadn’t made it any easier. Trying to live their normal lives and go about their day to day as if nothing had happened made everything feel surreal and dream-like.

Ira wouldn’t be surprised if that was the cause of her hectic and vivid dreams.

But she was suddenly glad her husband was home, despite the odd nature of a visit from him in the middle of the work day. Ira knew it was only a matter of time before he took note of the state of her, heard the rumbling of her stomach and noted the absence of a coffee mug. Then he would press food and drink upon her and force her to care for herself, even if only for an hour before he had to return to the car and his office beyond.

As expected, the clock ticked time silently, and Delmar began to move like a clockwork automaton, preparing a meal the two of them could eat.

Some unknown interval of time later, he set a hot mug of steaming coffee in front of Ira, shifted her chair so she was looking at it and set a plate down beside it.

The first part of the meal passed in the same silence. It wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t comfortable either. There was something strained about it, as if they were both waiting for the roof to fall on their heads.

Then at last, Delmar sighed and fixed his wife in the center of a serious look. “Listen,” he said softly, “I’m really sorry to bring this up on a day like today. But there’s a reason I came home when I did, and I don’t think I can neglect to mention it despite the circumstances.”

Ira arched an eyebrow. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder why he was home until this very moment. But of course, he hadn’t known about the phone call until he found her in her sorry state.

“What is it?” she asked.

“An old friend of mine has run into a bit of a pickle.” Delmar was careful not to name the old friend, but Ira could easily fill in the blank. There was only one person who had melted recently out of the hazy depths of his past.

Ira had never met Nala, but she expected that was about to change.

“I’m assuming you’re about to tell me the reason I should be involved,” she announced primly.

A faint smile split Delmar’s lips. “It’s a relief to see you’re as sharp as ever,” he murmured, his voice infused with the warmth of fondness before he grew sober again. “It’s a weird one,” he admitted. “And you’ve always been good with the weird stuff. Especially when it involves pattern recognition.”

Ira tilted her head, unable to hide her interest in the quandary. Delmar didn’t usually like to admit that weird things tended to happen around her. So if he was openly speaking about it, Nala must be in quite a pickle indeed.

“I know it’s bad timing…” he added when she didn’t offer a reply.

“It is,” she agreed with a sigh. For a moment, she deflated, unable to hold up her head even with the infusion of coffee and food her husband had provided her. But then she steeled herself.

Life, such as it was, must go on until someone delivered her from limbo.

“And I don’t think I can focus on anything today.” She would have to call her office, and that just might consume the last of the energy she had available. “But get me the details,” she added. “I’ll do my best to take a look at it tomorrow.”