Heart of Magic - 1st chapter

Aislinn tried to open her eyes but found the task almost beyond her. She felt drugged and sleepy, not tired sleepy but groggy sleepy like she had a hangover from the night before, which seemed strange to her, since she had never touched a single drop of alcohol in her life.

Her eyelids felt like rocks, or like thin sheets of ice frozen over the tops of her eyeballs as she tried to lift them open. Slowly she pried her eyes open having to actually resort to using her fingers. She wished she hadn’t for in front of her, she saw nothing but a grey fog that was so thick she could make out no shapes or any other colours. She panicked for a moment thinking that she had gone blind and could no longer see but she knew where her lamp was so she slowly reached out to the side of her hoping to encounter cool brass but instead she felt a very icy and uneven surface. In fact it felt very much like rock. The feel of it reminded her of gravel but it was not smooth and lumpy and the stones felt much bigger than those normally used in gravel. As she breathed in and out she could smell and she realised with a lurch of her stomach, taste the air around her. If you could consider air to age, this air had to be ancient. She couldn’t be sure of course but the air was like what could be found in a sealed underground tomb. Musty and dead but at the same time smelt of damp and decaying earth.

Taking her hand away from the wall she moved it through the fog (making no apparent impact on its density) to the floor and again felt the same surface. I am sitting on a rocky floor, not in my bed, so maybe I’m not blind but just in another place, another very foggy place. This thought calmed her a bit as being blind had recently become one of her worst fears as she would constantly be in the dark that she had begun to fear and hate. However on the tail of the uplifting thought that she wasn’t blind came another, so where the hell am I and how in the heavens did I manage to get here and oh god this grey fog stuff is making my lungs ache! It was true the fog was making it harder to breathe and not just because of the smell, the air it’s self felt thick and heavy so that she almost felt it pressing in upon her. She had no idea if this ‘fog’ was dangerous or had long-term effects so she tried taking as shallow breathes as possible. It seemed she was ever practical even when on the edge of hysteria she thought with depression and a good deal of confusion. Aislinn had to believe the event now happening to her was a dream that way her sanity was reasonably safe from theft.

Slowly she pushed her way up from the rocky floor and through the dense otherworldly fog. She couldn’t see anything through the fog, not even when she held up her own hand in front of her face. She reached out to her right to put her hand and against the rocky wall and a stray thought came into her head, that to find your way through any maze you should put your hand against the right hand wall and keep it there until you come to the exit. This method would always allow you to find your way out. Dismissing this apparently irrelevant idea Aislinn slowly made her way through what she assumed was some sort of tunnel. With each step she fought to control her panic and to hold on to her sanity. The ‘fog’ seemed to be resisting her advance through it. She had another one of her many stray thoughts and believed that this must be what it would be like to walk through a place that had very high gravity.

She seemed to go on like this forever, but she had no sense of time in such an environment. She could have been walking for minutes, hours or even days and she doubted she would realise it as nothing changed and everything was still around her, this seemed like such a cliché and she laughed out loud slightly hysterical, but no sound actually came out of her mouth. She felt bile and panic form a lump in her throat and only be sheer will power did she manage to continue to place one foot in front of the other. She kept hoping that this was some kind of dream but it all seemed so real. A dream would explain her confidence and her ability to soldier on. She just wasn’t a brave sort of person normally.

Aislinn had been listening to the sound of her own steps and ghostly soft breathing for quite awhile which had also been the reason that she realised she had on only her socks. Her softly clad feet made but a whisper of sound against the solid surface beneath her feet. Strangely however her feet were only a little bit sore from walking nearly bare foot for so long. However because she knew the sound her own soft steps made she was automatically aware when this sound changed. Well not changed exactly but became slightly drowned out. She stood stock still, turned her head toward the way she had come and listened intently. At first she thought maybe she was imagining things like some crazy person driven mad by loneliness and the obsessive feeling that everything will always go wrong if it can. But then she heard the noise again and it was a steady rhythmic noise that gradually grew louder and then almost thundering and like a doe frozen in the head lights with the certain knowledge of her own death she stood there waiting for her destiny.

As Aislinn stood there the fog slowly cleared she felt a slight lifting of weight as if someone had started waving a fan back and forth to dissipate the grey fog. When it cleared she got her first look at her surroundings and also what was causing the now thundering sound.

She was indeed in a tunnel about four foot wide and nearly seven feet high, she would have guessed. The walls were made of rock but the colour was odd it was a sort of muddy red. The closest she could compare it to would be like well worn building bricks, but a bit darker or maybe dirtier was the right word. She took all these details about her environment in, in a heart beat and they were pushed just as quickly to the side as unimportant compared to the source of the riotous noise heading toward her.

The creatures seemed to appear out of thin air and were rushing towards her in what appeared to be a semi military like march pace. At only 30 feet away from where she stood she could tell they were the most disgusting, repulsive and plainly evil creatures she would ever see or imagine. Words like trolls, goblins, ogres and even demons went through her head but none of them seemed to fit. These were a hundred times worse than the trolls from the TV programme the ‘10th Kingdom’, and at least fifty times more disgusting than the goblins from ‘Lord of the Rings’. There really was nothing in her whole experience that she could possibly compare these creatures with.

Their skin was sort of a mix of muddy colours, like wet autumn leaves compacted together and trodden upon many times. They had the most amazing amount of muscles and their skin seemed to gleam and drip with moisture in the fiery glow of the torches that some of them carried. The ones she could see at the front she estimated stood between six and six and a half feet tall. But it was neither their height nor size that froze Aislinn’s feet to the tunnel base but their grotesque faces. From what she could see (and she could see a lot since the creatures wore next to nothing) they had no apparent body hair, no eyebrows, no nothing. Their mouths and noses seemed to be the same appendage. The best word in the English dictionary to describe it would be a snout but it held only a slight resemblance to one. The ‘snouts’ started in the middle of their faces, they were almost as wide as the creature’s faces and were a triangular shape which pointed down toward the ground and just eclipsed where their chins would have been. She could just make out two elongated holes running down this snout. They didn’t have ears as such but small holes in the side of their heads which Aislinn could just make out and could only assume where used for listening. These creatures had no cloth to cover themselves with but they were sporting what could have been strips of leather or human skin? The strips formed a cross over their chests and held all manner of things which Aislinn could not even begin to imagine a use for. She guessed some weapons and others; she shuddered as a word came from deep in her mind to describe such odd implements. ‘Toys.’ As in the sort they would use to play with people to make them suffer. The creatures’ bodies bulged with muscle and glistened with moisture, they appeared to be coated in an unidentifiable mixture of filth. All these combined features would have been enough to pin her to the spot but it was their eyes alone, that captivated and horrified her at the same time. Their eyeballs seemed to be just resting on top of their sockets and the eyes themselves had no pupil but were glowing globes of brilliantly violent red like the tale lights of a car.

She noticed all these details within a space of a few seconds but it seemed like hours to Aislinn, as she stood there knowing that she was going to die.

She didn’t. In fact the creatures walked right through her as if she was not even there. She did not even feel a thing as she stood on the uneven, rocky floor. The shock of this and also the close up look at the disgusting faces before her made her throw threw herself violently to the left and to plaster herself back against the wall and continue to watch this procession walk by from a faintly more agreeable view.

The line seemed to go on forever and in her current state of mind she couldn’t even attempt to count how many went past. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t see her. This reassured her that they couldn’t possibly be real and were perhaps simply a part of some kind of vivid nightmare. She started making herself breath in and out slowly for she realised she had been holding her breath and was now trying to catch it again. She looked down at her feet as she did this and it was the first time she had done so since the first time the fog had begun to clear. Her eyes saw through her feet that were some kind of ghostly colour to the dirt and rock floor beneath. Looking at her feet was like looking at ‘Casper the friendly ghost’ and she felt like giggling insanely at this random idea. But she sobered as she realised that she was the one who was not real in this place. How or why were not questions that she had sanity enough to contemplate at that moment but strangely she was determined to answer them at some point. It was amazing to her the deference a dream or what ever this was, made to her characteristics.

Aislinn realised she had been holding her breath from the moment she had spotted the ‘creatures’ and upon this realisation she let out a great gasp for breath and began to panic, which was at last a response that she expected of herself. Oh my god can people hyperventilate in their dreams? Or am I part of someone else’s dream? Just as this thought crossed her mind she began to hear screaming coming from down the procession somewhere as yet unseen. To be cliché, it sent chills running up and down her spine, for it was like the person issuing such a sound had no sanity or even a single hope left, the thing that made it fight in such away. Aislinn would swear for the rest of her days that such a sound could only be issued from the mouth of a being with all the essence of rationality bled from them leaving only the base animalistic need for survival.

This screaming seemed to echo throughout the tunnel and along every nerve ending she possessed. Her body began to shake violently from head to toe and her legs became unsteady beneath her. She collapsed to her knees on the rough cave like floor as the scream seemed to disable all her senses and fuse with every cell and fibre of her body. She could feel the rough rock cutting into her bare knees. Everything was sharpe and clear around her even as her body seemed to be falling apart. Heat enveloped her and wrapped itself around her, probing under her skin like pins and needles slowly being driven into her. These things she felt and reacted to were so real and acute like they were really happing to her and were not just part of a dream.

Her vision faded and blurred again so the fog surrounded her, but the screaming never stopped, she felt dizzy and disorientated and realised things were changing around her. Time seemed to stop as her mind closed down to the reality that surrounded her to bring her to another one.

The last coherent thought that came to her was that this must be what it is like when you are burnt alive.


* * *


It is a strange truth that we remember our nightmares with much more clarity than our dreams. Yet it is also quite often someone will look back upon the past and see things in a brighter light than what was shinning at the time. After such a nightmare as Aislinn had just endured, she would have expected to wake up screaming and drenched in sweat just like with all her other recent and unremembered nightmares.

This time she did not. She woke up feeling icy cold and was on her knees in the middle of her bed, with her hands pressed to her ears trying to block out a scream. It was exactly the same position that she had been in when in her dream. It took her a minute before she realised that there was no scream and slowly she removed her hands from her head, panting as if she had run some sort of race. Her mind began to kick into gear as soon as her hands hit her bed cover beneath her. A single conspicuous fact that could not be ignored flashed in glaring lights across her brain. That she remembered every single obvious and obscure detail of her nightmare like it had really happened to her. The colours of the dream world spun bright and vivid echoing within her confused and disorientated brain. The bizarre and frightening images of monsters and underground tunnels scared her witless and tears began to trail themselves down her face from her eyes without her consent or knowledge.

“No, it wasn’t real, it’s a product of an overactive imagination and reading to many novels” she whispered chokingly out loud trying desperately to convince herself. Trying not to cope with her thoughts she searched for a distraction and realised that her knees were feeling very sore, probably from kneeing in an awkward position on her bed for so long. She scrambled off the bed as quickly as she could and made a frantic dash for her bathroom. She saw nothing around her as she made the near mind less rush for the bathroom door. She didn’t even think about turning on any lights until she accomplished her aim. She yanked the old fashioned light pull flooding the room with a soft mellow light as the light bulb was covered and only a low wattage. It had been that way when she moved in and she had not had a chance to change it to the brighter type of light she had always preferred. She shut the door firmly behind her, cutting out the encroaching darkness of the hallway. She turned about and leaned back against the door like some kind of heroine in a horror film trying to shut out the thing that was after her or in this case it was merely the darkness that waited in the hallway, to envelope her and to take her back to her nightmares where monsters that had appeared so real waited for her.

Aislinn let her gaze wonder around her bathroom taking in the appalling but almost comforting sight at that moment of the previous occupant’s bad taste in décor. It seemed that they had a great affection for olive green. Nearly the whole bathroom was decorated in it. The bath tub sink and toilet were all in the same colour as were the walls. The only things that were different were the metal racks that were screwed into the wall over the bathtub and the plain white medicine cabinet that was just over the sink. As with all such units it had mirrors on its doors. The familiar sight of the extremely badly decorated bathroom allowed her to feel more like she was once again grounded in reality and that her monster had no power over her here.

When her perusal came to the mirror she stared at herself in shock. Her face was amazingly pale and drawn. She had large dark circles under her eyes where there had been none before she went to bed that night. Her hair also seemed to be standing almost out from her head. She looked both ridiculous and pitiful. Haunted she thought, like some sort of ghost was just behind her shoulder waiting to welcome her to its realm of partial existence. Aislinn stepped over to the mirror and placed her hand on the mirror as if she could touch and know the feminine like apparition that was reflected there.

The nightmare had disturbed and affected her a great deal more than any other she had ever had judging by her wraith light reflection. She desperately searched her mind for a reason why and realised that she had never really remembered her nightmares before except as emotions and thoughts. This nightmare had been like a memory or some sort of vision. It had been so vivid and the world which her imagination had created so real. What bothered her most was of course the electrifying scream that had invaded her senses. It had been otherworldly and terrifyingly familiar at the same time.

Aislinn tampered down her panic at the memory of the sound that had caused such a sensory overload. She was a very passive person normally, the type of person you could yell at but would get no reaction from. She let people say what they want to her and then she would simply walk away and get on with it. She had until recently always been in control even if in the process she had let people walk all over her. The only thing she prided herself on was her control and her ability to remain passive under the most stressful circumstances. She refused to loose anymore of her control over a simple nightmare. It was a very vivid and strange one true but, so what. She was certain that other people had them and didn’t start hyperventilating.

To avoid losing her much valued self control Aislinn turned her mind back to the reason she had come to the bathroom in the first place, which was because of her sore knees.

She let her head fall down and let her gaze travel down her thin shivering frame till they came to rest upon her knees. For a moment time seemed to simply stand still as her eyes settled upon her knees, which were lightly cut and bleeding. She had little doubt that such gashes were made by cutting your knees on sharp rocks. Her mind once again frantically searched for some sort of rational explanation. It felt like dozens made flight through her brain but none were allowed to land as there was no futile ground that could support them. Shocked into a hypnotic state Aislinn walked blindly back down the short hallway to her bedroom. Not really certain of her own purpose she flicked the main light switch as she continue to walk into the room, only coming to a stop when her bloody knees hit the edge of the bed frame. Her hands moved the covers aside, seeking almost of their own accord something that could have caused damage to her knees. Aislinn saw all this happening almost like she was an observer in her own body. Everything was beginning to go fuzzy and it was then she realised that she was going to faint at any moment.

But she didn’t. Not because she found the strength to stop herself but because a light thump, like the sound of something hitting her carpeted floor startled her. Slowly she lifted her head out of the grey world that had started to enclose her within its folds from her frantic perusal of the bedcovers to stare across the bed at the laundry basket sitting innocently under the window. She blinked several times to shake off the lingering affects of her almost faint and slowly her gaze focused on an innocent looking piece of furniture.

It stood about two feet tall and was one of those thickly woven ones which was slightly narrower at the bottom and grew slightly wider as it got taller and then curved in at the top where the lid rested. However the lid was not on top of the basket, where it had been before she had gone to bed that night. It was lying askew, leaving the basket partially open. She was certain it had not been like that when she went to bed and knew for sure she had not touched it since she had awoken.

Her gaze drifted away from the basket when she noticed an odd smell that she had been oblivious to upon entering the room. The best she could think of to describe it was, mould, moss and bad eggs all mixed together. Even in her daze she was surprised that she had not smelt it right away as it was pretty overwhelming. Instinctively she put her left hand over her nose trying to block out the stench.

Although severely troubled over what was happening to her she was once again unpredictably not acting in accord with her normal instinct, which was to flee all hint of danger. Normally she would already be running but it felt as if she were some kind of puppet and another was pulling her strings directing her where they wanted her to go. This being the case Aislinn slowly felt herself being turned to her left and toward the source of the over powering smell.

She found herself gazing at the wardrobe, which had been shut tight before she turned out the lights. The door was slightly cracked open about an inch or so and a light mist was being expelled from the opening. It was like some sort of ridiculously predictable scene from a B rated horror movie where some ditzy girl was killed within the first five minutes and she felt like she was now that girl in the movie. Compelled by god knows what to do stupid things like walk toward the rattling door or in this case open the wardrobe door wide. Again she had the feeling of being a spectator in her own body as she took but a step toward the door.

A step was as far as she got before the light went out. It didn’t just turn off as if there had been a power cut, but flicked a few times before the bulb burst and a light spray of glass fell upon the bed and scattered across the carpet. This incident managed to propel Aislinn from her ditzy blood bombshell state and although she was far from not panicking, the shock kicked her brain in gear. The brain which had seemingly refused to work from the moment she had gotten out of bed after her nightmare, perhaps even before then.

Aislinn was far from considering her self a brave person and knew she was a coward. She was also far from stupid and decided to get the hell out of her flat until the sun decided to make an appearance on the horizon. She refused to tackle what ever substance was causing her wardrobe in emit such a stench, alone in the pitch black.

She turned on her heel and made it but a small step toward the doorframe before she heard aloud crash followed by a cracking noise, which sounded like wood splintering. Her puppet strings seemed to be getting yanked on again as she made to turn around and face the source of the noise. She didn’t have the time to move more than an inch before something moist and heavy slammed into her back. She fell forward and smacked into the door jam head first. Pain exploded in her head making it throb and burn. As she sank down toward the carpeted floor she felt even more pain but this time it was several sharp stabbing pains in each of her shoulders. The blow to her head took away half her senses and she could not even contemplate that she was being attacked. In a state of bewilderment which she had been in nearly every minute since she awoke she reached up behind her to brush away the pain in her shoulder blades. At the same time she became aware of the unbearable stench that seemed to now surround her. Her hand didn’t connect with her warm skin but with something squishy, slimily and very lumpy.

As her hand connected with the odd surface she heard an odd sound echo right next to her ear which was half way between a cackle and a gurgle. Aislinn unsurprisingly screamed and yanked and tore as best she could at the strange surface she had encountered with desperation and blind panic. She didn’t know how but she managed to get whatever it was of her back and fling it against the far wall across the other side of the bed.

This was most definitely the best time to get the hell out of dodge. She was kneeing upon the carpet floor and knowing her life depended upon getting up and away from what ever was behind her. Trying to stand up, she found her vision was blurred and greyed the moment she achieved an up right position. She felt overwhelmingly dizzy and for but a few second she swayed on her feet trying to keep her balance and in that small space of time she swore she could feel her blood pumping through her veins carrying the chemicals that prepared her body for the well known flight or flight response. Aislinn imagined that this was what it was like to have insects running through the intricate transport system of her body. She felt so alive and aware of herself. She felt almost blind to her surroundings but only aware of what was happening inside of her.

Those few seconds she spent giving in to her injuries were to long. Being so disorientated she had unwittingly stood facing the direction in which she had thrown the creature that had attached itself to her back.

As in such cases like this terror inducing event every second that passed felt like a minute and every minute and hour. Her vision cleared and her body systems prepared her to run. The door was open and but a few steps away. It might as well have been as far away as the moon is from the earth, for in front of her appeared a small, diminutive, wraith like shadow. Lightning flashed outside as the storm raged on outside and began inside. When the bolt lit up the room with its sharp intrusive burst it left behind a woman who was on the verge of true insanity. Aislinn wanted to laugh and scream, cry and beat the walls with her fists until they were raw and bleeding.

The creature that had been momentarily illuminated by the intrusive stab of luminosity was even more terrifying than the monsters that she had seen in her dreams. Not because of the way it looked but more for the way it did not. There was little of it to see but what could be seen was petrifying.

The creature stood about half a metre tall and was nothing but shadow and lacked any normal humanoid features. It seemed to be made out of a sooty black cloud and blended and merged with the darkness around it. Or perhaps that wasn’t the right description Aislinn thought, it was more like it was made of and a very part of the darkness it stood in. The only feature’s that were distinguishable were two eyes that had no pupils. There was only eye whites and blood vessel streaking across them. The wraith like creature also processed a set of teeth. However there were no lips to guard them and unlike the creatures from her nightmare these teeth gleamed sharp and white in the brief flash of angry lightning. They stretched from what would have been on a human like creature from ear to ear. There was an amazing amount of them and they were all that Aislinn could focus on because like the lightning the rest of its essence seemed to disappear and blend into the darkness like it had never been.

It certainly didn’t look the way it had felt, that was for damn sure. The wraith had neither arms nor legs that were discernible, but by some deep instinct she was certain the little demon could move a great deal faster than her. Yet she realised that the creature was emitting a hissing like noise as if it were in some sort of pain. Previously she had not moved because she had been fatalistically certain that this creature would attack and kill her before she stepped out of the pitch black bedroom. Now she had a chance. With only that slight hesitation to think Aislinn bolted for the open bedroom door and into the darkened hallway of her outer London flat. The hallway was luckily carpeted which allowed her better purchase for her lightly clad feet. As she ran towards her locked front door Aislinn felt tiny pricks on her feet but ignored that and when she reached the door grappled with the door chain and catch. She was out the door before it was half open and yanked it shut behind her with a loud slam. Just before the wooden door smashed into its frame she heard an outraged shriek issuing from her flat. The Shadow demon thing had lost sight of its target and was not pleased.

Aislinn never lost momentum and instead of making for the lift she rushed for the staircase and raced down eight flights of stairs and out into the bitterly angry and battling night sky.