Roxanne's House

Roxanne awoke in the night, screaming and terrified. For several heart-stopping moments, the pitch-black room around her seemed filled with shadowy figures, remnants of a dream that refused to release her once she'd opened her eyes. In her half-conscious state, Roxanne could practically feel their presence around her, the suffocating darkness allowing them to don awful visages in her mind's eye. It was only once she'd struggled free from the sweat-soaked blankets twisted around her body and managed to light a stub of a candle that she was finally able to breathe, the flickering glow an indispensable source of comfort and lucidity that drove the horrors from her room and back down into the depths of her mind. Shuddering, she quickly lit several more half-melted candles that laid scattered around her nightstand, basking in the little bubble of golden light that they offered. Another nightmare, the fourth this week. How long had it been since she'd last gotten a good night's sleep? She glanced blearily into a mirror, and the dark bags under her eyes told her that it had been a very long time indeed. Sighing, she sat up in bed and rubbed at her face, wondering why she'd been so terribly plagued with nightmares as of late. From long-forgotten childhood monsters to many-eyed sea-beasts to demented marionettes, she'd been tormented by every horror that her subconscious could muster. This one had been the worst of all, with how realistic the scenario had been. Despite having never been one for journaling, she'd begun writing her awful dreams down in the hopes that she'd be able to make some sense of them. Squinting in the dim light of the candles, she fished a small notebook and quill from her nightstand drawer and began to write.

It had all started normally enough, seeming like just another day out in search of game. As one of the settlement's hunters, Roxanne labored hard every day to push the colony just a hair's breadth further from the brink of starvation. No matter how many seals she brought in, no matter how many strange birds she caught, it never seemed to be enough. The colony's hunger was insatiable, and she saw the loss of every escaped animal in the thin faces and rumbling bellies of her neighbors each day. Perhaps the stress of her responsibilities had something to do with her nightmares, she mused. With farming efforts barely into their infancy and the Depravity's stores little more than a memory, every hunter bore the weight of Port Argentium's survival on their shoulders. 

In her dream, the day's hunting had gone very poorly indeed. The woods were empty of game, without so much as a flutter or song of a bird in the bare, bone-like trees. She'd walked for what seemed like hours, searching fruitlessly for any sign of an animal as the sun dipped closer and closer to the horizon. If she found nothing, her neighbors went hungry. Bringing home sufficient meat meant rewinding the clock, setting the settlement just a little bit further back on its neverending march towards starvation. As she'd roamed through the woods, her annoyance morphed into desperation, then despair. What sort of hunter was she, to walk through an entire forest without spotting a single beast? How would the others react if she returned empty-handed? As she dwelled on her self-pity, a sound had caught her attention. She'd turned and spotted a massive pig standing on a stump, staring at her with beady black eyes. It had been a proper pig like they'd kept back home, not the strange boar-like beasts of the island. The creature had stood there, meeting her disbelieving gaze with an empty, soulless stare as she'd nocked an arrow and taken aim. It couldn't have been more than five yards away, an easy shot for even an amateur archer. When she'd released the arrow, however, it had flown off-course and landed at the pig's feet. The pig had let out a squeak and ran, vanishing into the endless white woods in an instant.

Roxanne paused in her writing, remembering the sense of crushing defeat and misery that she'd felt. It had seemed that all the frustration and disappointment from all of her actual failed hunts had combined into a massive wave that had struck her all at once, leaving a bleak despair that she still felt the remnants of even now. Shaking her head, she lowered the pen to the paper once more, trying to forget the feeling. It had only been a dream, after all. Besides, what had come next was even worse.

She'd returned to the settlement then, exhausted and empty-handed. When this had happened before, her neighbors' sympathy had been almost enough to mask their clear disappointment. This time, though, they'd had little patience for her failures. As she explained how she'd missed the pig, the crowd had turned on her, demanding to know why she'd failed to bring them anything to eat. Her protests of bad luck and poor hunting had fallen on deaf ears as the crowd surged forward and seized her, dragging her to the center of town. She'd known then, with the awful clarity of dreaming logic, that she'd failed them for the last time. She hadn't brought them anything to eat, and the townsfolk's hunger had become overwhelming. They'd decided that she'd provide them with fresh meat one way or another, and were about to take matters into their own hands.

The rest of the nightmare had devolved into a hellish blur, the details of which Roxanne couldn't bring herself to put to paper. She remembered being slung upside-down like a carcass for butchering, remembered the way she'd screamed and begged for another chance. She could still see the way that the townsfolk had morphed, their heads turning into those of giant, eyeless vultures that cackled and shrieked as they'd begun to devour her. Shuddering, she recalled the way their beaks had torn into her, how their long butcher's knives had scraped across her chest. Thankfully, the exact minutiae of the nightmare were already fading from her mind, melting into a vague, formless fear that she could cram away into the very back of her mind. Only the ending of the nightmare remained clear in her mind, and her hand shook as she entered it into her journal. She'd been screaming, she remembered that. Screaming the whole while, until the very end. Out of easy-to-remove morsels on her body, one of the vulture-headed ghouls had reached long, pointed fingers into her mouth and plucked out her tongue, leaving her helpless to anything but watch silently as it threw back its head and swallowed the still-warm organ. That was when she'd woken up, finally escaping the prison of her sleeping mind.

Tossing the pen back onto the wax-splattered nightstand, she snapped the book shut with a firm finality, willing the nightmares to stay locked away within its cheap sheepskin covers. It worked, in a way. She'd never had the same nightmare twice. Sighing, she rose from her bed and peered through her curtains at the moon as it made its way slowly down towards the horizon. There were hours still until the sun rose, but she knew for certain that she wasn't getting back to sleep tonight. Lighting a few more candles to replace the ones that had gone out, she began to prepare her belongings for the day's hunt. She had a long day ahead of her, especially if she wanted to bring back enough game to keep the settlement alive. They probably wouldn't eat her if she failed, she told herself...but she certainly didn't want to find out.