Miss Ham and Eggar (pt. 2)

(Another 100 Horrors published a 100 word version of the first part of this story. Yesterday I posted the full version of it as it was originally written. This is the 2nd part.)

Ever so briefly she was in that place between dreaming and being awake and heard the voice clearly.

“Even the innocent. Especially the innocent.”

Then she was wide awake.

She didn’t remember the dream in any detail and she had the feeling that she should leave it at that.

Dana Eggar lay in her bed and felt her chest rising and falling with each deep breath. The familiarity of her room was comforting. Even though she knew without looking at the clock that she was in the deep end of night the room bore testament that the moon must be close to full and hanging in a cloudless sky. Dana never closed her curtains and the moonlight rushed in the window and cut her bed cleanly in half between light and dark.

She was trying not to think as it would just make it harder to get back to sleep. She more felt than saw the fluttering of the moonlight as if a large flock of geese had flown between the moon and her window.

She ran her hands through her hair, stretched her neck and adjusted the pillow under her head. Her hands looked featureless in front of her face.

She waggled her fingers in the darkness and her eyes ran down the length of her arm to her elbow and then back again. She was almost transfixed by how foreign this appendage suddenly looked and she found herself enjoying watching her hand twist and flex in the darkness as if she was hanging it out the window of a speeding car.

A smile crept slowly across her face and she felt like a baby examining her limbs for the first time.

After a few more moments she sunk her head back into the pillow and realized that she would have to be getting up soon and it was time to get back to sleep. She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of any lingering thoughts.

But there was movement above her face. She could feel it and the bed rocked ever so slightly in time with it.

She opened her eyes and saw her hand once again twisting and turning in the air above her.

She had occasionally lost the feeling in her arms before, somehow cutting off circulation and being forced to wait those strange minutes until the blood rushed back into it and once again gave her control. That’s what this felt like… sort of.

Except instead of laying limp next to her body her hand was alive and moving without her permission. Floating above her as if moved by invisible strings.

She remembered the playground.

She had not allowed herself to think about since that day. She had kept the kids inside, despite their loud and pointed complaints, ever since and had not even ventured back there to take a look herself.

Her hand stopped for a moment.

Then it slowly waved at her.

She wanted to scream but her face remained a frozen mask. She willed herself to take back control of her arm and for a few moments it twitched and trembled until finally it fell down at her side and into the light.

She felt the tingle of blood rushing into her fingers like she did when her arm was ‘waking up’. She opened and closed her hand and let out a long scared sigh.

Her other arm calmly lifted up, reached over and started to pull her hand back into the shadow.

Her eyes opened wide and she felt a wild fear begin to well up in her throat as her hand gripped the bedspread tightly. A lifeline. Clawing at the sheets to stay in the light that had traveled such a long way to make its way into her quiet room. Every inch that her hand retreated into the dark was another inch that went dead to her until finally both hands moved and swayed above her.

She wondered why she couldn’t scream. Maybe she had never actually woken up. She clung to the hope that this was a bad dream and she would wake up with a start and turn on a light and never turn it off again.

She was smiling. She didn’t want to smile but a smile hung on her lips nonetheless.

Her hands floated down like leaves off a tree until they lay touching her face in almost a caress.

“Even the innocent.”

She felt her mouth form the words and she heard them pass through her lips but they were not hers.

Only her feet, sitting out from beneath the covers and fully in the moonlight, started to thrash when her thumbs began to push down in the corners of each eye socket. Her mouth would not give her the scream she wanted so badly. She felt the warm blood start to trickle down the sides of her face as her eyeballs bulged and strained against the fingers that dug deeper into her skull.

She felt everything.

Her legs twitched wildly until finally her thumbs were completely inside her head, her eyeballs hanging by wet red tissue and resting on her cheeks.

She was dead by the time her mouth once again spoke.

“Especially the innocent.”