Her skin had gone pallid, almost yellow. Bruised shadows bloomed beneath her eyes. Her cheeks formed gaunt hollows, so tight I could practically see her skull. But her smile didn’t change. It remained soft. Familiar. Disarming. Welcoming.

  “How was school today, sweetheart?” she asked, voice honey-sweet and warm in all the ways her appearance wasn’t.

  My pulse hammered in my ears.

  She stepped closer.

  I noticed for the first time that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her bare feet were caked in dirt, black grime creeping up her ankles and onto her calves. Sometimes my mom liked to work barefooted in the garden—insisted it “grounded” her—but she’d never track that much dirt into the house. She liked things neat, orderly, and clean.

  I tried to step back but couldn’t.

  “Did you finish your homework?” she asked, tilting her head just a little too far to one side. Her eyes were sunken pits now, but her voice was pure nostalgia. “Your friend is coming over—he’s almost here—and you need to finish your homework before he arrives, Danny. Mrs. Mitchell emailed me, you’ve got a report due on the security features of your temporal pocket dimension.”

  “This isn’t real,” I whispered, voice trembling. “You’re… You’re not real.” I shook my head in denial. “There’s no one coming over…”

  “Yes he is, honey.” She smiled wider. Too wide. “In fact…” she cocked her head to the other side. “I think I hear him now.”

  Something shifted behind the sofa.

  A backpack slid off the coffee table on its own.

  The cave beyond the sandstone walls exhaled, cold and damp.

  And behind my sweet, familiar, nightmare-mother, two silver pinpricks of light blinked open and stared straight at me. I still couldn’t see the thing they were attached too—just a writhing mass of shadows—but the eyes were unmistakable.

  My mom moved.

  One second, she was standing by the couch. The next she was a blur streaking across the carpet, her limbs distorting and lengthening as she barreled toward me.

  The familiar lines of her features smeared like wet paint, pulling into something masklike and wrong. Her skin turned bone-white, lips splitting open, widening until her mouth stretched almost ear to ear. Teeth pushed out of her gums in uneven rows, sharpening to points as her jaw unhinged. Her eyes swelled, ballooning into huge, black voids with pinpricks of silver at the center of each. Her neck kept growing—too long, too thin, creaking like an old extension lamp—and dark waves of hair brushed against my cheeks as she hit me.

  I barely had time to get my arms up.

  She crashed into my chest and drove me backward. I fell and my back slammed into the floorboards, which were suddenly cold, gritty stone again. The impact knocked every bit of air from my small eleven-year-old frame. She straddled my hips, pinning me to the floor. Her weight felt wrong. Too heavy for her body, like someone had parked a car on my pelvis.

  “Danny,” she breathed, inches from my face.

  Her breath reeked like spoiled milk and grave dirt.

  That was finally enough to snap the last strands of whatever power was holding me back.

  I sucked in a ragged breath and did the only thing that made sense.

  I raised a tiny hand and activated Hydro Fracking Blast.

  Power should’ve surged through me, unleashing a high-pressure wave of water capable of turning concrete into Swiss cheese. Something fizzled inside my chest, my power distant and weak, and a pitifully thin stream of water burped out of my outstretched palm.

  It was about as intimidating as a cheap Super Soaker. The off-brand kind, my brother and I would buy from the Dollar General with our meager allowances.

  The tiny jet hit Nightmare Mom full in the face, dripping down her stretched skin and razor teeth in a pathetic trickle.

  She blinked, unimpressed.

  “Well, that’s some bullshit,” I wheezed.

  I tried to summon a spell card—any spell card—but my fingers closed on empty air. No crackle of magic, no glowing rectangle, no Ace in the Hole to save the day. Just my small, shaking kid hands, empty and useless. That made sense, in the manner of dreams. My Relics were a part of me, but the Spell Cards weren’t. They were real, physical objects back with my body.

  I tried Frostfang Spire, and this time cold gathered in my palm. But instead of a towering spear of ice erupting from the ground, all I got was a sad little icicle the size of a pencil. It formed in my fist, weak and brittle, moisture slipping down my fingertips.

  Nightmare Mom grinned wider, teeth clicking together in anticipation.

  Her yawning mouth shot toward my neck.

  I moved on instinct and drove the icicle straight into her elongated throat.

  Despite its small size, the icy shard punched through rubbery skin and black blood poured over my hand in a hot, thick wash, splattering across my face and chest, soaking my Superman shirt.

  But my mom didn’t scream or wail.

  She simply looked down at the icicle jutting from her neck, then back up at me, that insane grin never wavering.

  “Y-y-you need to study for your test tomorrow,” she hissed.

  There was an odd studder there, but the voice was still my mom’s. Layered under it, however, was something else. A second voice, deeper and cold, speaking in a language my brain refused to process.

  Her hands snaked forward, fingers wrapping around my wrists as she squeezed.

  White-hot pain exploded up my arms.

  Her limbs were painfully thin, but her grip was all steel. I tried to twist free, but her hands didn’t budge, and my fingers tingled, going numb as blood flow cut off.

  Her eyes swelled, those silver pinprick pupils shrinking even further, until they were just dots in an ocean of midnight. Her grin somehow went wider still, splitting the skin at the corners of her mouth, revealing thin cracks that oozed more tar-black fluid.

  “I’m your mother, Danny,” she said sweetly. “You can tell me anything. You know that right? We’ve talked about this. You need to tell me where you are. What you’re doing. Why you’re keeping me out. You shouldn’t keep your mother out. I love you, Danny. Love you so much it hurts my insides.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Then she opened her mouth.

  And vomited into my face.

  It wasn’t normal puke. No half-digested mac and cheese, no bile. What poured out of her was a torrent of thick, cold sludge. It forced its way into my nose, my mouth, my eyes, tasting like rusted pennies and burned plastic.

  The world shattered.

  For a heartbeat I wasn’t in the cave. I wasn’t in my living room. I wasn’t anywhere. I was just a mind floating through an endless void.

  Then the void trembled and a torrent of images flooded into my head. A throne room with black floors and bloody walls, stitched together with skin from a thousand different bodies. A forest of dangling corpses swung overhead, suspended from meat hooks sunk into the ceiling.

  Flicker…

  A towering pyramid rising from a sea of sand, neon lights crawling up its sides like technicolor parasites.

  Flicker…

  A Roman legion marching to war along a massive stretch of highway, their armor gleaming, bloody red cloaks snapping behind them, their ranks and files as neat and orderly as anything I’d ever seen on a Parade deck.

  Flicker…

  A vast ocean beneath a tiled ceiling—something colossal moving beneath the waters. Figures in yellow hazmat suits trudged along catwalks, their faces hidden behind mirrored visors.

  More flashes.

  Faster. Faster. Faster.

  Things that might’ve been monsters if “monster” wasn’t too small a word. Non-Euclidean shapes that hurt my brain just looking at ’em—joints bending in angles that didn’t make sense, textures my eyes refused to focus on, mouths inside mouths inside mouths.

  Each vision hit like a hammer blow, trying to smash something loose inside me—my sense of self, my sanity, my soul. Whatever this thing was, it wanted in. It wanted to fill my head with its images, its truth, until there wasn’t any room left for me.

  Somewhere far away, I could still feel my body on the stone floor, the Nightmare Mother’s hands crushing my wrists. Her voice was a sing-song murmur threading through the endless, flickering slideshow.

  “You can tell me what’s wrong,” she said sweetly. “I’m your mother, Danny. You can tell me anything. Tell me your secrets. Tell me what you fear. What you hate. What will hurt you. Let me inside and I can make it all go away. You could be happy, Danny. Don’t you want that? To be happy?”

  I felt something tapping at my mind, like claws scratching at a window, testing its strength. A System prompt flickered at the edge of my awareness.

  You have temporarily resisted Mind-Siphon…

  You have temporarily resisted Nightmare Echo…

  You have temporarily resisted Identity Bleed…

  You have temporarily resisted Thought Leech…

  Although my Relics and Artifacts didn’t seem to be working right, my Grit was still stupidly high, especially for my level, and that seemed to be my only saving grace.

  “Not… today,” I growled.

  Pressure built behind my eyes, like my skull was being inflated from the inside. The visions hammered harder, frantic now, desperate to force themselves in. The casino. The corpses. The endless water. The untold horrors.

  I dug my heels in—not physically, but mentally. Reached for every stubborn, petty, spiteful part of myself and wrapped it around my mind like barbed wire.

  No, I thought.

  The single word rang out like the rapport of a rifle.

  No, you don’t get to move in. You don’t get to play house in my brain, mother fucker.

  Another prompt snapped into place:

  You have successfully resisted Eldritch Intrusion!

  The pressure broke.

  The visions shattered like glass, fragments of imagery dissolving as the world around me snapped back into focus. Suddenly, I was in the cave, lying on my back, gasping. The thing on my chest was still there, still pinning me. My face was slick with cold slime that steamed off my skin and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a faint, chemical sting.

  Her silver-pupiled eyes were wide with surprise now.

  “Danny,” she whispered, voice clipping in and out like a messed-up tape recording. “That’s not… you’re not… you should’ve—”

  My training kicked in.

  I bucked my hips hard, twisting to the side. In a real fight, you go for leverage, not strength—roll, turn, use your attacker’s weight against them. Even in a kid’s body, muscle memory was still muscle memory.

  The thing on top of me wasn’t expecting resistance.

  Her balance broke and she tipped sideways with an inhuman screech, her too-long neck flopping to one side, hands tearing free from my wrists as she crashed onto the floor.

  I scrambled to my feet, boots—no, sneakers now—slipping on slick stone. The moment her fingers lost contact with me, the room itself seemed to tear at the seams. The sandstone walls rippled like disturbed water, and the living room furniture warped and sagged, melting into the cave.

  The thing on the floor tried to rise, head rotating nearly all the way around on that stretched stalk of a neck, mouth yawning open.

  “Danny, don’t you dare storm off,” she choked. “I’m not done with you. We’re still talking—”

  I blocked out the words and ran, bolting for the tunnel, sprinting blindly into the dark. It didn’t matter where I was going. Anywhere was better than here. My breath came in ragged gasps, and my legs shook from the strain and adrenaline coursing through me.

  Another prompt swam across my vision.

  You have been Afflicted with Hypnagogic Amnesia! Recent memories feel hazy, unreliable, or strangely unimportant. You suffer reduced recall, delayed threat recognition, and a creeping certainty that whatever just happened probably wasn’t worth remembering.

  As the message faded, the world flickered and the cave disappeared entirely as I slammed back into my own body.

  I jolted upright with a strangled yell, my hand flying to my throat, expecting to find black slime or curling fingers.

  But there was nothing.

  I was in my room, in my bed, nestled safely inside the store, far away from the dangers of the Backrooms.

  Everything’s fine, I told myself over and over again.

  Except, I didn’t feel fine.

  My heart was beating like a drum, trying to punch its way out of my chest, and cold sweat poured down my face and torso, plastering my T-shirt to my skin. My sheets and blankets were a tangled mess wrapped around my legs.

  “Just a dream,” I rasped. My voice sounded unconvinced, even in my own ears. “It was just a dream,” I said more firmly.

  This time around, it was easier to convince myself, since the sharp edges of the nightmare were already beginning to blur, the details slipping away like sand through a sieve.

  Everything felt fuzzy, dim, and there was a soft pressure behind my eyes almost as though there was another presence coiled around my brain, pushing against the back of my sockets. I sat there for a long second, breathing hard, and slowly the adrenaline spike faded, leaving behind that familiar post-fight exhaustion.

  Then my wrists started to throb.

  Frowning, I lifted my hands into the weak light spilling in from the bathroom.

  A pair of dark, finger-shaped bruises was already forming around each wrist. Four ovals and a thumbprint, perfectly spaced, like someone with vice-grip hands had pinned me down and squeezed until the capillaries burst.

  I stared at them, baffled, trying to remember where they’d come from or how I’d gotten them. I couldn’t, which confused me even more. It was like I was searching for a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite find. I knew it was there somewhere, but it was just out of reach.

  “Huh,” I murmured, examining the marks more closely.

  I rolled my wrists experimentally. They were sore, but nothing felt broken. No lingering debuffs popped up, no status notifications, no creeping afflictions flashing away in the corner of my vision.

  My gaze drifted and a memory slipped into focus.

  Theo.

  The Food Court.

  Vamps everywhere. Close-quarters fighting. Grabbing me. Slamming me. Hurling me into a table.

  Yeah, that had to be it, I told myself. Must’ve happened during the brawl. Easy to miss something like that in the aftermath. Adrenaline could do some really weird shit to the human body. The only odd part was that the bruises hadn’t faded yet. They were superficial, and my Health Regen should’ve already taken care of ’em already.

  For some reason, though, the inconsistency barely registered.

  Just another weird thing in an endless parade of horrors. The bruises didn’t feel ominous. Just a little tender and painfully ordinary. The kind of thing that would fade in a day or two. Hell, they’d probably be gone by morning.

  I dismissed them without another thought.

  A yawn split my face as exhaustion crashed down on me in a heavy wave, and I flopped back onto the mattress, adjusted the chaotic tangle of bedding, then did my best to get comfortable again, the nightmare already bleeding away. The only thing left was a tight knot in the pit of my stomach that refused to leave—like a gut instinct trying to warn me about some lurking danger.

  I did my best to ignore it.

  I tossed and turned for a few minutes, first trying my left side, then my right, before finally adding another pillow beneath my head and lying flat on my back, knee cocked out to one side. It was useless. Every time I found myself on the edge of real sleep, something yanked me back to the surface and forced me to start the whole tedious process all over again.

  Left side. Right side. Flat on my back.

  After half an hour, frustration finally won out and I sat up, grinding my palms into my eye sockets. It was clear that sleep wasn’t on the menu. Not tonight, anyway. And if I wasn’t going to get any shuteye, I might as well do something useful.