Secrets Never Known

For the first time since she was a child, Anna was on her own when she entered sleep. As soon as the realization settled in her mind, her heart tripled in speed. Panic clawed at her stomach like a starving beast in a metal cage, ripping her sanity to shreds within seconds. In the moment it took her to realize she was alone, Anna was going mad and in her state, the irony of the situation was far from her mind. Instead, a single thought plagued her: Where was he? Had something horrible happened? Then she began to move both her eyes and feet.

The walls were nonexistent, the floor transparent, and the ceiling higher than her eyes could even begin to travel. If she hadn’t been visiting this place her entire life in more vivid dreams than this particular one, AnnaBelle would have lost herself in the seemingly deserted space. As it was, some part of her mind was thoroughly convinced that she had to move her feet forward.

Though her heart still pounded in consternation, Anna’s feet moved steadily until her subliminal senses told her that she had entered a room. As her eyes moved around and focused, her heart stopped pounding and a warm sense of home flowed through her veins.

The Madman was pacing. His feet were carrying him back and forth across the floor. The cold room was completely unfamiliar to AnnaBelle’s eyes, but that was nothing new. In fact, many times she was met by the image of her Madman in an aberrant landscape. It didn't set her off her feet nearly as much as the start of the dream had. The only thing that had her fingers in a nervous twitch was the freezing air of the place. She had been to a million different places in her Madman’s odd home, but none had put the ice in her blood as much as this one.

Despite the foreboding feeling, the presence of her Madman, so at ease in this environment, sent a countering feeling of safety through AnnaBelle. She was soon lulled into the sense that the only thing happening the rest of this night would be her Madman pacing and wondering, so she settled herself in the back of the room, far away from the centralized man. A small trickle of invariable fear told her not to go near him; he was either in a dangerous mood or this was a delicate sleep state that she was submerged in, capable of being shattered by the smallest of communication between the two.

The man's pacing never ceased, though the music of his rumbling voice was added to the clips of his sharp steps. AnnaBelle closed her eyes, a shiver passing through her. It wasn't often that she was allowed to hear his voice and when it did grace her ears, it was tinged with desperation. This time, however, it was nothing but calculating. His brilliance was shining through in a refulgent corona, the gleam of it keeping her in a calm state and sending a stream of dread through her at the same time.

He was contemplating, names and directions falling from his lips in rivers of complicated combinations. None of it made any sense to AnnaBelle, but she listened to those guesses as if he would suddenly ask her opinion. Some of the ideas she heard were obviously only spoken to fill the silence. Others sounded so intricate and perfect that Anna was almost convinced that she would be found in the places he named. Or maybe she was just hoping that she could be in those other worlds – for she knew he spoke of alien planets – instead of being lost from him on her own waterlogged rock.

All at once, the Madman stopped all movement. Anna stiffened. Her first thought was that she was waking up, that the sun was finally streaming through her windows and pulling at her eyelids. But the look on her company’s face told her different. It was a look of fury that she had never seen before. Then she felt it in the back of her own mind; a probing, poking feeling that had her gut curling up.

With a start, AnnaBelle awoke in a tangle of sheets and blankets. Her vision was blurred, weariness still clawing at her mind, begging her to return to the abyss of sleep. For a few moments, Anna fought that urge. She wanted to write everything down. She wanted to draw her Madman’s face from the dream; that anger that had tinted his eyes to a color that she never again wanted to see. Maybe, just maybe, if she was able to remember that look of pure fury, she would abandon these dreams at last. It wasn’t that she didn’t love seeing him every night, but she felt the terror that her Madman could instill in her with just a single glance would soon enough be the death of her.

Even with her fingers itching to create the image and half of her mind fighting to surface completely from the dream, she was soon falling again into that strange, cold room.

The Madman was grinning. His pure white teeth stood out in dark contrast to the rest of his features which seemed to be shadowed by some cruel emotion. It was much more frightening than the anger AnnaBelle had witnessed in the first part of the dream. She took an instinctive step back.

A laugh ripped loose from between his lips, echoing eerily in the room. “Oh, no, no, no you don’t,” he hissed to the empty air.

For a split, horrifying moment, Anna thought his eyes were landing on her. She thought that, for once, this would turn into a nightmare and that her Madman, all this time, had been searching for her only to be rid of her. Then she saw the look of passing in his darkening eyes.

She wasn’t here. She was never here. But, in his mind, someone else was. And they were a threat.

“No one can keep me from her...”

AnnaBelle snapped awake again. She was barely conscious, but her hand reached out instantaneously, grabbing at anything she could find on her bedside table. Her hands found the two items she was searching for. Shaky fingers clutching a dulled pencil, she wrote the final words that still rang in her ears, the cold, boasting laugh of her man singing mercilessly to her.

“Not even you, Doctor.”