The Mirrorverse
Chapter 19

Ellie

She looks so small, the figure on the floor. There’s blood everywhere, coming from cuts on her arms that look more like an animal has viscously attacked her than a disturbed person has turned on herself.

I’ve called the hospital, they’re coming for her now. I sit back helplessly and watch her muttering to herself as she won’t let me near her. She’s rambling about creatures attacking her in other dimensions, a long term delusion that the hospital has failed to treat, despite putting her on every antipsychotic in existence. She gets better for a while, almost normal before returning to the broken girl before me.

Her dark hair falls back as she leans against the kitchen cupboards, revealing a distraught face with a bleeding gash on her cheek. I wonder how she can do this to herself, how she can believe that it was a force other than herself that did this. How did my best friend go from a happy, intelligent teenager to this psychotic wreck in pink pyjamas, bleeding all over my kitchen floor.

The doorbell rings, it’s the ambulance.

“Don’t let them take me away,” begs Maya as I head towards the door. I don’t answer her, I can’t, there is nothing I can say that will make things better.

I open the front door, and instead of paramedics there are monsters, coming for me, coming for us, slashing at us with giant claws. I scream and try to run but it’s too late, they have got us, got her.

Ellie woke up screaming as her memory turned into a nightmare again. Slowly she returned to the present, breathing heavily to dispel the feeling of hopelessness that always accompanied the dream.

She leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp, knowing that sleep would elude her for a while. Now illuminated, she searched the shadows of the room for the monsters that followed her from sleep when she didn’t realise she was still slumbering. She seemed to be awake but it was hard to tell sometimes.

Satisfied that she was in fact awake, Ellie leaned against the headboard and cried. She cried for Maya, cried for herself and her own hopelessness, unable to save Maya from her demons. Unable to save her from herself.