Down on Clydeshore Avenue, close to the shingle bank of the wide firth estuary, the thunderclap exploded overhead just as a jagged fork of lightning stabbed down from the black cloud, a sizzling stutter of energy which tore the air apart and speared the fork of a massive beech tree. The westward half of the tree simply peeled away from the main trunk and fell forty feet, flames licking up its entire length, to the ground below where the drenching rain instantly doused the fire.
The girl woke, wide eyed, mouth agape, a cry trying to blurt from a fright-locked throat.
The lightning flickered outside, sending stroboscopic patterns through the chink in the curtain and on its heels, the thunder growled like a hungry animal in the night.
Her hands were shaking, held up rigid and hooked in front of her face. Her eyes were wide and staring in the dark, blind to the flashes of light, seeing only the images of the dreadful dream unreel in her mind. Trickles of sweat ran cool fingers down between her shoulderblades and her heart was beating so fast, so hard, it felt as if it would punch through her ribs.
The dream was still running, re-running, playing the scenes back for her, and the eyes, poisonous yellow-orange in the dark, stared through her, drilled into her very self.
Finally her lungs unclenched and the girl let out a moan of fear and anguish.
It had been a nightmare, a terrible dream. Someplace dark, where the very air felt as if it had been compressed by weight and heat. A featureless plain of blackness, seen from above. She had been floating over the desolation, knowing without seeing, that this was no desert, that million upon million twisted and wizened and tormented things writhed far below, crowded so close together that they formed the surface. She could sense their suffering and their hate as she sped on, drawn forwards to the only feature, unseen in the distance, but sensed, somehow, the way it is in dreams, a looming foreboding, the certain prescience of the mindscape.
She finally approached, silently through the oppressive ether, a pinnacle of rock soaring up from the flat, a jagged tooth of stone, riven with crevices and saw-toothed ridges, black as night. On the almost vertical sides, she sensed more of the creatures, climbing ever upwards, falling back to oblivion among the masses, heard, in her mind, their screams and shrieks of frustration and despair.
She rose up the face of the rock spire until she came level with the spiked top, and there she saw the shadow.
Blacker than black, deeper than night, it hunched, still as stone. It defied vision. There were no outlines to the thing which sat on the high vantage, yet her dream senses could perceive its malevolence. She tried to back away, but it drew her in towards it, an amorphous writhing shade within shadow. In the dream, she shook her head, denying its existence, tried to tell herself that this was a dream, but still its foul magnetism drew her on until she could almost have touched the slime-coated rock.
It turned, though she saw no movement, only felt it. Two eyes opened, enormous and sickly yellow, completely round and featureless. A baleful light speared her, reached into her and touched her very self. She tried to cry, to twist away from the touch of corruption and disease, but it held her.
Then the sound of thunder rolled over the plain. A green light flickered in the far horizon and the eyes closed.
"Now, little one," a voice like scraping rock whispered inside her, "we are together."
The shadow moved, a sensation of oily limbs, jagged joints, a spider-like, yet slithery motion, and the dark rose upwards from the rock towards a red-purple sky, changing to a sphere, fuzzing to a cloud. She was caught in the wake, dragged along in the turbulence. A crack appeared in the sky as she was blown through.
And she was in a strange room.
She was high, close to the ceiling, looking down on them as they sat around the table. The stone was moving, whirling faster and faster, jerking from one oddly-slanted letter to the next. It happened in a flick-flick stop motion sequence, out of synch. A man stood up, moved to the door. She saw, rather than felt, the black cold wind whirl around the room, rattling the paintings on the walls, the quaint glassware in the cabinet. Two women getting to their feet, backing away. The old woman, bowed over the back of the seat.
All the time she felt the black presence of the thing that had dragged her from the hellscape through the crack in the sky. It was in the wind that shivered them all, it was in the stone. She saw it, a fuzzed and writhing cloud of darkness, narrowing down to a spinning cone and force its way into the old woman. She heard the grating tones as it spoke through her, sensed the sudden burgeon of fear in the women.
On the table the stone blurred in its spin then flew off to shatter against the fireplace and she heard the guttural laugh as the shards fountained outwards.
Run! Get away!
She tried to call out to them, but she could make no sound. She was locked in the dream, powerless to escape. The door opened, the men spilled out, the women at their heels. One man sat still, unable to move.
The old woman rose up from the chair, limbs twitching. The girl could see the black aura of the thing within and without her, heard its glut as it absorbed the fear and horror. Then the woman fell. The man now moving, strobe-effect jerks as the chair toppled. The terrible sound of broken bone and crushed flesh, and then, above it all, the shriek of mad laughter.
She tried to pull away again, but the numb lethargy still held her. On the ground, far below, the woman's dead eye flicked open and glared at her from a mess of damage. The lips moved, just a twitch at first, as if the nerves were finding new pathways to travel.
"Now it begins," the grating voice said, so softly it was more menacing than the laughter.
"Wait and watch with me," it said.
And she awoke sitting up in her own bed, shivering in the aftermath.