It started as a question. A simple utterance of her name with just the slightest upward inflection, as if the speaker was unsure if her name was an undeniable truth.
It came from the trees that surrounded her, flitted through the whispers in the rustling leaves, as if the wind itself was calling her name. She couldn’t quite make out the voice; it was too quiet, too timid. Alice turned in a circle, feet making patterns beneath her on the damp ground. For a moment, she believed that it wasn’t even real. A sigh escaped her, dissipating in the air in a breath of fog. The voice had just been a figment of her imagination, much like it had proved to be over the past months. It wasn’t real; it wasn’t-
And then there was a scream.
Piercing, close, shattering the air around her, it was all too real to ignore. It was real, and it was familiar- frighteningly so. The breath was knocked from her as she froze, eyes widening and cheeks draining of all color. She stopped, she waited, she listened.
Another scream, then, “Alice, help! Help me!”
“Frank!” she cried her throat raw and her voice infuriatingly quiet, no matter how desperately she tried to throw her voice, “Frank!” His screams punctuated each step she took as she hurtled forward into the darkness of the trees, branches whipping at her face and vines seeming to lurch up from the ground and wrap around her ankles, slowing her down as she went. She called out to him, but the sound of his voice covered her own, rendered it obsolete in the thick air. She couldn’t reach him; his voice was everywhere, filling her head, filling the air.
And then it changed. “Please! Alice, please! Help me! Alice! Alice, help!”
It was Remus’s voice now, coming from just where she’d run from. Alice skidded to a halt, losing her footing and falling onto her back as the ground seemed to shift beneath her. “Remus?” she craned her neck as his screams, freshly replacing Frank’s without missing a beat, pierced her ears. It was painful; her first inclination was to cover her ears. But she stood, gritting her teeth against the pain, for Remus needed her.
“I’m coming!” she cried, scrambling forward through a web of vines as Remus’s screams formed her name again, “Remus, hang on! Remus!”
She plunged forward, eyes searching the darkness, then the sky, which was muddled by clouds and a smattering of jagged branches that looked far too much like crooked fingers to truly be a product of nature. Remus didn’t seem to be growing any closer as she ran, the trees reaching out with spindly fingers to cut at her cheeks and her arms and legs. It wasn’t until the pain of her ankle twisting in a root just to the side of the path slowed her down did she realize that the voice had changed again.
It was a chorus of voices this time, all female, all crying and wailing as if she wasn’t trying so desperately to get to them. Lily, Mary, Dorcas, Amelia, pleading for Alice to find them, to help them, when she couldn’t even find Frank to begin with.
“Where are you?” she cried, crawling forward and pulling herself to her feet with a shaking hand on a steady branch, “Lily! Amelia! M-”
And then the screams went quiet again, leaving her with nothing but the sound of her own voice and the feeling of sweat dripping down her spine in intrusive beads. Alice stood, knees bent and back hunched, poised to spring into action should she need to. But the silence was more of a deafening roar than the screams had been; for a moment, she was convinced that she had simply gone deaf from the strain of it all.
But then, just to prove her wrong once more, a single voice, this one just as distinct as any of the others, but perhaps just a merciful fraction clearer, rang out from behind her, from whence she had come.
“Alice, help me! Help! Please! Alice, please!”
It wasn’t like him to plead for help; she should have known that something was wrong right away, but her body reacted before her mind could. Stumbling over herself, she turned and threw her weight forward, ramming into tree trunks and tripping over entangling roots as her throat rubber bloodily raw from the screaming of his name. “Alastor!” she shrieked, tears streaking her grimy cheeks, both from the pain of running, of being pulled, of screaming herself silent, and from the knowledge that she couldn’t fucking find him. “Alastor!” she wailed again, hitting away branches as she ran with bloodied fingers, cut to the bone.
“Alice, where are you? Please, Alice! Help me!”
And then her feet dropped from under her, and she was falling, falling away from the screams, away from the thick air, and down into the cool darkness of the ground below her. But she didn’t want to escape; she wanted to keep running, to find Alastor, and Frank, and Remus, and the others. She reached up as she fell, hands clawing at the air, at the quickly disappearing light of the sky above. But then her back made contact with something hard and soft all at once, and with a crunch she came to a stop.
Her head whipped to the side, and her screams loosed from her throat before she had time to hear them. At her side was Alastor, his eyes staring but never seeing, his jaw wrenched open and to the side at a ghastly angle. Below her was Frank, on her other shoulder was Remus- and Lily- and Dorcas, Mary, Amelia, Emmeline. But her eyes remained locked on Alastor, for his face was close, and pale, and angry in it stillness.
As another scream prepared to loose from her throat, the world went black-
and the dream was over.
