Steps upstairs

Rating: PG
Characters: Original and Samara.
Disclaimer: Not mine, don't sue me.

It's been a week now, full of nightmares, black and white in your dreams, a persistent whirr in your ears, day and night. Never stops. Lately you've been thinking again about your days as a child, the horses, how you wished them to love you as you loved them. Just because they're appearing every night. Horses galloping around your bedroom. There's old Silver, and dear Chiquita, and even Marqueze is there and you wish you could hide your head under his neck as you used to do those days, but remembering makes the sight so dark you wish they just disappeared. Even Morgaine's there, that's when you always start to remember. They're all dead, and Morgaine's death was entirely your fault. That's when you always start to remember and wake up crying, take a shower wondering why you thought you had forgotten it.

Come on, it was your fault. But you hadn't thought about it for years. And the last week seems years now because they're here every night, and Marqueze looks at you with the empty hole of his left eye, the one you used to look with pity. There's a knot in your stomach, where breakfast can't pass through. So you leave to work and it's been a week now.

Whirring, waiting, calling the elevator. You can know where it is by the sound of the cables, they make a loud screeching while slowly arriving to the sixth, seventh, eigth floor, and you lean over the banisters because there's noise in the stairs. Someone's running, a white, incredibly pale hand is all you can see, the hand caresses the banisters two levels under, and going up. A loud crack tells you the elevator's here, so you just shake your head thinking how much you hate children of the neighbourhood, that run upstairs at seven in the morning when all you'd like would be to sleep without dreams. You enter the elevator and look at your watch, press the button. It doesn't work at first. Then the door closes, slowly, but the elevator doesn't move. Children keep running and they must be on a race, because you hear steps near now. For a second, they stop. The elevator door opens.

And you scream.