Chapter 3

First of all, I did not scream like a girl when I first entered the Anger Realm. Second of all, no matter what you may have heard, I did not pee my pants, either. But I will tell you this much; You will not want to enter the Anger Realm alone.
The first step I took through the door had me falling, continuously falling. It was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. My stomach was churning, and I kept screaming. I held on tightly to my bag and my doll, making sure they didn’t fall off me while I was going down. When I looked down, I saw an orange, furious fire burning below me. I shrieked, certain I was going to be burned alive. I could feel the heat and sting of the flames licking my feet, which are bare. It felt like a billion tiny needles being stuck into my heels. I closed my eyes tightly and waited for the flames to engulf me, only to feel hard ground strike my soles as I hit the ground. The fire was gone, and the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes was I was surrounded by red brick. I couldn’t tell if they were just red by nature, or painted red, or just covered in blood. Am I in hell? I kept asking myself as I walked deeper into the red brick tunnel. I felt something wet beneath my feet about halfway down, lifting my foot to see blood covering the bottom. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming, for it’s well known that I am terrified of the sight of blood.
I thought I wasn’t in the Fear Realm anymore, I groaned in my head as I made myself walk faster down the hall and into the opening at the end of the tunnel. I hated being alone through this.
There was a small room in front of me, kind of like a sitting room. An old fashioned couch and tea table were to my left peripheral, and the rest of the place was covered in books. Shelves and shelves of beloved books, my best friends. I smiled, the first smile since I’d entered this freakish dimension, and perused the shelves for something familiar. I hoped they had a copy of my favorite, ‘The Silver Kiss’ by Annette Kurtis Clause, because it would make me feel like I was at home even if it lasted a little while. I heard footsteps coming close down the spiral staircase that had appeared behind me, making me tense and start digging through my bag for my knife, a gun, something to defend myself with. Then I stopped when the figure had fully descended.
“Mrs. Haley!” I shouted, grinning from ear to ear as I ran up to hug her. However, I stopped short when I heard a sharply screamed, “Get out!” A lethal, probably poisoned long claw poked out of her sleeve as she grew larger, scalier, and slimier. She looked like a giant lizard by the time she got done transforming. Her mouth was stitched back like the Chatterer from Hellraiser, and she looked like she’d been scalped by an Indian war chief. Blood oozed down her head and I could see her skull, except something shiny was sticking out of it. She didn’t have a tail, but she looked like a very tall, very ugly mutilated torture victim. Blades had been forcibly put into her fingers; they were makeshift claws, I guessed. Her skin wasn’t green like a lizard’s was, but an ugly, scaly pale beige. I knew this fighting-ugly-creatures-to-find-the-Key-thing was going to be hard, but why were they using bits and pieces of my memory to lure me in, then have them turn into these freaky things? I figured it was a mind trap. Still, off to the fighting we go, I thought to myself with meek humor as I reached in my bag. I drew out a small gun that looked like the kind you blew bubbles with.
You’ve got to be kidding.
Whatever works, I thought as I aimed for the creature’s belly. Sure enough, bright shiny bubbles that looked like rainbows lived inside them floated their way out. As they landed on the creature’s skin and popped, I heard it gasp and shriek in anger…and pain. Seriously? Bubbles are going to be the death of this thing? Still, it pleased me to see I’d done some damage. Still, there was a funky smell afterward. It smelled like…chemicals. Then it hit me.
Acid.
Yes! I thought as I blasted more bubbles, tormenting the thing with skin-searing, muscle destroying goodness. The bubbles, it turned out, were made of acid, thus making the bubble gun a lethal weapon. Why it didn’t melt the plastic on the gun, I didn’t know, but such small questions were not the key concern. It didn’t take long at all for me to find a weak point in the monster, and I attacked it with all I could. The heart literally fell out of its chest, flopping to the floor with a sickening squish. Blood spattered everywhere, even managing to get on me. Again, yuck. The creature itself fell to the ground as well, bursting into flame. I did scream that time, having not expected the sudden inferno. When I managed to put out the fire with an extinguisher I found on the wall, I walked closer to the now-human appearing Mrs. Haley. I poked her shoulder, and sure enough it was her. Come to think of it, this realm looked a lot like her sitting room.
Oh…God, no.
I was alarmed then, and started shaking her by the shoulders. Her heart still flopped around on the floor, making me cringe with every beat. I shrieked in rage at myself. I realized fully what I’d done.
I’d killed Mrs. Haley.
I walked up the staircase in a daze, still trying to piece together what had just happened. First of all, I’d killed the one person that had been like a parent to me since the Accident. I remembered the first time I’d met her, the very first day of school. I was in Kindergarten back then, and she was a quite a bit younger looking. I remembered her soft-spoken personality, how she would always read books to me after I’d been to the office for getting in trouble. I kept thinking about all of this when I suddenly realized the staircase was still going. I’d been walking for Gosh-knows-how-long, and it was still going. I started to run, hoping I’d get to the end faster.
If I’d intended to fall on my face, my plan would have worked beautifully.
When I managed to peel my face off the floor, I realized I was in another lovely room. It was a child’s bedroom, I realized, and it sort of made me smile to see all the toys and the small crib. It was a bedroom made for a newborn boy, I think. I remembered the time when Mrs. Haley was gone from school for so long, and that mean librarian whose name I currently cannot remember substituted for her. I didn’t really know why she left, but it was at least a year before she came back. It was way back when I was in second grade. When she came back, I remember hearing a lot of people apologizing to her and she’d just nod, dabbing at her eyes. She cried a lot back then. It was then I saw a picture frame on the table beside the crib, so I walked over to it and picked it up. It was Mrs. Haley, with a very big, round belly. Also on the table were a bunch of black and white pictures with numbers on them, an odd looking shape in the center. A baby? So, all that time Mrs. Haley was gone…she was pregnant?
But how? Where did the baby go? If she didn’t give birth, what happened? I browsed the rest of the table for answers, but came up empty. I looked over to a small dresser on the left hand corner of the bedroom, and something urged me to open the top drawer. When I walked over to it and peeked inside, I saw a small pink book marked ‘Diary’. It belonged to Mrs. Haley, or Deidra Marie Haley. I smiled, glad that we shared the same middle name. I didn’t know that. It turns out, I found out, that the diary was given to her by her mother, who I know died before I was even born. The first thirty pages or so were torn out, but I could see just a little bit of pencil in the margins. Nothing readable, though, but it still caught my eye. The first entry described when and how she felt when she discovered she was pregnant, the joy and excitement filling the next three pages.
I read through the first four months, but something strange caught my eye on the fifth month’s entry. She‘d been beaten by her husband one night while he was drunk and the wounds to her belly, she described, were slowly eating at her baby’s health. She’d taped a couple of pictures to the page beside it, more sonograms. The baby was deformed, the head was dented in and it was abnormally thin. The next entry told me that the baby had deformations and a bunch of health problems, that Deidra was dealing with a lot of sadness and was doing the same things that I did. She was cutting her arms like I used to, and she had even taken a picture of them and taped it to an empty page. She’d cut at least 15 marks in her arms, along with the words Help Me. I shuddered at the picture and moved on to the next entry, which ended up scaring me the most.
She’d skipped the last two months and had the baby, simply having taped a picture to the empty page with the word Why scrawled in thick bloody lettering. The picture, which was so disturbing that even my strong stomach couldn’t digest it. I vomited on the floor, falling to my knees as the picture fluttered to the ground beside me. As I coughed, I couldn’t help but recollect what I’d just seen. The ‘baby’ didn’t look human at all; pale, slimy, blue-blotched skin covered it, there was a giant lump in the front of the baby’s forehead, and the belly was swollen so much it had burst open, entrails spilling out. The hands were smaller than my doll’s, the feet swollen and huge. The legs were simply skin and bone, as well as the arms. There was no neck, just a chubby, contorted face that suggested agony and sick amusement. What scared me most was it didn’t have lips. I wiped my mouth with my not-so-torn sleeve and picked up the picture, slamming it back on the table. I took the diary and put it in my bag, starting toward the staircase again.
There was one problem with my theory of going back from where I came in. The staircase, of course, was gone. The floor started to feel weird, as well. Soon, I saw a thick, black, oily sludge oozing from the inside of the crib. I could hear a baby’s wailing, twisted and sounding like a thousand voices at once. The floor started to ooze the black sludge as well, and I felt myself sinking. I looked up in panic, reaching into my bag so maybe I could find a hook and rope to pull myself out. To my relief, there was a doorway in the ceiling that opened up to another room. I pulled out what I needed, a hook and rope. Thank you, mysterious travel bag. I circled the hook above my head like it was a lasso and tossed it upward, feeling it hook onto the inside of the opening. I pulled with most of my strength, hoisting myself out of the sludge and closer to the next awaiting challenge. The black pool kept rising, as if it was following me up, and I screamed as I felt its pull on my legs again. But just as soon as I felt it grab at me, I could feel it fading away with every inch I crawled and clambered. I squeezed myself through the not-so-spacey hole and slammed the door shut before the sludge could get any closer to me.
I looked around, and all I could see was porcelain. It was like the inside of a shiny new toilet. That was a gross thought, I managed to mumble in my mind as I climbed out of what looked like a bathtub. When I looked down at the door I’d slammed, it had apparently played mind-trick and turned into a drain stopper, the rubber kind with the metal ring on it. I was in a bathroom now, and my hair was very wet. I felt like I’d just taken a shower. My feet hit the smooth, cold tile and I had to hold onto the tub to keep from slipping. The entire floor was wet. Water? I crouched down, about to taste the wetness on the floor until I heard something sizzle. Then my feet started to burn, and they didn’t stop. The awful, gut-wrenching smell of burning skin and muscle made me gag, and I was screaming. I was so glad I decided not to taste it. I saw the door to the bathroom, but when I looked at the path to it, I wanted to cry. There were nails everywhere, and even more acid. I knew if I kept standing here my feet were going to be reduced to nothing, not even bone, so I started running. The pain from the nails going through my bare muscle was something I could barely withstand, but I made it. I threw the door open and jumped, landing on my face hard. I didn’t feel any more sizzling, no more nails going through my skin either. I looked up and into the next room, knowing I couldn’t be back in the Hall so soon. To my surprise, I was proven wrong. I looked to my right, where the Anger Realm was, and the door was disappearing. I cried with relief, pain, and utter depression. I was never going to get out of here.
I searched in my bag for something that might help my feet heal, and I was delighted to find a bottle of liquid named ‘Treatment for Acid Burns, Razor Cuts and All Other Injuries’. I opened the bottle and dabbed a little onto each foot, marveling at the quick re-growth of the skin and muscle. Within minutes, I was back on my feet again and ready to go through the next door. Still, I figured I should keep the little bottle just in case. I knew there wasn’t that much inside, given the travel size, so I corked it tight enough that it wouldn’t spill and put it back into my bag. I think it was then that I realized the doctor had stopped trying to follow me. I was sickly relieved at first, but then again, he could be in any of these rooms. An awful sense of feeling like all eyes were on me took over, and I couldn’t help but keep my eyes in motion at all times. I had to make sure nothing and no one was following me. When I saw nothing, I relaxed a little but not as much as I would have liked to. I still felt like something was watching…like something had been watching the whole time.
Was it my doll, whom I now knew was my Companion? Was it the helpful Tree-it, who promised it’d always be here for me? Or was it the doctor, whom I was certain wanted me dead or alive? Maybe they were all working together, and maybe they all wanted me dead or alive. This Key they sent me after…was it me? All these questions swarmed my brain with at least a million others, sending me into a state of paralyzing, fearful confusion. I remembered my doll was on my back, and I slid my arms through the backpack-like accessory I’d made for her to hold her in my arms. I started humming again as I stroked my doll’s hair, but I could feel the burning heat of tears filling my eyes again. I cried then, like I’d always cried since the Accident. I missed my mom, my dad, and my two older siblings. I missed running from the police, trying to avoid that awful room. Right now, that room seemed safer than this place by a long shot.