Chapter 8
1027 Words
Whispers Between Worlds
(Juliet’s POV)
She wasn’t cold anymore.
That was the first warning.
Juliet stood in a field of tall black grass. The sky above her pulsed like a dying heartbeat—red, then white, then nothing. The wind whispered her name, but it wasn’t a wind made of air. It was made of voices.
> “Juliet… Juliet… Juliet…”
She turned slowly. The field stretched forever.
And in the distance—at the center of the nothing—a single tree rose.
Charred. Dead.
Bleeding.
Her feet moved without her permission.
The closer she got, the louder the whispers became—fractured echoes in a language she shouldn’t understand but somehow did. Names. Dates. Apologies.
And then—
The tree opened its eyes.
Dozens of them.
Human. Familiar.
All crying.
Juliet stumbled backward.
A girl stepped out from behind the trunk.
Young. Pale. Hair the color of storm ash. She wore a locket—Juliet’s locket. The one she lost as a child. But her eyes—
Her eyes were Eli’s.
> “You shouldn’t have come here,” the girl said softly. “Now it knows your face.”
> “Who are you?” Juliet whispered, the dream tightening like a noose.
> “I’m what he buried,” the girl said. “What you woke up. You touched his blood when you touched him. Now it wants you.”
Suddenly, Juliet was falling.
The tree vanished. The field vanished.
The sky shattered like glass, and the darkness swallowed her—
Until she hit floorboards.
The train.
But not the train as she remembered it.
Everything was inverted. Rotting. Walls pulsed like veins. Shadows moved without sources. Every light flickered with indecision.
And in the seat across from her—
A man.
Reading a newspaper soaked in blood.
He didn’t look up, but spoke in a voice that echoed Eli’s father:
> “Your name isn’t on the list. But the train remembers debts, girl.”
Juliet stepped back—
And something beneath her growled.
The floor writhed. Hands tried to climb out from the slats.
The man turned the page of his paper.
On it—
Her face.
Crossed out in red.
Juliet stared at her own blood-blotted face on the paper.
Crossed out.
Discarded.
Rejected.
Something in her snapped.
> “You think I’m afraid of you?” she growled.
The man behind the newspaper didn’t answer—but the walls did.
They laughed.
Low. Hollow. Like forgotten children banging their skulls on the walls of a well.
Juliet took a step forward. The hands writhing beneath the floor reached for her ankles. She stomped hard. Once. Twice. Bones crunched.
She didn’t stop.
She leapt over the clawing fingers, seized the newspaper, and yanked it down—
But there was no man behind it.
Only teeth.
Rows and rows and rows.
They screamed her name in reverse.
Juliet shoved the paper back and slammed it against the seat like she was smothering something alive. The hands from the floor shrieked, and the walls pulsed harder.
Blood rained from the ceiling like ink.
Juliet stumbled—but caught herself.
Her breath ragged. Her rage rising.
> “You made a mistake,” she said aloud, glaring at the flickering lights above. “You came into my head. You dragged me in here.”
She tore off her jacket, wrapped it around her arm, and punched the nearest window.
Glass exploded.
Black wind howled.
Something screamed behind her—but Juliet didn’t look back.
She crawled through the shards, out the window—into void.
Free-falling.
Until—
She landed hard.
On her back.
Gasping.
Eyes wide.
Alive.
---
Juliet shot upright in the real train car, her body drenched in sweat and blood that wasn’t hers. Her heart thundered. Her fists bled.
And on the seat beside her—
A broken piece of glass.
Wrapped in her jacket.
> She brought it back.
Her hands trembled as she picked it up—and saw something etched faintly across its surface.
A word in red:
STAY.
Juliet stared at the glass.
Stay.
Her breath fogged the window beside her, but the rest of the car was ice still. The kind of stillness that didn’t belong to the living.
She stood slowly, muscles sore, neck aching like she’d been hung upside-down in her dreams.
The train creaked. Groaned. But not like metal—
Like bones.
> “Eli?” she called.
Only silence answered.
And then—
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Her head whipped to the door at the end of the car.
Something moved behind the frosted glass.
She gripped the shard tighter and stepped forward.
> “Eli, if that’s you, you better not be pulling some messed up—”
The door slid open on its own.
And the hallway beyond was wrong.
The lights were too dim. The walls looked stretched. And there were footprints on the ceiling—bare, human, and still wet.
Juliet stepped through.
> “This is so far past the worst idea I’ve ever had,” she muttered.
She followed the hallway, one hand on the wall, the other on the glass shard, until—
A whisper tickled her ear.
> “He’s dreaming of you…”
Juliet spun around.
Nobody.
Then a second voice—whispered like someone breathing behind her eyes.
> “But someone else is dreaming through you.”
She backed up—
And walked straight into a figure.
Not Eli.
Not human.
Tall.
Pale.
Dressed like a plague doctor. But the mask wasn’t leather—it was bone.
And inside the sockets—
Were teeth.
> “You shouldn’t be awake yet,” it rasped.
She slashed at it with the glass.
The thing hissed and evaporated into mist.
But not before it dropped something at her feet.
A small, bloodstained envelope.
With a seal she recognized.
> Her father’s.
She knelt and picked it up, hand trembling.
Inside was a single strip of paper.
Seven words.
> HE IS NOT YOUR ENEMY, JULIET.
Her heart stopped.
> “What?”
And then—behind her—someone screamed.
Eli.
- Writer
