It happened simultaneously for them.

Lee was about to wash his hands in the bathroom when he felt a stinging sensation on pointer finger. He had accidentally cut himself on something. Blood began to seep from the strangely big gash on his finger. He quickly turned on the faucet to let the water pour over the wound. He looked up and shut his eyes; the wound hurt more than it should have. Instead of checking, he kept his eyes closed. Until, of course, he felt the warm, thick, burning sensation drip on his finger, at a high pressure, I should mention. He looked down and to his horror; pitch-black oil ran from the sink. It was strong and hot. To make things worse, Lee froze. Not in fear or panic, though. He felt like he couldn’t move. He urged himself to run from the sink to another room but he physically couldn’t. He was stuck there, in front of the sink, from which oil oozed above his finger.

Suddenly, the world felt like it was spiraling. The floor began to spin and he felt like the room was descending fast. It felt like falling down a hole. Only, the hole wasn’t like that of Alice’s. It felt like an endless abyss. He also couldn’t see. He could hear things. Screams. The screams sounded like they were coming from right in front of him. And then there were words. Sentences. They sounded like thoughts. From what Lee could make out of them, they were thoughts of despair.

Whoever was screaming, he knew they were in pain. And maybe he also knew who it was. They sounded like people he knew. People he loved. No.

No.

He couldn’t bear the thought of them being in pain. He could only hear it but as he felt like he was falling endlessly, he knew it was something bad. He could hear his best friends screaming.

“Ah!” he couldn’t help but exclaim.

“Hey, are you alright?” Greg said as he passed by.

Greg was looking rather disheveled himself. Lee didn’t ask why. He couldn’t even tell Greg what just happened for when he looked back at the sink, water poured. And on his finger, there was no cut to be seen. And most of all, he wasn’t falling or frozen. He was completely fine on stable ground.

He should’ve told him, he would later realize. But he didn’t. This was the evil’s intention. The evil that crept and took over wherever they were like a storm wanted the silence between friends. He needed them to hesitate and eventually forget the choice of telling their friends the horror they saw. And that evil succeeded in doing so.

“Nothing. It was nothing,” Lee said.

“Okay, uh, sure,” Greg replied, leaving Lee.

Lee pressed his back against the wall. He took a few deep breaths and walked out of the bathroom, walking towards the dining table where the others were.

They all began to eat. They were talking about light things but all avoided the feeling that something was coming. The feeling, of course, came from the experiences they just had, especially Lee.

“I think we should go on a road trip. Y’know, just for today,” Andy proposed.

All were interested, of course.

“That’d be great!” Aria said.

Gabby and Paul nodded, “Sure.”

Greg and Lee agreed as well.

Tony asked, “Can I drive?”

None of them asked. They all said yes.

Something pushed Tony to drive. Maybe he wanted to do something for his friends. Or maybe it was evil controlling their fate, like it always was.

After getting ready, they all got in the car. They were headed for a place named Malzier, a relatively short drive with a zigzag road and windy weather always. It was a slightly dangerous trip, but Tony could handle it.

As the drive began, conversations were lively and went on continuously. They were talking about school and the funny anecdotes they experienced despite the bad things that happened from time to time.

They were talking and enjoying themselves. This is why it was surprising to see things go south for them and the conversation.

Tony lowered the volume of the radio as Greg began to speak,

“Lee?”

“Hm?”

“What happened in the bathroom earlier?”

Suddenly, a mist, a dark but invisible to the others mist, came over Greg’s eyes. He slightly tensed up at what he saw. He was quick to say more before Lee could reply.

“You looked scared and your hands were covered in this weird black liquid.”

“What? Lee, why didn’t you tell us? What happened?” Aria asked, immediately very concerned.

“I thought I was the only one who could see the oil,” Lee replied shyly.

“Well, you weren’t,” Andy said.

“What?” Lee asked.

“I saw something. It was a moon but… shaped as a heart, I think.”

“I saw it last night and as I was looking, something took it away. Well, that’s what it looked like,” Andy told them. This wasn’t the scariest part of it, however.

He continued, “And I had that feeling, something like…-“

“Like you were going to lose something?” Lee continued.

Andy nodded slowly. The car was now dead silent. Nobody knew what to say. I mean, what was a teenager to say when they know they’ve been seeing things that gave them signs of misery or even worse, death.

“Something’s coming, I think,” Paul spoke up.

Gabby asked, “What’d you see?”

“It was a storm but the lightning was red and the thunder didn’t sound like thunder. I don’t… I don’t even know what it sounded like. But I saw something else it was- it was…”

Paul cut himself off due to hesitation. He didn’t just see something.

He saw everything. He saw thousands of possibilities and where they’d lead. It was unclear to Paul, who always understood and knew things, whether or not they had a chance of winning this confusing blob of alarming events or even manage to get out of it alive.

He should’ve told them. He wanted to. But something stopped him and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

“What was it?” asked Greg.

“I don’t know,” Paul replied.

“We’re dying,” Tony muttered.

“What?” Lee asked, alarmed.

“We’re dying. We’re going to die. What part of that wasn’t clear to you?”

Tony had just snapped at Lee but he did not curse himself for it. And Andy did not call him out on it either. Now, they were beginning to be consumed by the darkness they could not understand.

In a frenzy of stress, panic, and the consuming evil, they all began to argue with each other. Lee had taken a cigarette out of the pack he had been hiding from his friends and lit it. Greg began to call him out on it. Aria and Gabby were angry with Paul for holding back what he had to say and Tony and Andy were trying to silence them while also arguing with each other.

There was no stopping them. Nobody, not even Andy, had kept calm in that moment. The drive seemed to be going on forever. They were in a deserted path on the way to their destination. There were no shops around. There were no houses around. There was nothing, and more importantly, there was no one to see what would happen.

As they bickered, they hardly, and by that I mean they didn’t, notice that the road was changing. The road had changed into a bumpy, zigzag path. And the wheel, though Tony had his hand on it, was no longer under his control.

The wheel turned slowly and kept turning, controlling the car, making it move left to right.

“Tony, what are you doing?” Andy asked.

“I’m not doing anything!”

Tony steered it back to the middle. Tony sighed in relief; the car was back to stability. They all sat in silence. Silence ensued. Silence was even in the truck that collided with them and got them off the road and falling down a cliff.

What was strange, however, was how they woke up in their own beds.