Kathryn Dahne - Curse of the Nun

“Hello, my name is Anna Winter, I’m at—”

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to hang up on people?” The voice replied in a nasty tone.

Anna kicked viciously at the nightstand, frustration and fear curling hot in her stomach.

“Listen, asshole—”

She was cut off by a demonic snarl.

A multi-tonal voice, like a thousand creatures screaming at once, hissed out of the phone. “ No, you listen, you fucking junkie.”

Anna froze. The hot rage turned instantly to ice.

“Who is this?” She asked.

“ Stay with me Anna, don’t leave me like you left Lex.” Anna could barely process what was happening. So many emotions were bombarding her at once.

“Lex almost killed me!” She shouted.

He hadn’t given her another choice. She’d had to leave him, for Claire’s sake as much as her own. Even if that decision had almost cost her everything in the end.

“ It’s a shame he didn’t succeed,” the voice snarled in an inhuman tone.

The phone at her ear sparked and Anna dropped it to the floor with a yelp. She watched the screen as it bubbled and hissed, the plastic casing twisting itself into unrecognizable shapes. Her heart was slamming hard against her ribcage. She didn’t understand what was happening at all, her fear spiraling deeper.

She forced herself to take a deep breath. She was not a helpless victim. Anna Winter would never go down without a fight.

She scooped up her purse and pulled out her handgun. The metal weight settled into her palm, cool and familiar. Anna let out a quiet exhale. She didn’t understand what had happened, how she had become locked in this nightmare twisted version of reality, but she was not defenseless.

Anna squared her shoulders and stepped out of the bedroom. The hallway was dark, no windows to let in any natural light. To Anna’s mind it seemed to have grown impossibly long. On edge, she crept over to the landing, setting down each foot as quietly as she could manage. Her hackles were raised, instinct screaming danger: run! She darted a quick glance behind her and felt sure for the space of a heartbeat that she would see the towering form of the nun right behind her, poised to shove her down the stairs.

The hallway held only darkness.

Anna began a cautious decent down, one hand on the railing to steady herself while the other held her gun at the ready. Her first priority had to be to get out of the house. As much as she wanted to give into the cocktail of emotions churning in her stomach there would be time to fall apart later.

She tried to be as stealthy as possible as she made her way through the foyer to the front door. She twisted the brass knob and pulled at the door.

It was locked.

Anna huffed slightly and resisted the urge to repeatedly kick the door in her frustration. She hadn’t truly expected it to be that easy, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t hoped.

A light clicked on upstairs, drawing Anna’s attention back the way she had come. Anna frowned, her gun pointed out in front of her. A pained moan in a woman’s voice came from somewhere else in the house. Anna couldn’t tell if the sound was coming from upstairs or from somewhere on the ground floor.

“ Help me, ” the woman’s voice implored.

“Hello?” Anna called out.

She didn’t trust the voice, but she also didn’t want to ignore it if someone else was stuck in this nightmare with her. Worse, the voice was strangely familiar, but Anna couldn’t quite place it. Had Donna possibly come back?

“HEEEELLLLLLP!” The woman suddenly screamed.

Hacking and coughing filled the air, the wet, glottal sounds of someone trying to force themselves to throw up. It was a sound that Anna knew all too well. She remembered it with the phantom taste of bile in the back of her own throat. Cautiously, and against her better judgement, Anna headed back up the stairs.

“Help me… please !” The woman sounded weaker, her voice hoarse and raspy.

“I’m coming,” Anna replied.

The hallway again seemed to stretch out to eternity. The bare, off-white walls felt like they twisted off at odd angles that existed only in dreams. The effect was making her dizzy, forcing her to keep one hand on the wall for balance.

She glanced into each doorway as she passed them, flinching slightly in expectation of another violent assault. Each time she felt like she saw a flash of something. A bible on an altar. A nun kneeling to pray. A polished silver crucifix, spotted with blood. Then she would blink and the image would be gone, leaving her staring at nothing but empty rooms with unnatural lines of space.

Anna followed the sounds of piteous moaning back into the bathroom, holding the gun out in front of her as she gingerly peered around the corner. She expected another flash-image before the bathroom took on the same subtle-wrongness that pervaded the other rooms.

It took her a few moments to process what she was seeing. On the floor in front of her, Anna watched herself convulsing. Her clone was dressed in dark pants and a loose over-shirt on top of a black tank in the exact same manner as Anna. The clone’s shirt, however, was sweat soaked and dotted with little flecks of vomit. A bottle of pills laid next to her on the ground, its contents gone and cap scattered. Her clone looked up at her with a pleading expression.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said to Anna.

Anna dropped to her knees and set the gun aside. She cradled her clone’s head in her lap.

“No, no…” Anna whispered.

She could almost feel the room spinning around her. Her limbs suddenly felt heavy and sluggish in a way that Anna tried so hard to pretend she’d forgotten. She frantically rifled through her clone’s pockets, reasoning to herself that any clone of hers must have a phone somewhere.

“You knew I’d relapse,” the dying Anna on the floor said.

Anna shook her head in a violent negation as she pulled the cell phone free.

“No, I’m gonna get you help,” she told herself.

“You let this happen,” the other Anna reached up to grasp her wrist before Anna could bring the phone up to dial. “It’s too late.”

Anna continued to shake her head in denial.

“You survived this once, you’ll do it again!” She told the other Anna desperately.

The other Anna just gave a wet hack as she shivered on the tile.

“Tell Lex I still love him,” she whimpered.

Anna recoiled from her doppelganger, horror and disbelief written across her face.

“What did you say?” she demanded.

That wasn’t true. She did care for Lex in some way, pity him certainly, but love had died out a long time ago. Teenage Anna had loved the fact that Lex loved her more than she actually loved him.

The other Anna looked up at her with a suddenly twisted expression before fading into nothingness. Anna felt a sliver of fear slide down her spine. It was the only warning she got before the nun’s fingers wrapped tight about her neck.

Anna felt herself being lifted off of the floor. She kicked wildly, hands trying to pry the fingers away from her throat. She could feel the chilled rasp of the nun’s breath against her ear. Cold, nothing alive could possibly be that cold. She spluttered, trying futilely to draw air into her lungs. She didn’t have the strength to wrench her way free this time.

A glimmer of a desperate plan came to her. Anna let herself go limp. Her captor released the choke hold on Anna’s throat. She let herself fall to the floor, keeping her eyes screwed shut. She could feel the presence of the nun hovering over her prone form.

It took everything she had to force herself no to shiver as she felt two fingers caress her chin. Anna concentrated on slowly inching her hand across the floor to where she had set her gun down. She just had to stay calm. She could get out of this.