I could see her before I opened my eyes all the way. Her skin glowed, providing the only light in the room, causing me to squint against it's unnaturalness. It was overly domineering and powerful, and I couldn't draw my eyes away. I wanted to avert my eyes elsewhere - like my room, but it wasn't happening. I was frozen to the spot.

I could smell the gawd-awful stench before I knew what it was I was smelling for. It was the all too familiar scent of old, dried blood. How could I not know the smell? It was overpowering and I became instantly lightheaded; my eyes lolled slight.

Her face was caked in brown blood, even on her white lips, but was almost instantly covered as fresh blood began to drip out of her scalp and mouth. It was set thick against her ash-toned skin, running in slow, steady streams.

Feeling the wall behind me, I clenched onto the towel rack. Tightly. I couldn't move. I couldn't blink.

She stood there unmoving, staring through me with hallow what should've been eyes. They were empty sockets blackened by years of cruelty and uncertainty. They looked like dark, endless tunnels that hadn't ever seen a lick of light. Although they weren't there, I could feel their stare and it chilled me to the core. She was gazing right at me, but I had the unnerving feeling that she was looking into me.

My mouth ran dry and my hands were shaking. My mind was screaming to run, but my body was immobile, unable to move. They weren't cooperating at all. I wanted so badly to leave, to hide under my covers like a child. But I couldn't. I tried to speak, to scream, to make some sort of noise, but my throat was clenched too tightly.

I was in complete, utter, disbelief. I couldn't see myself in the mirror anymore, but instead I was replaced by this infamous female fiend whom I thought didn't exist. It felt like a hand was clutching at my throat. I couldn't breathe well and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the site that sat before me. She hadn't moved at all since I first saw her, yet I could feel her all around. It was hard to comprehend that she wasn't standing in front of me or behind me, or anywhere other than the other side of the mirror.

Within a few seconds, though, I was reaching for the doorknob. Yanking at it, I struggled to do the most simplest of tasks. It wasn't opening. I rattled it frantically but it wouldn't budge. It wasn't making any sense to me. It wasn't possible for a non-human to control something like a door, right? What was happening? My arms were shaking and I couldn't get a tight enough grip..

Breathing heavily, and mustering up some courage, I looked back in the mirror. But I wished I hadn't. She had moved and her gaze trailed me to the door. And if that wasn't enough, her mouth began to move in inaudible words. No sounds escaped her lips, but she was definitely trying.

The room began to spin around me. Colorful objects blurred together and my stomach started to flop from the motion. The sides, under my jaw, twinged as the juices of sickness flooded my body. Then as if there was a banshee in the bathroom, the eeriest, high-pitched scream penetrated right through my skull. I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to stifle the noise, but it wasn't working. It only grew. It was so loud and so high my head felt as if it was going to combust. The scream pierced so deeply, my brain felt like it was swelling and my eyes were blinded my a redness I couldn't explain.

I dropped to my knees.

Still clutching my ears, I leaned forward to the floor, unable to get up. My body was on fire. It felt as though a thousand red-hot needles were being plunged deep into my skin and I couldn't do anything about it. I had lost control of my body.

Falling to my side, I groaned against the horrific pain. Acid burned in my stomach; bubbling, rising, threatening to escape. My tongue swelled and my teeth chattered despite it. My entire body convulsed causing my head to slam against the tile flooring. I couldn't feel it's pain from the throbbing of the constant scream; however, it caused my teeth to sink into my tongue and blood started to drip out of my mouth and onto the floor. Again my head thrashed uncontrollably, this time aimed at the porcelain bathtub. Green and red sparks flew about in my mind.

In spite of the feverishly-pitched wail, I distinctly heard a shatter and bits of glass sprayed all over me, some slitting the top layers of my skin. The pain couldn't affect me. Nothing else affected me like the sound of that which I was experiencing. Not now that I was going deaf from the screech. My head throbbed and smacked itself against the tub once again, sending more sparks flying. The third blow sent a wave of numbness over my body and I started to relax. I could feel my eyes rolling backwards into my head and there was nothing I could do about it. The numbness was dissolving the pain slowly.

Or was the pain dissolving the numbness? The reverse effect was now taking place, and I flipped onto my stomach. The banshee-like cry grew louder and more overbearing than before. I rolled onto my back onto my back, as well as I could and coughed against the heavy amount of blood that trickled down my throat. I gagged and tried to spit it out, but was distracted when something fell to the floor, jolting my body. I tried to open my eyes, but all I saw was the burning red film. I couldn't see anything. My hands were still clamped over my ears, but were suddenly yanked away by a couple of clammy sets of fingers. I flinched as the coldness stung my skin, overpowering the burning sensation. The rapid change of temperature sent my body back into some form of shock.

My body jerked violently and then stopped.

Slowly, I melted into some illusory, hazy, deep realm of my mind.

~*~

(Patrick's POV)

Sitting straight up in bed, my heart pounded harshly in my chest. I sighed when I realized that the noise I was hearing was just Michael and nightmare. That poor kid. I thought he out grew those a long time ago. For God's sake he was fifteen. He shouldn't be having night terrors anymore. It didn't seem normal. His doctor did say, though, that sometimes adolescents have a tendency to not be completely cognitively developed that the abnormal development could have effects on his sleeping patterns. That's supposedly where it was coming from; but I don't know of anyone less cognitively developed than him. It seemed strange to me that someone so bright could be like that. But the doctor said it was normal in some teenagers, so I wasn't too worried.

His screams still rang in the air, quite awhile longer than usual, and I started to wonder if Zander had any control over him. Zander was usually pretty good about calming him back down and all, but this time he seemed to not be able to. I thought that I might go and check if it didn't stop in a minute, but I'd let Zander handle it if he could. I already had to get up for work in less than six hours and I hadn't had a decent nights sleep in awhile. Getting up was the last thing I was looking forward to doing.

That's when I realized that the noise was coming from the wrong direction.

If my ears were any indication of where Michael was, he definitely wasn't in bed. And not only that, but I was being to make out other sounds like banging and hitting. My eyebrows crossed and I strained to listen more closely. It sounded like he was in the bathroom. That didn't make any sense, but I jumped out of bed anyway and went to see what was going on.

Zander was already outside the door when I got there. It dawned on me then that it was possible Mike had subconsciously, with the fresh curiosity of ghosts, had tried something foolish in his sleep. I'd have to kill Troy if this was in fact from that and he was going to have another series of crazy dreams because of it. I wasn't willing to let this one slip. I was sure he did it on purpose and he knew how sensitive Mike was about some things. How could he be so careless and do something so stupid? I realized that it was Troy, and he had very little brains, but that was just uncalled for. Not to mention Steve's input. I heard more than enough of that conversation and I knew he would get to Mike at some point. It obviously didn't take long to see the full effect of their antagonizing.

Zander rattled the doorknob and when it didn't open he pounded on the door. "Michael! Open the door!" he yelled.

It was terrible, between Zander's yelling and the desperate screams from the bathroom. There was something wrong and I wish I knew what it was. We could hear Mike start to choke and gag. You could hear him clearly and it was disgusting. He cleared his throat and his screams began to subside and lessened themselves into a strained whimper. I pushed Soda aside and tried to open the door myself. It wasn't happening so I tried to talk to him. "Michael! Open the door!" Again, he didn't respond. I pounded the hard wood with my fist. "Mike! Open the God-damned door!"

"Pat, he can't! It's locked." Zander said. He turned away from me and rapped on the door lightly. "Mike? You in there?"

There wasn't a response.

"Mike, can you hear me?"

Nothing.

He turned to me and planted a worried expression, much like the one I was wearing. He bit his lip and tried again. "Michael, this isn't funny! Open the door! You gotta come out," he pleaded. He knew, as well as I did, that it couldn't be good, whatever was going on in there.

"Stay here," I told him and went back to my room.

I remembered a keyring in my nightstand that had keys to every room in the house. It belonged to my father, who had it made when we first moved in, afraid that one of us would accidentally lock ourselves in a room when we were younger. He always kept it on his dresser and everyone knew were it was, having to use if frequently when Mike and Zander were little. By the time we moved in, I was old enough to know better, but you'd be amazed at how often they found themselves trapped in the bathroom or laundry room. Anyway, after they died, and we had to clear out their room to pawn a few things off to pay for expenses, I snatched it for myself and put it in my nightstand. I never had to use it, not once, expect to lock our parent's bedroom up, and I almost forgot that it existed.

I found it after frantically digging through a bunch of papers and odd objects. Keys in hand I ran back to the bathroom. Luckily for us there was only about six or seven keys on the ring so it only took a minute to figure out which one was the right one. I shoved in the lock and wiggled it until it clicked open. I pushed the door open, flipped on the light, and froze in my spot.

Michael was lying on the floor on his stomach, twitching. There was glass all over the floor and my heart jumped in my throat when I saw that it was the mirror. That confused me. Of all the past few years that he had been having these weird sleeping problems, he had never been destructive or harmful in anyway. And I had no memory of him ever sleepwalking either.

I knelt next to him and rolled him on his back. There was blood dripping out his nose and lined around his hands and forearms. There was little nicks on his face where it looked like he had been scratched by little pieces of glass, but nothing too serious.

I looked up at Zander with wide eyes. He obviously had less of a clue than I did about all of it, but instead of staying in shock over it he ran out and down the hall to the laundry room. He was going to get the towels we always reserved for aftermath's of fights and injuries in general. We used them frequently enough with the guys that there wasn't any need to ruin every towel we had. So, we set them aside for times like this when we needed them.

"Mike?" I tried to get a response out of him while I lightly tapped his face. "Mike? Can you hear me?.Buddy, you gotta talk to me. Can you hear me?.God, what the hell did you do?"

I slid my arms under him and gently lifted him up as quickly as I could. He was such a small kid. Sure, he had some meat on him, but he didn't weigh hardly anything. That could be a good or a bad thing, all depending on from which angle you looked at it. I had go admit that I was pretty glad at that point that he was as small as he was. It wouldn't have been as easy to help him if he wasn't.

I had to readjusted my hold on him as we moved out of the bathroom. As small as he might've been, he was twitching and shaking like nothing else. It scared the hell out of me. He was more that just out, there was something wrong with him. There was nothing to explain his strange actions. They weren't violent, but they were enough to startle you.

Zander was waiting for me out in the living room with towels and the first aid kit under one arm. He had cleared some newspapers and other stuff off one of the couches as to have somewhere to put the kid. I sat down on it and had Mike lay with his upper body in my lap. He needed some sort of support with his constant light convulsions. It was so sporadic and unpredictable, I didn't dare let more than one of my arms leave his backside at one time.

His skin was cold and clammy, and he had cold sweat running down his temples and sides of his face. Zander tossed me a towel which I used to wipe it up and try and stop the flow of his nose bleed. It wasn't too bad but bad enough to need to be helped.

As I applied pressure, I kept trying to come up with some explanation for this. It really scared me to think that something like this would happen to anyone, let a lone Mike. For one, it didn't make any sense. He had more brains than to try something that Troy and Steve had set him up for. And if he didn't, he wouldn't have done something crazy to explain his attempt, or whatever you want to call it. And for another thing, it just plain didn't add up. Nothing was normal about this in the least. It worried me to think that it was possible for him to do something like this in any matter. Conscious or not, it wasn't safe and I wondered how the hell you were supposed to deal with something like this. I tried to pass it all off as his night terrors, but it wasn't settling enough.

"Damn," I whispered as I tried to help his nose bleed. It was easing up, but not enough to make me content. It wasn't the worst one I had ever seen, the it wasn't helping that he was unconscious and couldn't do anything for himself. I decided to prop him up so he was sitting more vertically. The last thing we wanted him to do was choke on his own blood. That would make things quite a bit more difficult, and it was already hard enough.

Zander had opened up the first aid kit to look for some iodine or something to clean up the cuts on his arms. There was certainly enough to alarm us. I checked his wrists, and it wasn't them that were cut, so I wasn't overly concerned. We would just find them and fix them up when Zander got around to it. He was pulling out Band-Aids and gauze and cream before looking up at me for a moment, while wondering on something.

"What do you think happened?" I asked him, before he had the opportunity to bombard me with a question I couldn't respond to. It was more of a hypothetical question than anything, I wasn't expecting a real response, but it would've been nice if he had an answer. I was hoping that at least Mike would have an answer when he came around, but if he didn't, I wanted one from someone. It wasn't Zander that I was depending on for that, of course. It was only that I wanted an answer now. Not tomorrow. Not when I took him to a doctor. Now.

Zander just shook his head and left the room to go wet down another towel to wipe away the blood on Mike's face and arms before trying to help out anymore. I don't know what I'd do with out him. He was more than help. He was the one person who kept me sane. And I was lucky enough to have him around for times like this.

"Does he need ice?" he called from the kitchen.

", no ice." If anything he needed a blanket. I wasn't sure that was the smartest move, though. Would he bleed more if we warmed him up? It was probably better how he was, although it worried me more than anything. "Hey, Zan."

"Yeah?" he came back in with his freshly wringed towel.

"Can you find me a thermometer? I wanna check his temperature. He's really cold." The phrase sounded wrong, even to me, but it was true. I've never heard of needed to check someone's temperature because they were too cold, but it made sense to me.

Mike chose that time to continue his moving that had stopped for the briefest moment. I dropped the towel I was holding and clung onto his raised shoulder as he shuddered violently. It was almost like he was having a seizure. He twitched hard and then fell limp in my arms.

"Shit," Zander whispered and dug into the kit. He found what he was looking for and gave it to me. "Here."

"Wait!" I said. I wanted to figure out why he had stopped moving so suddenly. I felt his heart - it was still beating so I checked his breathing - it was still there. I looked at Zander and he shrugged. I didn't think it was those things, at least I was hoping it wasn't, but if was an explanation, that's what I was searching for. I was hoping it was something more along the lines of his crazy nightmares ending or anything like that.

"Here," I said, holding out my hand to receive the thermometer, then stuck it under Mike's tongue.

In the mean time, Zander cleaned the blood off Mike's arms and face. His bleeding had subdued enough to not need the towel anymore. Which was fine by me because I was busy elsewhere now. He was really careful about touching his nose, so he wouldn't start it up again, and he was successful. At least in that area.

"Is he bleeding bad?" I asked, regarding his arms, while pulling out the thermometer.

"'s not bleeding at all." His voice was full of confusion and he lifted up Mike's arms higher to look at them from all angles. "There's no cuts."

I looked away from trying to read the red markings. "What?"

"He's not bleeding. Just his nose." He moved back and dropped his towel before putting the Band-Aids away. He looked so bewildered and baffled that I thought that maybe I'd better double check. There's no way he wasn't bleeding. His nose hadn't been bleeding bad enough to get all over him like that.

But first I checked the thermometer. "Zan? Ninety-eight degrees is normal. Right?"

"Uh, yeah. Ninety-eight point seven or something like that. Why?" He closed the box and threw it on the other couch, before coming back over to me to look at the thermometer himself.

"Does that look right to you?" I handed it to him and went back to trying to revive the kid. I tapped his face with the palm of my hand, lightly.

"Looks okay to me." Zander shrugged and put it way in the box carefully. He must've known that we'd be using something in the box again, because he left it open. That was smart of him. More likely than not I'd want something out of there sooner than later. He then came over slowly and sat on the arm of the couch next to me. "What're we gonna do?"

"Wait," I said, "and see what happens. I mean look. He stopped moving, I'm sure he'll wake up soon. He's okay." I was beginning to feel a lot better about everything. He wasn't convulsing, his temperature was normal, and he everything else seemed to be just fine. Except that he was unresponsive. That was obviously not the best thing, but he was okay. Everyone of the guys had been unconscious at one time or another, including Mike, and it there wasn't much to worry over. He'd wake up and we'd find out if we could figure out what had happened and then life would go on as normal.