The dying sound of hysterical laughter rings in my ears as I open my eyes with a start. Bright lights shine in my face as I look around, trying to orient myself. Confused, I realize I’m in a small square room, a cell really, with clear walls on three sides. The floor is white, I’m dressed in white, and the wall behind me is white.

After a few moments, my eyes get adjusted to the fluorescent light and the laughter starts up again, a desperate insane sound. I snap my head to the right, taking a step back as there is something that isn’t human leaned against the transparent wall, looking as if it is being held up by the air itself. I narrow my eyes, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. It’s fairly humanoid, the thing standing there laughing. Head to toe, the being covered in silver feathers, gleaming in the intense light.

The side of its face is pressed against the thick glass or plastic of the wall, revealing a pointed ear under the long silver feathers swept back like hair. Its feet are like a giant bird’s, still covered in the feathers of the rest of its body and ending in black talons. A wing is crumpled against the wall, blood trickling out where, I realize with a jolt of horror, white bone pokes through the glittering silver. The other wing of the creature is spread, sprouting from its shoulder, and is shaking. Whatever it is, it’s in pain, lots of pain. I step closer to it, wondering if I can hear it, could it hear me?

The laughing being turns its face toward me, an amazingly human, female face. Tears stream from closed eyes on the silver feathers of her face, as she keeps up that nerve racking laugh. She claws at the wall with black talons like those on her feet, four lines appearing as she drags her metallic fingers down the barrier.

I step a little closer, pressing my own palm against the wall where her hand stopped. “Are you going to be okay? What are you?” I whisper to her, not expecting a response.

She picks up her hand, dragging it down the wall again, her laughter stopping but her shoulders are trembling as her tears continue to flow. “Outside.” I hear her say, in a voice like soft pained chimes. “I want outside…can’t get outside…want to die.” As she turns toward me more, I can see three deep crimson gashes ripped into her silver stomach. Her eyes open, a glowing amber shade beneath the silver lids. “…Won’t be a toy anymore.”

I watch, horrified, as she buries her black talons into the wounds, pulling and digging deeper into her own flesh, crying out softly as her tears continue and she slumps to the floor slowly, her crushed wing leaving red streaks against the plastic of the wall. She curls on the white floor, sobbing and hurting herself.

“You don’t need to hurt yourself! Stop that! I mean, you’ll never get out of you die!” I exclaim, but she starts to claw at her arms, new wounds appearing with every strike. I don’t know what she is, but I can’t just watch as she tries to kill herself! “Someone help!” I call, desperate as the blood pooling in the cell next to me continues to grow.

Another laugh echoes to my ears, unbalanced and, this time, male. “Don’t even try, kid, she’s too far gone. Harpies go nuts after too much time out of the sky. She’ll be happier dead. Most of us would be.” I turn around, looking through my left wall to see a young man about my age, about 19, dressed in white, watching me and the silver woman. He called her a harpy? I know I’ve heard the word before, but I can’t place where it might have came from.

His hair was raggedly cut, a dark brown, and the sleeve of his left arm was spattered in blood. With an odd grin, he lifts his left hand to his mouth and bit down on his fingers, pointed canines piercing already torn skin. His eyes were a bright, bright blue and they seemed to almost glow as he fixed them on me.

“What are you talking about?” I ask staring at the hand he’s chewing on. He seems to catch onto my gaze and stops biting himself, starting to clean the fingers he made bleed like a cat would, licking away the blood. Silence falls for a few moments between us and I realize it’s not really quiet. I can hear the crying of the silver woman in the cell over, not to mention more distant sounds, more crying, more laughing, some screaming. He seems not to notice, but scoffs at me.

“New blood, I see.” He says, smiling that odd smile, showing equally strange bloodstained teeth. “They catch us and experiment on us, starve us and pit us against one other. They’re trying to figure out what makes us tick. Some of us can take it for longer than others, but we all go like her eventually.”

“What? Who? Make who tick?” I ask again, trying to look around. People are starting to walk by, in black pants and white lab coats, carrying clipboards. A few of them have stopped outside the dying silver woman’s cell and seem to be talking amongst themselves with grim faces.

My neighbor scoffs again before biting the skin between his thumb and index finger, drawing blood again and licking it off. “The mortals, of course, you idiot. Some of have found ways to see down past their level. Now they’re trying to fuck with what they shouldn’t. Stupid cattle…shouldn’t mess with what’s higher than them.” He descends into mumbling as holds his bleeding hand near his mouth and I take a step back. He’s insane, absolutely insane.

“Subject Twenty-four, death by self-inflicted wounds, 3:01 a.m.,” says one of the people outside the clear walls.

My neighbor laughs in his unbalanced way again, hand still near his mouth. “Three a.m. mocks three p.m.” He mumbles and I turn around. They let her hurt herself so bad she bled to death?!

I rush to the wall she had been leaning against, to find the silver feathered body curled up in the corned. She was no longer moving, her claws buried deep into her forearms. I look up at the people with clipboards. “Why didn’t you help her?” I ask. One of them stares at me coldly. “Subject Eighty-One exhibits unusual behavior. Perhaps we should see how he interacts with Forty-Two.”

“What? Unusual behavior?! You just let her die! No matter what she was, she didn’t deserve that. And I’m not Eighty-One, my name is K-” A grinding sound erupts behind me and I whip around midsentence to see the wall between me and the insane boy biting himself slide apart and he starts laughing, shaking his head as he walks towards me.

“Sorry, new blood,” he says in a low tone as he advances, “but I’m fucking hungry.”

I step back, retreating, but he’s faster than I am. In a flash, I feel my back slam against the white floor and I cry out in pain. I struggle, panicking, but I’m pinned to the ground and, opening my eyes, I realize it’s because he’s sitting on me, breathing hard through parted lips. Leaning forward, Forty-two’s eyes gleam as he focuses on me and more importantly on my throat. In an instant, it all clicks in my mine as the sight of his teeth close up. I struggle harder and he makes a hissing noise through a fanged grin, pushing down hard on my shoulders.

“Eighty-One reacts like prey to a predator’s attack.” The researcher comments coldly and I can feel the breath of the creature called only by a lower number against my skin. I cry out, my entire body in sudden, burning agony after a sharp, piercing pain in my throat. I hurt so much I can’t think, I can barely see, and all I can hear is screaming and screaming that I don’t know is in my own voice or not.

I sit bolt upright in bed, eyes wide against the darkness of my bedroom, a sharp contrast the blinding white I was just in. I realize I’m not in pain anymore, but I’m still screaming. I clap my hand over my mouth, muffling the sound that won’t stop, and am started to realize someone is still screaming. A girl’s voice. Maybe she’s not dead and I can help her!

I throw back my blanket and jump out of bed, running out of the door into the shared living room, just in time to see a fist flying at my face. I don’t catch myself in time to dodge and pain explodes in my head as the fist connects with my jaw. I reel from the blow, reaching out for the wall with my hand and finding nothing, so I fall flat back onto my ass.

“What the fuck, Koda?! What the fuck was that about!?” The voice of my roommate, Jacob, assaults my ears. I look up, my vision correcting to see the blond, normally spiky haired sophomore standing over me, shaking his fist in demand for an explanation. Tanya, his girlfriend of six months, clings to his other arm, looking scared. So it was her I heard screaming and not the sad silver bird-woman from my dream, because that’s what it must have been. Just another insane dream, in a long line of insane dreams. It felt more real than the rest of them, though.

“I thought someone was dying,” Tanya says, looking down at me.

I rub my jaw where Jacob slugged me. “Someone was,” I reply, muttering. They wouldn’t understand and I don’t think either of them even heard me.

“Well, now that we all know it’s just Koda, can we go back to bed?” The calmer tone of my other roommate, D.J., is a welcome change. The redheaded music major walks over and offers me a hand off the ground. I take it and stand up. I’m grateful for D.J’s more level attitude.

Jacob, however, seems to still be irritated and I wonder if I interrupted something. I mean, Tanya has been staying over a lot more lately, after all. “If he didn’t scream over a goddamn dream, we wouldn’t be up in the first place! Every now and then it’s okay, Koda, but you’ve got us up almost every night this week! Get help, Koda, you need it.”

He takes his girl by the hand and goes back into his bedroom, leaving D.J. and I in the living room. Let him fume. I’ve woken them up this week maybe three days out of six. That’s not almost every day.

In fact, I haven’t woken him up for the past two days, because I’ve barely slept. I only was sleeping tonight because I practically passed out from exhaustion. Sometimes I’d just rather not sleep than dream the way I do.

I look at D.J. and give a kind of embarrassed shrug. “Sorry about waking you up.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t in bed yet anyhow. Had homework to do and stayed over late at the station.” D.J. works at the school radio station, and his nickname comes from his job. His actual name has nothing to do with the letters ‘d’ or ‘j’ but the moniker became more useful when he ran a pirate radio station in his high school years because there’s no name to trace back to a person named D.J Deejay. He’s used to late nights, but now he yawns and sighs. “Going to go now though. ‘Night.”

“Goodnight.” D.J. wanders back to his own bedroom, one of the four in our apartment made for four. We’ve never been able to get another roommate that would stay; I’ve accidentally made sure of that, what with all the nightmares and screaming and passing out in my cereal during breakfast a particularly nice roommate made for me in attempt to make me feel better. I may have drowned in milk months ago if both Jacob and D.J. don’t pull me up when that happens. I flop down on the couch, rubbing my face with both hands, jarring my injured jaw. I’m so fucking tired, but I can never go to sleep again once I wake up like this.

I grope around in the ugly dark blue couch, searching for the remote to the TV, figuring I might as well distract my still buzzing brain. The hysterical, hopeless laughing and sobbing of the dying harpy still rings in my ears. The lost, desperate look on her face seems to have burned itself into my mind. I pull the remote from the depths of the cushions and shake my head. Why do I dream shit like that? I’ve never even thought about something like her before, before she was crying and hurting herself in that strange white and plastic prison, so why did I dream about it? Not to the boy who was biting himself, Forty-Two? Since when do I dreaming about insane vampires trying to kill me? It just doesn’t make any sense.

I sight and press the red power button on the remote and squint at the light of the set turning on. I flip channels for awhile, sighing when I realize it’s three-thirty in the morning: just too late for the night shows to still be on and too early for the morning ones. It’s the dead period of the night on television and here I am, awake. My channel surfing finally settles on a twenty-four hour news station, as the female anchor talks about some sort of disaster in the Middle East. I rest my elbow on the arm of the couch and my sore chin gingerly on my hand. I close my eyes and sigh. I’m just so tired.

Blistering pain rips through my body and through blurring vision I can see Forty-Two lift his head, insane laughter ringing though the cell. He grins with bloody fangs and looks down at me with a predatory glitter in his eyes. I take a breath and my lungs sting. I try to call for help but he yanks my head back with a clawed hand and bites down hard back into the wound he made. The pain intensifies, and I take a breath, to scream-

My eyes snap open, staring straight at the screen of the television as the blonde woman keeps talking. “-14 U.S. Troop were killed in the attack. Back to you, Jim.”

I grip the blue cloth of the couch and stand up, shaking my head. I fell back into it when I drifted off, fell back into the dream. I fell back into dying. I can feel myself trembling as I force myself to my feet. Get a hold of yourself, Koda, it was just a nightmare, I think as I rub my face some more

I walk into the kitchen, opening cabinets and searching for something to eat that wouldn’t kill me if I happened to fall asleep in it again. Not that I see that happening, I think I’ve neatly scared myself out of falling asleep for another few nights. Wonderful. It’s not like my grades aren’t already slipping, not like I haven’t already fallen asleep in Psychology and woke up screaming there too.

I pull a package of cookies out of the cabinet and shut the door. Munching on a cookie, I slump down in a kitchen chair. What am I going to do with myself? This can’t be normal, it just can’t be. Maybe Jacob’s right. Maybe I should get help. I’d do anything to be able to sleep normally again. Well, I guess not again. I never really slept right, not even as a little kid. I’ve always had bad dreams, just never this bad. I never felt the pain while in a nightmare like I do now.

Picking up another cookie, I start to rifle through the drawers in the kitchen, looking for a phone book, a daunting task. My roommates aren’t very organized, to say the least. Eventually I find it, hiding out under the sink with various cleaners neither of them has touched in since we moved in this year. I have, but that’s only because staying up for four days in a row made me constantly sick to my stomach and I tried to eat. I was scrubbing the living room floor for about an hour and a half to get the scent out so I wouldn’t be sick again.

Sitting Indian style on the cheap linoleum of our on campus apartment's kitchen, I start to flip through pages, trying to find something that seems like it could be of some kind of help to me.

But who do you call for help in a situation like this? I bite my lip for a moment, half eaten cookie still in hand, as I think about what in the would actually call what happens to me. I’ve never heard a description of a disorder that actually fits and I’ve sat through a lot of psychology classes, due to my major being the subject. I finish my cookie, my phone book search for the moment idling on a page advertising pet groomers, still thinking.

Night terrors. That must be what my nightmares would be classed as. It doesn’t fit perfectly, but they wake me up all the time, normally in panic. Unfortunately, people are supposed to grow out of having night terrors. Personally, mine just keep getting worse the older I get.

Picking up the thick yellow paged book, I stand up and set it down on the counter, still open and advertising fancy haircuts for poodles at my empty 3 am kitchen as I rummage for the coffee can that is around here somewhere. I mean, it’s not like we could be out of it, seeing as how often I remind my roommates to buy it. I drink a lot of coffee when I have a lot of classes and little to no sleep. Pausing, I try to remember where I put the stupid thing, because I’m sure I was the last person to make some.

Unable to think of where the last place it would have been is, I start to go through the kitchen at random. On a whim, I open the freezer and see the can of coffee grounds sitting inside, chilling out next to the frozen pizzas. Wonderful. In my sleepy stupor of the last two insomniac days, I put the coffee in the freezer!

With a sigh, I pull the cold metal can out of the freezer it shouldn’t be in, but is anyhow, and put it on the counter. Irritated at my own tired stupidity, I pull over the phone book and start flipping through it as I put the cold coffee into the coffee maker, looking for the treatment for sleeping disorders. I pause to pour water into the machine before scanning the page for a local clinic that deals with what I’m looking for.

Blindly, I reach up into the cabinet above me for a coffee mug. My fingers find the ceramic handle of one as my eyes find an address on the page of a facility near by. I nod and tear the section of the page out, putting it into the pocket of my pajama pants. I’ll google directions when I get around to it. I close the book and glance at the mug I had set on the counter.

It was white, with red lettering that proclaimed the drinker “Number One Mom!” I shake my head and remember vaguely a radio conversation between a ridiculously amused D.J. and his co-host about the mug he was drinking from while hosting at one in the morning. I shake my head at the mug. And my roommates say I’m the weird friend. When the beverage is done, I fill up my Number One Mom mug with the precious caffeine and sit down at the table to nurse both the cup of black coffee and my thoughts.

Listening to the buzz of the twenty-four hour news station droning about some conflict or another, I decided to head for a therapy appointment as soon as it is a reasonable time for humans to be up and about. Maybe Jacob was right. Maybe I need the help. Maybe it’ll actually do me some good.

My mind drifts back to the hopeless, wounded, tear filled amber eyes of the harpy, Twenty-four, and the predatory, jewel-like blue of the bloodthirsty Forty-two. I shake my head and take a sip of the bitter liquid. If all goes well, those two will be the last residents of my nightmares that stay behind to haunt me.