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'maybe it should have been me.'

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Scientists say that everybody is born with two fears, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises and from the moment of our birth, those fears are engraved into our minds. And as we grow those fears do too and things that once didn't scare us become our worst nightmares, the monsters under our beds or in the closet and the dark, all fears that nobody thought to give a second look to. Maybe it was because they knew they were simply figments of our imaginations, chemical imbalances in the brain or simply tricks of our childhood minds. But for some people, when they aged, they grew away from the monsters and being scared of the dark, the nightlights that once sat in the corner of their rooms being forgotten and their parents no longer had to check under their bed before they slept, but for some their fears would consume and everything about them became more scary. Although fear was something that made them human, they cried when they were sad and they bled when they were hurt. As far as anybody in the town of Beacon Hills knew, they were all simply human.

For Lilac Collins, she was rather well aquatinted with the emotion, she was all too familiar with it, she was used to the constant clammy palms and the feeling of a glass bottle against her salty lips, she was used to being scared all the time. The cards that life had dealt her were not the luck of the draw and everyday she lived with the pain that had become her normal, pain that she hid rather well. Most days she wore a mask, more commonly known as a smile, one that to anybody who gave her a second glance would believe she was okay. It was a smile so sickening it made her face hurt but it was better than dealing with the constant looks of pity or whispers as she passed her classmates in the hall.

She was so used to living the chore that now came along every time she awoke that she could predict everything that would happen in her day before it even happened, every morning she pulled her tried eyes awake, she stumbled to her bathroom and hit her toe on the same spot of the doorframe, she knocked every item from the cupboard above her sink looking for the bottle of aspirin she found herself constantly restocking. Every sunrise before she awoke from her sleep, she knew that the moment her eyes opened the world would be a blur and that the day would be filled with numbness, the same way it was the day before and the day before that. But she knew that when she woke things would change and all eyes would be back on her, she knew that from the moment she stepped in that dreaded building, her whole demeanour would falter.

And as her heavy eyelids slowly pulled themselves apart, that same pain began to seep in, the weight that disappeared when she slept falling back onto her shoulders, she felt that same familiar ache run through her body the same way it did the morn before and she knew that the moment the sunlight began to hit her gaze that everything in her room, even the table beside her bed would simply become a vague shape. Her body began to toss around from the spot she laying looking for an inch of comfort from her bed but as her hand began to wander looking for her phone, she did not feel her blankets or a bed for that matter, instead under her fingertips she felt dampened leaves that now scattered the ground and the softened mud that now coated them and as she began to piece together where she was, the fear that had already pitted inside of her only began to grow.

She had never liked the woods, the preserve or whatever the people in her class liked to call it, she didn't like the way the trees shadowed her from the eyes of the towns people or the possibility of becoming one of the next animal attacks, there was something about this place that made her feel strange, a feeling she couldn't quite put her finger on. And in the back of her mind she heard a whisper, one telling her not to move, a whisper that was telling her she was here for a reason. As her tired eyes wandered down to her clothing, she found it rather strange she wasn't on the brink of her fingers falling off or her nose turning blue as what little fabric covered her skin, her body was embraced by a strange warmth, one that came along with the pit in her stomach.

Every sound around her seemed to hit her ears, her body flinching ever so slightly, not from the low temperature or from her dampened clothes, instead from the whistling of the winds through the trees, trees that looked to be shaped like monsters in the dark. Each sound of nature put her more on edge, there was no way of her knowing what lurked in the darkened horizon, and as she listened to the leaves of the trees whistle and owls hoot from where they had perched themselves on a branch, one noise sounded louder than the rest, it was a sound she could only decipher as the howl of a wolf, a creature that hadn't been in her town for over sixty years. And it was that reason alone she became frightened for her life, each passing second she felt closer to death.

Horror movies had always been her least favourite genre of film, she had never liked the jump scares or the paranoia she found herself experiencing after watching them, and right now as her heavy body laid on a pile of leaves without another person in sight, her mind could only think about the terrible things that happened to the teenage girls in those movies, the ones where they ran for their lives from a crazed man holding a chainsaw and her chest began to feel a little tighter. But just like every other thought that crossed her mind, it quickly disappeared and although at most times of the day she found her mind completely bare, at this moment her head was running with a thousand possibilities.

It was only as her nose began to upturn her mind registered the awful scent in the air, the stench was like nothing she had smelt before and as she began to realise how acrid it really was, enough to make her whole body wash with a wave of nausea, one that only seemed to be heightened by the alcohol she was sure was still in her bloodstream. And that whisper that was in the back of her mind, the one that was telling her she needed to be here was now screaming. As she slowly began to move each of her aching limbs, her eyes became fixed on something she wished to never see again, a sight that made what little food lining her stomach begin to rise in her throat. Just beside her was a girl that appeared not much older than her, but the difference between Lilac and the girl was that Lilac was still alive.

The girl that laid merely a metre away was dead, her limbs were stiff and her skin ice cold to the touch and Lilac found herself unable to move her gaze away from the corpses eyes, the eyes that were still wide open and filled with what she knew was fear.

And every second that passed as she stared at the girls body, the realisation of the situation began to hit her, something in her mind felt the girls pain, something in her mind was telling her the body was the reason she was here and the feeling of fear that still laid in her eyes and as she scanned over her decaying corpse, she began to see how badly this girl must have been in pain. Her skin was littered with bruises and her hair was a tangled mess but what disturbed Lilac the most was the fact that half of her was missing, no legs were in sight, only a torso but it was enough for her to know she would be haunted by it for the rest of her life. On the ground around her laid no droplets of blood, and she had watched enough episodes of Criminal Minds to know that meant this was simply a dump sight but the more she began to think logistically, the more she began to see that whoever or rather whatever had done this to her was not human, she saw the scratches and the teeth marks on the girls paled skin and it was the she pieced together that this would simply be another name on the unsolved animal attacks of Beacon Hills.

But as she finally willed herself to move her gaze away, those eyes seemed to be engraved into her mind but she knew that if she didn't find a way home rather quickly, she would most likely end up with the same demise as the girl and with that single thought her shaky legs once again held her body weight as she peered around looking for a source of light. And judging by the full moon that was shining brightly in the sky and the darkness that was surrounding her, it was late a night and any sane person wouldn't want to be out alone at that time. Almost like magic a layer of fog began to coat the ground and make the already invisible horizon even harder to see, as she stood her arms began to wrap around her now cold body in hopes of finding a sense of warmth. As she pondered the many possibilities she began to realise her stupidity, and as she reached into her bra, her phone fell into her hand but as she quickly began to tap at the mobile device, she saw the lack of bars in the corner of the screen and she had to resist the urge to scream from frustration. Never had luck been on her side but right now she felt like the most unlucky person in the world.

And she began to see there was no hope, no hope of somebody coming to help or a saviour appearing from the sky, her feet began to move through the darkness, the layer of mist swarming around her feet as she walked, in a direction she could not see, she pulled herself over scattered branches and dodged the abundance of trees, her tired body slowly becoming more exhausted as the crisp night air blew against her sickly coloured skin. Each step she took feeling heavier than the last, her once dry feet dragged through the softened dirt, her heels leaving large indents in the covered ground and as she caught sight of her shoes, she saw that her once white converse had now turned a muddy brown, a colour she was sure would stain.

And her once blank mind began to be plagued by glimpses of those lifeless eyes, with the possibilities of what could have happened, it was times like these anxiety crippled her, for once in her life she was in the right place at the right time, and she found herself feeling rather thankful that her name wasn't going to be the headline of the news regarding the latest animal attack of the town, there were already too many people that looked at her as if she wanted pity and if her life was to end she didn't want the people that looked at her with remorse to act as if they cared, to act as if they were once her friend, Lilac didn't want to be remembered by people who couldn't even remember her name.

"Maybe it should have been me."

~~~

Nightmares, nightmares were something everybody experienced at one point in their lives, everybody had woken up in a cold sweat or screaming with fear, at one point in their lives, every human had a nightmare. Most of the times we knew our nightmares to be simply bad dreams or figments of our imagination but for some their bodies become so overwhelmed with fear that their entire being becomes numb, that each limb, each muscle, becomes paralysed and the only thing they can do is scream. They scream as their eyes lay wide awake with fear, as they stay so still waiting for whatever is haunting them to appear and they scream, so loudly it would put a banshee to shame. Because sometimes all people could do was scream, scream until it's all over, scream until they feel their fingers slowly begin to move and the monster stood in the corner of the room disappears, until the fear that was once consuming them vanishes as if it was never there.

Because no matter how much they grew or how much they tried not to dream, there were times those nightmares, those monsters, times when they creeped back in, that they came back to haunt us, sometimes they never really leave. Sometimes even during the day when the sunlight shines down on us, the monsters that usually haunt us at night become reality. And as Lilac walked through the woods, every nightmare she had ever had, each monster that had ever haunted her seemed to find it's way back, her mind was a place she found herself stuck, a place she couldn't find a way out of no matter how hard she tried. No matter how much she banged against the walls of her mind or screamed inside her brain, she couldn't escape the thoughts from seeping through, from overflowing her with fear and putting her on edge.

And she walked her legs felt heavy, each muscle in her body ached as she willed herself along because no matter how dark her mind seemed she kept walking, she always kept walking. No matter how tried her body grew or how many times her body told her to stop, her legs pulled themselves along, willing to be back inside of her bed, a place she could hide away from the monsters, away from the fear and the darkness, a place she felt safe. Her whole life she had been afraid of the dark and right now she found herself enveloped by it, every direction she turned only seemed darker than the last, her only source of light coming from the moon and the screen of her phone that was slowly dying. The once steady ache that had found herself in her overcrowded mind began to pass throughout her entire body and in every bone she could feel the dull ache, one that she was sure was simply a side affect of the alcohol, the impending hangover. Each time she passed a pile of leaves the thought of simply allowing herself to fall asleep was becoming more appealing but her ears had decided against it.

It was as she reached the tree, the one she was sure she had passed three times already that sound began to register in her ears, that faint voices, no louder than whispers began to sound clearer, that the cackling static of radios seemed to dull into them, words that seemed to be stringed together into conversation slowly becoming louder as she walked towards them. The hope that was once in her mind of help finding its way to her was quickly beginning to restore, enough that the tiredness in her body began to diminish, that her pace began to quicken and as the voices became clear enough for her to hear every word, the shining of what appeared to be flashlights came into view, the once darkened horizon was now clear, she could see every branch that laid on the ground in front of her, every tree in her path but what made her finally take a breath of relief was the sight of who the lights were coming from, the uniforms each of them wore, the badges she would know anywhere, the sheriff's deputies.

But the feeling of relief, her steady beating heart was quick to subside as she became rather startled, as her body jumped back and she was once again filled with fear, as a pair of sharp canines bared in her face, and it was as her mouth opened sound finally left her mouth, what was meant to be a scream sounding more like a whimper for a moment she thought back to the girl and what had torn her apart, the thought that the monster was in front of her but as she heard the unmistakable sound of barking, some of the fear that was taking over once more was quick to subside but as she saw the aggressive look in the canine's eyes, the fear didn't disappear. She felt as every pair of eyes around laid themselves upon her and the dog that was still barking at her.

And as the cold girl stood waiting for somebody to come over and ask her if she was okay, the animal was grabbed by the collar, the barking coming from its mouth quickly being silenced as a stern look was sent its way but as she looked at the man walking towards her, the look on his face had been the opposite of what she had expected. In his eyes was what seemed to be suspicion, she saw how his hand had been placed on his belt, the holster that held his gun as he approached and every step he took closer, Lilac took another back but as her spine hit the hard surface she knew to be a tree, her wrist was grabbed rather tightly, the deputy pulling her shoulder and moving her forward, his grip tight enough she thought it would leave a bruise.

"Hey Sheriff, we found someone!" The man holding onto her shouted, a small wince leaving her mouth as he spoke, his voice booming through her eardrums and she stood, a smirk forming on her face waiting for the man to appear, to tell his deputy who was currently man handling her to ease up and she watched as figure appeared from behind a tree, his hand placed over his gun on the off chance they had found the murderer but as the mans eyes laid on the shivering girls face, his eyes began to soften, a small smile being sent from the girl.

"Lilac? What are you doing out in the woods at this time of night? It's the first day of school tomorrow. Don't tell me my idiot son dragged you here." Noah's voice seemed to calm her, the fear she once had now being completely diminished and as the words fell from his mouth the mans grip on her was quick to drop, his hands laying back beside his hips. But how exactly did she tell the man in front of her that she didn't know, that in her drunken state she had wandered into the woods and found a dead body, how her mind was now a constant loop of those eyes.

"Actually Noah I was at a party, must have taken a wrong turn on my way home." And the man sensed the hesitancy in her tone, the way she was waiting for him to look at her like she had done something wrong or for his eyes to fill with sympathy but as he nodded his head not think to judge to obviously drunken teenager, all of the memories began to flood back in, the ones she tried to push away, the ones too painful to think about, each of them starting to resurface, no matter how much she drank, the pain was still there. Throughout her life the man in front of her had been like a father to her but now when she looked at him she couldn't help but picture that day, the day everything went wrong.

"Really Lilac, a party on a school night? You're supposed to be a good influence on those boy." And even though he thought his words came off rather sternly, the girl in front of him couldn't help but smile at his fatherly tone, the way he didn't sound mad or hadn't decided to ask a million questions, it was a tone she found herself missing, a tone she didn't hear anymore.

"Just wanted to end the summer well, I have a feeling everything will change this year." And as the girl spoke the man stood in front of her, the man who was just as well a father to her as her own had been saw how her teeth were chattering, how her skin was covered by a lack of fabric and even though not long ago her body was embraced by a surprising warmth, she was now shaking, her paled skin ice to the touch.

" You must be freezing Lilac." Noah said, it was obvious to everybody around them now, this girl wasn't the killer they were looking for, there was once a time everybody in the sheriff's station knew Lilac Collins, a time they all greeted her whenever she entered but now she was simply somebody they didn't recognise, not because half of the people standing around her were new, but because she looked different, she had changed but after everything she had been through, it wasn't surprising." Somebody get this girl a jacket!"

And it was within a minute of the man in charge giving his order that a jacket was