Lightning broke up the darkened sky, it's flicker of light spreading across the city and in the moment after, gone.

The man ran, as far, as fast as his legs could until the time they would give up on him.

The soles of his shoes traced a panicked path along the asphalt, steadily flowing with water as the storm closed the few spots the light seeped through, covering the entire sky in a dark blanket of clouds. The sounds of his feet pounding on the puddles dampened more and more as the sheet of rain turned to a raging blast of water.

" come on, come on, come on, COME ON! COME ON!! COME ON!!!" Yelling at his fate, slipping through the lanes of vehicles, he jumped though traffic into the next lane. And then the next as he saw the figure again. The shadow didn't give up and it grew closer and closer the further he ran.

The next haze of red and white streaks. The next. The man was determined to do so until he escaped this psychedelic nightmare that followed him around. Ever since he saw those scripts. Ever since he laid his grey eyes on the cursed images the shadow appeared and followed him around.

Until it decided it would hurt him.

" ђєє๔ Ŧ๏г ฬђคՇ ץ๏ย รєєк เรภ'Շ ๒єђเภ๔, ๒ยՇ เภ Ŧг๏ภՇ, ๒๏ץ."
(Heed for what you seek isn't behind, but in front, boy.)

The harrowing cry of caution exuding from it crawled in his ears as his legs went limp as he tripped over the curb, the last thing he saw being a speeding SUV headed for his life.

*THUDD!

*****

POP!

A noise popped in his ear, startling the man awake. Bright lights aside, the room his vision came to were pitch black.

" Hnnngh!" He tried to scream out but instead, a muffled cry took off. A sharp sting formed in his lips as he tried to tell again but the same result iterated. Enhen Cornet ( In-hen ) tried to move but he couldn't on top of his voice sounding like it was submerged in water. His hands felt like they were tied up in chains to the walls but there were no walls.

Until it wasn't. The room which he was unable to see till then broke as the walls and the ceiling turned to glass. And behind that, water.

His eyes widened in panic, seeing the entire ocean around him. The floor turned to the ocean bed as he started to sink into the sand and gravel, Enhen struggling to get free of the now visible chains of an anchor hanging above him.

" HELP! SOMEONE!" His eyes started to dilate in fear, realising he was going to die unless he escaped from the dire situation he was placed in. Moving his whole body in an attempt to flail out of the chair, one of his hands slipped out fortunately in time as he held onto the chains which held him and pulled himself up, feeling his muscles tear in the process.

" GET. UP!!" Shouting at the top of his lungs as to motivate himself in this hopeless moment, he gasped for air and let himself go as he felt the ground change back to cement again.

" F*ck. What is happening?!" Trying to make some sense of his state now, twisting his chair to move his constricted body, Enhen rolled over and found himself face first, the chair...gone.

No signs of it. But the chair was the only thing keeping the anchor in the air, in this altered dream state of the man.

And without the anchor's anchoring point, it dropped like a bird off the sky. Suspended twenty feet in the air, it came crashing down as the captive made a mad dash towards one of the walls where he estimated the humongous hunk of steel wouldn't hit.

Instead, in a moment of euphoric instance, his hands reached for the chains that moved back up, and tried to pull it down.

It stopped, at least stopped falling. The anchor swung and in the next second, hit the glass. With one final thought, namely, " fuck." Enhen flinched as he waited to hear the flow of water as he was to be crushed under the pressure.

All that happened was a metallic thud which echoed across the room. But that was enough. He was glad. Enhen Cornet was relieved that he would somehow finally wake up, from a bad dream or get sober from this nightmare that was surely a result of his hallucinogenic drugs he bought off from somewhere.

Of course, he would have his pants pissed and would probably cry the moment that's revealed but one horrifying thing had yet to occur.

His eyes scrunched up as he saw a vague figure approaching. Of a woman. A woman in her late thirties maybe, he wasn't able to pinpoint exactly because of the water surrounding her. Her body glowed like stardust and her face was ethereal. Still, there was something ominous about that view he had.

He looked up, at her face, squinting as once again, his face beaded in sweat, seeing her drown and get crushed under the overwhelming force under what could be said a place under the ocean where you couldn't determine the depth in which you are.

Bubbles were strung out from her nose and ears as a steady foam flowed out of her throat. The figure slowly drifted towards the glass cell as Enhen hurriedly gestured her to come to him without any plan to get her inside or himself out of harms way. The figure swam in closer and closer and finally hit the glass chamber as her heavenly beauty was in full bloom to him.

Only to be drained of it. Literal blood choked out of her, making Enhen instinctively touch the glass as it shattered. It wasn't a big dent but the tiny shard that broke made its way and the moment it hit her, and the moment he saw her, her face rot into a grey shell and burst into a pool of blood, engulfing the entire body of water in a tint of scarlet.

And the dream resumed. The sudden image threw him off edge than he already was as he dropped the chains, causing the anchor to descend again, shattering the ground as he fell into a pit of wood. More accurately.

A floor littered by broken doors, patina infested logs, splinters and planks. And there were four walls as usual. Only this time, it had two of them replaced with actual saws, shredding away at the trash.

" This has to be a dream." Enhen came to a conflict of what to believe in and not to. And for what he wanted to believe was a dream, it was disproved, by the time a plank ricocheted off the saw and slammed him against the wall, reeling in his arm.

The same being for the times before, he roared in agony as his left wrist got between the dull circles of metal, causing his arm not only to be shattered, but to be pulled in even more. Letting out gut wrenching shrieks of fear, Enhen Cornet did what he deduced to be the best possible outcome without him dying.

Shouting at the top of his lungs, grinding his cords, he drove his arm into the row of saws and yanked it out as far as he could, hearing a sharp snap at his elbow, the world momentarily overcome by a ringing noise. All he could see for moments were a blinding light, and his own body collapsing sideways into a wall.

All he could hear was the thud of his ears onto the floor, but the floor broke again, everything around him turned into a disintegrating pile of ashes as he fell, with no energy to retaliate to it.

The fall began again.

*****

Reluctant to open his eyes, Enhen kept them firmly closed as he tried to feel everything around the new place he felt his bones crunched against.

To his left, he could feel air drafts, and he hit a table. And to his right, he felt a knob. The engraved symbol was familiar to him, opening the door with a bright smile and opened his eyes to see his dazzling girlfriend...

" Tana, what are you doing there?" Shivers ran all over his body as his mind stopped to process what was happening once more, but it wasn't able to.

" Heya En!" Tanya's chirpy voice echoed in the soul ridden house. Her black eyes were like the dark room, signs of any life, absent.

" TANA GET BACK HERE THAT'S NOT SAFE!" Nothing else on his mind, he slowly paced to his lover, standing on the edge of the building. Her feet were one step away from the unavoidable pull to the ground under. Until he stepped near arm's length, the girl who didn't move leaned backwards with her hands on the guard.

" THIS ISN'T A GAME TANYA TAKE HO-" Voices at its highest, seeing the railing break upon his touch, fear still frozen in his eyes. Enhen took in the view of the connection snap.

No thought or time used, he jumped on the grill, putting his left han-

The girl fell, death down as Enhen's blood went ice cold.

The girl fell out the ledge, out to the air.

Enhen woke up.

His eyes dilated, sensing his pulse fall to a minimum low from the array of events that unraveled in front of him and took to check-in everything was well in place. Still shivering from his failure to bring the girl back in, Enhen looked at his perfectly intact body and arms, laughing with tears flowing down his face as it transitioned to low sobs, seeing how his body still felt colder than icicles, blood frozen from his nightmares.

Time ticked by, as the clocked struck six in the morning. And by the fifth strike of a clock so old, he remembered it in his grandfather's house, the sixth brought him back to yesterday.

Correction : Back To Reality.

The Cardiogram went off, as Enhen Cornet died from the accident, drugs found to be in his system, namely traces of Amphetamine from the coroners study when an autopsy was conducted.

It was concluded that the effects of hallucinogenic psychosis been the cause of his erratic behavior of panic, ending with the subject jumping in front of a moving automobile to escape the sights of paranoia that might have manifested. Further research had drawn out the fact that Enhen Orlé Cornet ( In-hen Or-lay Corn-at ) had already been in trauma from the discovery of a deadly practice followed by the local cult, and was in a state of aforementioned paranoia ever since.

The case was closed, with lies and heresy dripping out of the very court that vowed to protect the innocent.

*****

And for the last time of that day, Enhen opened his eyelids back in the same room that the cycle of torture began.

" You've got a wild mind, kid. I think I've got the job for psychos like you."

Moving his head up, no change in his emotion, his vision lined up with the same woman that he saw under the sea, once again her ethereal beauty encapsulating everything once more.

" I've got a deal if you wanna hear about it." Her raspy voice emanated from her heel red lips. Her laugh after those words echoed against the walls of the room which had no walls.

Well, they just weren't visible within the range of the eyes of a human.

And that day, was when Enhen decided to die. That he would leave behind his life to hunt down apparitions.

Nothing makes sense.

This is the world of a Phantom, someone who slaughters apparitions and beings of thought that strayed from the minds of the wicked. And his life was on the line.

*****

Phantom - Nightmare