HeavySleeper 's Profile

Into The Dark Frame

Blurb:

Nine friends fell asleep watching a horror movie. When they woke up, they were trapped inside it. The town is cursed. The monsters are hunting. And the deaths from the film are beginning to happen exactly as they did on screen. The worst part? None of them stayed awake long enough to see the ending. Now they must survive a story that wants them dead, uncover the secret hidden in the missing final reel, and find a way home before they become part of the movie forever. Some nightmares end when you wake up. This one begins.

Excerpt:

The theater is silent. The screen is dark. The portal to Paris flickers at its center, a tear of gray light and rain and morning that I can smell but not touch. Not yet. Not until the sacrifice is made. Carti hasn't moved from the mark on the floor. The symbols from the 1983 ritual glow faintly around his feet, and he's looking at me with an expression I've never seen before. It's not fear. Carti has never looked at me with fear. It's something quieter. Something that's been waiting years to surface. "Ella." His voice is steady, but his hands are not. He folds them together, then unfolds them, then shoves them in his pockets like he doesn't trust what they'll do. "I need to say something. Before anything else happens. I need to say it now." "Then say it." My voice comes out hoarse, scraped raw from screaming and crying and saying his name too many times. He takes a breath. "I've loved you since we were seven years old." The words hit me like a physical force. I don't move. I don't breathe. "You fell off the swing set in the park by the river," he continues. "You broke your arm. Do you remember that? You were wearing a green shirt with a duck on it. A cartoon duck. And you hit the ground so hard I heard the bone crack from across the playground. I ran over and you were crying, but when you saw my face, you stopped. You wiped your eyes and said, 'I'm fine, don't worry.' You were seven years old with a broken arm and you told me not to worry." "I remember," I whisper. "I loved you from that exact second. Not kid love. Not crush love. The real thing. The thing that stays." His voice wavers and he lets it. He doesn't hide it. "I've loved you through every boyfriend you ever had. Every time you asked me for advice about some guy who didn't deserve you. Every time I sat across from you at a café and watched you laugh and thought, tell her, just tell her, open your mouth and tell her—" "Why didn't you?" "Because I was scared." He pulls his hands from his pockets and lets them hang at his sides, open, empty. "Because you were my best friend. Because losing you as a friend felt worse than never having you at all. Because I convinced myself I had time. Years. Decades. I'd tell you when we were thirty. Forty. When it felt safe." A sound escapes him that's almost a laugh, almost a sob. "There's no time, Ella. There's no more time. So I'm telling you now." He steps off the mark. The symbols flare and dim. He walks toward me, and his eyes are wet, and his face is the face of the boy who gave me his ice cream when I broke my arm, who stayed up with me the night my parents fought so loudly the neighbors called the police, who has been the first person I text when something good happens and the only person I want when everything falls apart. "I love you," he says. "Not past tense. Not secret. I love you, and I don't get to keep you. I know that. But I need you to know it before I go. I need you to carry it. That's the only thing I'm taking with me—that you finally know." I open my mouth to answer, but he presses his forehead to mine. His skin is warm. His breath is uneven. The portal flickers behind us, and the Director is waiting, and somewhere in the dark I can hear the projector humming, hungry for its final frame. "Don't say it back," he whispers. "Not yet. Say it when you're out. Say it on a morning when the sun is real and the air smells like Paris and you're standing somewhere I can imagine. Say it then. I'll hear you. I swear I'll hear you." I'm crying. I can't stop. I grip the front of his jacket—the Lover Boy's jacket—and hold on. "Carti." "Yeah?" I don't say it back. Not yet. But I press my lips to his forehead, and I let them stay there, and I let him feel everything I can't put into words yet. Everything I'll say on that morning in Paris, standing in the rain, talking to a ghost I'll carry for the rest of my life. He pulls back. His eyes are red. His smile is the saddest thing I've ever seen. "Okay," he says. "Okay. Now let's get you home."

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