Her eyes fluttered open.

The plain white ceiling of her dorm came into view.

Goosebumps lay scattered across her skin, her hair damp with sweat, as she sat up.

Tahlia slowly brought her hand to her chest, and just like she'd expected, her heart had been racing superhumanly.

She gulped plainly; she didn't want to close her eyes and lose herself to a grim nightmare yet again.

For a second she couldn't help but wonder why her? What had she possibly done wrong in the eyes of the universe to kept being punished like this. Living vile memories over and over again, until she'd inevitably disrupt her own sanity.

Her eyes landed on the bedside watch, the numbers bluntly reading 6:47 A.M.

She exhaled, partly tired, partly relieved.

So she wasn't a complete insomniac.

As she wiped the perspiration off her forehead, a flash of light caught her sight from the periphery of the room.

She glanced at the television that was left on, she presumed, by her roommate.

She glimpsed at Wynn's snoring form once and saw the remote clutched in her hands, flopped over the duvet.

She shook her head to herself, as she got up to switch it off.

"..Lieutenant Kennedy is said to be releasing an official statement on Wednesday. It's been only 2 days since the gruesome murder of Tori Enfield. The 23 year old waitress was possibly last seen leaving with a man from the local bar she'd worked in on Friday. The man has yet not been ID'd. In the meanwhile, all citizens are being advised to stay in-"

The newsreader's overdone face and her shrill voice evaporated, the screen going pitch black, as Tahlia's fingers pushed down on the switch with a copious amount of pressure, as if, turning off the screen would tune out reality too.

Her legs felt like twigs, ready to snap with the slightest force, so she sat down at the end of her bed harrowingly.

She couldn't think. She didn't want to think.

With her nightmares, Tahlia could not find peace in sleep.

But then, when she was awake, everything around her felt nothing short of a nightmare.

Her alarm went off obnoxiously.

She glanced at it and sighed.

Yet another day she'd have to make it through.

By the time Tahlia had finished showering and gotten ready for her 8 AM lecture, she'd already forgotten what her latest nightmare was all about.

A fresh poison was on her mind.

The hall was quiet today. Not a lot of people had shown up, but the ones that did seemed visibly distressed.

Wouldn't blame them though;

It's not everyday that a girl is found with her larynx cut out of her throat in a public park.

Tahlia couldn't pay attention to any word of what the Professor was saying.

She had questions that were left unanswered.

And there was only one person who could answer those.

✴✴✴

Elise Moreau woke up slowly, quite like she was used to on a daily basis, serene but drowsy.

Except, instead of her plain white satin sheets, she found herself sitting over a pool of dried blood, strapped to a wooden chair with what felt like tape.

She attempted to open her mouth to let out a blood curdling scream, only to realize that her lips too had been shut close with duct tape.

She thrashed around, in hopes that the restraints would fall off, yet she only succeeded in rocking the chair sideways to a few centimeters.

Fruitless tears rolled down her cheeks, nothing but muffled sobs emerging from her throat, as she sat trying to understand her predicament.

It was only with the sound of the creaking wooden floorboard, that she looked up.

Her eyes were met with a pair of brilliant blue ones, bluer than the waters of the Saint-Croix Lake back in her hometown.

"J-je ne comprends pas." She mumbled, her words not coming out coherently, owing it to the tape on her lips.

Soon, his face registered in her mind as the man she'd agreed to leave with last afternoon. The man who was supposed to be the young foreign exchange student's guide for the day.

But was it even afternoon? It only struck her then that she had no idea how long she'd been out for, or what could have happened in all that time.

She mumbled a string of words, it all sounding like hysterical gibberish, as she pleaded aimlessly.

The man looked at her straight, not an ounce of emotion in his face.

It was then that the piece of tape on her mouth began to fall loose due to all the saliva. With a sharp jerk of the head, Elise was finally able to shake off the tape, looking up at the man again with tempest in her eyes.

"Va te faire fout -" She had only just started to curse at her captor, when her eyes landed on the butcher knife that was gripped in his right hand. She stopped at once, her eyes bulging at the sight of the weapon.

She glimpsed at his face once, then back at the knife, then back to his face as she started to shake her head rapidly, screaming at the top of her lungs.

Elise thrashed around maddeningly as the man walked closer to her.

She shut her eyes close, her nose running as she pleaded for her life in her native language.

"Elise."

She reluctantly opened her eyes as she heard the man say her name in a grave tone. They had talked before last evening, but today his voice held something it didn't seem to have last night.

Madness.

He seemed nothing like he did yesterday. Yesterday he looked like a handsome boy with his charming endeavor and god-sculpted face.

Today he looked like a demon.

Perhaps, it is what his true form was.

He raised the knife, as to strike at her stomach. Elise screamed for her mother and instinctively shut her eyes.

Nothing came.

She opened them, only to find her captor gone, the knife plainly lying on the floor in front of where she sat.

She blinked a few times and had only started to wonder what wicked game she'd landed herself in, when a hand landed on her shoulder, making her yelp.

It was him, the devil with the blue eyes.

He stood before her once again.

He was bent down on his knees, matching her eye level.

Her face lost the remainder of it's color as she now spotted a hammer in the man's hand.

He placed his hand on her constrained one, brushing over the surface softly.

"Let's play a game." He said.

Elise couldn't understand every word, but the sadistic smile that had curled up on his lips, set off all kinds of red sirens in her head.

"You want to learn English, don't you?"

She broke down into a bawling mess.

His smile widened, "For every sentence you get wrong, my croissant," His fingers brushed over her knuckles, laughing dementedly at his own sick joke, "I break one of your teeny little fingers. And when we have none left..."

His guttural laugh rang all across the rotting room.

"Let's begin, shall we?"

Elise Moreau had never been much of a theist, but right now, in her head she began to say every prayer she'd been taught in school.

"Say, 'Elise has been a very bad girl'."

She shook her head, "S-s'il vous p-plaît Ian."

She called him by the name he had given her yesterday, as she pleaded for mercy.

He let out a dramatic sigh, shaking his head condescendingly. He gazed at her, brushing back a strand of her blonde hair that had fallen on her face.

He smiled. "Wrong answer."

Elise almost didn't have the time to see the hammer being smashed down on her index finger.

✴✴✴