literature

Max and the Magic Lens Ch.2

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CHAPTER 2: A Bad Dream

“Dad!”
Max shot out of his bed and flew down the stairs to his parents’ room, later remembering that his parents became unintelligible lunatics when awakened too early. Additionally, he soon realized that his pulse beat an erratic tempo which indicated that the dream was so frightening that it didn’t bear remembering, and as soon as he was in his parent’s dark room he forgot what had scared him so much.
He went over to his sleeping father, a huge lump under the covers that rose and fell with every epic snore.
“Dad, come on, wake up,” he whispered, nudging the covered beast.
He pushed some more which led him to an epiphany.
“Dad’s not here anymore.”
The blankets exploded off the bulge in the bed and the last thing Max saw was a gruesome, choleric face, framed by a head full of slimy, slippery, disgusting snakes.
The banshee-face unhinged its jaw and shrieked. . .

Max ripped the covers off and made a dash for the bathroom. Multiple dreams always freaked him out, let alone multiple nightmares, whether he remembered half of them or not. After releasing the adrenaline-induced excrement, he went over to wash his hands, or he would have if he hadn’t suddenly seen something in the mirror.
A quick glance revealed a life-sized face of his sketch of the perfect girl before he shouted “Whoa!” and whipped around. She wasn’t there. He turned back to the mirror. She wasn’t there.
“Am I hallucinating?” Max asked his reflection.
He shook his head and slumped back to his room, mumbling animal grunts of weariness and confusion. He opened his window, letting the chill night air wash over his excited face, careless of his alarm clock flashing 5:13 which meant that no more sleep was needed, and pondered at the moon floating unusually close to his window tonight, engulfing most star constellations (that he couldn’t see in the city anyway).
CREEAAK, went his door in a volume that was impossibly soft for the expected sound effect. In fact, if things hadn’t been so silent, Max might never have heard it. But he did and as he turned about while his nerves did summersaults, there in his door was none other than the perfect girl come to life.
“Death” would have seemed more of an appropriate word, and living death the most. Her body, standing a perfectly average height for a girl of his age, was as pale as a lifeless corpse, her skin shined like marble, and her rich, now three-dimensional hair flowed like a curtain of rain, but flashed a terrible color, or absence of color, in a ghastly hue. It was as if Max had met the virgin angel of all zombies, whose eyes burned such a blindingly empty white light that Max felt powerless in their merciless gaze.
He wanted to run.
Instead he stood where he was, admiring his come-to-life piece of art in all its naked glory. These conflicting parallels of shock and obsession forced a spell-bound bewilderment on Max, to the effect that his legs gave out and his tail bone met his bed, the whole of his body shivering as the night-breezes wafted through the window to play with The Perfect Girl’s hair. Things didn’t go any better for his pulse when she inched her legs closer to him.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
Her arms drew to Max’s face, his teeth chattering from the sudden chill. With her delicate hands, she cupped Max’s cheeks and drew herself to him, her face expressionless and her eyes still terrible. As soon as those hands connected with his skin, Max felt his own body temperature dropping, his whole being shaking with supernatural reflexes.
Then her lips parted, and just as her eyes were too bright, so the void of her opening mouth was too black. It triggered the long-worn-out adrenaline in Max, as his body came to his senses and he forced those frosty arms away from him.
“What are you doing?” he demanded of his own work, who still had her mouth open.
He pushed her aside, but she advanced again then rushed out of his room, slamming the door. The girl arched her spine backwards and from her unused voice arose a gargling noise that was half between a moan and the sound one makes when vomiting.
“Mom!” Max hollered, sliding down the stairs’ rail-handle. He wasn’t sure if he just had another nightmare, but at least he knew his mother would be in her bed downstairs.
She wasn’t, though. After knocking on the door and then almost ripping it from its hinges (his patience did allow for two seconds of waiting) he found the very sight his fear-induced logic expected.  
The Perfect Girl shot upright in such a straight manner that Max was reminded of a vampire rising from its coffin. She pulled the covers around her frame so seductively that Max felt he could at least allow her a question before running off.
“W-what do you want?” he stammered.
“Max,” said the phantom in a delicate whisper no louder than the air-conditioning grille beside the bed, eerily crying its somber wails of woe. Max always hated that sound.    
“Max,” she repeated, toying with the word’s length and stress.
I wonder if I have that effect on girls, he thought sardonically. “What exactly do you want from me?”
In a shriek that was akin to a tornado’s powerful whistle, the girl repeated “Maaxxx!” Her prey promptly covered his ears and ran for Logan’s bedroom, back up the stairs.
“Logan!”
He swung her door open without knocking. She was, after all, his sister, so there wasn’t any respect needed, not to mention he was being chased by a freaky abomination from his own lustful imagination.
“Typical,” he half panted, half whined when he saw the empty room. “She’s never here when I need her.”
The Perfect Girl was waiting below, at the foot of the stairs, softly singing “Max,” when the subject of her cries met her lifeless gaze from the top.
“Hey, you’re cheating,” Max cried in desperation. When The Perfect Girl stopped moving and closed her mouth, Max understood that she was thoroughly confused.
You mean that worked? he asked himself. Okay . . . What now?
“You see,” he continued. “You have to give me a chance. A place to run. It’s the rules, see?”
There was silence, hampered only by the air-conditioning system, then . . . “Max” as The Perfect Girl advanced up the stairs.
“Now what, genius?” he chastised himself.
When she met him at the top, Max could feel a tight pull from the same wind that tugged at the girl’s hair. Her smaller, demure figure did nothing to help matters, as indeed, a large part of him (mainly the part that couldn’t think) solely wished to get closer, and she was, after all, his creation.
But Max was born with a large quantity of luck, and just as she opened her mouth to draw in her prey, whose eyes were half closed in sensual relaxation, Max came up with an idea.
“Hey, what’s that?”
The Perfect Girl looked behind her and Max dashed for it, tripping on the seventh stair and tumbling down. He was unfazed as he made for an exit in the nighttime horror house. He slammed the door behind him and gave himself a breather.
“This has to be a dream,” he said between gasps. He thought about how close he came to the phantom that was The Perfect Girl and decided that it did make one wild adventure.
But the adventure wasn’t over because the street outside was covered in grass, flowers, and bushes. It looked as if he had walked out of a hut into a meadow. Not a single building was in sight but the one in which he lived.
“You know?” he nodded to himself, his heartbeat rising again. “Now would be a good time to wake up.”
He heard the distant sound of hissing amid the forest of azaleas, sunflowers, daisies, roses, heather, and flora to such an extent that names evaded him. This hissing was what really mattered.
“Oh man, not snakes!”
Fear gripping him as only a phobia could, he aimlessly ran from his door stoop until his strength was gone and he collapsed on the ground.
Thunder quaked at that instant and the leviathan of all flower shoots rocketed up at a pace set on fast-forward in a nature documentary. It was a rose, the stalk of which reminded Max of a gory fairy tale. When the bud peaked fifty feet above the ground, Max felt slimy coils wrap about his heavy limbs. They hoisted him higher as the pitch of Max’s shouting rose, pulling his limbs out as if he were a butterfly on display. When Max saw the heads attached to such thick reptilian bodies, he nearly went numb with fear. Then the rose bloomed and out of its blossoming petals sprung the giant head of The Perfect Girl, her seven-foot jaw gaping as wide as a mountain cave.
“You gotta’ be kidding me!” he whined as the coils rose higher to serve the perfect girl her prey.
“Max,” he heard the wind whisper before it turned violent and he found himself dangling from a single coil above a spinning vortex of darkness.
“Not good!” Max shouted, struggling with the monstrous snake roped about his ankle.
It let him go.
“Craaaaaaaaa-!”
* * *

“Aap!” Max shrieked. It was finally morning, birds were chirping, that infernal air-conditioning was off, and Max could feel his heart pounding.
He decided that he must be awake now, and though he could still very well be dreaming, he preferred not to dwell on it. Instead, he made a mad dash for the sketch that lay on his desk. He stumbled on the crumpled bedcovers, though, and pulled out a strand of hair from his head.
Red, he told himself. He immediately ran for the sketch and to his horror, The Perfect Girl wasn’t there. Just a blank leaf of paper with a lot of smudge marks.
Where is she, then? Max thought, anxiously turning his head all about and still feeling this weird . . . sensation.
Why does something feel so wrong? he thought, rather urgently. And why do I feel . . . shorter? And my clothing’s loose.
He glanced at his shirt and saw something that made him run to the closest unobstructed mirror he could find, as fast as he could, which happened to be the bathroom, rank with un-flushed urine. Max didn’t care about the stench. He had to see himself.
He gazed into the mirror.
Staring back at him, wide-eyed, was none other than The Perfect Girl, only this time she was different. She had, in Max’s long bowl cut style, chestnut red hair, deep blue eyes, and . . . freckles on her face? Not to mention this girl was wearing Max’s T-shirt and boxers.
Max turned away, saw no one behind him, and stared at what could only be . . .
“What the . . .?”
Herself.
In her nerve-racking realization, Max practically ripped off her T-shirt, which hid the two bulges that had first terrorized her. Then she apprehensively lowered one of her hands to the area where both her legs met. She removed her boxers and saw with her own eyes.
“No way!” she shuttered in amazement. “It’s . . . gone. There’s nothing there.”
But she had to correct herself for there most certainly was something there. Something that, when she put a finger to it-
“MOM!” The Perfect Girl cried. “MOOOOM!”
Here's chapter two. Enjoy :)

Max and the Magic Lens is copyright Hipper Reed.
Comments17
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well this is one story that really freaked me out. but all in all it was a good story. by the way were did you get the idea for this story anyway.