Erin's Living Nightmare - Epilogue

Erin woke from groggy memories, not quite following all that had gone before, with the enormous office, out-scaled coworkers, people being eaten… She blinked it all away, trying to brush it off as a wild dream, but instead the thoughts came into clearer focus as her mind cleared. Xavier sucked up her nose, Boran swallowed alive, Yvette eating captives from a drawer. She grimaced at it all, cursing her mind for going to such dark places. But she felt a cold surface under her hands and as she sat up and realised she wasn’t in bed, nor anywhere familiar, and she was almost certain those memories weren’t dreams.

Taking in her enclosure, she felt a flutter of fresh panic. The walls were glass, stretching high above, obscuring a blurry world beyond. The ground was glass. She hurriedly stood and turned around, finding she was in a cylinder, the ceiling metal. No – she turned again, patting her hands frantically against the walls. She was in a jar!

“Help!” Erin cried, pacing about in the tiny enclosed space, breathing faster. “Someone, help me!”

She ran her hands over the glass, tried to get some grip but found none. No way she could climb up, though the jar was maybe only eight feet high. She jumped on the spot, trying to stretch her hands towards the lid. Unable to reach, she slowed down, peering outside instead. There was a wide, dark plain next to her, maybe a wall in one direction, a rounded object in the other. She pressed herself to the side, to see out better. Another jar, the same size as the one she was in. She banged on the side, shouting, “Hey! Is someone there? What’s going on?”

There was movement, a dark silhouette beyond the other glass, and her heart lifted. Whatever this was, at least she wasn’t alone. But just as she started to make out the shape in the other jar, her world was shaken and she fell against the side as the jar was lifted up. Erin braced herself, cowering as she was carried through the air, towards an looming wide object, a head distorted through the curved glass. It became clearer as the giant held Erin’s jar closer, a woman’s face, grinning in on her in an ogreish manner, teeth big and frightening, eyes bulging. But when Erin’s initial spike of ear passed, she realised she knew the face.

“Radik?” Erin exclaimed, scampering to the front of the jar. She banged her hands on the glass with a rush of relief. “Is that you? You’re alive!”

“Naturally,” Giant Radik replied, voice low as it rolled through Erin. She repositioned, fingers pressing into the glass as she held the jar, and Erin, in her palm. She must’ve been a hundred feet tall, or more. “I do not die that easily. Or at all.”

“What are you?” Erin cried, and glanced again at the vast fingers flanking her. “What’s going on? Why am I in here – let me out!”

Radik laughed the rumbling belly laugh of giants out of fairy tales, and Erin had a strange sense that she’d ended up somewhere not far from that estimation. A thick wooden shelf of jars, a burning fireplace in a stone cottage, quaint if not for its magnificent scale, all fitting to Radik’s scruffy outdoors aesthetic.

“No, you can stay in there for now,” the vast giantess said. “I usually only let my pets out when they’re invited to dinner.”

Erin backed up, scanning side to side again, the confines suddenly feeling a lot more dangerous. Was Radik joking? No, first time she’d seen her, this woman had snacked on a tin of tiny people… Well, the first time she recalled seeing her. Erin asked, pathetically, “Please. What’s happened to me?”

“Only what was promised,” Radik said. “But you’re lucky, you’ll get more than most – since you wished for an explanation.” The giantess tapped the jar thoughtfully, holding off for a moment more with a playful smile, then continued, “I found you on a bridge. Not the one where we last met, but one that would’ve been fatal to jump from. I really think you were going to do it. So, I talked to you. You opened up, and you made your wish. You wished to expose the world to the nightmare you felt inside and you wished that they’d feel it too. One had to come before the other. These things can unfold in mysterious ways, but you did get what you wanted.”

Erin swallowed, snippets of the start of this coming back more clearly, at last. There had been a high bridge, a gushing river below. Was she really going to jump? And that wish… But she frowned. Had it happened like that? Had things changed when she wished for a better wish? Was Janet wishing for her to grow been a happy bit of fortune or part of her own wish playing out?

“Don’t tie your mind in knots over it,” Radik said. “It’s done now. You’ve filled your belly on the suffering of others, so I’m satisfied. And in return, I get to keep you.”

Erin frowned, at once both disturbed by this apparent clause and strangely calmed by a sense of it all now being over. She said, “Was it… real?”

“Oh yes.” Radik grinned. “Pagen Paper is no more and the world got a glimpse into powers that they’ve forgotten for far too long. There’ll be a lot of disbelief and conspiracy theories and all that, but try telling that to everyone you killed. There’s probably a few dozen bodies digesting in your gut right now that would certainly attest to it.”

Erin put a hand to her stomach, alarmed at the thought. She didn’t even know who she’d eaten. Why had she eaten them?!

“I’ll confess some of it was for my own amusement,” Radik went on. “But most was driven by your own passions and fears. I considered taking it all the way to the end – I could’ve stretched it to you devouring the world, can you imagine that? But we can’t have everyone appreciating your nightmare if no one’s left.”

Erin looked up with wonder, thankful it didn’t go that far. She said, “And now? Are you going to… kill me?”

“Absolutely not. You’re in my realm, now. Normal rules do no apply here – you can keep me company in that jar for centuries, if I should wish.”

“You’re not going to eat me?”

Radik shrugged, playfully cryptic.

Erin found herself oddly unbothered about it. She’d apparently done what she set out to do, getting a very twisted sort of revenge, and there was nothing left for her back in the real world anyway. Better to leave a great, destructive crater, than the piteous life she had been enduring. She sighed and leant back against the wall of the jar, and tiredly said, “Okay.”

Radik raised an amused brow. “Okay?”

Erin nodded. “You can put me back on the shelf now.”

The giantess regarded her curiously, impressed by how she was taking this, then did as she’d been bidden, placing the jar down. Her enormous shape drifted back out of view, and Erin readied herself to settle down to life in a jar. She paused, though, looking out the side again to find that she’d been placed slightly closer to the next jar, and could see the person inside it. A young woman, who started banging on the side.

“Erin! Hey, Erin, it’s me!”

“Chloe!” Erin gasped, pressing herself to the glass again. The jars muffled their voices, but they could just about call out to each other. “How did you get here?”

“I don’t know!” Chloe cried. “I woke up here! What happened to you?”

“A lot. I grew huge and trashed the office. I killed a lot of people.”

“Oh hell. Really? Oh my God. Tell me everything!”

“Sure.” Erin laughed, happy despite everything. She had company here. Maybe even a friend. “But we’ve got plenty of time, I guess. What about you? Did Janet hurt you?”

“She threw me around, yeah,” Chloe said, more gravely. “She took me back to her place, treated me like a damn doll. I… Maybe let’s not go into it? But she kept saying she was going to eat me. I was terrified. Only, when I finally slept, like I said, I woke up here.”

Erin tried to recall the workings of all that had brought them to this, and how her wish had warped one way then another. What part of it might account for giving her a friend in the end? Maybe the wish really had distorted when she’d wished for a better wish, if that had gone through. But another thought occurred to her: Chloe’s words as they’d approached Radik. She’d mentioned wanting protection. Perhaps this was it.

“What happened to Janet?” Chloe shouted, eager for nasty news. “Tell me you squished that bitch.”

Erin’s eyes widened at the thought, an unfinished detail. She’d been holding Janet when the giant reached down from the sky. Quickly, she patted herself down, probing a hand into her skirt pocket. There was a bulge – her fingers hit something small and moving. She grabbed it, and drew her fist out with Janet desperately struggling at the top, slapping at her fingers. The vicious bully, still beautiful if bloodied from their battle, was only three inches tall.

“Get your hands off me!” she squeaked violently. “I’m gonna bite your head off!”

Erin grinned as new possibilities crept into her mind. This might be a bargaining chip, something she could trade to Radik for better consideration. Or, at the very least, she’d have something to keep herself amused in this jar. Somehow, in its own warped way, Erin felt like everything was going to be okay.

“Save your energy,” Erin told Janet. “Welcome to your nightmare.”