Beverly jolted awake, her heart pounding in her chest. She was back in the abandoned warehouse, the damp, musty air filling her lungs with each ragged breath. Angele and Joanna hovered nearby, their faces etched with concern.

“What happened?” Beverly croaked, her voice hoarse and strained.

Angele exchanged a glance with Joanna before speaking. “You were screaming in your sleep. Thrashing around like you were fighting something.”

Beverly shuddered, the memories of the college dormitory and the twisted visage of the woman from the supermarket still fresh in her mind. She looked down at her tentacles, half-expecting them to transform into human limbs, but they remained stubbornly, grotesquely alien.

“I was back there,” she whispered. “In the supermarket, with that woman. And then I was in college, and she was there too, watching me, following me.”

Joanna frowned, her brow furrowing. “The supermarket? You never mentioned that before.”

Beverly hesitated, a flicker of doubt igniting in her mind. Had she really never told Angele and Joanna about the attempted abduction? The memory seemed so vivid, so real, and yet…

She shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs from her thoughts. “I guess I must have forgotten,” she muttered. “With everything that’s happened, it’s hard to keep track.”

Angele placed a tentacle on Beverly’s shoulder, her touch meant to be reassuring, but Beverly flinched away instinctively. There was something about the way Angele and Joanna were looking at her, something that made her skin crawl with unease.

“Beverly,” Angele said softly, her voice tinged with a peculiar blend of concern and frustration. “We’re here for you. You know that, right? You can tell us anything.”

But even as Beverly nodded, forcing a smile to her lips, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Angele’s words were hollow, a façade masking some deeper, darker truth. She thought back to the countless hours they had spent together, the intimate moments shared, the secrets whispered in the dead of night. And yet, now, in the harsh light of her fractured memories, those moments seemed tainted, poisoned by the insidious tendrils of doubt.

Beverly pushed herself to her feet, her tentacles shaking with the effort. “I need some air,” she mumbled, avoiding Angele and Joanna’s eyes as she stumbled towards the warehouse door.

Outside, the world was a bleak, desolate wasteland, the once-vibrant cityscape reduced to rubble and ash. The sky churned with sickly green clouds, and the air tasted of decay and despair. Beverly wandered through the ruins, her mind reeling with questions and suspicions.

Why had Angele and Joanna come into her life so suddenly, so insistently? Why did they seem to know so much about the alien consciousness, about the pocket dimension that had swallowed the world whole? And why, in the deepest recesses of her mind, did Beverly feel a nagging sense of wrongness about their presence, their motives, their very existence?

As she picked her way through the shattered remains of a once-bustling street, Beverly’s eye caught on a flicker of movement in the shadows. She froze, her tentacles tensing in anticipation of danger. But as the figure stepped into the sickly light, Beverly’s heart stopped dead in her chest.

It was Angele, but not the Angele she knew. This Angele was older, harder, her face lined with a cruelty that Beverly had never seen before. And beside her, emerging from the darkness like a nightmare made flesh, was the woman from the supermarket, her features twisted into a grotesque mockery of motherly concern.

“Beverly,” the older Angele said, her voice a silken purr. “It’s time to come home.”

And with those words, the world shattered around Beverly, her reality crumbling into a kaleidoscope of fractured memories and shattered dreams. She fell to her knees, a scream tearing from her throat as the shadows closed in, enveloping her in a suffocating embrace of madness and despair.

Not. The. End.