Down
Down. Down deeper than you could have possibly imagined, deeper than you thought possible. The light started to fade and your mind started to slip the further you went. Eventually you realized you weren’t digging through pencils anymore, you were falling through an oppressive blackness. You tried with all your might to stay conscious, but whatever force you were moving through was too powerful.
Your eyes open to a familiar sight. Your room. You shrug off the covers and look around. It all seems- normal. Quiet and slightly cluttered just the way you left it. The only thing missing were the sounds of your roommates moving around. It’s probably just early in the morning, right? You’ve been woken up by nightmares before, it’s not a huge surprise.
You move to check your clock, but it’s been reset. Your phone is dead too. There must have been a power outage. Well, if it’s early enough to be light outside it’s early enough for a meal.
You go through the motions, making yourself some pancakes when your whole body seizes up as you drop a glass bowl on the floor. It shatters with a crash that sounds deafening in the silence of the dawn. You brace for the yelling from your roommates telling you to shut up but.. Nothing. Not a sound.
Now that you think about it, it’s almost too quiet. No cars driving by outside, no walking around from the people upstairs. You panic and start knocking on the door closest to you. When no one answers you slowly creak it open. There’s nobody here. No one in the next door either. Or the next.
By this point you don’t even bother to knock, you’re bursting in. There’s not a single person on your floor, and not a single clock is showing the same time. You run outside and it’s deathly quiet. No birds chirping, no traffic in the background, not a single sign of any living person. There are cars on the road, but they’ve all either stalled out or gone quiet.
You need to go somewhere, anywhere, find some other person, find what happened to everyone else, but the roads are too crowded to drive. So you do the only thing you can think to do. Start walking down the middle of a four lane highway. And walk you do. After a few hours you stop bothering to check the cars for people. Some of the engines are running, but that doesn’t matter. There’s still no one there.
You watch as cars roll slowly down hills, and neon signs flash but the sun is setting now and there’s still nothing. After a small pit stop in a deserted convenience store, you keep moving. All of the registers were clocked in, so you rang yourself up. Despite whatever was happening it didn’t feel right to just take things. Not yet at least.
By this point you feel your eyes starting to droop again, so you head towards the suburbs and knock on the door of a small family home. Just as you expected. No answer. You search the house, finding a car backed halfway out of the garage and a sink that was still running next to an open dishwasher. Video games showed a timeout message and the TV was asking if someone was still watching. Nobody was.
You grab a knife from the kitchen to defend yourself in case something miraculously showed up, and pick a room to sleep in. You’re woken up again in the middle of the night, panicking for a second before you remember where you were, and suddenly against the pitch black of night, a blinding light shines through the window. You throw open the curtains and what you see makes your jaw drop. A massive floating outline of a person stands in front of the house. It’s hand beckons you and with a flash you’re suddenly outside, looking up and the 30 foot tall being in front of you. The light dies down slightly and you jump as a voice enters your mind.
“Little one. You have experienced much. We thought that moving you would keep you safe, but we were wrong. Your world is coming to a close. All those who once called it home have been moved to another. Except you.
"Despite our strongest efforts, your memories were retained and manifested in your mind as a dark cell imprisoning you. This weight ties you to this place. Unfortunately this means our only option is to move you with memories intact. You will be torn between this world and the new one, and that means you may find yourself here, or the dark prison containing your memories, more than you may wish”
Before you can react, you are blinked away and wake up in a bed. It’s not yours, you remember yours, but it feels like you’ve always lived here. In a room you don’t recognize. The clock says 5:30am. You can hear your roommate snoring next to you and the birds chirping outside your window. Nothing is wrong, so why do you feel this way? It must have been the dream you had. What a strange dream.
Ending 10/16