When I woke up this morning there was a hole in my bedroom wall. It was no ordinary hole. It didn’t lead into the next room. It didn’t seem to lead anywhere. I looked into it but there was nothing but darkness.
I don’t know how you’re supposed to describe finding something like that. I was both terrified and intrigued. How did it get there? Where did it go? Who (or what) made it?
I did the only thing I could. I climbed up and went in.
I’m not sure exactly where I am now, or how to get back.
I just wanna get back.
This place isn’t right.
I don’t remember emerging from the hole. It was more like I woke up. I was in the middle of the living room. My living room. Only it wasn’t.
It’s like someone went into my memories and reconstructed my apartment as best they could from the hazy images held there. The walls are kind of ashy in colour, not off-white like they should be. The living room feels just a little smaller than it should be, the bedroom just a little bigger. The door handles are an inch too high, the kitchen sink an inch too low. Nothing you would notice at first glance but together it feels somewhat off.
Wrong.
The air smells of rust and mildew and is too cold for this time of year. It’s overcast outside and quiet. Too quiet. I haven’t heard a single animal since I got here. No birds, no dogs, no insects.
But that’s not the strangest thing.
It’s the people. I can’t see their faces.
I first noticed it when I saw the photo that sits on my bedside table. It’s the same one I have at home of myself and my partner, only it’s not. The colour is wrong. The shape is wrong. But it’s the same photo. Only you can’t see our faces. It’s like they’re blurred. The features are there but I can’t make them out, like my brain refuses to process the image.
I looked outside and the streets were empty and wet. It was the same view I saw every morning when I woke up but it wasn’t. The road was warped to the left just a little more than it should have been. The cars a little smaller than I remembered them, the houses a little wider. The trees brown and dying, the grass patchy and withered, as though god had woken up a few days ago and turned the ‘LIFE’ switch to off.
Then I saw him. At least I think it was a him. He was wearing a suit and wide-brimmed hat, carrying a suitcase as he walked towards the bus stop. The bus stop with the sign too tall, the chair too small. There he stood, waiting, but no bus ever came. He just continued to stand there, frozen in a desolate landscape where nothing moved or breathed or looked true. Then he looked up at me and I fell backwards in terror.
He had no face.
He continued staring at me, a faceless mannequin my brain simply couldn’t comprehend. He knew I was here. I could hear a high-pitched screaming, so loud it was as though it was right inside my cerebral cortex. I fell to my knees in pain, unable to do anything to make it stop. I was in hell being stabbed with a thousand hot pokers while a sledgehammer was being taken to my brain and senses. I was roasting over a cauldron of flesh and bones and grizzle while slugs slithered and sizzled on the coals beneath me trying to get their share of my essence.
Then I was back and the man was gone. As though he’d never even been.
I haven’t been outside. I can’t. There’s something out there. I can hear it in the distance, only I can’t. A rumbling like the earth itself is opening up, although there’s no actual sound. The world is silent, but I can still hear it.
It’s getting closer.
I don’t know what to do. I’ve searched the entire house and the hole is gone now. There’s no way back.
The TV works but it’s just white noise. The radio blares nothing but static. My phone connects but there’s no-one there. Is this message even going through?
It’s all just a dream, right? Anything’s possible in a dream.
The noise is getting closer.
Let me out.