Woe.

It Came Again

His eyes shoot open, he’s on his right shoulder, facing the closed door that leads to the rest of his house. The room is dark, shadows draped over everything. His dog is still in the bed, sleeping comfortably. He tries to reach for her, the arm doesn’t move, nothing moves. Sleep paralysis. Again. He curses to himself.

“Fuck. Again. Gotta wake up before it comes again. I have to ge-” His thoughts are cut short by a screeching that comes from inside his own ears. Throbbing, he starts to immediately scan the only half of the room he can see, when he catches something moving behind the door. His heart rate gets faster. Too fast. He needs to calm down , his heart is going to explode, he knows it, it’s not a feeling, he knows it’s going to explode. He can feel it expanding too much in his chest cavity. It’s going to be skewered by his own rib cage. Literally killed by fear.

“No no no no no” The doorknob attempts to be turned completely, to unlock the gateway towards unknowable fear, but the lock is stubborn and holds the black just long enough to give him a cinder of hope. But what waits on the other side of his thin wooden barrier cares not for small empty cinders or the will of small metal locks. The rattling is distant at first, slowly rising until it becomes a cacophony of metal churning against metal. The rattling of the knob the only thing he hears, the only thing he sees. Everything else fades away as his vision is narrowed into a tunnel, the pale vertical walls becoming black and concave, plummeting into the door lock, being shaken from the outside. He attempts to hear his own broken voice, to have it yell out, his larynx on the verge of tearing from the strain being placed on it to create a sound other than the grinding metal protruding out of the wretched lock. Attempts to wake himself up, to startle his dog in order to break him free from his own mind and yet. Nothing. Even his own body which he can normally depend on to keep him away from more than 4 hours of continual sleep fails him, no spasms from his back, no cramping from his legs, no movement at all. Nothing ever moves.

Suddenly the rattling stops, the tunnel vision begins to subside, his breathing starts to slow down. His heartbeat beat the only thing he can hear now. But instead of leveling out it, keeps slowing down. He comes to the realization that his heart is going to stop beating now. That it wasn’t slowing down to become a normal heart rhythm, it, like himself, is just fading away.

The clock has been reading 3:17 for 2 hours now and yet, the room starts to brighten, the shadows reluctantly retreat into corners. Time has no sway in this place. Pupils start to contract, attempting to adjust at the same speed as the rooms’ lighting, while simultaneously expanding when he feels the pressure of the bed change. Something passes over his legs, a long damp slithering something. His first thought is a snake, followed immediately by the thought of his dog being consumed by it, but his dog isn’t on the bed anymore, which gives him relief.

His heart, beating what seems to be only once every 5 minutes, struggles to get blood to every part of his body, but is failing miserably. His right arm is completely cold. He looks over the bed towards the ground, his floors have always been carpeted and yet when he looks at the ground it’s not carpet. Not hard wood floor, not linoleum, not concrete or even dirt. But something else.

Meat. Rotting. Molding. Littered with translucent throbbing tubes of greenish grey. Massive veins and arteries, pushing unknown liquid to and from dark spaces. Another snake crawls over his legs from behind him. He didn’t get a good look at the first snake. This time what he sees is not a snake but something else. Maybe it was trying to imitate a snake, but the only thing that it had in common with a snake was that it was long and had no appendages. But snakes can be beautiful. They can be graceful. This thing couldn’t be farther from those things.

It is the same color and same translucent greenish grey of the veins currently pumping sludge on what used to be his floor. What could only be described as it’s head, because it was at the front of the the direction it was traveling in, slithers off the bed and onto the meat floor, making a grunting noise when it landed. It begins to rear up and the “head” begins to split open into a horrific mouth, but, instead of it opening like a snake or any other earthly creature, it splits its’ “mouth” vertically, its jaws hanging loosely by its sides. And out of its tremendous gaping mouth, 8 tentacles dribble out. Moving freely from each other, almost sentient in their own right, like vipers inside the mouth of an even larger one, sniffing at the air and then pointing towards the “floor.” Suddenly, they become erect and rigid. Viciously stabbing a large bulging vein from the meat floor. Sucking in the disgusting bile from it, growing far too fast then should be possible for any creature. Within seconds, the “snake” is 3 times the size it was before, and the vein on the meat floor shriveled and blackened, leaking bile everywhere. The 8 tentacles retract from the empty vein and back into it’s mouth. It turns to him now, not with eyes but with a furrowed shadowed brow and yet he could tell that it was looking at him. He tries again to move or do anything but his body refuses to move, maybe his own body knows that to play dead might be the best course of measure when coming face to face with a thing like this one.

The snake makes another grunting noise, this time, unnervingly attune to a human grunt. It begins to slither toward him. He can’t even grit his teeth in preparation for what’s to come. But, the snake stops, then, like a child who has been told he can’t play with a particular toy until he eats all his food, it sighs. Drops it head disappointingly a few inches and turns around, slithering toward the gaping hole that used to be his door. At least one less horror he has to worry about, he thinks to himself. But his “room” is vast. And wherever this thing came from, chances are there are more like it, probably worse.

Behind him, his back is exposed to what very well could be ungraspable horrors. Someone lays down behind him. He closes his eyes and awaits the tentacles to pierce his weak body and drain the life from him. His eyes straining to remain closed. Something long and wet drapes over his shoulder. This is it.