I didn’t notice it at first, the mood swings I attributed to simply having a bad day. I grew two inches over night, which I thought was just me improving my posture. I put on twenty pounds of muscle, simply my workout finally paying off. I could see better, hear better, smell better, I figured maybe there really was something to eating right.
It wasn’t until I found that dead man in the alley that I knew, unequivocally, that something was very wrong with me.
I stared at the body, curled up in a fetal position, obviously dead. I could smell him even standing six feet away, I knew what death smelled like, you smell it once and you never forget, but this was different, this smelled good, delicious in fact.
I began to salivate, slowly moving towards the man. I felt a hunger I had never known before, I knew, just absolutely knew, that if I were to crouch down and take a bite out of his rotting corpse it would be so good.
I could feel the blood rushing through my body, my face began to heat up, my heart started to pound, I could feel my pulse in my teeth, my jaw creaked as it dropped open and I began to pant.
My clothes got tighter with every step I took, and I thought for a moment, they would just burst off of me. My eyes burned, and the darkness of the alley lit up with a deep red glow.
There was a voice screaming at me in the back of my mind, alarm bells beating against my consciousness. I watched, as if in a dream, as my hand reached out to touch the man, and it was the sight of my hand that threw me firmly back into control of myself.
My hand looked, skeletal, my fingers were elongated and bony, there were two extra joints on each finger, the skin stretched so that it was almost translucent. Veins crawled along the digits wriggling and pulsing as if they were living things.
It was so totally alien, that the sight of it stunned me, and I couldn’t comprehend that this was my hand. I brought the appendage slowly up to my face and touched it, and I couldn’t recognize my own damn face.
My jaw was hanging open, and as my fingers drifted across that horrid maw I could feel the sharp prick of jagged ivory. My tongue slithered out of my mouth and it was a thick oozing tentacle that slithered over my digits.
I could taste the air around me, the heat of my breath tasted of blood and burned against the stretched skin of my elongated palms. The horror of what I was seeing and feeling crescendo’ed in a wave of blackness and oblivion.
I woke up on my couch a few hours later thinking I had just had the most fucked up vivid dream of my entire life.
How very wrong I was.