I am a 24 year-old graphic designer (or at least, I was before this whole ordeal took place) living in a medium-sized town in New Zealand. A couple of months ago, I was walking back to my office after getting a coffee at the nearby cafe when all of a sudden, right before my eyes, I saw the people around me evaporate like a mist. The sky, that had moments before been beautiful and clear, was now overcast with a thick cloud cover. The buildings around me became decrepit, covered in cracks and mould. The fresh, aromatic coffee I’d purchased minutes earlier now emanated a stench so foul that I threw it as far away from me as I could. I’d left my phone at my desk when I’d gone to get my coffee, so I couldn’t use it. Panic and terror seized me as I processed all these changes. Was I hallucinating? I screamed at the top of my lungs, hoping and praying that this was but a hallucination, that someone would come and snap me out of it. As I screamed and screamed, no one came, and the horrifying reality dawned on me – I was trapped in an alternate dimension.
I tried to go back to my office building, but the doors were jarred, and I couldn’t go in. So, I kept walking aimlessly. As I fumbled my way across the derelict streets, I was startled by a creature jumping in front of me out of the blue. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I saw that it was a fluffy, seemingly harmless, cat. It sized me up, looking at me timidly, and meowed, and then ran away from me. Not wanting to lose sight of the only sign of life I’d encountered so far in that nightmarish place, I decided to follow it, and it took me to the entrance of the new hospital that had opened up in my town (it wasn’t so new in this dimension I found myself in). The cat kept meowing at the hospital entrance, as if it wanted me to go in. Knowing how scary hospitals can be in our normal world, let alone in a cursed place like this, I was very uneasy and hesitant to go in. But, what alternative did I have? I had to find a way to get out of this mess and get back to the real world as soon as I could, and perhaps this cat could guide me to find a way out.
So, my hands trembling with fear and uncertainty, I opened the hospital door, half expecting some kind of ghost or monster (or a creepy nurse) to attack me as soon as I entered. Instead, I was greeted by sheer emptiness – there wasn’t a sign of any life, and surprisingly, in a rather pleasant way, the inside of the hospital seemed quite normal except for the absence of people unlike the outside that was rotting away. And the lights were still on, which was a plus. The cat didn’t seem to want to come in, so I left it at the door and made my way in, and took a look around. I eventually came to what appeared to be a store room, and found something that gave me a glimmer of hope – there was plenty of canned food that was still fresh and hadn’t rotted! Maybe this hospital was some kind of safe haven in this world, maybe it could serve as my base of operations as I looked for a way to get back to the real world.
As I opened a can of tuna, I got another terrifying jump scare. Much to my relief, it was my fluffy feline friend again, who’d jumped in through an open window. He eyed the tuna and started meowing, so, assuming he was hungry, I shared some of it with him. His hunger satiated, he left through the window that he entered through, leaving me all alone. The feeling of dread and despair, that had momentarily been numbed by the discovery of the food and the company of the cat, came back with a vengeance. I lay down on one of the hospital beds, staring aimlessly at the ceiling, as tears of fear and loneliness flooded my eyes. What if I was trapped here forever? Would I get to see my friends, colleagues, family again?
As I lay there pondering these things, I heard what sounded like the sound of someone opening a door, which sent chills down my spine. Was someone else here? What if it was someone hostile? I decided to try and hide, but before I could get off the bed, a figure barged into the storage room with a flashlight and stared at me, and I stared back like a deer in the headlights. The person in front of me was a young woman, around my age, give or take, and she looked slightly dishevelled, though not too much, as if she’d been here for a few days. She eyed me suspiciously, and I decided to break the silence and asked her who she was. “You first,” she retorted.
“Kyle, my name’s Kyle,” I responded, my voice shaking with fear.
She stared at me for a few more seconds, and finally lowered her flashlight and said, “I’m Amy. How did you get here?”
I explained how I’d one moment been walking back to work after getting a coffee, the next moment, the world around me transformed into this bleak, otherworldly dimension. She told me that she’d had a similar experience, but a few days prior, that she’d been at the hospital to see her GP when she’d experienced the exact same transformation. I asked her what she knew about the place, acknowledging that it would be natural to not trust each other just yet. She said that I was the first human she’d encountered since she’d been sucked into this dimension. I asked her if she’d seen anything else that wasn’t human. She hesitated a bit and said, “There’s this cat that comes around. I call him Murphy.” I told her I’d seen Murphy and had fed him some tuna.
She seemed a bit angry that I’d helped myself to some food, and told me how she’d been scavenging for some food, and that the supermarkets were still reasonably well stocked, though they were not nearly in as good a condition as the hospital. She said that now that I was there, the two of us should go to gather more supplies and explore to try and find a way out the following morning, murmuring something under her breath of having an extra mouth to feed. She then just said goodnight, and went and lay on one of the beds and seemed to fall asleep instantly. I chose to go into a room nearby to try and get some shuteye, but with all the thoughts about my predicament running loose in my head, I just couldn’t fall asleep.
Just as I was about to finally doze off, I heard my name being called. “Kyle! Kyle!” a female voice was yelling. I opened my eyes, and saw Amy standing at the entrance to the room. “Wake up! No time to sleep, we need to go out to find more food, and possibly a way out of this hellish place.”
“Yeah, right. Where are we going?” I asked.
“Just follow me and stay close,” she said, the tone of her voice indicating that she didn’t trust me. And I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know me, and for all she knew, I could be a monster waiting for the right moment to strike her down – we were in a weird, alternate dimension after all, none of this was normal.
She led the way through the rotting streets, and a great heaviness came upon me when I saw familiar locations once buzzing with life now looking like we were in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. We got to the nearby Woolworths, and Amy was right, the interior was as sad as the outside. It was as if the hospital was an anomaly in this world – a light shining in a dark place. But thankfully, there was still food and water. “Wait, that’s weird!” she cried, sounding surprised.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“There’s way more food than there was when I came to loot yesterday. But how did it get here?”
“Maybe me entering this world made it so that the supplies that were available in the real world at the point of my arrival are copied over into this world?” I theorised.
“Possibly. Guess we may never find out,” she replied.
We gathered some cans of food and some instant noodles, and started to make our way back out of the shop. Amy went ahead of me, and as we were about to exit the shop, she suddenly froze in her tracks, and covered my mouth with her hand and signalled to me to stay put and not make a sound. Her eyes began to well up with tears and tears started to stream down her face, and within seconds, I felt a sharp sting in my eyes as they began to water uncontrollably just like Amy’s. My vision blurred by the tears, I saw across the road what I can only describe as a blob of flesh – humanoid in its outline, but anything but human in all its other features, moving in a twisted, contorted manner, making a kind of hissing sound as it slowly shuffled along the pavement.
I’d never seen a more horrifying sight in my life before, and I was in a way glad my eyesight was partially dulled by the tears as I wouldn’t want to lay my eyes on such a vile, foul mass of gore ever. As it slowly moved past us and away from us, I felt my eyes start to feel normal again, and the waterworks subsided.
“What was that thing?” I whispered, my voice betraying a mix of horror and also anger that Amy had kept back her knowledge of the existence of this creature from me.
“I don’t know, what I do know from my encounters with it is that it burns my eyes when it is in the vicinity, and seems to be blind, and it moves quite slowly. I haven’t been attacked by it yet, but I don’t want to risk going anywhere near it.”
“Why didn’t you warn me about it before we came out here?”
“I didn’t want you to think that I was crazy, plus, trust takes time to build.”
“You could have gotten us both killed! Let’s get back to the hospital, and let’s devise a plan to get out of this freakish place with this abominable creature.”
On our way back to the hospital, we noticed a gun shop, and decided to go in and arm ourselves in case we had another encounter with whatever that thing was. Thankfully, we made it back without incident. I confronted Amy, asking her to tell me what else she was hiding about this place. “The only other thing I know is that there are more of these creatures, I’ve seen at least two at once,” she said.
“Are you sure you aren’t hiding anything else?” I asked.
In retrospect, I should have been kinder to her, it wasn’t her fault all this was happening. But, in the moment, I was angry, and she began to sob, and screamed, “Yeah, I’m hiding the fact that I miss my mum and my dad and my little brother and my best friend, and I’m terrified that I might never get to see them again. Is that all you need to know?”
I realised that she was just a scared young woman trying to make sense of everything that was happening to us the same way I was, and felt sorry for having raised my voice at her. I embraced her and we both wept in each other’s arms, and spent some time sharing about each other’s lives before we got sucked into this nightmare. She showed me a picture of her family, something she always carried around with her, which had thankfully survived getting zapped into this dimension. She also showed me a necklace that her mum had given her as a birthday present for her 21st. She asked me if I had anything on me from the real world. I had my wallet, and I noticed that in my other pocket, I had a guitar pick that I had forgotten to take out. I told her how I’ve been taking guitar lessons, and was meant to go to a lesson the day before, the day I’d entered this alternate dimension.
She suggested that we should exchange the items we had – her necklace for my guitar pick, so that if one of us somehow makes it back to the real world, we can have proof that the experience wasn’t some kind of hallucination, and can remember to try and find a way to get the other person out. I agreed, and put her necklace into my pocket in exchange for my guitar pick. We were startled out of our conversation, but thankfully, it was just Murphy, coming in for some food. We realised that we were hungry too, so we opened some cans and ate, the three of us in this broken, desolate world we found ourselves in.
“How on earth did you get here, Murphy?” I asked as I pet him.
“Mee-ooow,” came the response.
“Right, that’s helpful to know. If we ever find a way out of this place, you’re coming with us and one of us will adopt you.” Amy and I chatted a bit longer, and then decided to retire for the night.
The following morning, we decided to explore a different part of town. I knew the way to a New World supermarket, and we thought it’d be worth scavenging for more supplies and also to see if we could find anything or anyone else. The silence in the whole town was deafening, and our footsteps, which would normally be drowned out by the sound of hundreds of others, coupled with the buzzing of cars and conversations and everyday life, now sounded like roaring thunder. We got to the shop, and it was no different to the rest of the town – worn down, overgrown vegetation, cracks, rust – all the hallmarks of the other buildings in this world were to be found here as well. But thankfully, there was more food.
Amy and I started grabbing some cans when I felt the very familiar sting in my eyes, followed by my eyes getting submerged in uncontrollable tears. There was a monster nearby. We stood still, and grabbed out the guns we’d gotten from the gun store the day before, and I noticed a monster slowly shuffling towards us. It looked far more grotesque up close than what I remembered from the previous day. I hoped that it would move past us if we stayed quiet, but suddenly, behind me, I heard Amy scream and then a gunshot, and another, and another. Another monster was near Amy, and she was shooting at it, but her bullets didn’t seem to make a dent in the creature. I shot at it too, and then quickly at the other one, and it was soon evident that our bullets were useless against whatever these monstrous blobs of mutated flesh with an odour like that of a tonne of onions on steroids were, so we decided to make a run for it.
As we were running away from these monsters, suddenly, just like a couple of days ago when I’d been walking to work from the cafe, and had witnessed the world shift around me, I experienced the same thing again, but now in reverse, as the monsters dematerialised, the buildings and streets went back to normal, the sun came out, the town was buzzing with people again, and the gun I’d been holding disintegrated. And Amy, Amy was gone, nowhere to be seen. As I looked around in confusion, I was tackled to the ground by a security guard.
“You think you can shoplift and get away with it?” Shocked, I realised that all the cans of food I’d taken in the alternate world I still held in my possession in the real world, and in the real world, you don’t just take stuff – you pay for them. I was made to pay for all the items and a hefty fine. The cops came, and told me that I’d been reported as a missing person two days prior, and asked me what had happened. I lied, saying that I’d just run away due to work being stressful and gotten drunk and had tried to shoplift just for the thrills (all lies – I loved my job, I’ve never had a sip of alcohol, and have never stolen).
Surprisingly, they didn’t arrest me, and instead let me go with a warning and a fine. However, I did lose my job for going AWOL for a couple of days, and my shoplifting story had reached my boss, and I couldn’t tell him the truth of what had happened. Neither could I tell my family, who heartbreakingly feel ashamed of me as they think I’m a drunk, slacking shoplifter. But how could I? I didn’t want to get locked up in some kind of psychiatric facility. After all, no one would believe my story. They’d chalk it all up to a hallucination or drugs or some such thing. But I know it was real, everything I’d experienced, it was all real, not a figment of my imagination nor a dream nor a hallucination.
I know, for in my pocket, where I’d normally keep my guitar pick, instead of the pick, I found Amy’s necklace. Amy was still in that nightmare world, trapped, with those monsters after her. And I am the only one who knows. The fact that I’ve done nothing to try and rescue her for two months is weighing heavily on my conscience. I have to find a way to get back into that dimension, to get her out, to reunite her with her family. That is, if the monsters haven’t already gotten to her. Perhaps I should go to the cops, surely there must be a missing persons report on her. But will they believe my story? Or will they think that I did something to her? All I know is that I need to find a way back to that dimension, and find a way to rescue her. But I just don’t know how.