Ever since I was a child, I have had strange experiences, accidentally entering into a dark world which I came to think of as the “badlands”. I’ve seen people call it “no-clipping”, which is as good a word for it as any.
The first time it ever happened, I was coming home from school. My parents both worked late, so I was all alone. I walked into my front door, my head down, so at first I didn’t even notice what was happening all around me.
It was as if I had walked into the wrong house. The house I lived in with my family was a small duplex that we kept clean with Persian carpets and mirrors all along the front hallway. The house I had actually entered looked abandoned, with black water dripping from the ceiling, floors that looked like they were about to collapse and ceilings that hung down so low and had so much black mold that it was a miracle they were still standing.
I tried to spin around and run, but the door had slammed and locked behind me. Despite looking for any deadbolt or other lock on the handle, I could find nothing, but there was no way to get it open. I pulled with all the strength an 8-year-old could muster, pulling hard, screaming, slamming my little fist into the soggy, ancient wood. I hoped someone would hear me.
Then I heard something slithering behind me. Its breath sounded ragged and strained, as if it were choking on its mucus. It coughed constantly. I turned, my heart beating fast, my eyes as wide as dinner plates, and saw a creature from my worst nightmare.
It was a woman- or at least, half of a woman. She pulled herself forward on rotting arms, her entrails and intestines dragging behind her. The lower part of her body was entirely missing. She had no legs or waist. How she could still be alive was totally beyond my child’s mind to comprehend.
As she got within ten feet of me, her head jerked up suddenly, her jaw opening far too wide and showing a mouth full of fangs streaked with clotted gore. Bloody trails ran down her chin and naked, decaying breasts from her open mouth. Flies swarmed around her, as her body gave off a smell like rotting roadkill and copper. Two huge black wings unfurled from the rotting skin of her back, and with a sudden, savage leap, she flew into the air, her mouth wide open and aimed at my throat.
Screaming in terror, I pushed with all my strength at the door, and at the last possible moment, it flew open behind me, dumping me out onto the sidewalk in front of my house. I fell hard on my back, shrieking, scraping my hands and elbows as I tried to crawl backwards on all fours. The door slammed behind me, and a heavy thump smashed into it, rattling the entire front of the house. My neighbor, a sweet, old woman named Mrs. Fulman, ran over from her front yard, a gardening shear still in her right hand.
“Dear child, what is wrong with you?” she cried, putting one trembling hand over her chest. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!” I pointed at the front door with one shaking finger, but now there was no sign of the badlands or the creature I had seen. It looked like just a regular front door on another stereotypical suburban home.
As I grew older, I realized the creature I had seen was real- a type of vampire from the Philippines called a “tik-tik”. They leave the lower half of their bodies behind when they go out to feed. How she got here, thousands of miles away from the Philippines, was only one mystery among many, and not even a very large one. Wherever I went when I no-clipped, it was not necessarily attached to the original location of this world. Or maybe the tik-tiks existed all over the globe. I would never find the answer to those questions.
After this, however, whenever I opened a door, I would peer inside and make sure there wasn’t some strange, otherworldly dimension on the other side. This worked well for years, until I was 17 and coming home from working at a restaurant one cold fall day. The place where the restaurant was located was on the border of the city, and it was an extremely nasty place at night. Drug dealers and prostitutes controlled that area of the town.
I had just walked out of the restaurant, smelling like pizza and fried food, a smell which seemed to seep permanently into whatever clothes I was wearing when I was at work. My head was down, as I was texting a friend from school about a camping trip we were planning that weekend. Because of this, I didn’t notice the three young men silently following me, red bandanas wrapped around the dark skin of their foreheads to mark them as members of the Bloods.
When I turned to take a shortcut through an alleyway, they followed close behind, then ran up on me. I heard footsteps coming and looked back in shock. One of them had a pistol out, kept pointed down for now. The gun looked huge and as black as the night I walked through.
“Yo!” one of them screamed at me. “Stop right there, motherfucker!” That was all I needed to hear. I took off, sprinting wildly down the alleyway. But they were faster than I was. Within seconds, I felt a hand on my shoulder. In a panic, my subconscious mind took over. It brought up my past experiences in that other world, like a video running through my third eye. Breathing hard, I pulled away from the hand that seeked to stop me- running right into a solid brick wall behind a dumpster.
I thought I would smash my face and chest into it, so instinctively closed my eyes as I impacted it. But there was no collision. I went right through it. Somehow, I had, for the first time, intentionally no-clipped out of the normal world and into the badlands.
Looking around, I saw I had entered a seemingly abandoned, post-apocalyptic version of the city. Some of the buildings were half-collapsed, smashed bricks and shattered glass littering the ground. I walked through the ruins of the building I was in, jumping over the broken wall back out into the alleyway I had just come from. There was no sign of the gang members- or anyone else, for that matter.
At first, I just doubled over and caught my breath, glad to be out of immediate danger. Little did I realize that I had gone out of the frying pan and into the fire. There were far worse things in the badlands than simple gang members, and I was about to find it out the hard way.
I walked through the streets back towards the downtown area, finding a warehouse that was mostly intact. I pushed on the front door. While the warehouse in my world was a bustling distributor for Spanish foods and drinks to the local bodegas, here it appeared to produce something much more unsettling. The first floor had an assembly line with half-finished torture devices. I saw massive iron maidens, the countless sharp spikes waiting for whatever unfortunate victim would be shoved inside. Thankfully, the doors were not yet welded on the front of them.
Farther on, I also saw brazen bulls. They were huge metal constructions, with a door in the side where the victim would be forced in, a fire lit underneath the iron to make it scalding hot. The victim would burn alive within the brazen bull, a series of pipes and horns underneath the head of the bull leading to the oven so that the tortured screams would sound like the roaring of a bull. Most of them were still missing their metal feet, while others still waited for the doors to be welded on. I had seen enough. I wanted to get out of this place.
I stopped looking after that, running up to the third and topmost floor. The building smelled dusty and ancient. Spiderwebs got tangled in my hair, causing me to freak out and spin in circles, beating myself on my head and face and chest to make sure no creeping bugs or spiders were going under my shirt or crawling down my nose and mouth. After I had calmed down, I carefully walked towards the window facing the street, keeping my arms in front and waving them back and forth to try to keep the spiderwebs out of my face.
Looking down, I saw someone walking along the street. From where I stood, they looked like nothing more than a dark silhouette. I could discern no features, no eyes or hair or nose or even ears, and their clothes, if they were wearing any, must have been pure black. They looked like nothing more than a walking shadow to me. Getting closer to the window, I tried to get a closer look, but the window was old and falling apart. As I put my hands on it, leaning forward, a pane of glass fell out. The creature looked up instantly, the glass shattering on the street a few stories below.
Taking a deep breath in, I stepped back from the window, a sense of panic and an unsettling fear rising in my chest. Below me, I heard a door open and close.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” I whispered to myself, looking for somewhere to hide. Heavy footsteps were running up the stairs now, and I had no time to think. I found an old desk nearby, crawling underneath it and pulling the boxcutter I always kept in my pocket at work out. It seemed like such a small and useless weapon, especially in a place like this.
Within seconds, the third floor door slammed open, and I heard a heavy, distorted breathing coming from the entryway. The creature slowly walked over to the window. Peeking out from my hiding spot, I saw it looking down from the window where I had just stood.
A soft tickling started behind my left ear. Reaching back, I brushed at the spot- and saw a huge, fat, black spider stuck to my hand. Screaming in instinctual panic, I threw it across the room, crawling out from the hiding spot. I wondered how many others were crawling on me at that very moment.
But as I crawled out, I stopped, realizing my stupidity. The creature was now looking directly at me, standing only ten feet away. It was the purest black, as if it were truly nothing more than a shadow. As it stared at me, however, its features began to transform.
The darkness of its silhouette seemed to melt away from it, puddling into a shadow at its feet. New features melted onto its face, like liquid wax solidifying into a human face and body. With horror, I realized I was looking at my own face- except it wasn’t exactly the same.
The creature had used my likeness, but the eyes I looked at were bloated and yellow. The skin was falling off, rotting, its hair dry and covered in clotted blood. Maggots infested every inch of its skin, wriggling and falling off in droves. Spiders crawled into its mouth and out of its nose and ears. It had transformed into me as a decaying body, as if I had been murdered and thrown in a swamp for a few days. Shrieking, I tried to crawl back away from it on all fours as it walked slowly up to me.
“Sweet, sweet child,” it said to me in a croaking, inhuman voice, bending down close to me. I could smell the rancid gasses emanating from its mouth, smell the bloating of its intestines and stomach as liquified shit and rotten meat dripped from every orifice of its body. “You are a long way from home.” It put its hand around my throat. I felt some of the skin slough off as I tried to struggle away, but its grip was like iron. Lifting me up, it held me up in the air with one hand, bringing me inches away from its sickly, jaundiced eyes.
“Get… away… from…” I tried to say, but it was choking off my air supply. My vision started to turn white with adrenaline and oxygen deprivation. With a last burst of energy, I took the boxcutter, slicing it across its right eye. With a shriek like a banshee, it dropped me. I fell hard on my back, my head slamming into the concrete floor. I saw stars for a moment, but I didn’t have time to waste getting my bearings.
Pushing myself up with unsteady hands, wavering, I began to sprint away from the abomination. I looked back as I went through the third floor door to the stairwell, seeing vitreous fluid and maggots leaking from its slit-open eye. It wiped away the disgusting mixture, then took after me, running at a superhuman speed that I could never hope to escape.
Taking the stairs two at a time, descending at a suicidal pace, I made it back to the first floor before it caught up with me. I had run past the brazen bulls to the section of iron maidens when it grabbed my shoulder, spinning me around. With an insane, burning anger shining in its remaining eye, it opened its mouth. A spider crawled out, jumping onto my face. I would have screamed, but it had grabbed me by the face and throat, and it now looked as if it would kiss me.
It began to suck at the air, and I felt myself weakening. I saw white light exiting my mouth and going into its open maw as more spiders and maggots crawled from its body onto mine. With a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I pushed it as hard as I could.
It stumbled back, falling into the open casket of an iron maiden standing directly behind it. While the monster was still unsteady, I put both my hands out and ran at it, shoving it into the spikes of the iron maiden directly behind it. The spikes went right through it and into my hands. Shrieking in pain, feeling warm blood begin to run down both of my arms from multiple holes in my palms and fingers, I pulled back. Instinctually, I began to bat away the spiders that had landed on me and crawled in my hair, around my face and chest, leaving small splashes of my own blood all over my body and clothes.
Then I heard more footsteps from behind me. Spinning around, I saw two more of those things. Without a second thought, I took off running towards the back of the factory, hoping with all of my heart that an emergency exit existed there.
They gained on me rapidly. As I saw the broken doorway in the back, I began to think of my world. A vision of blue skies, moonlit nights, oceans, cars and other facets of the normal world ran through my third eye in moments. A hand landed on my shoulder, but I had reached the door. Pulling away, I jumped through it.
I landed heavily on the city streets behind the factory, noticing with relief that I was back in the real world, but I had not lost the creatures. They had both come through close behind me, pure black shadows that bent close to my face, as if examining me. One had opened its mouth and was approaching my face, unhinging its jaw and showing a flood of sickly white light within its body. I heard the screaming of children and the cries of tortured souls within these abominations, as if the souls of their victims were forever trapped within their eldritch frames.
At that moment, I heard a few soft footsteps. With my last breath, I yelled, “Help!”
“Hey, he’s over here!” I heard a deep voice yell. Looking up, I saw the three gang members, one of them with his pistol still out. “Motherfucker, you’re gonna regret…” the leader started to say, then he noticed the two black creatures. They had turned to look at the three with hungry interest. “What the fuck?”
The two abominations rushed at the three thugs. I saw the leader of the three raise his pistol and shoot the front one directly in the chest. It stumbled for a moment, then stood back up, rushing forward.
The three thugs tried to turn and run, but they didn’t make it more than a few steps. The abomination in the lead grabbed the first one and slammed his head into a brick wall, dropping him to the ground in an unconscious heap. Then they closed the distance to the remaining two, each grabbing one by the throat and putting their lips up to the thugs’ mouths.
As I got up, still unsteady and bleeding from multiple spots all over my hands, my only thought was to get as far away as possible from those abominations. The last thing I heard was the gasping of the gang members and their cries for help as their life was sucked out of them.
It has been a few days since then, and now reports are coming from all over the city of mysterious bodies, dried up and dessicated, as if their insides had been sucked out by a spider. I know those monsters are hard at work, and though they may have saved my life, I hope I never see them again.
I don’t think I want to no-clip anymore, either.