It all started some time ago, the day I woke up face to face with a waking nightmare. This wasn’t out of the ordinary however. I’ve been unwell for a while now so waking up to my demons is nothing new. I rose from bed and walked past it into the kitchen. The sky was cloudy. The dark overcast loomed over the town, rain tapped on the windows as if it was asking to come in. I didn’t leave the house.
I woke up the next day to the same fate. The rain continued to fill the air around me, the thick clouds shrouded the world in darkness, and my monster in the closet had come out to play. I studied it’s complexion through the darkness. I could make out that this creature was about 4 feet tall and mostly human shaped. A welcome change to the amorphous blobs that usually cursed my peripheral vision. Such detail in fact, perhaps this monster had a place in reality outside of my head. In whatever case, this was the perfect excuse to stay home. I didn’t leave the house.
I woke up on the third day. I felt much better then usual, some sun even peaked its way through the clouds and into my dusty apartment. The creature however, remained, and in the suns new appearance I could examine it more closely. This creature was void of all facial features opposed to two holes in the center of its face. Pale grey skin stretched across its whole body, long strands of hair protruded from its head. It followed me into the living room, its eyeless face staring up at me. My food supply was running low so, I left house to get more.
The streets were busy, lots of people milling about minding their own business. Something rather curious happened on this journey however. Normally I was the monster who walked these streets, having hardly spent any time outside I’ve become somewhat of an oddity in my local town. I was very pale and messy and I probably stunk a bit, a stark contrast to my fellow man. People would stare as I walked to the store, though today I had a little passenger. The creature peacefully followed close behind me as I walked. Although this must surely be a stranger sight than normal, I could feel the prying eyes of the curious decay behind me as I went by. Heads would turn like they always would, but as soon as I walked by and my passenger was in full view, they would forget.
Even as I entered the store, the man at the register who usually hounded me for my savings failed to notice as I picked out my things. I walked out with everything I needed without a single disturbance or paying a single dime. When I returned home I found myself at an abnormal peace. I felt invisible, and only the creature following me could be blamed. For some a fate of invisibility would be torturous, but for me this was a dream come true. I never liked being seen by people anyway. The air was calm and without sorrow or pain. The rain had stopped.
I turned to my little creature friend and it held out its hands. I held out my hand in response and it grabbed my fingers. In a sequence, the creature squeezed one of my fingers in each hand for about one second before moving onto another finger and squeezing that one. It was slow, methodical, and perfectly timed, just squeezing one finger after another in order of closest to last squeezed. I could feel life flow through its fingers, a gentle stream of vitality filled my body. It was somehow endearing, and more importantly it made me feel alive. I thought this couldn’t be the work of an evil monster. This must have been a savior wrapped in twisted skin, or perhaps a tormented soul of the past sent to save me from the rot we both shared. Together we lived in symbiosis, me feeding my loneliness with its presence, it living off of my ability to remember.
The weeks came and went. I found that I no longer needed to eat, I no longer needed to drink, all I needed was this perfect harmony of solitude and my monster friend to hold onto my fingers. My little friend also seemed to show a preference for the sunny spots in my apartment, a sentiment we shared. For the first time for as long as I could remember I felt the sun on my skin and the warmth it brought with it. Occasionally the other curious monsters in my head would come to investigate, but none of them could scare me any longer. I was finally at peace.
People stayed away from my home, they consider me the outsider and avoid me as such, but I see it a different way. They are the outsiders, they’re outside after all, so I labeled them as such. Nevertheless occasionally a new outsider will knock on my door unaware of who’s on the other side. Normally I would loath these troublesome interactions, but now I had the perfect weapon against their intrusions, so when the day came and an outsider knocked on my door, I deployed this perfect weapon.
I walked to the door with my friend in tow and shuffled it between me and the door, then I opened it up. On the other side of my castle gates stands a lone man. He is dressed in casual outside attire with a very enthusiastic smile. He asks me if I had heard the good news. His gaze fixates on my passenger and he is clearly unsettled. Regardless of how he must feel about what’s he’s seeing, he still goes on to give his religious speech, which I kind of respected at the time, though I don’t know how one could continue believing in a god in the presence of what surely could not be the work of one. I don’t say a word and after a few seconds of awkward silence he must of reached his limit. He thanked me for my time and turned to leave. After he walked away I noticed that he did not seem to forget, which I remember feeling uneasy by, mostly because this might have meant that it’s possible my monster friend could leave me for someone else.
This possibility was quickly proven impossible however.
*crack*
I turn to look at the creature.
*crack CRACK pop*
My monster has suddenly started to transform
*CRACK riiiiiiiiiip POP*
Tendrils of face matter stretched and ripped over a now gaping maw filled with needle sharp teeth. A horrid gargle sound bores through the air as a mass of sticky black ooze spray against the door. I stare, frozen out of both fear and disgust of its transformation.
The creature turned and faced me, twitching its head slightly with every motion. Something about the way it stared at me made me reach out my hand, like it was trying to communicate something. Instead the monster wrenched it’s head back around and ran at a frightening pace out the door. One of its needle sharp teeth tore through the side of my finger as it’s head turned. The agony soared through my whole hand instantly, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster wanted me to follow it into the outside. I swallowed the pain and I chase after the creature. I followed the trail of black ooze for a bit when heard a scream, it had to be that man who did not forget, my friend had found him.
I ran up to a bend in the street around a corner store when I found them. The creature was tearing into his abdomen with its needle teeth and he was screaming so loud it hurt my ears. There were many people on this street and plenty of them heard his cry’s for help, but no one would be coming to save him. Some even ran over to help, but it was no use. Patron saints of futility flocked to the cries of pain only to clueless moments later. They would all forget, all but me who would be cursed to remember every detail. The agony in my arm become too great for me to bare, I collapsed onto the street. I lifted up my hand and found nothing but rot. My whole arm began to degrade into a black ooze.
The pain that surged through my entire body petrified me in place. My arm, weaker then having sponge flesh and chalk bones, crumpled under my body weight and sloped off into the concrete. I raised my head once again to face my betrayer. The man’s torso was reduced to a black puddle with a rib cage. His face, twisted in agony, bore lifeless eyes filled with tears of coagulated blood. His suffering had ended, no one could help him now, no one could help me. The searing agony I felt encompass my whole body was impossible to describe with words. The rot had reached my legs and neck, leaving me unable to control my spasming body any longer. I began to cough and choke, spitting up a mixture of blood and black ooze. Chunks of my teeth and jaw bone split from my rotting face and onto the pavement, my loose tongue to follow. The last thing I saw was the face of my once savior standing over me, and everything went black
Then there was nothing, and I don’t mean nothing like a black void or an empty pit, I mean nothing in the sense of a lack of anything at all. Blackness is something, this was nothing, like being a brain in a jar. No eyes or ears, a mouth or a nose. No way to sense the world, no way to observe the passage of time, no way to even know if this was death or simply the everlasting final second before it. I felt like I’d been in this nothingness for eons, or for milliseconds. Time is an arbitrary measurement dependent on the observation of its passing, so millions of years could be passing and I’d never be able to tell.
A single thought was my first sign. A thought pieced the nothing, bringing something into my world, and in a sense became all that I knew or could ever know.
“If a tree fell in the middle of the forest, and no one was around to hear it, would it make a sound? Or retrospectively, if I were to die here in the street and no one could ever remember me, would I have even existed to begin with?” Said the thought
The thought could have only been my own, but how can one think if they were dead? This feeling then gave way to more thoughts. I thought about my life and how I lived it. How unbelievably sad it was to have lived as long as I had the way that I had. I thought about my dead family, how I’ll be seeing them soon, and how I could finally apologize for how it all ended up. I thought about my future, the one I wouldn’t be having. Somehow I’d fix myself and live a normal life with friends and a girlfriend. She’d be beautiful and have long brown curly hair that I’d mess with when we cuddled together. I could practically see the new house I’d live in with a nice yard and a little dog out front. I felt crushed under the weight of my failures. Endless echoes of thoughts that swelled wildly throughout everything that I was. This feeling I couldn’t fight overwhelmed me. Then I noticed, I could feel more then just thoughts. My senses returned slowly, like my whole body was slowly being lifted out of a pool of water. The weight of the nothing washed off of me as I was lifted out. I could feel the rain.
I opened my eyes, clouds formed overhead and it began to rain. I could see. The creature stood over me, squeezing my fingers like always, I could feel the weight of life though it’s hands and into mine. The rain poured down from the sky and onto its head. The water dripping off of its face almost looked like tears. I was alive.
With time I have come to learn that my body being returned was no gift but more an exchange. I get to live once again but at the cost of control, I can feel the will of my passenger and I can not disobey. In the end, though I didn’t die, the idealistic future I dreamt of in my moments before death were truly robbed from me. My future has been highjacked by a parasite that uses me to find food. This monster needs rememberers. Those who see and don’t forget. So if you are reading this and you do remember. You don’t forget. I’m sorry, I don’t have any control over what I do anymore. This story was my mercy, a tinge of my will seeping through the selfish motives of my bodies new owner. Now you can at least know why you were killed and how it will happen.
I wouldn’t leave the house today if I were you.