It’s a relief to find this subreddit. Anyone reading, please, I need any advice that you can offer on staying awake for as long as possible. I know that I can’t go on indefinitely, but I have to play it safe.
I have to make sure that he’s dead.
Every night, I used to fall asleep by letting my mind wander and dream up any images that it wanted. It always came out to be your standard nonsense. Bizarre creatures morphing through different forms, buildings with impossible architecture, discolored images of the countryside near my house. My mind would conquer them, but I knew at the same time that I was the one creating the images. I could always figure out the inspiration of a certain image, and no matter how tired I was, I always intuitively knew what would come next.
Until the eye.
It wasn’t particularly different from the other images at first. Just a blue, human eye. My brain couldn’t seem to decide if it was the left or the right one, but it didn’t really matter. It was much more important that the eye had a very detailed pupil, and it was moving.
It’s difficult to describe exactly what it was like. The pupil felt like it was beyond my control. Rather than my mind telling the pupil to point in one direction or another, it moved unpredictably, with a will of its own. I didn’t know where it was about to look. It was like I was watching a movie that I had never seen before, uncertain of where things were going.
The feeling startled me and I jolted upright, causing it to fade at once. I sat in the dark of my room, breathing heavily. It had to have just been a nightmare - although I can’t stress enough how it felt like I had still been awake at the time. My mind-movie had transitioned perfectly into the eye without any intermission during the really blurry period of actually falling asleep. I turned on my lamp and looked around the room, but there was nothing unusual about it. It was already about 3am, so I decided to just get up for the day.
That was Sunday. I had an early shift at work the next morning, and my boss had already been on my case about my performance. The eye was weird, to be sure, but it still seemed better to deal with it than to risk my job. I was still unnerved by the experience, however, so I told my roommate Kevin to wake me up if I started to twitch while I was sleeping, making up a lie about how I was worried that I had started sleepwalking.
I tried to keep my mind entirely empty. I counted my breaths and stared at the dark ceiling. It didn’t help that my imagination sought to make forms out of the cracks as soon as my vision adjusted to the dark.
I started to drift off and my willpower faded. I couldn’t stop myself from picturing the eye, just as I had seen it before, and it was suddenly there, clear in my mind as if I was looking into the face of someone standing just over my bed.
This time the pupil flickered around only briefly before it locked in a direction that I knew was somehow focused on me. The region of skin around the eye started to come into focus, detailed down to the tiny hairs sticking out.
It took me a surprisingly long time to recognize my own face.
I might as well have been standing in the dark bathroom and looking into the mirror. The vision was in every way my living, breathing face, flexing slightly as I breathed, the skin flexing atop the muscles. My lips were moving slowly, uttering an incantation that I didn’t recognize. I’ve never been good at reading lips. Again, I had no control over what I was seeing: I could feel a deep sense of shock rising in me, but somehow I couldn’t tear myself away. Everything else in my mind shut down until only I - the reflection - remained.
Eventually, the reflection closed its eyes, and I woke up in the full light of morning. I had the strangest sense of disorientation - it felt like the time I had been day-dreaming in class and came to my senses to realize that every other student was already leaving for the day. It felt horribly like I was missing something. I walked about the apartment and couldn’t find anything that was amiss. My reflection in the mirror was completely ordinary, although it chilled me to look at it.
I’ve read stories about people coming through on the other side of the mirror, and I always thought it would be easier to tell whether or not things had been reversed.
I went into work that day and everybody seemed normal enough. Everybody who had been left-handed before was still left-handed, for one.
The face was back that night, and the next. Every time it was the same: a fully-formed, unpredictable image, chanting the same phrase under its breath, and the moment it closed its eyes I woke up with a sense of vertigo.
The concept of being reflected through the mirror began to obsess me and I wondered if there was any way I could test it. I could hide something in a place where the reflection wouldn’t think to look so it wouldn’t be able to make a copy. Then I could check if it was still there the next time I woke up.
It’s funny, trying to figure out where you wouldn’t hide something from yourself.
I eventually decided that the gutter was off-limits. It was several feet up from my window, just high enough that you couldn’t reach it without going outside and putting up a ladder. It took me the better part of the day to work up the courage, and the rest to go out and buy the ladder, but I eventually propped it up against the wall and climbed up. My heart was trembling enough at the thought of the ground stretching below, and when I saw that something was already in the gutter, I nearly lost my footing.
It was a plastic ziplock bag containing my childhood diary. It was a cheap thing that I hadn’t bothered to look for in ages, just a simple black cover with a string to latch it. I shakily grabbed the bag and made my way back to the ground.
I rushed over to the kitchen table and took out the book. Every page was exactly as I remembered it - just the random scribblings of a child, complete with hyperbolic stories and rough illustrations. I nearly destroyed the thing in my disappointment, until I remembered that I had always thought that invisible ink was completely stupid.
The reflection must have thought I would overlook it. I didn’t own a UV-flashlight, but something told me I would be able to find one in this version of the apartment. I ruffled through the junk drawer and sure enough, there it was at the very back, buried in a mess of old rubber-bands.
I flipped to the first blank page and shone the flashlight onto the surface. Fluorescent handwriting glowed back at me. I couldn’t make any sense of it. It was in some sort of cipher but I couldn’t find any solution online. I thought for a moment that the reflection had really thought of something that I couldn’t. After all, we clearly weren’t exactly the same if it was formulating some sinister plan in a notebook and I wasn’t.
I stared at those pages for hours upon end until my head began to drop. With a jolt, I suddenly realized that the reflection would know I was onto it if I didn’t put the notebook back in place. I’d have to return the ladder too and burn the receipt. This was all easy enough to do, although I hated having to climb up the cursed thing again to put the notebook back.
The face returned that night to bring me back to my side of things. I had tried to memorize the writing as best as I could, but I really had not made much progress. The best thing that I could do was wait until I was brought back there.
For whatever reason, Kevin decided that he would clean the gutters that day, and he returned from the task with a small ziplock bag clutched in one hand.
“The hell’s this?” he asked, slamming it down onto the table and roaring with laughter. “You’ve been hiding this in the gutter the whole time? Man, if you’ve been stashing some messed-up porn in here…”
He opened the bag and drew out the book as I stood in bewilderment. This couldn’t be happening. I was back on my original side of things, so it couldn’t possibly be here. I couldn’t have mixed up the dates - it had been four nights, and it had come every night. Four swaps put me right back where I had started, unless I really had imagined the face one of those times.
Kevin leafed through the pages, the grin fading off of his face as he squinted at the childish writing. “What the hell?”
“It’s nothing,” I lied, trying to grab it. “I didn’t mean to leave it there -”
“No,” he said, flipping through the pages. “You didn’t leave it in the gutter by accident. Just tell me what’s in here. I won’t judge.”
He grew increasingly exasperated as I mumbled about embarrassing childhood memories. “Fine, man. You know, I admire the dedication to the end. I’ve just got to check-”
He whipped out his keychain and directed the little UV flashlight on the end to one of the apparently blank pages. “I knew it!” He studied the cipher for a moment. “Are you actually going to make me translate this or will you just tell me already?”
I couldn’t stop him from grabbing a sheet of paper and settling down on the couch to transcribe the text. He highlighted the text with his light, page-after-page, and scribbled down the characters, then started writing down a list of notes beside them. At first he kept looking up at me with a gloating expression, moving the paper away when I tried to grab it, but after he made some progress he started to look worried.
“What the hell,” he muttered again, the excitement gone from his voice. “You wrote this?”
“No -”
“‘Escape the ever-gorge,’” he quoted, fidgeting with the pencil in his hand. “What is this? This section’s about - sacrifices - you’re justifying murder - ‘blood on my hands so that I may perserve myself’ - dude, this is really fucking messed up!”
“I didn’t write that!” I protested, but I could see that he didn’t believe me.
“‘It swells,’” he read, his voice shaking. “‘The void cannot escape the mouth the stars are crumbs before its hunger it comes for us it comes to swallow’ - the fuck - ‘it ate the devils already they’re gone from their place in the beyond between where all that is is is is is but I swam to one before it was fully digested and I tore its secrets from the mouth and now I can get to where the rest have gone-’”
He threw me out of the apartment shortly thereafter. I’m writing this now in the park. I still can’t make sense of it. I’ve checked and checked again and I’m sure that it was my turn to be back in my reality. That notebook should never have been here. It doesn’t bother me as much that Kevin had been able to read the thing, since he was probably just better at puzzles than I was, but he never should have been able to find it in the first place.
Regardless, I’m not going back. If the reflection thought it could swap with me and subject me to whatever horrible fate awaits its world, I’m not going to let it.
Please help me stay awake until it takes him.
Update:
The ids tis it comes to us and it consumes forever it cse thes light and the void and everything lost to the jaws
Thew he dstre wicked tricked me this is the world that gies i’m in his i’ve got to go back
I need to sleep i’ll sleep but you if we if you’re reading this
youre in the wrong one and it comes and it’ll be on us when the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow and we sit in the stomach of the everything and you can’t swap
he won’t bkac let me back I want I want bakc I CAN sees theut eye give ME THE eye LET em trogu