I crossed the empty street. Glancing around, I couldn’t see Jack. He wasn’t supposed to come with me anyway. He was just supposed to help the way a good friend would. Avoiding any upcoming blockades, I took a right, then I took a left and walked into the middle of the forest. Once I got through the block of forest, I reached a road. I looked both ways. To my left was a blockade. At least two police cars and four officers. To my right was the empty road stretching as far as I could see. Avoiding the blockade, I sprinted across the street and stepped into the forest.
As I trekked through the forest, I took note of the draining silence. The only sound was that of trees swaying in the wind. But at one point. A strange point. The wind was blowing, but the sound of trees swaying in the wind was left behind me. I continued walking, hoping this would be quick.
Likely 10 minutes later, I spotted the elementary school through the trees. Of course, there was a fence twice my height. I took a right and traced along the fence. The silence was heavy. I could hear the faint ringing in my ears as it accompanied the crunch of sticks under my shoes. I scaled around the corner of the fence and continued forward from then until I reached a road. There, I took a left and walked onwards, passing the school while almost dwelling on the faint ringing in my ears.
Gotta look for the being, wherever it is. Whatever it is.
I didn’t hear or see anything strange until I had passed four houses. As I walked, a low bullhorn noise echoed through the air. It came from all directions. I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from, but then I thought… this must be part of it. I continued on forward until I began to notice the trees up and down the street looked blurry. As I glanced at one of them, I stopped. It was a blurry fuzzy green and brown. I began to wonder if it was a tree at all. I could take a guess that it was a tree, but only because that’s what I thought it was before it went blurry. It was confusing. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I looked back down the road. Every single thing was a blur. Familiar… but I couldn’t bring myself to come up with what they were. I could only guess they were what I saw before, but they looked different enough to look like something else. Or two things at once somehow. I even had this with the sidewalk. I couldn’t take a single step.
This had to be it. I grabbed the circular device out of my pocket. All I knew about the thing was that it was supposed to curb the being. I didn’t know how it was supposed to do that, or how it worked in general. All Charlie told me to do was drop it on the ground after getting everybody out. Anyway, I observed it. It was blurry too. It was something circular, but what was it? I trusted my intuition that time and slipped it back into my pocket. I had to trust the sensation of texture rather than my own vision. Then the scenery changed. Everything turned a dark shade of blue, then a light shade of yellow. The color changed until it stopped at light brown-ish yellow.
A painful scream echoed from beside me. What looked like a yellow wall was forming between me and where the scream was echoing from. I also saw an opening. I stepped up to it and looked into the room. The room had yellow walls, and it was empty aside from there being a man lying on a concrete floor. His eyes were shut tight, his face was blood red, there were bruises on his legs, and he was shaking. He stayed in one spot in the middle of the room, shrieking like an animal.
“Dude, what’s happening?” I asked.
The man shouted incoherently.
More screams came from every other direction. I looked behind me. There was another open door. Another empty room with yellow walls. I stepped over to it and saw a woman standing up against the wall on the far corner. She was frozen. Just standing there.
What the hell is happening?
The screams from all around were too chilling for me to bear. But I couldn’t escape them. They were loud and I couldn’t recognize a way out. I stepped down the hallway. Walking turned to sprinting as I tried to find a way out. Why were people screaming so much? Was I going to be like them?
On my way down the hallway, I passed dozens upon dozens of rooms. The chilling screams stayed constantly loud. There were only opened doors. Openings I didn’t want to look into. Even though there was no visible scar or horrific sight, something was happening. Not knowing what it was filled me with dread. I don’t know how long I ran, but it was enough to start being able to hear some animalistic screams echoing from further down the hall. I can only describe them as demonic. There was a sign up ahead. It just had the number two on it. Much further down the hall was a moving cloud of fog. What looked like people crawling out of the fog were pulled back in. There was a sign ahead of that too. I wasn’t going over there. Nope.
I was confused as to how I was supposed to get any of these people to listen to me. That was besides going up to them and bearing their persuading screams. All while the craziest, creepiest, most unlikely ideas about what might be happening to them flooded my head. I didn’t know if it was me doing that or if the being was pushing more chilling thoughts into my head.
As I ran, something blurry slammed me in the face. I fell to the ground and looked at my surroundings. All that was around me were yellow walls. I was laying on a cold cracked concrete floor. Before I could pick myself up, images of mangled faces, ape-tiger hybrid creatures cornering people in warehouses, people falling off of bridges, etc. flooded my brain. These weren’t just images though. I could feel everything the imagined people were feeling. Excruciating sharp pain on every part of the body. Adrenaline. General terror. Sometimes the pain was prolonged. Other times the pain was a sudden stab straight through every sense at once. The worst part of it was… I knew these people. Some were my neighbors. One of them was Sam. I felt them. I felt the worst pain imaginable… It was theirs. It was surreal to feel the pain of good neighbors and my good friend.
I struggled and stared at the exit. However, it was as if I couldn’t move. With every imagined scenario, I felt as if I had to stay in one spot and imagine it. I brought up a different thought, but it was interrupted by an abrupt thought about a bear with sharp appendages and a human head chasing me down a trail in a forest.
It went on for what felt like an hour before I was able to take at least one mental step up and imagine some destructive stuff happening to the town like Charlie told me to do. I began to imagine the town being swallowed into a sinkhole, but the image of a screaming skeleton covered in decomposing flesh invaded my head. An unbearable pain gnawed at my bones. With the image came a pit of dread in my stomach.
I tried again, but another image popped up. It was of me walking down the hallway at night. As I neared a corner, I heard my name being called by a voice. A voice without any character to it. I looked back and saw a dark rectangular object at the other end of the hallway. There was no light shining on it, so I couldn’t make out what it was. Four red round lights opened up like eyes, at different places on the figure. It sounds simplistic, but the thing I saw inspired a pit of dread in me. The thing lunged at me three times faster than my normal walking speed.
I jumped. The pain I felt was sharp… but like dozens of knives were stabbing me at once. Although these things were imagined, they were somehow able to inspire real feelings in me. As if I was there and not just feeling a slight tingle or light chills when imagining anything of the sorts on a normal day.
I couldn’t do it. I could only think about the stuff the being was stuffing into my head. A dozen more terrifying images of creatures chasing me, everybody swarming my neighbors house and breaking everything while threatening my neighbor, and cult members surrounding me with torches and books with weird symbols on them popped into my head over the following moments, filling me with dread and adrenaline. It felt as if the ‘imagined’ scenarios were warnings. They were too vivid to be my own imagination.
There was another source of dread though. It came from me being unable to move. I had become like the others. What did this being want? Why did it need us to be scared and in pain? Why did the pain have to be real? It forced us all to live out hyper realistic imagined scenarios that technically doubled as real.
Then it hit me. All the intrusive imagined scenarios were built off of fear. It seemed only the terrifying ones were being pushed. So what if I imagined the town being destroyed in a way I’m fearful of?
I Imagined myself standing in my kitchen while my house burned to the ground. My house never burned in real life. Don’t worry. But I imagined it in as much detail as possible. Every appliance was flaming, thick smoke obscured everything into a dark grey hell-like scene with flames being slightly visible in some places, and the flames were growing in my direction.
I went on to imagine the entire town in the same condition. Every building up in flames. Every tree too. After about five seconds of me imagining this, I felt an odd throbbing sensation on my forehead. It then extended to my entire body. It wasn’t painful, but I felt a miniature wave of relief every two seconds.
This had to be it.
I put my focus back on the flaming city. I imagined the roads cracking, fiery explosions on every street corner, and then the ground protruding upwards. At that point, the throbbing became distant and the relief began to overtake the pressure from said throbs. Out from under the ground came a robotic sphere. The sphere detonated in an explosion I intended to be 10 times worse than the one in the Hiroshima atomic bombing. The throbbing stopped and I felt a falling sensation for at most two seconds. I ended the thought. However, the throbbing hit me all over, so I brought the thought back. Especially the intention. And I held it. The throbbing dissipated.
I was laying on the floor of the yellow room. It began to blur. I picked myself up and walked into the hallway. The blurring of everything obscured my sense of direction. I was leaving the shithole. But I still needed to do the task at hand.
I warned the person in the next room over to imagine their worst environmental fear happening within the town. By this time, the person in the room had become blurred and unrecognizable. The sight was… chilling. You’d have to be there to know how uncanny they looked.
I imagined them standing in the parking lot of the Torsney library. I decided the library was hit with an asteroid. The blurred person screamed. I rewound the scene. The blurred person is standing in front of the library while it’s up in flames. Parts of the building crumble. Then I imagined the entire town up in flames again, but with every building collapsing and the parts of the town away from the library sinking into a fiery abyss.
The blurred person had defined facial features again. The outline of their clothes was made clear as well. I didn’t have time to speak to them. I rushed to the next room. Only issue was everything around me had become a yellow-ish white blur. I attempted to use the technique to stay in a lucid dream, assuming it would work inside the being’s perceptive reality. Everything had become a white blur. I felt I was slipping. I imagined everyone I knew and have at least seen the appearance of before standing on the property of Torsney Elementary School. I imagined the same thing I had imagined previously.
While holding the thought, I remembered the device. I pulled it out of my pocket and dropped it. I hoped I could get everyone in time, but there was no way I could. I didn’t know everybody from Torsney.
Maybe I could recall some of the screams?
I recalled the screams. I imagined them surrounding the town. Every house exploded. Maybe I couldn’t get everyone, but I was the last one who wasn’t a victim of the being. Until I was captured by it. I was brought out of my mindset by a change in scenery. The sidewalk… trees… houses… partly cloudy sky… it was all back. It was all clear. Outlines… colors… everything. A man was standing a few feet away from me. His eyes were wide open. He glanced around at everything in our vicinity and his expression pulled back. Another two people stood across the street, glancing all over as well.
It was a silent walk back outside of town. People were back, the trees moved with the wind, the police blockade was gone. I found Jack’s car in the spot it was left in before I went into the town. I looked around. Jack wasn’t in sight. Nobody was. I messaged Jack and waited an hour for a response. But it wasn’t even read.
I had the heavy feeling that everybody knew what had happened. But I had no evidence of it. I checked the news, but it was the same stuff as usual. Nothing about Torsney. The world didn’t know what happened at all. It was isolating. But the entire situation was over.
My phone vibrated. I checked and saw a message from Sam, asking if I was okay. I told him yes, then I asked him if he was okay. It was a short conversation, but… I didn’t want to talk about what happened all that much. So this may have sounded brief. It wasn’t. I was relieved Sam was okay.
Okay so some ‘investigators’ spoke to me, asking about what happened. I told them everything. They told me the being that invaded my town… which they referred to as the ‘Anti-Communication Anomaly’ was gone. No more slight traces of it could be found. I learned a couple more things about it, such as though the being was mainly a perception, it manipulated reality. Like a shapeshifter. It wasn’t a vision, really. I also learned the government’s only source for what the anomaly does to people is the witness reports they’ve gotten from those captured by it. Other than that, they haven’t been able to get any information. They elaborated, telling me they tried to get a live stream into the town while investigating, but the stream cut off. It cut off with each attempt too. Then they observed from afar five agents they sent out being captured by people with weird eyes.
Then they mentioned finding dead bodies with weird looking eyes and that they’re theorizing the anomaly being gone rendered them lifeless. Then they told me Jack was missing, along with about 100 people. Only 95 people ended up reappearing.
The pit of dread returned. I asked them if they knew exactly what made those people go missing. What they said chilled me to my core:
“When the anomaly disappeared, it either… ran away and took those who were still stuck inside its reality with it or it stopped existing and the people who were still stuck inside it’s reality stopped existing as well.”
A cold sensation washed over me. How could anyone just disappear like that? Stop existing? Their atoms had to go somewhere. The idea hurt my brain. I didn’t even know Jack would’ve gone missing. Of course, he could’ve gone missing for some other reason, but I couldn’t escape the chilling idea that I may have inadvertently ended his existence. However ending someone’s existence would even work.
The rest of the conversation was smooth. It didn’t last for more than half an hour at most. The last thing the investigators told me was that I can only refer to them as ‘investigators’ if I ever brought my situation up to anyone. Including those who experienced the same thing. They noted the being isn’t supposed to be known about by the general public yet.
I need to distract myself for a while. I’m not living this down. This came out of nowhere and I don’t know whether or not it will happen again. I don’t know why the anomaly had to do what it did. In fact, I don’t even want to know. I’m not going to try to find out. Maybe someone else will. Not me. It’s too freakish.