The smell of rain lingered in the air. It had only been a couple hours since rainfall but there was a rather confusing level of rainwater reflecting across the pavement. It felt almost supernatural. Its never this wet. At least not from what I remember, which isn’t a lot. This place seems stuck. Not necessarily stuck in time or stagnated in one direction for eternity, just stuck. Almost like a really bad lucid dream that wont end. The feeling of how one certain area is the only thing that exists within time, yet it feels infinite and boundless, needlessly moving to the pace of your consciousness until it is forced to end.
There doesn’t seem to be a purpose to this “house”. I wouldn’t call it a house, nobody would live here. It looks as if it was designed to raise red flags. Ceiling to floor windows with randomly sized ones between. A huge door with windows adorning the sides. Oddly sized rooms with sparsely spread furniture, too big to make any sense. This is how i would design a house if I had never seen one but heard of one. Like those ancient drawings of animals that didn’t slightly resemble their actual appearance. The only way I could even contextualize this house with would be that it was designed by a predator for prey.
Something was incredibly off. I was here with family and some person I have never seen in my life. They look artificial. This is how i imagine someone with prosopagnosia feels. It doesn’t quite trigger the uncanny valley effect but god is it close. Nobody else seems to really know who they are, I almost sense a silent agreement that they are here because they are here. All too accepting. Surely i can’t be an outlier? I started pressure washing the walls. I barely finished one before the roof started leaking, but I never directed the stream to it. The strange person said it was a sign of cannibals. The statement made no sense, or at least i couldn’t make sense of it, maybe it was some sort of higher level thing that flew over my mortal head. So i just stared blankly at them and continued my activity.
Someone knocked at the door way too hard to be considered a gesture of friendliness, maybe I’m just paranoid. Who wouldn’t be paranoid after getting a knock at the door of this messed up house with no telling what lays beyond its walls. I let someone else answer it with the intentions of eavesdropping. I couldn’t hear much, but what i did hear was boring and uninteresting considering the locale. Blah blah blah good area for camping. Who cares. I peaked around the corner to catch a glimpse of the boring stranger and what i saw was unsettling, i didn’t know what to make of it. The door knocking offender was an older woman but her face was proportionally off, I’m not one to judge on looks and i’m certainly not rude outside of my internal monologue for the most part. Her mouth was several inches too large for her face and her eyes were wide and overly alert, like a mountain lion at the sight of some small rodent in the brush. Maybe I’m overanalyzing it and she just has a botox addiction. Or meth addiction. No clue.
She left shortly after, thank god. At least her physical presence did. I still feel a disturbance, not unlike two magnets pushing each other away. It’s a very comparable feeling and it feels at place, but this is the first time i’ve ever felt it, so why does it feel natural? Its almost like there is another plane of existence sitting just atop my own, and i’m sure that i’m the only one who feels it because if the others did i would undoubtedly hear about it non stop. I say the others like they aren’t my family but the more i think about it the more i realize i don’t know these people. I know they aren’t hostile, they’re actually very warm and kind to me as if they’ve known me for as long as i’ve been present in the state of existence, yet i gave no recollection of them existing before this point of time. I’m relatively unbothered by it, it doesn’t feel new or surprising and i trust my intuition regarding these people, even the actual stranger.
The lady was sat in her car flashing her headlights right at the house. It was extremely obnoxious and cursed me with feelings of dread. I wondered if she was signaling for help, but the car was parked only about a hundred feet away. She could walk here if she really needed help. The stranger gave me a concerned look, or tried to, it looked weird. He said that was a common thing for cannibals to do as well. Dread. I feel dread. And i trust that sensation as if it were a godlike entity telling me so. Paranoia sets in, but can it be called paranoia if the causation rang valid? The lady stepped out of the car. Fuck that. There were five people i could not see but i could feel. It wasn’t nighttime a second ago. There was no moon in the sky, the only light sources were the headlights and the fixtures inside the house. She bolts for the front door and i see a a gun shaped object in her left hand. Probably a gun. Most likely a gun. My vision zooms out until it reaches nearly 360 degrees of view. Weird panic response. Usually panic attacks don’t give the gift of seeing what was previously unseen.
I run as fast as i can, there were so many choices to make. Do i run out of the house into the woods? Surely i would die out there. Do i hide? It feels like my only option. I scramble trying to hide under a bed at first, but it was too small. The spaces under beds are never that small. I try hiding in a cupboard but there were wooden blocks that seemed designed to take up as much space as possible while leaving room for cleaning supplies. I hear a gunshot and a window shatter, she must’ve come in through the big window. I was across the house at this point and that’s saying a lot. I had time. Not the kind of time to waste, but time. Maybe 30 seconds. I hear screaming and the sound of slashing, somebody was being murdered. The sounds were disgusting. I hated it. I needed to find a way to survive. I started feeling around the seams of the floorboards hoping for some sort of basement or crawlspace. My fingers fell upon the seams of a vertical trapdoor about the size of the seat of a wooden chair, i dug my fingernails in and wedged it open. There was a slight hiss when the seal broke. I crawled in and the space was too big for the depth of the wall. I see a mirror in front of me and in that mirror i see a door behind me with a humanoid figure standing next to it, but when i turn around all i see is the closed trapdoor. There were stairs leading down to a blank wall where the mirror just was, it was a very short staircase, maybe only 5 steps.
I hear something scratching at the trapdoor. Relentlessly. They’re going to open it. Panic. My vision zooms out even more and my body goes numb, i’ve never felt what can only be described as the definition of dread and fear. I fall down and scramble around the floor uncertain about what i could even do to get out of this. I grab my head and pull my hair. I felt something. Something was in the back of my head. It felt like a thick organic wire firmly socketed into a plug. I yank it out.