As my sister and I drove forwards back in 2018, something strange began to happen all around us. We had planned a trip to see our grandparents, who were both very old and in failing health, when the road suddenly changed.
I had the radio on. Bruce Springsteen was singing some song about “bring em home”. It was one of my favorites.
But then the radio cut out. For a second, we were plunged into silence. And then, with a hiss like a snake, the volume turned up louder and louder, until my ears rang as if some banshee had started shrieking within the car.
“Jesus Christ!” I said, trying to turn the volume down with no effect. I pulled over and began smashing the radio with my fist. Finally, after a few seconds, we were plunged into total silence again.
My ears still rang, and I could hear my heartbeat, fast and excited. I looked up the street and realized I was no longer on Route 9.
The scenic forest road wound along countless fields, farms and rural towns. People often traveled it simply for its beauty, even though it took significantly longer than the highway. I was one of those people. I would rather drive an extra hour surrounded by woods and mountains than be stuck on a concrete highway surrounded by cars and tractor-trailers.
But the mountains had gone, and the forests, and the fields and the farms and everything else. In front of us stood a black void, an abyss that sucked in the twin beams of the headlights like a greedy mouth.
A famous quote occurred to me then: “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.” And indeed, it felt like thousands of eyes peered out from that oblivion, eyes that may not be human or even physical.
“What is this?” my sister said in a trembling voice. I looked over at her. Her green eyes, so much like mine, so much like our dead mother’s, stared back at me. In them, I saw the mortal terror and fear I felt reflected like a mirror.
I looked behind us and saw only blackness there as well. The engine started to sputter and die, as if the emptiness of this place was sapping all the energy from it. The lights went out completely then, and only the interior light of the car and the radio display stayed on as the engine died.
That little interior light looked like an island in the middle of a vast ocean, a sun in the middle of trillions of miles of empty space. Once it went out, or we left the car, it would only be the dark ocean of nothingness as far as the eye could see.
Then the radio came on again, the cracked plastic reflecting strange symbols instead of numbers and letters. I saw spirals and what looked like Sanskrit flash across the dial before it, too, went dark and died.
“Well, it looks like we’re walking from here,” I said, my voice cracking as I gave a dry laugh. I felt anxious, dissociated, almost as if I were watching this all happen to someone else. But the sound of my own laughter in the car felt eerie, and I quickly stopped, breathing hard and staring out the window.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Sarah said, looking over at me. The interior light began flickering, going dark and then flashing back on, brighter than before. But it immediately started dimming, and within seconds, I could barely even see the steering wheel in front of my face. My other senses heightened as the darkness became complete. I could hear every one of Sarah’s fast breaths, but also a new sound outside the car. It sounded like soft footsteps approaching from behind.
“Someone’s coming,” I whispered, fumbling around for the automatic door locks. In my fear, I hit the wrong buttons over and over. I tried squinting and moving my head closer, but the light had faded to almost nothing. I heard the footsteps right outside, and just as the door handle to the driver’s side began to pull from the outside, I found the door lock and heard the satisfying click as they engaged. The unseen figure began pulling faster and harder, smashing on the window, shaking the car. Yet they said nothing.
“Get the fuck away from my car!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “I’m armed! I will shoot you!” Sarah had begun screaming by now as well. A chaos of pounding and cracking glass and shrieks filled the utter darkness. I felt like a blind person, trying to make out what was going on solely through my hearing and sense of touch and vibration.
The vibrations of the fist against the window changed audibly as the glass lost its integrity. Sounds of tinkling interspersed with the violent blows as the safety glass shattered, falling all around me. A moment later, I felt a huge, clawed hand on my chest, yanking and pulling on my shirt and skin. I felt cold scales and a reptilian smoothness as it grabbed me. Its claws dug into me and I felt warm trickles of blood begin to pour down my chest. I tried to move away, but I still had my seatbelt on.
The figure tried to pull me straight out the window, but the seatbelt kept me in place. I began to scream as the seat belt pulled tight against my legs, until I thought they might break. Then the shoulder strap tightened around my neck and my screaming stopped as it cut off my breathing.
“This one will taste good roasted alive on the fire,” a deep voice said from the side of the car near Sarah’s window. The voice had a trembling quality, its pitch rising and falling slightly with each word. Moreover, it sounded almost like a man who had smoked 100 cigarettes a day and drank endless whiskey with every meal, though underneath, I heard something inhuman in it.
Panic had set in as I felt myself suffocating. I kicked with my legs at the steering wheel, making the horn honk a few times. Sarah had ripped her seatbelt off and thrown it, taking a small chip out of the passenger side mirror as she flung it away. She reached over and grabbed the hands around my neck just as the world went black. And then the hands loosened and I drew in a sweet breath.
“They’re coming!’ the one on Sarah’s side of the car said. “We need to go. We’ll come back for the bodies… no wasted meat.” The one on my side grunted something, and I heard footsteps running off into the blackness, leaving just as abruptly as they had arrived.
The inside of my throat felt like sandpaper. My mouth was dry, and every breath hurt. But compared to the sheer panic and torture of suffocation, it felt like bliss.
“Here, Ken,” Sarah said, reaching over and handing me a bottle of water. Sometimes it seemed like she had ESP. I would think of something, and she would know it right away. Perhaps it was just the bonds siblings form over the decades, but at times it still seemed eerie.
“Thanks,” I said in a quiet, raspy voice. It hurt to speak. I sipped the water slowly, feeling the cold chill of it run down my throat. “You know, we can’t stay here,” I whispered. I heard her breathing in the blackness. She sighed.
“We’re going to die out here,” she said. “I know it. How could we possibly survive? We don’t even know where we are, or what’s happening. The car stopped working, and we have no flashlight…”
“No, wait,” I said, “my phone!” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Android. It still had nearly 50% battery life. I turned on the flashlight app and the bright LED illuminated everything within the car in a white glow.
In the light, I could see Sarah’s face, and the terror and fatigue hammered the futility and strangeness of our situation into my mind. I looked in the rearview mirror. I saw the deep red hand marks pressed into my skin, marks that would undoubtedly leave huge purple and yellow bruises all over as they began to heal. But at that moment, seeing the marks there like dead bodies strewn across the highway, I felt simply happy to be alive.
“We better get out and start walking while we still have light,” I said. “If the cell phones go the same way as the car battery, then they might start dying at any moment. What’s your battery at?” She looked down at her phone.
“35%,” she said. I nodded, not surprised.
“We should use one phone at a time for light. Once it dies, we will switch to the other one.” It seemed odd to me that we were rationing light instead of food and water. I had never thought about just how essential light was in a survival situation. People often talked about surviving in harsh conditions, focusing on warmth, sustenance and a place to sleep, but what about the darkness? In the dark, black widow spiders could cover the sleeping area of the survivalist, and he would never see a thing until he laid down and got bitten to death.
“Do you see that?” Sarah asked, pointing straight ahead of us through the windshield. I squinted, then turned off my flashlight app, plunging us both back into darkness. At first I still didn’t see anything, but then it slowly seemed to materialize. It looked somewhat like St. Elmo’s fire. Bright streaks of lightning seemed to flash and roll off a building in the distance, hovering around the roof and siding. I heard a slight buzzing noise, even from inside of the car, and I felt all my hairs standing on end.
“Let’s go,” I said, opening the door and stepping out before I had time to question my decision. Sarah looked over at me, her face a mask of fear and hesitation. She appeared as if she would bluntly refuse, but then, with a tremor in her hand, she opened the door and stepped outside.
Underneath me, the texture of the road had changed. Instead of solid concrete, whatever we stood on felt spongy and wet. I shone the light down, but it appeared as pure black, just like the sky above which seemed to show eternity without a single star or planet.
“What do you think mom and dad would say if they were still alive?” Sarah asked. She sounded like wanted to cry. Part of me felt the same.
“I think they’d tell us to go forward and survive,” he said. “What else would they possibly say? We need to get out of here and then worry about… well, whatever. Grandma and grandpa will notice we are missing if, or when, we don’t show up in a few hours. But we can’t count on help coming. For all I know, we are in Purgatory somewhere, and it’s impossible to get in or out. Perhaps we died in a car accident and this is Hell. Who knows? I don’t know about you, but I’m not just going to lay down and die. We have to try to figure out what’s happening. We have to go forward, not back.” Sarah started crying then. I put my arm around her, giving her a hug. “We’re not going to die,” I whispered. “Not if I can help it.”
We had drawn close to the light as we walked. Now I could see a building, only a few hundred feet away. It looked like a quaint German building, with green rafters, white clapboards and a rolling, rural style of architecture that would have looked beautiful in other circumstances. On the front, I saw a man hanging above the door, skinned alive and crucified, blood trickling down his body. The crucifix was suspended from a thick, steel wire that wound its way to the top of the roof, where it wrapped around the sturdy chimney on the top of the building. The crucified man’s head lolled forward, and he appeared dead.
But as we got within a few feet of him, his eyes shot open and his head went up. He stared directly at me and the LED light, his bleary, brown eyes moving from right to left quickly, his mouth opening and closing as if in a silent scream.
“The food’s acting up again,” a deep voice said from inside. “Go out and tenderize it. It’s almost time for dinner anyway…” As the door flew open, Sarah and I ducked around the side of the building, watching and waiting, my confidence in us surviving slipping away more and more in every moment.
Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15xbtmm/we_drove_into_a_strange_abyss_now_something_is/