I just don't know why this happened to me. I know that I've always been a sort of outcast in society, and that I've always generally relished horrifying things, but I never imagined that something would actually happen. To me, no less...
It all started four nights ago - The 27th of October, to be exact, unless this thing has fried my internal calendar so bad that I'm actually hallucinating the date I'm seeing on my cell phone. I was out for a night on the town with my girlfriend (Big surprise that I actually had one, in case you were wondering. I like to think that I was lucky for a little while before this tragic evil befell me). We had been hanging around Glover Park the entire day, enjoying some pre-Halloween spirit, since the day of the 31st falls on a Monday, and we had actually managed to remain productive for the entire evening.
The night ended with a good old-fashioned zombie movie at this restored theatre called, "The Strand". I enjoyed it. We came home that night, washed the blood off of us in the shower (we were dressed as pirate zombies and coated in a light smattering of corn syrup), and curled up together on the couch to watch something light-hearted while drinking rum and eating buttered popcorn before bed. I did get a little drunk, but it's no excuse for the things that I experienced that night.
Sure. At first, this was all just a dream. Something you could write off to drinking before bed. God knows I did, and if that was all it had been, I'd be light years away from evicting my brains from my skull with this .38 special that I found in my neighbor's night stand. I'm getting ahead of myself, however. Allow me to keep this thing temporally in check.
We were tired, so we laid in bed. I think I may have had a half-conscious conversation with her before falling asleep, but ultimately, I was snoozing before my head hit the pillow. The dream started in a silly way after that. I was back in my AFJROTC uniform from high school, standing among others in like garb, and we were in a formation in some sort of warehouse. Now, I don't know why the dream started like this, but there were black men, dressed as women, parading around the formation (which was essentially a "crowd" that was being entertained at this sick sort of talent show that was unfolding), and they were singing show tunes and shooting wide-eyed stares at certain people among our ranks. From there, the dream dissolved, and this is where it got absolutely terrifying.
I was in a motel that was abnormally large for where it was located, which was along a lone highway in southern Georgia. The building was three stories tall and U-shaped, wrapping around a rather sizable parking lot, which was also surprisingly packed. It was day time and the sun hung above the motel like a gleefully torturous eye, beaming down to roast us ants into smithereens. Also, the central air of the building was on the fritz, which caused everyone's doors to be ajar in the pathetic hope that some rogue breeze might come wafting into their room and give them the two or three seconds of mild relief that would complete their lives.
I guess, by "Them", I mean the guests at the motel. For some reason, most of the guests were people I knew. I didn't interact with many of them, and only saw a few, but it was generally known in my mind that every single person occupying a room was a significant person at one point in my life. I ran into my friend, Henry, and he began to tell me about this curious website.
"Hey, so I guess you must've heard about this already, but there's this crazy website floating around the net. I don't remember the exact name, but it's supposedly an unremarkable one. The messed up part, though, is that it steals your soul once you've viewed it." I remember looking down at the green, moldy carpet on his room floor, and thinking to myself, "In real life, this guy is constantly full of shit, so it makes absolute sense that he would be feeding me this insanity in the dream world. Still... I don't like what I'm hearing." I also remember the hair standing on the back of my neck.
I didn't respond to his tale, either. Instead, I wandered down to the parking lot to get something from my car, although I don't exactly recall retrieving anything whatsoever. Looking back, I'm almost sure it was just a plot device of the dream so that the next thing would happen. From the parking lot, I was able to survey the inside of every room from their open doors. I started by scanning the third floor balcony. I saw people pacing back and forth, sweating up a storm, and I saw others sitting on their beds watching T.V. (for some reason, I could only imagine it being shitty 70's television like Miami Vice or Sanford & Son). One room caught my eye for sure, however, for it was glowing red on the inside and absolutely vacant. I know I couldn't have been close enough to hear anything coming from it, either, but the longer I stared, the louder this grating, all-encompassing sound became in my head. It would have driven me crazy where I stood if I hadn't broken eye-contact with the door and stared down to the second floor.
There was no relief there, either. The first room I looked into was glowing red, just like the one above, but there was someone inside, and It was horror itself. A dark figure with glowing, red eyes. Just staring at me! I clenched my eyes shut for a good space of time, and made my way up to my own room, where my girlfriend was sitting. She greeted me with a smile, looking up from her laptop as I walked through the doorway. "Hey", she said cheerfully, "Wanna see this funny video I found?" I said "Sure", and kneeled to watch it with her. I don't remember what exactly it was, but it was harmless enough, and I think I even smirked at it, regardless of the horror I had suffered up to that point.
Things had seemed to come back to normality (as much as is possible in a dream, anyway), and I sat down on the motel bed, surveying the room with a sigh of relief. Then, my girlfriend came and sat next to me, wearing that same smile. She said, "Speaking of the internet, wanna hear something else?" I said "Okay", and she leaned is as close as she could possibly get, as if she didn't want anyone to know she was telling me, and began to whisper the words into my ear. With each one, her voice began to become overlaid with another voice, which got louder and louder and sounded something like what one hears when dragging a cinder block across a sidewalk in the dead silence of night. The abominable voice said, "I was looking at this website earlier. It's called 'Advocates for Kids'."
I was so disturbed at that point, that I woke up from the dream immediately. My pulse was pounding. I rolled over and gently coaxed my girlfriend awake so that she was almost aggravated, and I asked her if she would whisper something into my ear, just so I could know that I wasn't laying in bed with some sort of demon. She whispered "You're a weirdo, you know that?" and I rolled back over, onto my back, and gasped in relief. "I know", I said.
I fell back to sleep after that, and woke up a few hours later. It was about 9 o'clock, and the sun hadn't been in the sky that long, so it still cast the strange, grey light of morning at a sideways angle through my kitchen windows. I stood in the morning silence and allowed myself to take one steady, calming breath, and then poured myself a bowl of cereal. Sitting in the living room, I began to reflect on the troubling dream, and thought to myself, "You've got to lay off the alcohol, pal. You just aren't made for that sort of dreaming." Then, I chuckled lightly to myself and turned on the television.
I had watched cartoons for another two hours when I finally realized that it was almost noon, and still, my girlfriend hadn't risen. This was strange, because usually, she's the one to wake me up in the mornings. I stumbled back to the bedroom on cold feet, and found that the bed was completely vacant, and that she was nowhere in the apartment. That strange chill ran up my spine briefly, but I dismissed it and told myself that she had probably woken up and snuck out to get coffee from the place down the road. Shaking my head with incredulity at my sometimes woeful imagination, I went back into the living room and resumed my cartoons.
I started to check a few of my sites on my laptop once I realized that she wasn't going to be returning any time soon, and got lost in the fog of the internet, completely ignoring my surroundings. At least another two hours had passed when I noticed that it was eerily quiet in the apartment. I took pause for a moment to discern why, when I realized that I had gotten used to the chatter of the cartoons and they had been cut off abruptly. I guess I assumed that the DVD had just played through, but when I looked up, the characters from the show were just standing in the middle of the screen and staring at me while occasionally blinking and tilting their heads slightly to the left or right.
I waited for a second, giving the show a chance to resume its plot, but they continued to stare for ten minutes without uttering a word. Then, they were chuckling, and escalated into a fit of maniacal, raving laughter. I unplugged the television, but they remained, so I picked up a porcelain incense holder that my mother had given to me as a house warming gift and smashed the screen in.
An escape from the apartment and fresh air was needed very badly, so I pulled on some sweat pants and a hoodie, and walked into the hallway of the apartment building. It's always been a very quiet, desolate sort of place, and I never see my neighbors, so I didn't find it all that suspicious when the hall was, yet again, devoid of life and sound. I walked up to the glass door that led to the outside world, but felt a strong wave of foreboding before crossing the threshold, and thought better of it. Instead, I walked the halls and read the numbers on the heavy, yellow doors.
As I moved further down the dingy, high-ceilinged hallways, I began to feel light-headed. There was some evil cackling in the back of my head that was all but heard. I went to the back exit of the building to see if I would feel the same way before leaving. It was another glass door, yet beyond this one was not the sunny exterior of the building where I would have seen cars and the wooden fence that surrounded the neighborhood pool. I saw Hell. Fiery, tumultuous Hell.
Ever since then, time has been blurred and melted into a runny sort of cosmic slag. The only way I know that days have passed is due to the fact that the cartoons are still playing through the smashed screen of my television (which remains unplugged), and it's a Halloween special that apparently will never end. They keep whispering into each others' ears and casting sidelong glances at me, as if they've got something planned when the time is right and my end has come to fruition.
I've come to the realization that I am in Hell. I may never really know for sure, but that's just it. It's part of the torture. Upon further inspection of my neighbor's doors, I found them all unlocked, and no one was ever home when I searched further into the apartments. I'm just glad I found this gun, and I'm hoping that killing myself in Hell will have a reverse effect to what would happen on Earth, according to Christian law... although, I'm not entirely sure that I'm still a Christian.
I do think that it's ridiculous that I can still post a TK from the underworld, however. This would happen to me on Halloween. Shit.
