Awakenings by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SJ Whitby

Welcome to the Weirdlands

HESTER STEEL

When I wake up, the first thing I realise is that this is not a duvet.

The reason being, it’s moving. Also, it’s speaking.

It’s hissing words, to be exact, soft sibilant words that blend into each other. I think they might be something poetic and dreamlike, and I get this feeling that if I stopped to listen to them they’d suck away my mind into their whispers. Luckily, I don’t stop to listen to them. I’m too busy screaming.

Second advantage of being too busy screaming is that I don’t have to remember, yet, exactly what’s happening and why I’m here and what I think I might have become. Screaming is easier.

I kick my way out from under the thing that is not a duvet, which is not easy because it’s all curled around me and it does not behave like duvets should. It clings. Even once I’ve wriggled out of it I’m dripping. Dripping. Slime.

I, Charlie Ives, star columnist for the Daily Sentinel, am standing in a strange room, dripping slime and screaming. Good morning!

Clarification, achieved in glimpses: this room isn’t just strange as in unfamiliar. It’s strange as in bizarre.

A normal bedroom gone very wrong. Flowers in a vase - apparently moving, possibly on fire - a set of antlers mounted on the wall, dripping something that hisses on the carpet - jars on tables, containing things with what could possibly be eyes - slabs of what looks like meat stacked like books on the shelves, bleeding titles -

I wish I hadn’t looked at that lamp.

This is a dream this is a dream this is a dream -

But I’m awake and I have a horrible feeling creeping through my nerves and guts that I know exactly where I am.

And there is no time to think about that because something slick and silky and viscous, oscillating toxic shades of neon green and turquoise and violet, still whispering, is creeping across the room towards me.

Michael save me, but He won’t, not me, not now, not any more. The only one here who can save me is me.

Waking up into a surreal panic adrenaline kick does not necessarily make for brain clarity, but I grasp the basics of escaping. Door. Open. Slam. Run.

I’m halfway across a chintzy wallpapered hallway when the brain catches up with two crucial thoughts. The first is that crawling neon sludge may not be stopped by doors. The second is that if I can’t trust duvets or lamps or vases of flowers, I quite possibly can’t trust houses in general, either.

The chintzy hallway pitches upside down just as the glimmering disco ooze comes writhing out through the cracks around the door.

I land on my belly on the ceiling-that-is-now-the-floor, winded in a punch to my belly. And the ooze lands right on top of me, glooping onto me like a glob of mayonnaise.

It flows over me again, seeping this feeling of right, where were we, before you so rudely interrupted. Now it’s covering my mouth, smothering my screams, I hear its whispers.

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