Feel - #TNTHorrorContest

Feel

Feel

Alone.

That's how I felt save for the intermittent spurts of a crackling record playing on a phonograph somewhere in the milky black. I stood frozen curling my bare toes on the wooden floorboards, splinters piercing my skin in droves as my anxiety-ridden body remained locked in position staring into the nothingness. There was something there, I heard it breathing, but I dared not move, it didn't either.

Maybe there were things in the blackness waiting for my first move, waiting for me to take the first step, then the creatures hiding in the dark would all come out and murder me. I'd seen it a hundred times in horror movies to see how things like this pan out, and people like me usually don't make it. I didn't know what was going on, one minute I'm asleep in the dark. Nothing around me, then I woke up in a dingy room.

I tightened my fist only to feel searing pain shoot through my hand into my arm. Liquid dripped down my hand, only for me to notice too late that I had been holding a shard of glass in my hands. The glass sliced into me as I further tightened my grip, feeling the pain, feeling something. The darkness was unnerving, and eternal, it seemed. It never moved because I never moved.

Finally, I released my grip on the glass letting it clatter onto the wood beneath me as blood dripped into a puddle forming on the rotting floorboards. I finally moved, I had to see, I had to look. I slowly moved my head down, shaking as if I hadn't moved in years, bones stiff.  My hand was red, almost as red as the body sprawled out before me. My body.

I didn't understand, that was my body on the floor, sprawled out in a broken heap, stab wounds oozing red liquid like broken fountains flowing like rivers into the wet floorboards. My heart raced even more, matching the rhythm of the strange record playing somewhere outside the room. Nothing was visible except for me and my body. The one that wasn't standing, the one breathlessly lying dead in front me.

Almost as suddenly as I moved, I felt truly how cold it had grown in the room. Chilled air breathed on my neck from behind me as if it were alive. I turned around, shuddering, unknowing if it was the cold or the fear that was making me shiver uncontrollably. Behind me there was a single window. It was shattered, broken pieces of glass were sprayed across the floor, some large some molecular in size. Either way, the shattered window was letting in cold air.

I approached the window, feeling the glass beneath my feet crunch with each step. Some glass found its way into the bottom of my foot tearing at my skin, but I was numb. I didn't feel pain, or anything anymore. Out of the window a field could be seen, it was dark outside except for the moon which shone brightly on the land. It appeared to be a farm, and I appeared to be in an attic, three stories up, with nothing but the corpse and the darkness to keep me company.

I turned around and faced the darkness, the milky blackness that seemed to swallow the entirety of the hallway outside the room. Only a miniscule light made it through, getting severed as it tried to attempt to venture further into the black. I walked forward, unfeeling except for the anxiety which coursed through my veins, the feeling of dread, the feeling of death.

Into the darkness, leaving the solitary comfort of the attic for the cold, dead touch of the lightless hall in which I walked into. The smell of death permeated the air, thickening it with its nauseating stench. With each footfall the darkness grew blacker and blacker, and the stench grew stronger, almost unbearably so. I clenched my nose with my bloody fist and breathed in the smell of my own blood which was more inviting then the aroma about the hall.

With bloodied hands I scanned the wall, feeling with my fingertips, gliding along the wall with both my arms outstretched reaching for something, anything. With luck I tipped over a lantern, hearing that familiar metal crash as it smacked to the bottom. Luckily, the glass remained intact leaving the lantern nearly in perfect condition. I fumbled along the ground lifting up the lantern and reaching into my pocket for a lighter.