I almost laughed when I saw my wife in the mirror creeping up to scare me. Then I heard her car pull into the drive and remembered she wasn't home. I slowly turned around and looked behind me. There was nothing there. With horror filled eyes I turned back to the mirror and opened my mouth in a silent scream. The thing that wasn't my wife stared back at me with the same eyes, but when it opened its mouth there were rows of needle-like teeth. The thing held me captive with a gaze of immeasurable power and strength.
Its hand reached through the glass and all I could do was watch as it twisted a fistful of my shirt and pulled. I was dragged through into a world I can only describe as wrong. And I knew with every fiber of my being that this was not a dimension meant for me. I had to get out, but I had no knowledge of how to do so. There were red blobs rolling around beneath me on a cliff, green harpies flying overhead, and purple somethings marching with armor on their backs. The thing that wasn't my wife had changed into one of the green harpies, and grasped me in its talons before carrying me somewhere.
Wide eyes watched me from the shadows, with hunger. I looked up to the flock we had joined and nearly wept with fear. They were hideous up close. Hair covered every surface of their bodies, and it was matted with something thick I didn't want to recognize as blood. I turned my eyes down again because I simply couldn't keep looking. What future horrors awaited me here? I couldn't even bring myself to scream.
Below me I saw new shapes emerging, and they were like nothing I had ever seen before. They were not meant for human eyes, but it looked as though they were feasting on something vaguely humanoid. And as I watched, they began to take the shape of the things they were feasting on. I turned my head before I was sick, and my eyes looked to the acid green sky. A color manufactured by oil spills and radiation. Hideous in every way.
The harpy things were slowing, and starting to angle themselves down. Once they landed, I was discarded in a pit with steep walls, smoothed to the consistency of marble. And I just knew that if I attempted to climb out that my feet would find no purchase.
"Hey." A raspy voice called out, and I scrambled as far back as I could go. There was something in the pit with me, and it sort of looked like a corpse that was left to rot. But there was no stench, apart from what's to be expected with no showers, soap, or toothpaste. It appeared to watch me through hooded eyes, and I swallowed the lump in my throat nervously.
"C-c-can," I took a deep breath. "can you tell me where we are? Or how long you've been here?"
"I can't really know how long it's been. But I suppose this is what you'd call Hell." The thing with a human voice struggled to get up off the ground. I made no move to help. "There are no days or nights here, and nothing to count hours or days with. There was someone here before me, too. It seems that the things up there don't like to leave themselves without any easy prey."
"What do they do to us?" My voice is unfiltered, and raw fear is creeping in.
"Nothing." I can't explain it, but that answer scared me even more than had this person said they kill us. "They give us no food, no water, no shelter. They're something like vultures, and once the old prey starts to get to the final stages of life, they look for new prey. It would seem they don't like killing, so they justify this as not being their fault."
"Oh God," My eyes were filled with horror. Was this to be my absolute fate? "there's no way out, is there?"
The person shook its head, and I never heard them utter another word. It wasn't meant to end like this, I was supposed to get promoted in my career, my wife and I were supposed to have kids, we were supposed to die of old age or cancer. I'm not meant to end like this. I felt my knees buckling under my weight, and I felt the intense urge to cry. But before I could do either of those things, my vision started getting dark and fuzzy around the edges.
The crumpled sack of a person being hauled off was the last thing I saw before the fear-induced panic dragged me down under the waves into unconsciousness.
WFy
