[#014] Torment

I wake up and sniff the air. Musty. Cold, but growing warmer.

I cannot see or hear. I cannot remember.

Heat blasts from above. I reach out and touch opposing walls. The room is long and narrow… A closet? A hallway?

The fetid heat begins to fill my mouth with the stench of meat. A wet form slithers down my hand. I run for my life.

Hot air pulses around me, beating sweat from my bare skin for several minutes before a long and winding weight descends like a sandpaper snake, catching me by the neck and lifting me off the ground. I wrap my hands around its sticky length and pull it free, crashing to the floor, entangled with the massive, whip-like tongue. A million tiny legs quiver down my back as I gag on rotting, white-hot breath and--


I wake up and sniff the air. Musty. Cold again, but growing warmer…

[#013] Beware the Unmarked Door

Everybody encounters one at some point. Yours may be a rotting door at the bottom of an unmarked staircase lit by a single flickering bulb, or a metal hatch set into a concrete slab behind the community college. It could even be a dusty, gated elevator nobody ever seems to use at the end of a long hallway.

Mine is a fully-finished little door, half the size of a person and hidden inside a closet in the old Victorian house I purchased in Nowhere, Ohio.

Other people do notice your hideaway, as my realtor did, but none of them think twice about it. Once it catches your attention, it digs into your mind. I hear soft piano music drifting out of mine on a wind that smells like fresh-baked bread. Sometimes I pick up a distant rustling like spring wind through a row of blooming trees.

Of course, this is just a trick. None of those things are actually behind my door or beneath your elevator. These pathways open only from our side and only for a willing hand. Never approach your hatch alone, lest it sway you with a summer song or lull you with a heavenly chorus.

Because your hatch is not the entrance to a fairytale kingdom of manifest good and evil.

It is only an exit.

[#012] Missing Time

I checked the watch. 1:30 PM. Trees danced along the road. The sky brewed up a darkness that fell across the heated pavement like a bridge. I crossed.

I checked the watch again on the other side. 5:30 PM. My feet slid off the dewy grass. Golden light drew down the mountains as the last cloud blew away. Had I missed the storm? Had I missed the day?

I set off down the slope past the road. I checked the watch at the bottom, just as the cloak of night settled over me. 11 PM. Every step cost a little more time. I watched the stars pass overhead, charging through the heavens in a firefly stampede. Would my partner wait for me? Would my parents see me home?

The grass leveled off as I came to the trailhead a hundred yards from the road. The sun peeked out around the edges of the Earth. I checked the watch. 7 AM. I sighed and started up the path.

Only five miles to go.