Vanish
The first thing I noticed when I awoke was darkness. I’d fallen asleep almost instantly after returning from school, dropping like a rock on my living room’s couch. Something, however, was very wrong. The room was completely dark, leaving my vision to almost blind. How long had I been asleep?
Still recovering from the nap, I rose and walked over to the large French windows across the room. My actions were sluggish and ungraceful, though any drowsing cell in my body was slapped to attention as soon as I made it to my destination. There was nothing outside, just blackness. Not darkness, just nothing. My immediate thought was that the world had vanished at some point while I dreamt.
Anxious and frightened, I hurried to the digital clock, and whimpered when I realized what it said. 00:00 was blaring in bright, red letters.
I couldn’t stand the darkness, so in desperation I rushed to a nearby lamp. With shaking fingers, I eventually managed to flick it on, only to find it offered no help. As if I were looking through very heavy, dark sunglasses, the room remained in a sickly black-and-white gradient, though I could define more shapes around me. I was both submerged in a painful darkness and light.
I wanted so much to scream, to tear at the walls and cry out my eyes, but I didn’t. Something in my throat simply wouldn’t allow me to scream, something in my mind wouldn’t allow to me to cry. My eyes snapped up to the grandfather clock, desperate for some form of sanity. The hands on the clock had melted.
Breathing hard, I spun around, hands buried in my hair. I was trying to think rationally, though couldn’t. My mental ability seemed to have vanished with the rest of the world. Shaking, I looked at every possible angle, trying to find something to remind me of who I was, where I was. When my eyes skimmed over the window again, they caught something and quickly returned.
I stopped breathing, eyes narrowing, trying to make out what I was looking at. There was something in the window, a silhouette of darkness. Almost instantly I recognized what was there... It was a face. A nose, two open eyes, and thin lips. It was definitely a face, though there was something wrong as well. The skin was pulled too tight against its bones, its eyes were too dark, its mouth too straight.
My mouth dropped open and I slowly stepped backwards, until my back encountered the wall. I wanted to look away, to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring. It watched me as I watched it. My knees gave out and I slid to the floor, sitting with my legs pulled up against my chest. With great difficulty I managed to pull my hand to my face, covering my eyes.
The creature emerged from the wall and flew at me, melting its surroundings into darkness as it did.
I screamed.