There was a palpable tension in the air, as I walked into the apartment. Alyssa sat at one end of the room, head down, silent. Carter had a ball of water in the air, staring towards it like it was the most important object in the world. Vincent had yet to arrive.

They’d come to the same conclusion I had, that much was obvious. So I found myself a place to sit, and found contentment in summoning small strings of flesh in-between my fingers. It was grotesque, the way it stretched, with pockmarks of empty space in-between. But at least it kept me distracted. I didn’t want to think about the thoughts that touched themselves along the edges of my skull, hinting at larger pictures that my mind would not see.

Vincent walked in five minutes later, and stared towards the three of us, “Well, this simply will not do,” He walked around the room, eying each of us, “The world may be near its end, but that does not excuse such melancholy. I have seen dire straits in my life before, but we simply must keep our heads up, high towards that damned sky! And have at least the slightest hope for tomorrow,”

Despite that feeling of absolute destruction, I couldn’t help but feel at least slightly warmed by his words. More than that, he was right. We wouldn’t get anywhere by sulking here, and just waiting for the world to die. It was practically our job to make sure we did everything we could to stop it.

Taking a deep breath in, and putting my best smile on, I looked up at Vince, “Thanks, you’re right,” I looked over to the others, “We need to keep our best face on, at the very least. The world isn’t going to save itself,”

Carter chuckled at that, “Y’know what, yeah,” Placing an arm against the couch, he pushed himself up, “No use moping about the increase in demons. Just gotta get along with our job,”

-7

A knife twirled between her fingers as we walked up to a shabby hotel. I glanced towards the others. Carter’s face was a grim line, and Vincent’s was relaxed. The windows were crusted over with hints of decay. If one were to look at the building, they’d say it’s fifty years old, and nobody’s been in it for a couple of years.

As we walked forwards, I couldn’t help but feel like this was some sort of trap. Nonetheless, I pushed forwards with the others, and stared towards the door.

“How…How powerful does a demon have to be to age an entire building?” I asked carefully.

Alyssa smiled, the gesture all teeth, hardly reaching her eyes, “Powerful enough to kill everyone in that building, probably,”

I nodded slowly, trying to focus on the task at hand. There wouldn’t be any pep talks before we rushed in. Looking towards the others wouldn’t help me either. Reaching down into myself, I tried to feel that strange, wrong energy, that had made itself known in me. It was my way of preparing before we trained. From my peripheral vision, I could see the others doing something similar.

“Well okay,” I said after a moment, reaching for the door, “If everyone else is ready?”

With a couple of nods, I pushed the door open, and walked through.

-7

My eyes opened, as if from a dream. I was standing in the middle of a hallway, one that seemed to stretch towards infinity. My memories felt like they were, stuck, shattered in fragments around the edges of my skull. I remembered getting prepared with the others, and Vincent said that he’d keep everything appearing normal from the outside. My hand had been on the door, prepared to open it up. Everything had been…Normal, a demon hunt, the second that I’d be going on.

Then, bright flashes of light, I remembered moving forwards with the others, then I was in…Glass, shards stretching outward, the others had panicked, each trying to break through. Now, here, in an infinite hallway, with millions of doors.

Echoes preceded my movement; I reached out towards the first door I could see. Yanking it open, another hallway revealed itself, just as long as the one I now stood within. Frantically, I reached towards the next door, then the next, and the next, and the next. All of them were the same, infinite hallways without any hints of the others.

“Hello!” I shouted, only hearing an echo of my own voice.

Without anything else that I could do, I started walking forwards. Each step that I took seemed to stretch the hallway imperceptibly, it hardly felt like I was walking at all. The further I walked, the more useless the situation felt. I hadn’t been warned about this, hadn’t been told that a demon could do this.

“Am I just going to end up trapped here forever?” I couldn’t keep out the touch of desperation that leaked into my tone.

I hadn’t noticed it at first, but the further I walked, the further the walls…Warped. It started off as the beige of the walls getting brighter, then they started to get vaguely pink. At one point, they stopped looking like walls at all.

When the walls started making, sloshing, noises, I stopped being capable of handling it all. I was stuck in a hallway made of flesh, with the supposed sound of blood behind it. A…Demon, was locking me in an infinite hallway, and I had lost any help that I could’ve had.

It was when I stopped walking that the stairwell appeared, just out of reach. I had been walking for what felt like hours when it just, popped up, without much purpose. The others were probably still in the hotel, and I had no doubt that the demon was still alive. That was the only thing that convinced me to keep moving.

An infinite hallway, traded for a staircase that defies gravity. Stepping onto the stairwell seemed to flip the entire world upside down. I was standing, looking at the floor of the hallway from the ceiling. For a moment, I could only stare towards that fleshy precipice, only now realizing that the carpet was practically covered in miniaturized eyes, all blinking up at me.

Quickly, I walked up…Down…I walked up the stairs towards the bottom of the hotel. At the very least, I could get to Vincent and warn him about the situation. Maybe there were other Anti’s that could help us.

When I made it to the bottom, I couldn’t help but feel the mildest amount of apprehension. What if I just ended up walking into another hallway? And that mirror room, it’s possible that that was the next location I’d have to get through. I still couldn’t remember how I’d gotten from the mirror room to that hallway, so I’d have to figure out how to get through on my own.

My hand slowly latched itself around the doorknob, and I carefully pushed it. Before me stood the ground floor, entirely normal. I stared forwards silently, walking, and doing my best not to pay attention to the distorting landscape.

With the door opened, and the ground floor clearly presented to me, I couldn’t help but feel as if nothing was wrong. Perhaps it was the resounding fact that, within the space I now stood, everything was exactly as it should be; besides the lack of people. But, there wasn’t even a hint of blood on the floor, and no bodies to trace the inclusion of a demon to.

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Further into the ground floor, I began to notice the lack of…Sound. The hum of electricity, so ordinary within any environment, was gone, and that thrum of traffic had disappeared as well. Turning a corner, I found myself staring towards the check-in desk, where a clerk would normally be standing. Slowly, I walked up to it, expecting to find some horrifying monstrosity laying on the floor. Instead, I walked up, and found a perfectly and absolutely empty space.

That was when I noticed it, the abnormality. There were no windows, and the door out was missing. A blank wall stood in its place. Meaning I wouldn’t be able to get to Vincent, and he wouldn’t be able to get to us. Whatever this thing was, it was powerful beyond measure, enough to bend reality to its will.

As I turned to walk back to the stairs, a memory practically slammed into me.

“Are we sure separating is the right thing to do?” I was careful to ask, words slow and warbling, as the mirrors fractalized even further.

“Do we have a choice, it’s not like we can get to one another,” Alyssa replied, reaching for one of her knives, “At least this way, one of us might have a chance at finding the demon and eliminating it. Otherwise, we’re all stuck,”

Carter nodded, “Alyssa’s right. It’s either this or stay here,”

I blinked, rubbing at my eyes furiously. So we had separated, and that was what had gotten me into this mess. It made sense. Yet there logic had been sound for the time, at least I assume it had been.

Going back to the task at hand, I tried to find an elevator. I had already tried looking for it above me, which meant it would likely be below, if this building had a basement. The stairs had only led to the ground floor, meaning I needed an elevator.

It didn’t take too long to find it, located directly across from the main entrance. Luckily, it still appeared to be functioning. I walked inside, and looked over all of the buttons. The basement required a key.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to find my center, where that strange, and utterly wrong sensation sat. All I needed to do was…Something functionally impossible, like unlock something by inverting the lock itself, or making the lock never exist, yet still fundamentally exist on some dimensional wave-length. None of which made sense, but it needed to happen, so I’d have to make it happen.

Placing a hand against the lock, I tried to focus on the second. If it existed on some dimensional wavelength, then it might be useful later, if I needed to restore it or something. Desperately, I tried to imagine what I’d have to, to get something like that to work.

It involves time. All things decay in time, and so do locks. Rust withers away at metal, and some things simply no longer have a functional value. Meaning inevitably, a lock might be uninstalled, or decayed. All I needed was that basis to focus on. It took a bit of meandering, and a push and pull within my chest, but eventually, I managed to, shift, the balance between one future with the present.

The elevator shuddered as the door closed, locks shoving themselves opened as I was plummeted down. As I waited within that small room, I couldn’t help but start thinking, what if the others were trapped, and that was the reason they hadn’t found me? And why had I lost my memory after entering that hallway? More importantly, what doorway did I enter it from?

A ding signaled my landing, and the shuddering door pulled itself opened. The room was dark, and the iron smell of blood and rust made itself known. Slowly, I pulled myself into a dark hallway. Beside me, the walls were lined with an impossible age, showing signs of imminent collapse. I knew, without a doubt, that the demon was near.

That small amount of stealth training that I’d been taught wasn’t nearly enough for the situation I’d been forced into. My footsteps still scuffed against the ground, and my internal wincing, along with half-hiccoughed movement, should’ve alerted whatever monster sat beyond these walls.

Further along I moved, and yet the demon still failed to make itself known. It wasn’t until I’d pushed open rusted hinges, and sleuthed my way into the laundry room, that I found it. Upon looking up into the air, and seeing its body, I froze.

Four rusted hooks held themselves in the air upon nothing. Taut wires of flesh suspended themselves downwards from that array of hooks, holding upon them one, large eye. Yet the flesh holding it in the air was pulled far too tight, and the skin that held the eye within the air was tearing, great gigantic droplets of blood pattering upon the floor.

There was only the smallest of good news from this situation. In the corner of the room, held in great goblets of sickly ooze, sat my two friends. Their eyes were half-opened, clearly lost within some strange trance. I stared towards them for a silent moment, frozen with fear as the eye’s chains moved it along the room. It would see me at any moment, and what then? I would end up suspended in that ooze, just like them.

My movement was jerky, as I pulled myself around the beast. Fear trickled through my legs and arms, making it difficult to even stand upright. My entire body begged me to stand still, to just accept my fate, and become fodder for whatever horrid pleasures this monster would derive from me. But I couldn’t let my allies, my friends, die.

When the eye had arranged itself to look near the door that I’d pulled open, I moved over to Alyssa, grabbing at one of her exposed arms, and pulling as hard as I could. A meat shlopping sound echoed throughout the room as her body cascaded forwards onto the ground. As fast as I could, I ducked behind an old, beat-up washer, and waited. The chains above the eye slammed through the air, spinning the eye around with a speed I’m rather certain should’ve disoriented it.

With a speed that rivaled the chains, pustules began building upon the surface of the thing’s iris, before great, horrifying ooze, dripped itself right back down on Alyssa’s body. Her hand twitched, just for a moment, bringing a knife out from her pocket. The eye failed to notice, or care.

I almost lost it then, with adrenaline pulsing through my veins, and the desperate need for all of this to be over. I had been itching to move, push myself across the room and grab the knife. Yet, just seconds after the eye had turned around, it flipped back, and stared towards that empty space. My foot had scuffed along the floor, prepared for movement, when I saw it flip back around.

Carter was thinning. A desperate glance towards my friends brought that to my attention. His body was starting to thing, muscle bleeding off of him. I could see blisters growing along Alyssa’s back, where the snot like slime was burning holes off of her shirt.

Looking back at the eye, I waited until it had the other side of its body exposed, and moved over to Alyssa, where the slime was steadily spreading over her hands. I grabbed the knife before it could get fully buried beneath the ooze.

It took a couple of moments, but I managed to get behind the eye. Raising the knife up, I shoved it forwards, straight through the blood-drenched skin.

The thing didn’t make a sound, hardly even writhing in pain. More importantly, the chains were still in the air. Alyssa’s knife got ripped straight from my grasp, and the eye twirled itself around. Me and the eye stared towards one another. Pus started building at the rims of its eye, and in a flash of movement, it shoved me onto the floor.

Just barely, I managed to roll out of the way of dripping acid, but some of it caught onto my arm. I felt the horrid burn of feverish sickness spread its way through my limbs, as I lifted myself off of the floor. Silence cascaded as it moved forwards, staring, considering, waiting.

Pockmarks began to litter themselves across the side of my now infected arm, and I desperately dodged out of the way of another attack. My movement were sluggish, drunken swerving, maddened jumping. Still, I managed to get the knife back, and face the eye head-on.

My ears began to ring from the lack of stimulation, I could barely hold my arms up in the air, and my legs were seconds away from collapse. As the thing rushed forwards once more, I reached out with one arm, watching as the eye widened, colliding with the knife.

The chains fell, and I stared in disbelief.

“Was that it?” If I wasn’t so tired, I would’ve felt enraged, “Just needed to attack it from the front…”

Using the last of my strength, I lifted Alyssa from the ooze, then, using my weight, I toppled backwards with Carter, pulling him from whatever this sludge was.

-7

I awoke in a bed, body shivering, sweat glistening down my temple. My body was blistering hot, yet horrifyingly cold. One of my arms moved, maybe in an attempt to get out of this mattress, or explore the contents next to me, I wasn’t certain.

My head was filled with cotton, ringing in my ears, and hazy imagery before me. Hesitantly, I reached to the side of my skull with one arm. Something was…Leaking, from my ears. Lifting it up to my eyes, I saw the hazy imprint of blood on my fingers.

“Hey…Hey, don’t move,” Came a voice, somewhere off to my right, “You need your rest, after that fight,”

I looked over, seeing…My mom? It looked like my mom at least. I smiled at her and nodded, like I thought I was supposed to do. Her voice had been far, far too loud, and I hadn’t understood a thing. Slowly, so utterly slowly, I felt my eyes beginning to close, and the hazy shred of sickness began to rise over my thoughts.