Chapter 2: Even In A Different World

Day 1(I think? Not sure how long I was unconscious), Morning

Waking up sore was not an unfamiliar feeling to me. I worked out once or twice per week, either running on the treadmill or doing strength exercises for about half an hour during the evening. It was just enough stress to make my muscles hurt the next day, but not enough to transform them into stronger, better, and mostly painless version of themselves. I was pretty lazy when it came to exercising.

I wished I hadn’t. A groan escaped my throat as a touch of light brushed against my eyelids, and I jolted awake to a world full of sharp pain and deep aches. It would be an exaggeration to say it was hell, but man, the last time I was this uncomfortable was when I was experiencing a vaccine-induced migraine, and even then the pain was mostly concentrated my head and eyes. What the hell was I doing last night? Oh yeah, I was…

I froze, the memories flooding back into my head in a torrent. I sat up as quickly as I dared and looked around. I was inside what looked to be a fairly old but well kept home. The cottage. It was, to put it in the simplest way possible, one giant, roomless living space with very few furnitures. There was the single mattress I was sleeping on, a square table padded with what looked like glass in the middle of the room, three oak brown chairs that had definitely seen better days surrounding it, a blackened floor that seriously made me worry for its integrity, a wall shelf with wooden mugs on top and jars at the bottom, a simple cupboard with a pair of cut out grooves at the center, a wooden vase that looked far too small to withstand the massive bush of bright indigo flowers with starfish-like petals it was holding, a cozy-looking, medium-sized fireplace with burned, ashen logs in it; the wind blowing gently through round windows with a cross at the center, gentle sunlight pouring through the gaps between the roof, and dust giving the beams actual shape and form. There were also two closed doors—the front and the back—and no ceiling. This cottage is going to burn like a sauna when noon comes, I thought idly to myself.

Last but not least, the cottage owner—the otherworldly, plant-like monstrosity I had had the misfortune of meeting last night—was nowhere to be seen. I would be shitting my pants and crying my lungs out already if it was present.

Another person might have questioned if what they saw was just a dream, a nightmare, but I saw no reason to doubt my own memories. I could’ve been born with a hyperactive imagination and overdosed myself on LSD, and I still did not think I would be able to imagine something even a tenth as otherworldly as the thing I saw last night. Even now, my first instinct after remembering it was to bolt out of the door and get as far away from this place as possible. Instead, I took a deep breath and forced myself to stay calm.

There were several reasons why leaving the cottage would be a bad idea. One, this was the only shelter I could find when I was looking around yesterday. While I couldn’t claim that there were absolutely no other shelters in the vicinity—there could be an entire town inside the forest behind this cottage for all I know—but I would still have to find them first before I could get to them, and that meant exploring at least some stretches of this wilderness. Now, what were the chances that an unfit, half-dead man like me could survive a land full of dangerous predators, wild nature and unknown physics long enough to reach civilization? Probably lower than living in a cottage haunted by an eldritch horror, I would think.

Two, as much as the creature scared the living shit out of me, I did not think it—they?—actually meant me any harm, at least not immediately. I was completely at their mercy last night. If they really wanted to kill me, I would never have awoken. If they meant to threaten me, I would be hanging off some vines on the walls instead sleeping on a surprisingly comfortable mattress, unharmed and unrestricted. And if they meant to fatten me up like a pig before eating me, it still meant that I would be safe for a short period. Or maybe I was speculating out of my ass because I literally knew nothing about this creature except that it was made of plants, and it was scary as fuck. There just wasn’t enough, er, what did the nerds call it again? Right, data points to work with right now.

And three—

GROWL~

—I need food. Water. Sustenance. Something, anything to fill my stomach so it would stop cannibalizing itself. It had been a full twenty-four hours since I ate anything, and while I was hardly unfamiliar with the concept of going long periods without food—time had this way of Thanos-snapping itself out of existence when you were concentrating on work—this was a whole different level of hunger. How long had it been since I fell unconscious? Hours? A day? A few days? Doesn’t matter, I was hungry enough to eat a calf, lure the mother to its rescue, then eat it as well. Before I knew it, I was already rising from the mattress and tottering my way toward the center of the room. There had to be something I could eat in the cupboard or the jars on the shelf. If not, then maybe the backyard I hadn’t seen yet.

I was aware that the creature probably did not consume anything that was even remotely similar to a human’s diet, meaning that the chances of human food existing in this cottage was next to nil. Heck, the creature might not even be the original owner of this dwelling. Since the structure was obviously designed for human habitation, I reasoned that there was a chance the creature moved in after the original occupants had left. They might even be the reason the original owners noped the fuck out of their homes in the first place. Even so, it would be stupid to leave without even scouring every inch of the place first. Best case scenario, I find food, water, and a transdimensional portal that takes me home at exactly the same time I went missing. Worst case scenario, it was still a less deadly option than me crashing through the forest in search for edibles.

I went to the shelf first because they were closer. I counted three wooden mugs on the shelf and five lidded jars on the ground in total. The brown mugs looked like what you might expect to find in a fantasy inn, and the earthen jars were clay(?) containers with a cylindrical body, a long neck and a pair of vertical handles. I checked the mugs first not just because it was the easiest, but also because I strongly suspected that they would be a bust. I was right. I eyeballed the first mug I grabbed, flipped it upside down, and saw an entire pile of dust hit the ground with an audible thud. Just how long had they been collecting dust on the shelf? Years? Decades? I probably wouldn’t use them even if I had scrubbed every crook and nanny of the wood and submerged them in water for days. The jars it was then.

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I was a lot more hopeful that the jars might contain something edible because they actually looked clean, like someone had wiped them regularly. A human behavior. It actually made me pause for a second and wonder if the eldritch horror was less otherworldly than I initially imagined. My hunger quickly retook control and chased away the stray thought though. Eat first, brain later. I quickly opened the lid of the leftmost, moved closer for a better look, and—

“FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK!”

A long time ago, when I was still a kid, I had watched a horror movie where the main cast was exploring an old, haunted house for reasons. My memories of 99% of the movie was non-existent, but there was one scene that stuck with me even to this day. One of the characters had opened a lidded jar not unlike the one I was handling and discovered in horror that it was full of venomous insects.

I wished my jar had contained venomous insects. The second the smell hit me, and I caught a glimpse of crawling dark brown, I knew that my worst fear had come to life. Even in a different world, I couldn’t be rid of the living nightmare that was fucking cockroaches! I threw the jar against the wall so fast a baseball scout would’ve scouted me if they were present. As the clay container shattered into a million pieces, dozens of the monstrous things broke out of their hideout and scattered in every direction. Most were crawling, some were flying, and far too many were headed in my general direction. I saw red. I swiped two mugs off the shelf with lightning speed and started dual-wielding them like I had used them my whole life. And in a sense, I had. I had crushed cockroaches using sprays, swatters, slippers, books, rolls of newspaper, rolls of magazine, bathroom ladles and anything else I could convert into a lethal weapon against cockroaches. While these mugs were hardly the best weapon I could hope for, they were better than having to stomp the little shits with my bare hands and feet.

The next few minutes felt like hours. Truth be told it only took a few seconds for the vast majority of the cockroaches to vanish to god-knows-where, but there was always that one who thought they could avoid death by hiding in plain sight—and I would admit that their dark brown exterior matched disgustingly well with the timber—but the last time I had decided to overlook a cockroach, I had woken up to it sitting on top of my glasses and less than a meter away from my face (side note, but I don’t wear glasses anymore after I went through an eye surgery). Since then, I never let a cockroach live unless they were absolutely out of my reach. Never.

My skin still crawled, and my aches were temporarily subdued by the sheer amount of adrenaline that was coursing through my veins, but by the time my breathing was easier, the killing spree had ended with Mr. Mug—the brave little dude whom I was holding with my left hand—had killed about five cockroaches, and Mrs. Mug three. I would never forget their service rendered to me, but I would have to throw them out or burn them at the fireplace later. Even if they weren’t coated in dust, washing the sticky stains out of the seams would’ve taken more effort and disgust than I could bear. The cottage owner wasn’t using them anyway, so I was sure they wouldn’t be missed in any capacity.

With that entirely unasked for intermission behind me, I sucked in a careful breath before staring at the remaining jars with trepidation. Fear and hunger waged a great war against one another as I attempted to decide my next course of action. On one hand, I was still hungry as all hell, and killing the cockroaches had taken a lot out of me. Already the adrenaline was fading, and I was starting to wobble on my feet again. I needed some food in my stomach yesterday, and the only chance I might find some besides shambling into the forest or praying for divine intervention was to check the cottage thoroughly, and that meant looking into the jars.

On the other hand, I was growing more and more certain that I would not find what I was looking for in those jars. I am now going to make a number of mostly baseless but logical assumptions. Assumption number one, the jars belongs to the eldritch horror who lives in this cottage. Assumption number two, the eldritch horror who looked like a plant monster possesses plant-like behaviors and diets. Assumption number three, the jar was full of cockroaches not because they had chosen that spot as their nest—urp—but because someone had put them there. The reason I said this was because the jar looked too clean, was fully covered before I opened it, and—as far as I could remember—wasn’t cracked anywhere before I threw it against the wall. I also couldn’t find anything that might have lured the cockroaches into the jar on the ground. This led to my fifth and final assumption. The eldritch horror was a carnivorous plant who ate insects, and they stored whatever they couldn’t finish in the jars. This meant the remaining jars most likely held other types of insects or more cockroaches.

More. Cockroaches.

I made up my mind to leave right there and then. Not just the jars, but the cottage altogether. It was one thing to sleep upstairs where there were potentially millions of cockroaches crawling in the sewer pipes underneath your house at any given time, and another to sleep in the same room with jars full of cockroaches and god knows what else less than ten feet away from you. That I had unwittingly set some of the cockroaches loose had only strengthened my determination. So despite hesitating a little when I caught sight of the cupboard begging to be explored at the corner, I still threw Mr. and Mrs. Mug into the fireplace, tiptoed around the crushed bodies of the cockroaches, and made my way toward the front door. Might seem like a mighty foolish and cowardly decision, I know, but if the eldritch horror stored their insects in jars, what untold horrors they might store inside a larger storage space like the cupboard? Larger prey maybe? May stuff like rats, snakes, bigger insects, bigger co—okay you need to chill out right now before you actually flip the fuck out, Kaylan.

The front door was a couple of wooden planks nailed together and a single rectangular beam acting as the handle. Since I did not see a lock anywhere, I simply grabbed the wooden beam and pulled—

Groan.

The wood groaned a little, but did not budge. I supposed it was a door that opened outward then. A bit unorthodox, but who was I to judge? This time I tried pushing, but—

Groan.

Still, the door refused to yield to my power. The panic was starting to creep back in a little. Perhaps I wasn’t as free as I thought after all. Not yet, I told myself, there’s still the back door. When I turned around and saw that the back door was wide open, I heaved out a explosive sigh of relief. I was in no mood to play an escape room right now, perhaps ever. I strode toward it. When I was a few steps away from the warm, inviting exit though, a thought suddenly crossed my mind:

Wait, was the back door always open?

That was all I managed to think before green vines burst through the opening and knocked the wind out of me.