Terrance slowly lifts head, it has an unpleasant and dull throbbing feeling in it. His eyes feel dry.
He is currently lying down on his comfortable double couch, in a sprawled out position with one leg hanging over onto the floor. He quickly sits up right on the couch, but this proves to be a mistake as it makes him feel even more groggy.
Terrance places a hand to his head, as if to steady it, even though he knows this will do nothing effectively. He slowly recalls the events that lead up to this.
Basically he was up all night playing PUBG on his xbox one. He was playing in a tournament that had several rounds with only small breaks between them and dragged out all the way into the night and until the early hours of the morning. He had placed fairly well in the tournament, coming in ninety second by the time it was over.
Of course at that point, the sun had already started peeking over the horizon and he simply passed out on the couch presumably from exhaustion. He must have slept the entire day, as it was now once again night time.
The only thing illuminating the living room was his open laptop. He had opened it to check some of the online rankings before he had passed out and had left it like that.
As a result the laptop had gone to its screen saver, a simple windows logo bouncing around the screen and the battery was now almost dead, sitting at twelve percent.
The low light emitted from the laptop was enough to illuminate the room a little, enough to see that his curtains were still drawn wide open and that it was pitch dark outside, beyond the nice three meter wide living room window that his flat sported.
Terrance slowly gets up and walks over to the living room light switch and flicks it on.
Nothing.
It would seem that the power had gone out at some point. This would explain why his laptop was running out of juice, despite being plugged into a nearby multiplug to keep the charge up.
Terrance grabs his cellphone from the coffee table and turns on the rear mounted LED light and uses it as a torch. He navigates his way over to the kitchen to retrieve a glass from the high cupboard and bring it over to the sink to fill it with some water.
As soon as he opens the tap however, only a small stream of water pours out. Even this tiny stream lasts only a few seconds before reducing to a quick drip and then ultimately running dry altogether.
“Well that’s just great.”
Terrance heads over to his now ‘off’ fridge and retrieves his last can of beer instead. Gotta drink something! He opens the can and takes a few gulps of the all too refreshing beverage.
To be fair, in one of the cupboards, there’s a six pack of bottled water, but he is way too lazy to retrieve and unpack that right now.
With nothing better to do, Terrance unlocks his phone and checks for messages. Nothing. The wifi is obviously out, due to the power outage, so the phone must be running off his mobile data, which admittedly is not much. He instinctively checks the data connection, but it lists it as ‘no signal’. What?
Granted his reception isn’t exactly the best in this apartment block, despite being on the thirteenth floor, but he always has at least a ‘3G’ connection. Now he has nothing.
He glances over to the battery icon, twenty five percent left. But what really catches his attention is the time, 13:00.
If the phones clock were to be believed, it was currently the middle of the day. He immediately concludes that there must be something wrong with it, some kind of glitch, since it is clearly dark outside.
Terrance walks over to the living room window and looks outside. There is nothing. Due to the power outage, there appears to be no streetlights on. There isn’t any lit up buildings in the distance either. Looking up, he can’t see any moonlight or dark sky either. Is it overcast? Is that why there is absolutely no night-light like the moon for example?
He has looked out this window many times before, but never has there been a time, where he couldn’t see a single thing, both up and down or in the distance. The only thing he could see now was his own faint reflection in the glass.
There was simply nothing beyond that, just a completely black void, as though there was nothing beyond his glass window, the world just simply stopped.
That old bullshit poetry thing about how when ‘you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you’. Well right now he could feel it, he totally ‘got it’. It felt like the thing he could not see, was watching him, like the darkness was alive and it was as unnerving as hell.
Terrance immediately closed the living room curtains.
He grabbed a packet of crisps from one of the kitchen cupboards and went to go sit down on the couch, while he munched away on them to satiate his hunger.
After he was done with that, he played some of the single player games on his phone for an hour. The phones battery was now down to thirteen percent, it will not last much longer, before it starts bugging him about low battery.
Without much else to do and his only source of light about to run out, Terrance decides that while he still has his phone as a light source, he should go visit his friend, Josh’s apartment. It’s better than being plunged into complete darkness.
Josh lives one floor above him, in fact directly above him, just like his own apartment, at the end of the hallway. Terrance unlocks his door and opens it. Shining the phones light down the hallway, but it only illuminates upto about three meters. The hallway itself is also completely dark.
Terrance locks his flats door behind him and pockets the key. He walks slowly down the hallway, keeping the light in front of him at all times. His pace is slow and steady for some reason. He has an incredible feeling of uneasiness.
He reaches the stairwell, which is on his right and shines his ‘torch’ up and down it, instinctively.
Before heading up the stairwell, to the next floor, he decides to first go down to the other end of the hallway, there should be a fuse box there.
Terrance passes by the stairwell and slowly moves towards the end of the hallway, passing by one or two apartment doors on his left as he does.
This complex is in a small rectangular shape, reaching upwards of fifteen floors, with one long passage on each floor and several apartments all lined up on the same side of the building. There is also a stairwell on the opposite side, centrally located.
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Terrance pauses for a moment as he hears something. A noise coming from the end of the hallway. It’s the sound of wind, the sound of air blowing.
He slowly advances towards the end of the hallway, but before he can reach it, finds something else instead.
Nothing.
The hallway simply stops.
Where the rest of it should be, there is simply a void, just like beyond his living room window.
His first instinct is to run back to his apartment, away from the gaping abyss in front of him that feels like it’s threatening to swallow him whole. But he manages to resist the urge when he notices that where the hallway ends, both the floor and the walls, end in rough jagged lines with large cracks receding from it.
He takes another step forward, carefully bracing himself against the wall, lest he be swept up by a sudden gust of wind, or sucked in by that all too present darkness, and carefully peers over the edge, still using his ‘torch’.
The hallway indeed doesn’t just end. Judging by the one floor below him that he can see with his dim light, it appears as though part of the building has been swept away, or simply collapsed, like you would see on the news as part of the aftermath of a fierce earthquake.
Directly on the floor below him, or at the least the part of it that is visible to him, he can see somebody’s bathroom, or at least what’s left of it. He suspects that ‘up’ looks exactly the same.
He dare not look up though to confirm it, as it feels like if he does that right now, in this high place, at the edge of the world, that something in his brain will simply break and his mind will slip into insanity.
Well at least he assumes he is on a high place based on the little bit of rationale still functioning in his mind, it is not like he could see the ground in the murky void to confirm this. For all he knew the, ground simply wasn’t there anymore, that it was just more nothingness. At this point he wouldn’t even be surprised.
This absurd acceptance just goes to show how close to insanity he feels right now.
Terrance quickly turns around, he has seen enough. He doesn’t know if the building is even going to stay standing for another minute or not. He just wants to be somewhere safe right now. Somewhere with four walls and a fucking proper light source and maybe a friend would also be really nice.
He decides to fight the urge to run straight down the hallway and lock himself in his own apartment, primarily because he would soon be plunged into darkness and alone in there.
He resolves himself to take the stairs up one floor and seek shelter by his friend.
Terrance makes his way back to the stairwell, once again shining the light downstairs first on his left, more at a feeling of intense insecurity that anything else, a feeling like something could literally jump out of the dark and ‘get him’.
He then shines the light upstairs to light his path forward. His ‘torch’ catches a person however, standing on the halfway mark of the stairs leading up, the furthest point from him.
The person is just standing there looking at him.
The person has pale white skin and long arms, so long, that his hands touch the sides of his lower legs around the area of his calf muscles. He is also seemingly naked. The ‘person’ is just standing there, staring at him, with his impossibly large beady pitch black round eyes and grinning at him, with a wide ‘smile’ full of huge razor sharp teeth, arranged in zigzag piranha like fashion. The thing, has only two slits for a nose and no discernable form of ears.
And it’s just looking at him.
Terrance turns around and starts running down the stairs, he knows if he looks at that thing for even a split second longer his mind will break. No man can stare straight into something from a nightmare like that, something straight from the very visage of hell and maintain his sanity.
Terrance launches himself down the first half of the stairs, his mind a rumbling panicked mess. In his haste, as he turns to take the second half of this flight of stairs downwards, he trips over his own feet and falls forward.
Terrance stumbles forward, arms and legs flailing as he tumbles down the remaining several steps and into the hallway. He has to get up. The adrenaline is pumping so hard through his body, his heart is pounding, his head is hot, it feels like it’s going to explode.
Terrance jumps to his feet, he’s probably in a lot of pain right now, but he can’t feel it. He’s confident he could have a broken bone right now and not even feel it.
His light, he needs his light.
Oh fuck!
He doesn’t have it anymore! WHERE IS IT! WHERE?
The answer is a small glowing spot, no bigger than a few centimeters in diameter halfway up the flight of stairs, at the position he just fell down from. Judging from the tiny speck of light, the phone must be lying face up, pointing the LED to the ground below it.
He needs that light. If he’s fast enough could he get to it before that thing does?
Right then Terrance could swear he saw a shadow pass in front of it, just for a moment.
Electric signals are firing erratically in his brain, he can feel cold static running down his back. He’s going to lose it, he’s finally going to snap. He can’t but help wonder if maybe he’s already lost it, maybe his mind is playing tricks on him, maybe he didn’t really see anything at all.
Of course that would be too good to be true. It is far more likely that that thing is coming for him. It’s going to get him. He needs to move, NOW!
Terrance fumbles away into the invisibly dark passageway, leaving behind the only lightsource he can see. No matter how tiny it was, it was his safe place, the last place his sanity existed. Leaving it behind feels like he has left all hope behind.
He moves quickly down the hallway, tracing his hand along the left wall for guidance as he goes.
Wait he is going down the hallway, why didn’t he go down the stairs? The hallway will be a dead end, he’ll be trapped! Terrance feels like screaming out in madness and frustration, he feels like crying in hopelessness and fear.
Just then, his left hand loses the wall. No, it’s a door! That’s right there are apartments to his left. He quickly fumbles for the doorknob and tries to open it. It won’t turn. Of course it won’t. People don’t just leave their doors unlocked.
Terrance could swear he felt a breath on his neck, his heart skips a beat and his blood runs cold. He immediately abandons the door and half jogs down the hallway.
Then he realises that he went right when he fell down the stairs, not left. He’s going to run right into the broken off part of the building! He’s going to run right off the edge and plummet twelve stories to his death. At this point though, that might just be a mercy for him.
His left hand finally reaches the next door and this time he quickly knocks on the door loudly. He doesn’t care about making a noise, he’s sure that thing is coming for him anyway and this door is probably his last chance before the edge.
He glances to his left back towards the stairwell, a meaningless gesture as he can’t possibly see a thing, yet something he instinctively does all the same. That thing could be right in front of his face, ready to bite it off his head and he wouldn’t be able to tell, there just isn’t any light. It is gone from this world.
Nonetheless, Terrance is certain the thing is there, almost on top of him. His legs are trembling and he feels sick in his stomach. Then he hears the lock in the door turn. Did someone unlock it? Or did they forget to lock it and now just lock it, sealing Terrances fate?
“Pete, is that you?”
A woman’s voice! Did she just unlock it thinking it was this ‘Pete’ and then have second thoughts and call out to check? Or did she just lock it for safety before calling out? These thoughts flash through Terrances mind in a split second. Should he call out to her beg her to let him in, it seems unlikely she would, if she doesn’t then he will certainly die out here in just a moment.
WIth life and death literally hanging in the balance, Terrance takes a chance and turns the handle and forces the door inward.
It opens! He is engulfed in the brilliant light of a single solitary candle as he forces the door open wildly, sending a woman stumbling backwards from the sudden blow. Terrance can waste not a second thought for her, or her plight, as he steps inside and shuts the door behind him. He quickly turns the key that is still inside the lock, locking the door in place.
The woman scrambles up and reaches over the kitchen counter to grab something. It’s a butchers knife. She is pointing it in his direction threateningly.
But Terrance doesn’t care, even if she kills him right now. All his strength finally leaves his legs and he slides down to the ground, his back propped up against the door. This single flickering one watt candle feels like the very sun itself on his skin.
Tears start rolling down his face.