Josh had taken another drink, another bite of booze covered fruit after his roommates had left. It was the last bit he needed, the last straw to break the camels back that was his consciousness, before he passed out on the couch. Exactly as he’d planned.

But what happened next was nothing he had ever planned for. And how could he. He was dealing with forces far beyond his comprehension. Such is the nature of dreams.

It began with a departure from an elevator. For a moment, Josh thought he might not have been dreaming at all. It looked like the hallway outside of the penthouse, and the elevator that was closing behind him as he walked it had felt very much like the elevator in the Benedictine. It was entirely possible that Josh had merely passed out and walked out to the lobby to try and find his roommates, but returned unsuccessful. Stranger things had happened to Josh while he’d been asleep after drinking. What had never happened to Josh while drinking, however, was a feeling of loss of autonomy.

And that was exactly what Josh realized he was experiencing.He hadn’t meant to walk out into the hallway, but his body was doing just that. And it was taking him to a door that looked very much like the door to his apartment. He was helpless as his arm reached out, turned the doorknob, and opened the door. And he was helpless as he was engulfed by the world beyond it.

It wasn’t the apartment that he had been expecting to find beyond the door. It wasn’t a nightmare, exactly, either. Or the bubble that he had found himself in before. And it wasn’t the old apartment he had shared with Kerry. It was just… a different apartment. A cramped studio apartment, kitchen sink and hot plate in one corner, folding bed tucked into another. The space was littered with loose clothing, the wrappings that several orders of fast food had come in, and a strange assortment of objects Josh wasn’t familiar with.

Still without an ounce of control, Josh leaned down and picked up one of the strange objects. It was a little star shaped prism that fit in the palm of his hand, matte black in color, and the texture was glassy; though the points had a rubberized give to them. Another, still on the floor at his feet, was a similar object. The material was the same at least, the shape was more rounded, almost egg shaped. They all seemed to be the same material, but each was shaped slightly differently. In all, there were probably twenty or so scattered about the space.

Josh watched, like he was watching a movie in VR, as his hands stroked the material gently. Pushing against the points and rolling the whole thing between his hands. It didn’t feel great, but it was certainly interesting. The presence of sensation at all actually felt strange. For some reason, though Josh was sure it was still his body, it felt like there was a disconnect between what he was feeling and what he knew he should be feeling. It made the immersion, that virtual realty goggle like feeling, fade somewhat.

And with the fading of the reality of the scene that was playing out before him, things began to appear less real. The color faded into a more muted palette of browns and reds and yellows. Shapes became less clear, like he was looking through squinted eyes. And the sounds of the world, sounds he hadn’t even noticed were there at all, became muted; muffled like a cloth sack had been placed over his head. Then another sensation came, a burning on his left arm. And when he looked down, expecting to see a mark, there was none. It was just his arm. Sound began to floor back, loud and violent. Someone was slamming the door open behind him, he could feel it. Feel it in that way you can feel abstract hings in your dreams. How you can feel that you’re you, even when you don’t look like you, or that you’re in your house even when you clearly aren’t. Someone was coming to get him, and they were going to a lot of trouble in the process.

His vision cleared again, trading back out with the clarity of sound he had experienced. He watched as whoever or whatever was piloting his body began to run. Not so much run and dive, dive across the small studio apartment, towards a sliding glass door on the other side. There was a tiny balcony just outside, he could see it. And he knew that if he made it there, he would be safe. And as he dove, he felt himself gain control again.

Josh looked back towards the door he had come in from as he fiddled with the lock to the glass door. But when he looked back, he saw himself. His body was being pulled back by countless hands reaching from seemingly nowhere. The look on his own face, at least, his body’s face, was one of abject horror. Josh thought of turning back all the way to try and grab hold of his hand to pull his body to safety and stop it from being taken wherever it was the hands were taking him, but he was falling backwards.

The mix of sensations made it difficult to process. Some part of his consciousness was still trapped in the body he had seen being dragged away, but his functional self that could move and make decisions was falling backwards out of the now open sliding glass door. Where there had been a balcony before, there was just a sheer ledge into an abyss below. And so, initially, Josh felt as though he was being pulled apart in opposite directions. One way by the nightmarish hands and another by gravity. But in the end, it was the falling consciousness that could control its own actions that won out.

At first, Josh expected to plummet back into the empty white expanse and find himself inside the familiar bubble. But that didn’t happen either. The nightmare running rampant through his mind seemed intent to subvert all of his expectations. Instead, the darkness he fell through gained color again. Josh found himself falling through an open doorway, the doorway to his actual apartment at the Benedictine, and sideways through a series of rooms that didn’t seem to line up with the actual layout of the apartment. He began in the room he had taken as his own, then through the hallway, then Sara’s room, then Connor’s room, then the hallway again. But that next doorway led him to the opposite side of the apartment, where the laundry room door exited into the kitchen; though the actual layout wasn’t quite right.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was a straight fall down, though the directions that were down did shift slightly. Mostly ‘down’ was sideways, like the whole building had been tipped on its side. But after entering the kitchen, it shifted so that a different wall was down. So as Josh fell, he began to fall towards the open door to the balcony. He could feel his trajectory becoming certain, and while he could move his body there was no controlling the way the world turned to send him where it wanted. He scrambled to grab anything, a chain, a countertop, a blender, the door to the balcony. Anything he managed to actually get his hands on slipped through his fingers. It wasn’t until there wasn’t anything below him but the expanse of a sideways city landscape that Josh managed to hold on to anything. And the thing he had managed to grab was literally the last thing that would have been within his reach—the balcony railing.

The railing, both in the real world and in the nightmare, was an ornamental wrought iron fencing. Thin bars were interwoven with a sturdy mesh of metal ivy. Josh’s fingers were wrapped around one of the bars as the rest of his body hung sideways, threatening to drop into the void. But then he managed to get his other hand on the railing as well. There was a chance he’d be able to pull himself up, and from there he could jump and grab the door frame and pull himself back into the apartment. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about gravity being sideways, but it would be a lot safer than staying outside.

As he was struggling to pull himself up, the nightmare corrected his course once again. This time, much more directly. A lump had formed in the concrete of the balcony floor. And that lump slowly grew and extended until it was a hand, and then an arm, and then nearly a shoulder. Josh recognized the arm immediately. It was a grayish shriveled limb, nearly human but just slightly too long. And along the forearm was a mark. The mark that filled Josh’s heart with dread just by looking at it. It wasn’t a spiral of possibility, it wasn’t a generic bar code, it was alien and unintelligible.

Josh knew what it meant. And he wasn’t about to let that hand touch him. Falling into the void was a better fate. And so, he let go.

He wasn’t sure how far he fell, or how long it had taken. But it seemed to be a long time and a great distance. But it was hard to tell. Everything around him was dark. He could see his hands in front of him as clear as day, but it was almost as if there was nothing else around him. No shapes or objects in the distance, no rushing air that told him what direction he was falling, not even particles of matter or light. It really was the void, and it felt like it would never end.

“Why aren’t they waking me up yet?” Josh asked himself out loud.

His memory had returned in the calm of the void, and he could recall that Sara and Connor had said they would come wake him back up after a set amount of time. Maybe they’d had too much to drink and hadn’t been able to make it back up to the apartment from the lobby. Maybe they’d had their marks activate and abandoned him. That latter thought seemed to stick. He felt very much alone, abandoned by the people he cared about. And the lack of other things to focus on made it feel like an all encompassing sorrow.

That sorrow and anxiety and fear seemed to grow beyond the physical boundaries of Josh’s body. It was a similar abstract feeling as when he had known something was breaking down a door behind him earlier. But quickly that abstract feeling became more concrete. The darkness around him seemed to grow brighter. He could see a tint of color around him as the world began to lighten. And eventually, Josh found himself where he had expected he would be. He was within the confines of a semi-translucent violet sphere floating in a white expanse. But it didn’t feel the same.

Josh looked around the exterior of the sphere, and there was another bubble just outside his own. Within the other bubble he could see a silhouette of a person. Not an alien creature, but a human person. They were of average size, but Josh couldn’t make out much else. It was moving around, pacing almost, and soon pressed up against the side of the bubble. Josh watched as a slender human hand pushed passed the confines of the other bubble and reached out towards the violet exterior walls of the bubble he was in. He felt, in his loneliness, a profound desire to hold that hand.

There was no hesitation, no loss of control, no deeper thought in Josh’s head as he jerked his body to the side of his bubble and pressed his hand hard against the side. It didn’t give at first, but after applying a great deal of force, he managed to push in through. It was like punching a mixture of cornstarch and water. Both dry and wet at the same time. But when his arm emerged on the other side, it didn’t look like his arm. It looked desiccated, gray, elongated, and horrid. It had a mark on it that he had no desire to look at further than to confirm what it was. What he was.

He was not out of control. He was something different. He was alien.

A strange desire took root in his mind. Not just to grab hold of the human hand that had been extended towards him, but to draw it in to him. To have that hand, that arm, that body that lay beyond. To possess it. It was a desire driven by loneliness, by grief, and carried out in desperation. There was hardly any resistance as he managed to grab hold of the other hand. And it was a trivial matter to begin pulling it closer. To begin pulling the other being out of their bubble. They looked grotesque—small, soft, frail. In short, they were pitiable. But they belong to him now.

And as he drew that other creature into his own bubble, hand first, something rocked the foundation of the world. It was as though the invisible net that their two bubbled were suspended on, had been snapped like the reigns of a horse. The other hand had made it inside his bubble, but there was no fighting this new quake in reality.

Josh was shaking, his bubble was rattling like a maraca, his entire world was shaking.

“Wake up!” Sara shouted directly in Josh’s face as something wet and cold poured over him.

“Should I get another bucket?” Connor asked, frantic. “Ice water this time?”

“Don’t you dare!” Josh managed to hiss.

There was a fury in his mind that he didn’t fully comprehend. He had been interrupted, but the feeling quickly faded as he realized he was awake.

He was propped up on the couch in the apartment and Sara was holding him by his shoulders. She’d been shaking him, and something warm on his face told him that she might have slapped him too. But the rest of his barely conscious mind was occupied by the discomfort of Connor having dumped a bucket of water on him.

“Thank goodness.” Sara said with a drawn out exasperated breath. “We thought you were gone for a bit there.”