As I sit here, I think of them.
“And that is the agony,” Brandon Scott muttered and ran his hands through his hair. His eyes were tired, one more than the other, and his head was just a little off. “Sometimes I wonder what happens to them—and if it’s any different from what will happen to me.”
As he had, previously, occasionally, he cast his eyes to his half-closed door. The dark hallway stretched right beyond that, and he always worried someone might be looking back at him from between the slit of the door and the door frame.
This time something was.
The jolt ran across his entire body, and he nearly screamed.
But the face was not there anymore.
“Shit…” he muttered, and stood up, taking one step after another. Each moment he worried and tensed, but he managed to close the door with no resistance from the other side of it.
“Maybe nothing…” he said, not believing it for a second.
And, sure enough, when he sat back down at his keyboard, the door was open, once again. Not a sound accompanied it, the motion. Just an opening to the dark.
“Alright, if you are going to murder me—just fucking do it!” he yelled, and then let out a real scream as the door swung open to show the person standing there.
Well, persons. Many. Faces shifting and heights and forms sliding in and out of prominence, each of them gray and sickly and like a ruined photograph.
“You!” it said, stuttering out the single syllable.
Brandon went for something, anything, a weapon of some sort. The fact he was not a nerd that collected weapons, medieval or otherwise, was suddenly unfortunate. He scooped up a box that used to hold shoes and whipped it at the gray thing’s head.
The thing was there, then was not, as the box sailed on past. The cardboard slammed into the wall, and the gray creature easily picked Brandon up off his feet and held him there. Eyes of many colors, though bluer than anything else, stared into his soul.
“What do you want!” Brandon yelled, making sure to put phlegm into the question.
With a flick of motion, Brandon crashed down onto his bed, breaking the wooden legs of it and making the entire frame collapse. Brandon coughed after he managed to at least shake some of the daze off his body.
“You killed us,” the gray thing said. “Again, and again, here and there, in so many worlds, you ended us.”
“Oh, shit…” Brandon said, his head still pulsing. “Is this another meta thing?”
The gray person scooped up one of the two ten-pound weights off the floor and chucked it at where Brandon’s head had been a few milliseconds previously. The plaster dented, and the weight stayed lodged in the wall.
“Jesus fucking—” Brandon began, before leaping off the broken bed as a hand cleaved right through it.
“Look, I’m sorry—” he managed, before a kick that shot him to the roof hit.
He landed in a heap, and the gray thing stood over him. “Let’s see how you like it, author.”
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Special thanks to: Bob Gerkin, Collin Pearman, Dylan Alexander, Jerry Banfield, and Michael The Comic Nerd.
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