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All Things Real

In your room, there is a single dusty light bulb.

When you turn it off before going to sleep, it gleams for a few seconds, shining brightly and blinking slowly as a black cat's yellow eyes, from time to time illuminating your bedroom with devastating knowledge, forcing the blackened shadows to dance on the scraped wallpapers.

Those are just shadows.

For a brief second, it appears to you that they are something else, something more.

They aren't.

The bulb stops gleaming as you get more comfortable in your squeaky bed with red-colored bedding, fresh, rustling, hugging you from all sides.

There is nothing to fear. Your bed is your haven.

The bedroom drowns in pitch black and, suddenly, it is just as black when you close your eyes and when you keep them open. You can no longer tell apart what is and what is not. You trust your eyesight more than you trust anything else. What one sees is real, and what one doesn't – well, that's fake.

Children in books or films first see the monstrous intruder silently hiding under their bed or intently staring at them from the gap separating closet doors. Nevertheless, in the real world, in real life, children aren't the first ones to notice the uncanny because they haven't lived long enough to know what is normal, to understand what it is supposed to look like.

It's adults who know everything about the world they live in, who know what reality looks like and can confidently tell what is and what is not. And, after all, one cannot see the monster. Firstly, one must smell it. The odor is distinctly out of this world, wrecking the fourth wall of reality, coming right from the backrooms, where human's worst creations lay, where fantasies outdo sanity on all levels. The stalking, unfading scent of rot, death, feces, spoiled soil, and bleeding bodies – and even all those words are not enough to express its' uncanniness. This is the stench one simply cannot mistake for any other.

That is what you smell as soon as you lay down on your back, close your eyes and fall asleep. But perhaps you hadn't fallen asleep. It might be you're still wide awake.

You open your eyes – obviously, you cannot see a thing. Fear overtakes your body. In one swift second, you are no longer in control of it. Your heart starts beating wildly as you frantically look for something that smells so terribly. Your eyes are furiously searching for that which is not there. You don't see it.

You don't turn on the light.

The scent keeps getting stronger.

The thing keeps getting closer.

You feel something wet, cold, and muddy on your forehead—wrinkly fingers with sharpened nails.

You keep staring into the black.

You don't see

oh, you don't see

what is right before you

and when those sharp nails clutch your throat

and something warm and sticky starts running out of your body,

you don't make a sound

because you cannot see.

There is a single silly thought in your feverish mind as it blanks out entirely and becomes part of the all-consuming nothingness.

What you don't see – that is not there.