The Dread

I awoke to find myself in a dark and grimy tunnel. The tunnel was cold, damp and oppressive. I could not stand up because the ceiling was too low. In fact, I could not even sit up all the way without bumping my head, which already was quite sore, from what mishap I could not recall. The tunnel was not horizontal but inclined diagonally upward toward a dim light.

This analysis of my surroundings only took an unconscious split-second. Interrupted immediately by a sense of approaching dread from behind me at the lower, dark end of the tunnel that I could feel became even more constricted as it angled down below me. Anxiously, I began at once crawling upwards toward the light, desperate with the sense that I could feel the approaching Dread's hunger to clutch my ankles and pull me back down into its terminal darkness. Oddly enough, however, I would not allow myself to over-quicken my ascent, as I felt that were I to acknowledge The Dread with a mad scramble fear would overwhelm me, and it would overtake me. I can tell you that this was a most terrifying battle of wills.

As I came nearer the light, I perceived that the ceiling was well above my head, and I could now stand and walk up the tunnel without bumping my head again, already throbbing from too many failed attempts. I stood, but kept my pace similar to my crawl, trying not to demonstrate any anxiety. When I came out of the tunnel from the side of a wall, I leapt into a small storeroom with boxes and trash strewn over the moist floor. A lone, exposed, flickering light bulb dangled from the wet ceiling. The ceiling and walls were cracked and moist with water slowly oozing from the blistered and flaking paint.

For the first time since my ascent, I turned around to see what might be chasing me, but I saw nothing but the dark hole from which I came. It was an odd hole that gaped where the wall met the floor, as if some large mole ate through it, drilling downward as it went. It sounds unreasonably fearful, I realize, but I kept expecting the light to go out and The Dread to capture me. Speaking of reason, why was so afraid of this unknown Dread, for which I had no evidence? Evidence or not, my rapid pulse and sense of something real, yet not revealed or remembered, was ample for the moment.

At the other end of this storeroom was a staircase: the escape. I paused however, as the boxes caught my attention again. Was I supposed to get something from one of them? I quickly glanced at them. They seemed so insignificant and the longer I stood still, the more the sense of dread increased, so that I could think of nothing more than escape. At once, I began to climb the stairs. The steps were wood, painted with black enamel, and the walls were yellowed whitewash, which gave off an unpleasant sense of someplace familiar that I could not recollect, and furthermore doubted that I wanted to.

At the top of the basement stairs, I emerged through a pantry door into the main floor of the building and was standing in the kitchen of what appeared to be a deserted old house. I could hear the creaking and shutter-banging sounds that came with an empty house standing in the wind. Walking out of the kitchen, I came into a dining room and looked into the entryway at the other side, where the front door was.

Through the front door, I could see it was a dark gray, windy day. It looked as though it had just stopped raining and the sun had just set with dim glow in the west. The waving trees spilled their leaves across the yard and street. I stepped down from the porch, eager to be out of the house that clawed at my back. Out on the front walk, I heaved a sigh of relief. Looking back, it was a very plain, white paneled, two-story house with a shallow yard and no trees. All of its windows were black. A blast of wind blew from behind me and angrily slammed the front door wide open. I guess I hadn't pulled it all the way closed. My shoulders shuddered and my skin crawled.

Turning away from the white house, I stood on a curb looking across the wet street to a busy house with a wrought iron fence around it. This house was a single-story ranch that sat back low and wide on the property. It had dark green paneling, a red roof, and numerous trees and shrubs. It was on a corner and had several cars parked around it, in stark contrast to the empty white house. In fact, looking around this peculiar neighborhood, I saw no cars at any other house.