Horror

The Artificial City

If you're a fool who is expecting to read a mediocre
"spooky" tale with a silly little plot-twist or an ending
that wraps up everything up in a convenient little box
at the end of this strange and horrifying event, then
please do not continue. This is a tale of unusual and
endless dread and confusion.
What I am writing here in my notebook is the final
memories of the former life I had once a few years
ago. Ever since that time that one morning, nothing
had ever been the same, nor has it been the same. I
don't recall my name, the state I lived in, my family,
or anything of the sort. All I remember was tidbits of
my previous life, how old I believed I was, and a few
simple details of the town I used to live in.
This unusual, seemingly endless twisted hallucination
started when I was eighteen. For the most part, I was
an ordinary youngster growing up. I received fairly
decent grades and I had a family. I cannot, for the life
of me, recall if I had siblings or if I did not. I can't
remember if my parents were happily married to one
another or if they loathed each other and were in
preparation for a divorce. I can't remember if I lived in
a middle class, working class, or upper class family.
As mentioned earlier, a few vague, scarce details
linger in my mind pertaining to my old hometown. I
lived in a city, and I do believe I found it rather quaint
and crime-free. I believe I'd lived there my entire life.
It wasn't a large, bustling metropolis. Instead, it was
a humble city that had nice parks and was a
prominent art colony. On the window of every shop or
bar, you would find quirky little models or sculptures
lurking about. I will return to this point a bit later.
I forgot to mention that one of the few things I
remember was that I had a very miniscule social life. I
never truly remember ever being a member of a sports
team or attending festive occasions with any
acquaintances. To kill time and boredom, I'd often
take long promenades with or without music around
my city. It helped to clear my mind and allowed me to
appreciate the architecture and qualities of the local
artists.
During my walks, I often found one particular mural
that stood out to me from all the others, simply
because it looked so odd and somewhat unsettling.
Whenever I gazed at it, it left me with a feeling of
uneasiness that I could never and still cannot truly
explain. Perhaps it was something along the lines of
the Uncanny Valley, but it always left me feeling that
way.
But, being someone who enjoyed the macabre and the
grotesque, and the thrill of being afraid, I'd often sit
there for several minutes just staring at it, observing
it and carefully studying its design. As puerile as this
sounds, the thing that attracted my attention so
keenly was a mural painting of a large, cartoon
porcupine.
I'm not exactly certain as to how I can explain its
design properly, but I will try it for the sake of a clear
understanding. To another person, it may not seem
eerie at all, perhaps even amusing or welcoming.
This particular cartoon had a large, smiling face and it
was standing on its hind legs, making it bipedal. It
had very simply designed arms and paws, and it had
large spikes protruding from its back. The tips of its
spikes had a shade of white on them. It was simply
colored, just a few touches of white against a black
wall. It had large, otaku-esque eyes and it seemed to
be staring at a word, which, in retrospect, I believe
was the name of the shop or store, or whatever it was
that this mural was painted on.
I have no idea what it was, but whenever I walked by
that particular hole-in-the-wall store or shop or
restaurant with the unnerving porcupine on the side
of it, I always felt naturally compelled to stare at it,
even if I was tired or feeling somewhat apathetic to
anything else.
I've seen this odd wall-painting ever since I was a
child, so although it intrigued me endlessly, I would
see it nearly every single day. To amplify the unusual
circumstances surrounding this strange yet silly
picture, I never could truly figure out who the artist
was who painted it.
Unfortunately, I never bothered to enter the store or
restaurant or whatever it was to figure out who
painted it, or what the store even specialized in. I
suppose the animal enticed my curiosity a bit too
much to do anything else.
At this very moment, I can only regret ever staring at
that porcupine as that would be the true sign that
would confirm I was no longer where I had thought I
was.
The night before my weird and tenebrous life-
changing event occurred, I had received the most
unusual and overall disturbing dreams. To call them
dreams is a mistake, they were night terrors. My
nightmares consisted of me lying down, but I was not
in my bed. Instead, I imagined my eyes awakening to
an extremely lurid white light.
The light was so luminous, I recall I did not even
want to look directly at it, as my eyes burned from
the intensity of it. All I can truly remember is that my
body felt immovable, as if it were frozen or restrained
in this unfathomable, unexplainable way. Having
obtained a decent knowledge of dreams from me
reading about it quite often, I thought I was
experiencing a very peculiar case of lucid dreaming.
But at the same time, I felt similar symptoms to those
of sleep paralysis. I felt like I wanted to move my
limbs, but I felt that it was so difficult to do. The few
glimpses I caught of the blinding light, I saw that it
didn't look like any sort of light I had ever witnessed
before.
As I stared at it briefly, my vision appeared to seem
as if I were underwater, the light seemed to move in a
wave-like fashion.
From what I remember, I heard very little sound, if any
at all. If memory serves, all I heard was a sort of
unusual, low-rumbling echoing somewhere and a very
faint, distant high-pitched tone. It was as if I was
hearing noises from deep inside of my own body. The
best way I can honestly describe these noises is that
they mirrored sounds I heard from listening to the
music of the cosmos, the ones made by various
planets in our solar system.
It felt so difficult to move my body at all, even my
eyes. The most control I had over myself was my
eyelids, and I primarily wanted to keep them closed
due to the excessive luminosity of the light or lights
above.
Then, my thoughts soon began racing. Where was I?
Who was I? Where am I? Am I dreaming? I couldn't
begin to describe the horrible anxiety and panic I
began to feel. If what I was experiencing was truly a
dream, it was the most vivid, detailed dream I had
ever had despite my immobility. I suddenly attempted
to scream and shriek but I couldn't make a sound.
Just as I felt the overwhelming dread and the icy-
cold grip of terror, I saw an image that has never left
me to this day.
I saw three horrific enormous silhouettes suddenly
overtake the light. The shadowy beings were massive,
and they were shaped like no other living thing I had
ever seen. I could see the outlines of eerie tendrils
writhing about from one of them and I could see
another's single, glowing, purple eye through the
darkness.
I could hear them conversing with one another; a
horrible, baritone hoarse pattern of vocal effects
emitted from each of them. It almost sounded as if
they were speaking in whispered voices, but their
vocals were blaring in my ears.
As they continued, I felt a morbid loathing of these
hideous beings spring up in the pit of my stomach.
They appeared so large they almost seemed like
enormous, inhuman surgeons standing above me. It
was as if they were living Gods. As I felt my
conscious beginning to slip away from the paralyzing
fear overtaking me, my final sight was to see a snake-
like tentacle reaching down to me slowly.
I suddenly sat up in bed, sweating violently and
screaming. My sweet relief came when I realized that
that horrendous experience had only been a
nightmare. The feeling of dread began to get gradually
swept away as I sat up and began collecting my
thoughts and catch my breath. Those mysterious,
other-worldly beings still haunted my mind for a
moment as I removed the blankets off of me, when I
suddenly noticed something; my room.
Although it did have a sort of uncertain echo of
resemblance, appeared different from what I
remember.
I almost have no way of explaining it, other than
things just seemed irregular. And the more my eyes
scanned the room, studying each of my items like my
desk, bookshelf, and lamp, the more I noticed how
they had tacit little differences. Objects seemed to be
in the proper place, but they appeared deformed,
almost surrealistically altered as if I had ventured
inside a painting of Salvador Dali's.
Different shapes, perhaps a slight tinge of a different
color. Or there was just something flat-out bizarre
about the objects present.
Sometimes, the shape of my desk appeared entirely
slanted or as if it were purposefully disguised to
seem like my old desk, but it clearly wasn't. Or
perhaps the walls of my room, which were normally a
white color, appeared to be a slight yellowish rotted
color.
I then checked my blankets, and they too, appeared
strangely different and yet the same simultaneously.
My blankets were a hue of blue with vines and white
roses all over it.
Before all of this, I could remember the vines and
flowers appeared welcoming and comely on the
blanket. But now, the vines of the roses appeared
chaotic and uncouthly tangled amongst each other
and the roses appeared to be drooping and lifeless.
In an attempt to rid my mind of these unsettling
details, I climbed out of bed and slipped on my
clothes and shoes. Even those appeared differently
from what I imagined. I was wearing a shirt that
resembled one of my favorites.
I had remembered my shirt had an insignia of some
sort, perhaps a jaguar or tiger, or something along
those lines. It was small and located on the left
pectoral. When I took a quick glance at this new one,
it had what appeared to be a sort of pterodactyl-bat
hybrid which frightened me a bit more. I simply had
no idea what was going on, and it was starting to
take a toll on my nerves.
As I quickly marched through the house finishing
putting on my clothes, I could still observe the subtle
and creeping differences within my own house. It
followed the same structure of my room; the template
was the same, but the house was slightly modified in
different ways with furniture acquiring new or losing
qualities, things were different colors, or perhaps
entire rooms would be different sizes with shadows or
blurs of strange animals or beings seemingly
appearing and disappearing at random nooks and
crannies.
When I finally reached outside, that was when the
situation truly began to get unusual and frightening.
Running the risk of sounding monotonous, the
houses, although I could tell they were in the same
establishments as prior to all of this, they all
appeared different. In a way, they almost gave me the
chills, as some of them had grown decrepit and
overgrown with thickets and weeds all over the lawns
and patios.
In some other houses, the architecture was truly alien
to me. A few had a small, distinct pyramid-esque
shape reminiscent of those of the Mesoamerican
variety with windows and a door on a strange corner
of them. But calling it a "door" would be an
understatement, because it more or less appeared like
some sort of window with a peculiar large shutter that
gave the appearance of a door.
The streets were deathly quiet, not a single sound of
a vehicle or birds chirping was to be heard. It gave
me the impression that I was entirely alone in this
city. The air itself had a queer vibe; it didn't feel warm
or cold. It was during the summer, if I remember
correctly, but there wasn't that slight hint of humidity
that occasionally arises during this time. I felt as if I
were in some sort of box in which I couldn't feel
anything.
As I walked down the lonesome road, I began to gaze
at the signs of what I thought were markets. But after
seeing them, I couldn't tell what these little buildings
were. They appeared like shops, but they contained
objects that I couldn't remotely judge as to what they
were.
As I peered inside them, a few of the items I could see
were black, rubbery formless things, strangely vibrant
multi-colored jewelry that were cut into bizarre
shapes, and what appeared to be dead, hideous
skinned animals laying there resembling the way a
dog would lay as if it had died. It was very much
different from the art colony in which I had grown up
with. I contemplated entering one of those odd little
bazaars, but I had second thoughts with what
happened next.
I glanced up to read the shop names, but to my
chagrin, the text was in a language I had never seen
before! The characters appeared to be a mixture
between pictograms and glyphs. It was evident that
they had a language since many of the symbols
repeated here and there, which I could assume was
the same letter or sign. It was here in which I truly
began to feel afraid and the cold grip of fear seized
my throat and spine.
Nothing was making any sort of logical sense, and I
felt completely alone and filled with dread. The city
and everything seemed so distorted and unknown to
me, and I felt as if I had somehow wandered into
some unknown city in some remote country.
Unfortunately, the horror was yet to come.
I am not exactly sure why I decided to do this;
perhaps it was to try to find even a small sliver of
sanity in this demented, backwards town. I had
decided to look at the sky. The sky, to me, would
always be above us and retain its natural laws no
matter what. But even there, something strange and
nerve-wracking awaited me.
The sky itself was uncanny. It didn't appear a light
shade of blue as it normally would. Nor was it cloudy
or hazy or anything of that sort. It instead had a
peculiar shade of an eerie purplish-blue color, as if it
were some sort of alien-like firmament someone
would see when looking into the sky on another
world. What caught my attention made me gasp and
let out a cry of terror.
In the air there hung an eerie, colorfully-striped moon
that was much larger than the ordinary moon we are
so accustomed to seeing. The three primary colors I
had seen on it were blue, green, and a pinkish shade
of purple. To call it a "moon" is just to compare it to
something familiar. The truth is I don't know whether
it was a moon or a planet or some sort of illusion I
was beholding. I would have found it beautiful and
fascinating if it were not so subtly horrific.
Even more curious was the star constellations I saw
around it. Even though I got the impression that it
was morning since I had just woken up and the area
seemed bright with daylight (even though I didn't see
the sun, but I conjectured that it was behind one of
the strange buildings. How wrong I would be) I saw
unfamiliar star constellations glittering around the
circumference of the moon. They were a dark red
color and they seemed to flicker like light bulbs ready
to burn out.
I felt my knees beginning to knock together and then I
began to repeatedly ask those questions that had
been scratching at my subconscious: Where am I?
What is this place? Am I still on Earth? Or have I
somehow traveled to a different planet? Or am in
another dimension or universe? Or was I just still
dreaming?
Not knowing what to do, I passed numerous of those
weird, unsettling shops and odd houses when
suddenly, I saw a figure approaching me. I didn't
know whether to feel relieved or nervous as they
came closer.
As I watched them coming closer, it seemed like they
kept walking towards me, in a completely static way.
Their arms moved in the same motion, they didn't
look around, and at times, I felt as if they were
stationary despite them looking like they were
moving. It was as if I were gazing at an optical
illusion of sorts.
When I finally came near to them, I stared at their
face, and not only had I never seen them before, but
their face was so strange and it had such haunting
characteristics.
Their eyes appeared lost and reminiscent of a
thousand-yard stare. Their facial features appeared
disproportionate and mildly deformed. I suppose the
only true way I may express how their face looked is if
I described it as a sort of mask-like face. Their eyes
never seemed to move, and when their lips moved,
they didn't seem to be in sync with their words.
The more unsettling features struck me even more
when I saw their gait more closely. They walked in a
very curious, clumsy manner. I couldn't say it looked
humorous, but rather as if they were robotic and
programmed poorly in terms of walking.
When I got close enough, I inquired as to where
everyone had gone.
When they spoke, their voice came out as a hollow,
echoing voice that seemed to fade away in the middle
of their sentences. They would make bizarre facial
expressions like grins and looks of surprise, and they
uttered a few words that I'd never heard of. They'd
use weird gestures I'd never seen anyone use before
with their hands. Their words themselves were
incoherent and abnormal.
This is what I could make out when they spoke to me:
"Yes, we believe we all know where for went. There is
an up there beyond the valley in which the
instruments use no more of these. The tunes, the
tunes green make... no. Whither chill below down the
space emptiness from see..."
I merely stared at them as they let out this seemingly
stream-of-consciousness babbling. It sounded as if
this person was trying to connect sentences together,
but it came out as a garbled mess of speech. I began
to back away from the stranger, as they continued
their mindless speech patterns, and I left them with
their voices fading away behind me and my view
gazing into the streets of an unknown city.
Then, suddenly, I beheld the thing that confirmed my
suspicions.
It was the mural of that unnerving porcupine painted
on the wall. Although the general image gave me a
brief glimpse of the familiar scenery I was accustomed
to in my former life, I saw that it had distinctly
different features now.
Its facial features were no longer the otaku-styled
large eyes and the smiling face. Although the body
and position in which the original artist painted it
seemed similar to what I remember, its face was
considerably different.
The eyes were much smaller and seemed to have a
more menacing glare to them. The mouth was no
longer open and widely grinning, but instead the
porcupine was exposing two small pairs of teeth
twisted into a smile. The more I stared at this new
altered painting, the more the sinking horror overtook
me.
All it took was this porcupine for me to realize what
was happening. Not the alien striped moon or
constellations hanging from the sky, not the bizarre
and uncanny buildings that served as houses and
shops, and not the unusual scattered denizens of this
mysterious city.
Someone or something had replicated a world just for
me, but they didn't create it perfectly. That is why all
that I saw seemed so corrupted and I saw ghost-like
figures of animals or illusions suddenly appear and
reappear in the corner of my eye as I explored.
To try and word it as simply as I can, this was a sort
of flawed copy or "bootlegged" version of my town.
Perhaps I could claw it an illusion of sorts with many
glitches in it. With that terrible enlightenment, my
heart began to thud in my chest and I felt my hands
begin to quake. The porcupine's expression seemed
to be laughing at me in a mocking fashion as I began
to panic at this revelation.
Then, for a moment, I turned up to glance at the
planet and the extraordinary star constellations
above, and then, I felt a horrible knot strain itself
inside my stomach and I screamed such a
bloodcurdling scream that I could have never
imagined that I could yell in such a way.
For just a second or maybe even shorter than that, I
caught a glimpse of those hideous, fiendish giant
beings from that dreadful nightmare. They were
staring at me, as if observing my actions like I were
some sort of lab rat in an experiment they were
conducting. The skies resembled the same imagery I
had seen in my dreams; a lurid light being shadowed
by that trio of beasts.
Then, in an instant, it disappeared and returned to
that cryptic blue sky and those never-before-seen
star constellations and that strange moon. It was as if
they were a hologram that was momentarily projected
against the sky.
Then, all I can remember from this dreadful day was
running. I felt as if I no longer had a body, like I had
no identity, or was even a human. I was just made out
of sheer horror and fear, and I was running mindlessly
to nowhere. I had become a physical manifestation of
fear, just sprinting to get away from a world in which
I was trapped in.
Now, here is where my story ends. I've spent, from
what I think, years searching in vain for a ray of light
in this grotesque and corrupted version of my past
life. I have discovered more of these mindless,
artificial humans lurking about, but much like the
first, they only uttered those nonsensical, discordant
sentences.
Everywhere I look, I only see remnants of my past life
deformed into these unusual sights. I spend my days
locked up in my "room" trying to figure out just what
had happened to me to transport me into this place.
No matter how hard I try, I simply can't piece the
puzzle together.
I've been able to sustain myself with berries growing
in my "lawn". They appear crescent-shaped and grow
in bunches. They have an unpleasing grayish color
and have a very bitter taste to them. But they do the
job in terms of keeping me hunger-free. I'd also
rather eat these berries than resort to eating one of
the mysterious and unclassifiable animals I rarely see
crawling around, or gliding through the air.
Perhaps the worst part of this surreal endeavor of
mine is the fact that, although it's not frequent, when
I look outside the window and glance up at the sky, a
feeling of pure madness welcomes me as I see those
three beings momentarily, looming like mountainous
thunderheads in a developing storm.
I theorize that those three abominations are linked to
all of this, but in what way, I'm still at a total loss.
I'm penning these words because I feel as though
those God-like entities are beginning to get bored of
me and want to replace me with another specimen to
study, torture, or whatever it is they are doing. I feel
myself slowly becoming drained being in this
alternate dimension or simulation. I know I am
constantly being watched. And every time I see the
hideous porcupine illustration or the "people" walking
around, my loathing for them grows bigger.
I can only use this notebook to remember the days
prior to this madness. I can only write, and hopefully,
somehow, someone may read it and whether I'm alive
or dead, someone may give an explanation as to what
had happened to bring me here to this artificial town
and who I even was.