Nightfall

Chapter 2: Party Foul

The pounding pain of a headache greeted me as I broke from the dark embrace of unconsciousness once again. Gone was my hard mattress of concrete, instead it had been replaced by the soft embrace of my bed.

Was that just a dream or...?

Looking around, I found nothing obviously wrong with my room and heaved a sigh of relief as I looked up at the dull white ceiling. Everything was how it had been yesterday morning before I had left. My nightstand still was covered in charging cables, my clothes were still thrown on the floor around, but not in, my dirty clothes basket, and the poster of that supermodel I had met on the beach the year before was still on the back of my closet door.

Maybe everything had been a horrible, twisted nightmare?

The thought relaxed me a little. It was comforting to think it had been just a nightmare, but as I scrutinized my surroundings, I noticed some of the little details didn't line up. Most obviously was the fact that I was under all the covers of my bed. Since my mom didn't come into my room, it was a rare occasion that I made it well enough to sleep under all the covers at the same time. And secondly, the clothes I wore the night before were neatly folded and sitting at my feet on top of my navy-blue comforter and next to my string backpack. I never folded my clothes. Ever. I always had better things to do, like play video games.

A shiver ran through me, the inaccuracies weren't much, but they were enough to make me question myself. Something had happened the night before, but I was a long way from believing in the memories I had. The sight of my clothes brought with it flashes of the night's most terrifying moments and in order to stay calm I forced myself to dismiss the things that didn't line up with common sense. There had to be a rational explanation that I just was not aware of yet.

I decided to get moving and pushed the well-made sheets back as I stretched and sat up. My whole body ached. I had been expecting my legs to hurt, but it felt as if someone had run me over with a truck. I reached around to some of the sorest muscles and began to massage them as I looked at the clothes on my bed. They were still covered in dirt and soaking wet, making the navy-blue comforter around them so dark it was almost black.

Maybe I had just decided to do some really nasty drugs and hallucinated the whole thing? And maybe someone decided to carry me home after I blacked out?

I'd never done drugs in my life, but my mind was drawing a blank trying to think of another scenario that would've put me in the current situation. It was either drugs, or a demon really did burrow its way inside of me through a tattoo that formed on my skin from a liquid that had oozed out of its mouth.

Out of the two possibilities, drugs seemed a bit more likely.

Then suddenly, a thought struck me.

The symbol!

If it wasn't there, I was all good, and it really had just been a nightmare or bad trip. I inspected the area of my chest that the tattoo had appeared upon the night before, and thankfully, there was no sign of it. My skin looked unmarked and relatively clean.

I let out a deep sigh. With no obvious evidence pointing towards the night before being as I remembered it, I could uneasily accept it as a drug induced experience, but even without anything to disprove my theory, the experience gnawed at the back of my mind. The huge amount of detail I remembered baffled me, but then again, I didn't have any experience with drugs; maybe it was normal.

In an attempt to reassure my own belief, I mumbled to myself, "Well I guess I'm just lucky to be alive considering what must've happened..."

And after swearing to never touch drugs again, I looked over to my nightstand and grabbed my phone to check the time. It was nine in the morning, giving me an hour to get up and go to work; thankfully the hellish experience wasn't going to get me fired. I rolled over to get out of bed, but my unfamiliarity with tucked in bedsheets took advantage of me and tangled up my legs. Which resulted in me, more or less, face-planting onto the wooden floor of my room.