Day 3
That night he laid in bed unsleeping for hours. He was watching a single cockroach crawling along the hardwood floor. It traced its way up the stale white walls and climbed up to the roof, directly above him. Then it clung there, a solitary black dot in an empty field of white, and didn’t move.
He all red
in the living room. The drapes were open, but the window was a thick, oily black, and it seemed to be dripping. The anything outside of the room was lost in a darkness the light couldn’t penetrate.
A train of black insects were crawling in from the dark, each one a featureless speck as black as the dar
kness they had come from. At first it was just a few trickling in, but then they came in hordes, specks of darkness converging toward him and devouring the light on the way. Brennan tried to run, tried to escape the blackness, but there was nowhere to go. Then it caved in on him and it was complete.
He could feel the movement of a thousand flies and worms crawling along his skin. The thin hairy legs of insects were scratching against every inch of his body. Trails of mucus scum slid across him. They just wandered at first, tracing the contours of his flesh and sliding through any open cavities they could find. Then every one of them inched its way down and climbed off his foot.
He was completely alone in total blackness, naked now, cold and shivering. Traces of residual grime still tainted his bare skin. He knelt down and clutched his body to fight off the chill running through his spine.
Then a dead, rancid flesh it was
l o
u d a boy coated in a thick layer of some black oozing liquid, as though he had been drowned in motor oil. He was no bigger than a toddler. He stared at him with his featureless face, blank and motionless. A thick drop of the black sludge slipped to the tip of his nose. It hung there for a moment, shaking and glistening, until it snapped. Then it came crashing down and splattered on the floor.
