Rick McQuiston
© 2007
The swirling collage of disgusting colors flowed relentlessly from one side of the room to the other. Each hue meshed with the ones beside it creating an entirely new spectrum of shades. The many inanimate objects in the room liquefied as if struggling in a completely alien way to attain life. Chairs jostled back and forth, the television set writhed savagely on its stand, the refrigerator flung its doors open and shut as it moaned and snarled in rage. Even the carpet, a tattered and frayed Berber, melted into a filthy pond of nauseating transparency in which bobbed innumerable, glistening lumps crudely resembling peering eyeballs.
Garrett hated this part of the trip. It usually started towards the end of the buzz but he noticed that lately it had been progressing to the earlier stages. It didn’t bother him though, most things didn’t. Over the lazy course of his twenty-two years he had developed, as he liked to refer to it, a hard outer shell which protected him from the troubles and worries of daily life. However, his shell needed nourishment which most effectively came in the form of mind altering drugs.
His contact, Doug, was a repulsive character, utterly void of the virtues that graced even the lowliest criminals or street bums. But the one thing that Garrett needed him for he always came through with…hooking him up with a fix.
Garrett looked down into his lap at the gleaming syringe. It dripped a bright green liquid from its tip onto his leg. In its cylindrical reservoir were the traces of the drug. He rarely completely finished an injection finding all the protection, as he dubbed it, in about half a dose.
The closet door on the far side of the room swelled as if it were breathing. Its color changed from eggshell white to a bizarre hybrid of angry mauve and washed out brown. The hinges were straining mightily to contain the door, or whatever lurked behind it, but were clearly losing the battle, filling the room with ear-splitting creaks and clinks.
Garrett shook his head from side to side as if it would help clear it. The inhuman sounds leaking through the door were obvious in their intent and seemed to grow angrier when the human sitting on the couch did nothing. Apparently it did not appreciate its victims merely sitting idly by waiting for their destruction. It preferred prey that had spirit.
Garrett sighed as he began to feel the soft, comfortable clutches of sleep begin to invade his body and mind. The door was nearing its breaking point, which made embracing slumber all the more difficult but it was overtaking him nonetheless; an inevitable and welcome stage of his trip.
He lifted his feet up off of the carpet and marveled at how they were completely dry. Swollen lumps swam in every direction around the couch, occasionally dipping down deep into the carpet on mindless and incomprehensible journeys. The surrealistic vision of this did not deter the peaceful approach of sleep however and Garrett was starting to pass out as he had so many times before. He was content in the knowledge that he would awaken some time later in the comfort of his apartment oblivious to the strange carnage and absurd impossibility of what the drug had unleashed upon his senses.
The closet door had switched to a color of red so deep that it bordered on black. The hinges crumbled and plopped into the fetid carpet pond with a sickening thud as the walls around the door split in every direction like blind spiders weaving an insane tapestry of webs.
And then the door collapsed.
Garrett was only partially conscience as the thing menacingly slid into the room. It was ravenous, although confined to a drug induced nether region as it had always been it had never really known the joys of eating, but it was anxious to learn.
Its slime coated cloven hooves trudged through the carpet pond leaving an oily residue in its wake. Garrett glanced at it, and sickened by its visage, quickly looked away, eagerly awaiting the escape sleep so reliably offered.
He passed out just as the thing reached out for him.
The sunlight flooded the room, revealing thousands of otherwise invisible dust particles. Garrett winced as the rays assaulted his face. His head ached and his stomach grumbled in protest to its emptiness as he rubbed his eyes to clear his thoughts. The trip he’d returned from was frightening to say the least but strangely
satisfying as well. He’d escaped the troubles of reality successfully and although he now had to face them again he felt refreshed enough to do so adequately. He stood up shakily and stumbled into the kitchen. A hot cup of lemon-ginseng tea is what he needed, that and perhaps a sandwich.
The teapot whistle rang through the apartment, signaling the water within it had reached its boiling point. He removed the lid and tipped the bubbling water into a large coffee mug with a faded half naked woman on it; a twenty-first birthday gift from his buddies. His head was screaming at him, threatening to unleash a migraine as if in retaliation for the abuse it had endured.
The tea soothed his throat and relaxed his mind. He made a mental note to contact Doug to order a couple more fixes as he started to make a ham sandwich. And then a disturbing fact settled over his good mood…the syringe was missing.
He rushed over to the couch leaving his sandwich on the counter. A frantic and bewildered search revealed no needle or any clues to its whereabouts. He was certain it was in his lap when he tripped out and was sure he hadn’t moved it when he woke up. So where was it?
The knob on the closet door creaked as it turned. It violently swung open and slammed into the wall behind it, splintering the drywall and creating a small cloud of dust. Garrett’s heart was in his throat. The darkness inside the closet was perfectly framed by the doorjamb; a clean, black rectangle of the unknown…and all that it contained.
His migraine was stabbing at his head, further complicating the perilous situation he suddenly found himself in. He was never very good at dealing with life’s troubles and now he was going to have to face a big one head on.
The thing entered the room and fixed its loathsome gaze directly on Garrett. It was mostly transparent, giving it an appearance not unlike a distorted ghost. Great pain was etched across its face as every movement it made was accompanied by groans of discomfort. It seemed to be struggling to maintain its solidity in some way.
Garrett was froze to the spot where he stood. He wet himself when it began to stagger towards him, its determination to reach its prey clearly evident on its face.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
In its hand it held the key to its freedom and its meal…Garrett’s syringe, which was still dripping a bright green liquid.
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Rick McQuiston is a 39 year-old father of two who loves to read,write and play drums. He has had 87 publications so far and is currently working on his second horror novella.
