The Intrusion

Seventeen

[Andy]

It's the middle of the night. I know I'm not asleep, but I'm also not awake.

Everything is quiet except for a faint ringing in my ears, like the hum of mosquitos on a deep summer evening or the noise the TV makes when you've forgotten to turn it off at the end of a movie. It isn't playing anything anymore, but it's still showing a blank, black screen. The hum resonates inside my mind.

A dim, whiteish glow radiates from my blank windows—the only source of light.

I am deep underwater in some sort of enormous and futuristic yet at the same time ancient submarine. Everything has a silent distorted feel to it—like being suspended underwater until you can't hold your breath any longer. When you finally open your eyes, you realize in horror that you no longer remember which way is up and which way is down. You try to swim but you don't know if you are swimming in the direction you are supposed to be going or if you are pulling yourself further and further away from that break in the ice that you fell through when you went too far out on the frozen pond.

But I know I'm not underwater, and I'm not in a submarine.

I get out of bed and walk through my apartment. Everything is covered in dust and ash. It's falling, rotting and disintegrating—the walls, the ceiling, the floor and even the furniture. The only light is a pale glow burning in my windows like it is melting the glass.

I enter the hallway. I don't try the elevators this time—I know they don't work. I go right to the stairs.

It feels like I am descending forever.

Down, down, down into a pit or a cave, or perhaps a grave. With each step, the world around me changes from a dim, dark grey to whitish and finally a deep red, but the change is so subtle and gradual I can't be sure. Maybe it's been red all along.

The stairs don't go down forever. Eventually, I reach the bottom because I know it's really only 23 floors. I open the door and cross the hall, finally reaching a wall of shiny metal doors. I press the button and immediately the elevator opens, and I get in.

But I know it won't be 23 floors up. I have to go up 25 floors to get where I'm going.

As the elevator rises, I look in the mirrors that surround me. All I see reflected back is the shadow figure—a dark spirit walker. This time, I know it's me. It's not my body, but it's me. It's my spirit, or my soul or maybe just my consciousness.

When the elevator reaches the top, I exit and walk down the hall until I find the door.

It isn't locked. She never locks it.

She always locks it.

She always locks it there. But it's never locked here.

No doors are locked here. That is, once you decide that they aren't.

I enter her apartment and go to her room. She's asleep in her bed—another dark shadow, but I know it's her.

I approach the bed and watch. But this time, she doesn't scream. She stays asleep. I climb over the footboard and hover over top of her, holding myself so close that if my spirit-walker needed breath, my exhaling would be warm enough on her face to wake her.

But my spirit doesn't need air.

There isn't any air in here to breath, anyway. The atmosphere is empty. You can't breathe here. Living bodies will suffocate, chests heaving, sucking in air that does not exist.

I reach out my shadowed hand and touch her.

When I connect, sharp, brilliant pain pulses through my body like an electric current. Suddenly, I am sucked through a tube that is far too small to fit my body, but the pressure is so great that I am pulled in anyway. I bend over backwards and contort. My bones snap, splinter, shred and squeeze.

Blood bursts from my arms and legs. It gushes from my eyes, ears and mouth. It squirts over my lips and chin—down my neck. But, it doesn't reach my chest. After so much crushing and contorting, my torso is somewhere closer to my feet than it is to my neck.

Suddenly, as I am about to swallow my eye, I remember my spirit-walker has no bones and no blood. The pain ebbs away. I feel nothing but a faint coldness that fades into a faint warmness.

And then I scream.