Do you remember this town? Mornings still arrive here, the birds chirping in their same old, predictable melodies. Evenings settle like a well-worn blanket, and the scent of freshly baked bread hangs thick in the air – a cruel reminder of simpler days. The heavy silence serves as a stark stage, amplifying the sounds of life determinedly carrying on. The erratic clack of a rusty wind chime slices a dissonant note into the otherwise achingly normal scene.
The streets, once bustling, haven’t emptied – that would be too obvious a sign. Instead, they throb with everyday life. People walk their regular paths with practiced ease, the mundanity of their conversations echoing against the growing sense of wrongness. Children play, their laughter a brittle, too-bright sound against the stillness. The dogs pad along as dogs do, their tails wagging, friendly barks cutting the air with almost comical cheer. Yet, there’s a desperation in their eyes, a knowing too animalistic for their domestication. Their whimpers, ignored by the oblivious people, gain an almost prophetic edge, a sound of pure terror lost amidst the horrifying normalcy of it all.
The air itself holds a subtle, insidious ordinariness. It has the familiar weight and temperature, filling my lungs with each breath – this should be a comfort, but it’s an imagined deceit. Hidden beneath its normalcy is a metallic tang that lingers on the tongue and stings the nostrils. It carries faint whispers, promises in a language both ancient and alien that send a relentless shiver down your spine. Even the sunlight fails to reassure. It filters through in sickly tendrils, casting crisp shadows that writhe with unnatural hunger across the cracked sidewalks. This town, a place that once felt like home, has become too normal, stagnating from the inside out. The basic vibe clings to every surface, whispers from every shadowed corner. An unseen normalcy festers beneath the charade of ordinary life, a chilling blandness desperate to claw its way into the world.
Something shifted, not just in the town, but inside me too. Did you feel it? A prickle under my skin, the crawl of unseen eyes. Dawn painted warped horrors – a knuckle cracking out of place, the sun sluggish on the horizon, a stranger staring back from the mirror. They moved around me, blind to the silent scream tearing my throat. The baker’s grin stretched too wide, a knowing leer. Like he saw the rot in my soul, and smiled.
I walked. Turned away from the lights. Deeper into the city’s forgotten heart. Buildings watched. The air…wet earth, and something like copper. Each step. Shadows thickened. Alleys gaped. Then, the park. Weeds choked the life from the earth. An invisible pulse throbbed.
A breath hitched in my lungs – the air had thickened, congealed into a near-solid mass that made every movement feel as though I was struggling through quicksand. It clung to my skin, an icy film that carried the stink of damp mold and the metallic tang of blood. And there, nestled on a lichen-encrusted boulder like a malignant tumor, it sat.
The blackness that coated it wasn’t mere shadow, but a void that sucked the very essence of light from the world. It pulsed with a sickening rhythm, and staring at it made my stomach revolt. Etched on its cubed surface, a lone symbol writhed and shifted, defying comprehension. This mark was not merely carved but seemed to pulse, a monstrous vein beneath the inky skin of the box. The longer I gazed, the more I felt my sanity unraveling, threads of reason pulled loose by a horrific magnetism.
Driven by a desperate need I couldn’t name, I fell to my knees before it. The once-familiar earth turned alien under my trembling palms, the soil coarse, almost gritty beneath my touch. Each second pulsed by, a slow drip of agonizing awareness… then time shattered. Seconds bled into hours, a waking nightmare with no escape. My nails tore and splintered, leaving offerings of blood smeared across the unyielding blackness, yet the box remained inscrutable. With each futile attempt, the world itself warped, bending like warped glass beneath a relentless heat.
It wasn’t just the town shifting – it was something within you. Did you feel it? My flesh prickled with a constant, crawling unease. Each dawn held a new, subtle horror: a joint bending a fraction too far, the sunrise lasting an eternity, a mirror showing a reflection I didn’t quite recognize. Yet everyone else moved through their days, oblivious to the silent scream echoing inside my head. The baker’s smile stretched… too wide, too perfect. It was as if he saw the rot taking root inside me, and found it amusing.
Oxygen itself turned traitor, each breath a rasp down a sandpaper throat. It writhed, not with wind, but something unseen and hungry. The whispers were no longer confined to the edge of hearing – they were everywhere, a discordant symphony of buzzing and slithering that made my bones vibrate in my skin. The shadows…they pulsed with a life of their own, tendrils of darkness that reached out to taste my fear, to pull me towards their impossible depths.
Was it night, or is it day? You must remember the nightmares that had became a grotesque carnival of the monstrous. Sleep was a chasm we fell into, not a refuge. Instead of dreams, there were visions of cosmic abysses where shapes too colossal to comprehend flickered in and out of sight. Their gazes, vast and indifferent, promised not destruction, but a terrifying annihilation of the self. The terror shot through our arteries like a cold toxin, waking us bathed in sweat, screaming into the relentless silence of the too-still house.
The box would give up its secrets one way or another. When it did, remember, it wasn’t with a bang, but a whimper. The echo of your gasp carried on the worm-eaten wind, a fragment of revelation torn from the dying throat of time itself. It was a name, was it your name? Did you think it wasn’t a name meant for human lips, a twisting contortion of sound that made our teeth ache and our tongue try to curl back in revulsion.
Yet, even as a scream tore through us, we spoke it. The word hung in the air, pulsating with an obscene, alien energy. It was our surrender, our descent into the madness that awaited on the other side of knowing. With each syllable, we could feel something inside us snap, a chain severing that shouldn’t have existed, releasing a darkness that eagerly embraced the one waiting in the shadows.
But then, the box yielded with a soft sigh, a breath expelled from an ancient, impossible lung. The world seemed to inhale with it, then go still. You were gone, and I was alone. Absolute. Suffocating stillness choked the air from my lungs, the whispers snuffed out, the shadows recoiling into the corners of my vision.
My trembling fingers traced its now gaping maw. Inside, not some terrible revelation or cosmic abomination, but…emptiness. A void so absolute it seemed to claw at my soul. Was it abyss or liberation, a glimpse into the heart of existence or proof of its profound meaninglessness? Oblivion, or the ultimate, soul-shattering revelation? I would never know.
The world lurched back, disgustingly normal. The park, just weeds and dirt. My hands…clean, unmarked. No symbol, no pulse, just wood…ordinary, dammit!
Sanity shattered, or maybe it was just the last lie snapping. Was this real? Could it ever be? Scientists scoffed, their tests proved nothing. The box sits on my desk now, as plain as the day I found it. I haven’t slept since. The silence buzzes in my skull. Each creak of the house – is that it shifting to reveal its true form? Is that my mind breaking under the weight of a secret too terrible to bear?
It sits in my room now. I haven’t slept in a week. Every creak of the house… a new revelation? Or are the cracks widening in my own mind? Each passing day feels both unbearably long and unnervingly brief. Time, like everything else, has lost its meaning.
Think you see a flicker out of the corner of your eye? Hear a rasping whisper just as you drift to sleep? Perhaps it’s just your imagination playing tricks. Then again, maybe the box found you as well…
Does God Exist? 