Death Vision chapter one: "Malformed Shadows"

This is my first ever time writing, so criticism is highly appreciated. I have written two more chapters as of this post, and I have never made a post before this. Also, this story is intended to be in book format. I have used em dashes occasionally, but rest assured, everything is written solely by myself. That said, please enjoy and give me feedback.

Pain shot through my body. The taste of copper invaded my mouth, and the shrill sound of emergency sirens filled the night air. While a figure with spiraling red eyes loomed over me, my suffering reached its peak. A pitch-black void gradually enveloped my vision as I faded in and out. I could only accept what happened, though I would soon forget it. Hundreds of thoughts fired one after another as I slowly lost consciousness. 

Or… I saw the truth. 

Beneath a gloomy sky, I stood up from where I lay on the ground. The space I was in seemed like my quiet little town, but something was off about it. I must have been dreaming— because before me was a seemingly endless convoy of people shambling down the street. Almost in unison, their bodies swayed while marching. The most unnerving thing about them was their eyes. Where eyes were meant to be were bloody holes instead. They were right behind each other, only one step apart. I was an onlooker to their hundreds of grey bodies, but ignorant of what was soon to come. 

Suddenly, a man screamed with deep emotion, begging for everything to end. His voice, then followed by the others' hundreds of cries, was much like ‘the damned’ wailing in hell. The piercing sound echoed without end. I managed to endure its intensity. 

All of the Eyeless were entering a building single file. It looked to be an apartment at least thirteen stories tall. Uniform windows with metal rails surrounding small balconies, on the tall brick structure, mirrored the tortured souls staying in line. Not even once did they dare to break their conformity. Something akin to time passing began, and fog enveloped the parallel version of my town. The line of people never seemed to get any shorter until I focused my eyes on the back of the line. When someone took the place of the last in line, a screaming voice joined the choir. Yet, a pair of blurry red circles stalking me filled me with a dread much heavier than their screams ever did. The painful, never-ending screams of hundreds droned on and on. I stood still, afraid to provoke whatever was watching me. If everyone here was suffering… there had to be a reason. The red circles in the distance radiated animosity but didn't move from their resting point. I decided to follow the trail of tortured souls instead of waiting around. I was unnoticed by the queue as I walked ahead of them to the apartment building. 

Upon reaching the entrance, I shimmied past the line into a room containing a tall staircase and two doors on either side. The screaming halted once I entered the building. Shambling up the staircase were the Eyeless, and I walked up beside them. A woman in the line was openly crying, though blood fell instead of tears, and she was fervently begging not to let him touch her. Without thinking, I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder to try and provide some comfort. As if I violated some kind of rule, a red-eyed being appeared in front of me, forcing my hand to retreat. He gazed deep into my soul while towering over me. Cloaked in pitch-black void and with a malicious presence, the figure grabbed me by the shirt and threw me backwards into the wall. I waited for a sharp pain in my spine, but instead I found there was no surface to crash into. I was pushed into a lifeless void; I fell infinitely while panic engulfed every one of my senses.

Snapping back to reality, I lay flat as a board in a hospital bed. I instantly sprang upright, and sweat took residence upon my cold skin. What was that? It felt so real… but I've had nightmares far more visceral and terrifying. And the black figure— it felt familiar, though I don't know where I’ve seen it before.

Whatever injury that had landed me in the hospital, I couldn't feel it. I wanted to leave, so I slowly swung my legs over the edge of the bed. A girl interrupted me as I was gathering my strength. 

“Wow, you've got great timing, Henry. I thought you would be out cold, but you’re already awake. I literally got here five minutes ago,” my friend Athena said without reserve. 

“I'm guessing I was your sleeping beauty then.”

With a neutral expression, Athena explained, “No, dude. I heard you landed yourself in the hospital and I was curious. Aaand iii was sooo booored without your quirky ass.” 

I got a warm feeling from that statement. 

“Well, here I am, so let's talk. Clearly you've got plenty to say.”

“Actually, I want to take you somewhere. Like, as soon as you get your bony butt out of that bed,” she said with purpose.

“Okay then, scuttle along. I'll see you outside, Athena.” 

She left the white-washed, sanitized room. Soon after, I was free to leave my overpriced daycare, and I decided I would meet with her outside. Athena stood by a nearby bench, facing away from the entrance. I casually walked towards her and asked, “What's good dawg?” She stared blankly at me for a few seconds. 

"You're an odd creature… Anyways, there's a drainage tunnel nearby. And you are gonna investigate it with me.”

A drainage tunnel didn’t seem worth exploring when it was so cold outside, but I shrugged and simply followed her without much of a fuss. We'd been to some pretty weird places together before, after all. Like one of the graveyards in our town that had every corpse in it exhumed, leaving only empty graves that seemed to call for more lifeless bodies to refill them.

All was quiet between us as we passed through a small patch of woods, though my head was full of noise. She spoke as we trotted through the trees, “Y'know, I came to see you a couple times and one of those times, I took a shortcut through the woods like I always do. But this time, I saw something moving in the corner of my eye. I was gonna keep walking ‘cuz it was probably nothing, but I was curious and figured I'd see what it was. I thought it was, like, an animal grunting, but it was a woman covered in grime with dirty, old blood all over her. It was like I was a helpless child witnessing a murder— I was at a complete loss and didn't know what to do. I inched away without realizing it, until I saw the freakishly tall, pitch-black apparition standing next to her.”

“By apparition, do you mean like a ghost?” 

Athena ignored my question and continued, “They— it was staring right at me as it dragged the woman's body deeper in. Its silhouette was blacker than the darkness around it… The drain isn’t far from here, let’s see if the body is still there.”

“I doubt that there will be any trace of a body at this point. And maybe this is better suited for the police? But hell, why not?”

Athena half-smiled, “Good thing I caught you when you woke up. You get to come with me now! I mean, it's right up your alley, isn't it?”

It was up my alley, and we were close to the alleged tunnel already. 

Accepting Athena's words without a second thought, I casually walked up to the drain pipe, having to slightly bend my knees to comfortably move deeper. Athena followed close behind, trudging through the film of “water” that hugged the bottom of the pipe tightly. I turned my phone flashlight on when the light from outside began to fade, and soon after, faint sounds of groans could almost be distinguished as we carefully went forward. 

“It's kind of strange that we're exploring a drain in the middle of the woods right after I leave the hospital.” 

Athena joked, “Not really, you're kind of a weirdo. I bet you do this pretty often.” 

Of course she would say that.

“Yeah, I like to hang around in dank, dark and musty spaces. Kinda like your room…” A ghastly groan echoing through the tunnel abruptly silenced me. I looked back at Athena, and her seemingly unfazed expression allowed me to face forward and continue walking. I whispered, “Do you think that was something living, or just a weird sound?”

“Yeahhh, I'm pretty sure it's a creature. You're just too scared to want to admit it.” 

“I bet you're at least a little anxious too. Don't act so tough,” I said, irritated.

As we went deeper, I felt the air getting colder and the atmosphere getting more tense. We had to be nearing whatever was making the sound. And right on cue, I saw a black figure hunching over to fit in the drain ahead. I stopped dead in my tracks. The menacing gaze I could feel from it was similar to the one in my dream. A moment passed, and it vanished from sight when Athena paused behind me. 

“How far should we go? Honestly, I don’t think this drain pipe out here in Hicksville will have anything that entertaining in it.” 

I decided not to mention the figure I saw. 

Athena didn't reply, nor did a breath leave her lungs. Somehow, she silently stepped ahead of me, and only then did she speak. “Do you hear that?”  

Though silence filled the moment that just passed, I did hear her voice, and a visceral sound that accompanied it. Meaty thwacks and crunching gnashes assaulted my hearing, but sound faded into nothingness, not even a ringing, as Athena tried to tell me something. Her anxious expression racked my nerves like a wasp crawling in my ear. I was seemingly deaf, so I tried to signal in some way that I couldn't understand her. Then she bolted past me, and when she looked back, I shined my flashlight at her. Her lips formed the phrase, “Don't you see that?” I followed Athena on her way out of the tunnel, a brisk column of air stinging my back on the way. Luckily, sound seemed to return to my tired ears when we were back out of the drain. When we caught our breath, we started back into town away from the eerie tunnel.

“What did you see that had us heading back so early?”

Athena stated bluntly, “If it was a snake, you'd be dead! There was a homeless-looking man standing there with a human-shaped black bag. I didn't really want to find out what exactly he was doing… he could have been hauling the body I saw the other day that didn't seem too alive.”

I shook my head and held my tongue. 

The threatening presence of that figure evoked something primal in me. When did I first discover him? Better not talk about my hallucinations though... Athena has always seemed to be more grounded than me. Instead, I stated the obvious, “I think we should head home, Athena.”

“Ya think?” 

Dusk began to fall, and I bid farewell to my friend. At the end of the night, I found it very hard to fall asleep. Pareidolia consumed every inch of my sight; the shadows of darkness twisted and malformed into shapes. Faces on inanimate objects—a pile of clothes in the corner, reflections on the TV, bottles of medicine on the desk... Everywhere I looked, there could've been a soul inhabiting each ‘face’ I saw. After exhausting my mental energy into oblivion, I finally gave in to sleep and ended the day's troubles.

Feeling like a husk of my former self, I sought to find some purpose this particular morning. I lethargically slipped into something warm to brave the cold winter weather. Surprisingly, I was out the door after only a few minutes despite my lack of energy. I was going to visit my grandmother, who is currently buried in the graveyard on the other side of town. A little while back, Athena and I were looking for trouble in said graveyard just for fun, I guess. I haven’t ever really objected to her ideas for fun, and it often led me to some strange places. It was odd though— our graveyard visit, I mean. Every grave as far as the eye could see was empty. Each grave had been excavated, and every coffin was gone. It was very late at night, and we couldn’t make much of what we saw. 

“Dude, are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Athena asked in disbelief. 

“I see a bunch of holes we can climb into, if that’s what you mean,” I said sarcastically.

“Ha ha. Real funny, smartass.”

I responded, “So do you still want to go check it out?” She agreed, and we walked over to the first suspicious hole with a headstone atop of it. It looked like it was dug by someone who digs graves for a living— very clean and almost identical to the other nearby holes. “What do you think happened here?” I calmly asked. 

“Definitely not ghosts… and probably not zombies. So maybe aliens or the government?” 

“Personally, I think my dad had to remove all of the bodies for some kind of sanitary reason, considering his job.” My father works in a morgue, if you can see the connection.

“Somehow, that’s more far-fetched than my idea,” Athena said skeptically. 

Her conclusion was a cute one. It was far more likely there was a logical reason every body had to be removed. We walked around the graveyard for a few more minutes until we stumbled into a Grave keeper. The sneaky little guy noticed us and made his way over before announcing himself. Put simply, we were removed from the area. 

I walked over and sat next to my grandma’s grave, thinking about what to say. The flowers on her headstone were recently replaced; I figured my dad was responsible for that. The graveyard was much tidier than when Athena and I first visited, and it actually had people buried properly.

“Dad’s been keeping up with your flowers, huh? Hey, guess what? Your other grandson has been less annoying lately too, funnily enough. I remember how he used to be a little asshole to you,” I said.

After talking to my grandma from beyond the grave for a while, the cold wind started to bother me. I felt I could stay a little longer when I saw my dad pull up. His black sedan slowly came to a halt on the gravel, then he stepped out and greeted me. “Who died now?” I asked him. 

“It’s someone you know, so I’ll tell you this time. Jack’s father has passed. He’s been in a comatose state for a few months now, and it was determined his condition has reached a point of no return. Basically, he won’t be waking up any time soon. His family couldn’t afford to keep him in the hospital,” Dad said matter-of-factly. 

Jack had been missing for a few months, while his father remained comatose. After doctors were unable to determine how to wake him, his father’s condition eventually deteriorated to the point where his family could no longer afford to keep him in the hospital. It was only a matter of time, so I wasn’t shocked in the slightest. Then came Athena around the corner, greeting my dad and I. 

“Who died?” Athena wondered. 

“Jack's dad. But Jack is dead too for all intents and purposes, since he's been missing for so long,” I said frankly. 

“Well that's pessimistic,” Athena pointed out. “Hey Mr. Mors, what happened with all of the graves here being exhumed a couple of years back?”

My dad's face turned a little pale at that moment. He then reached for his phone and pretended to answer it. 

“Oh come on, it can't be that top-secret,” Athena said, unsatisfied. 

Dad didn't seem to be able to hear her as he made his way back to the car. “Now I really wanna know!” Athena shouted.

“That was really weird. I swear he started to look white in the face for a second,” I told Athena. 

“Maybe it really was aliens.” 

“It definitely wasn't,” I retorted. “While we're on the topic though, when was the last time you saw Jack?” 

“A few months ago, I think… but recently I swear I've seen glimpses of him whenever I'm out at night. When I turn to look, I've lost the image of him or it turns out it was actually someone else. By the way, it's always on the edge of town near the woods that it seems to happen.” 

The way her words came out without seeming concerned worried me a little bit. The possibilities for malintent were effectively endless. If Athena really did see Jack, then he could be alive somewhere… perhaps even hiding in the woods. “Have you considered actually looking for him instead of waiting until you catch him in the corner of your eye?” 

“Not really. I'd rather not go looking for people in the woods, and he was just an acquaintance to me,” Athena answered.

Soon after my dad left, Athena and I left the graveyard and hung out until dark at her house.

“Wanna go to one of my spots?” Athena asked me.

“Sure, why not? I need to stretch my legs anyway.”

We hopped on some bikes in her garage, and pedaled to the metal up the hill, out of her neighborhood, and took a shortcut through town. This time, she brought me to an old, abandoned train adorned with graffiti and greenery. Of course, the night sky was as black as Athena's painted nails, and the light of our city blacked out the stars. I supposed midnight was as good of a time as any to sneak around.

“See something weird here too?”

Athena shook her head in response. “It's nice and quiet here. Great for my walks at night.” As I pondered why she invited me if she usually came here alone, she proudly stated, “Isn't it a cool place to have to myself? Even though other people have been here, without a doubt, no one ever bothers me when I'm here.” We walked along the train tracks and past the train cars, enjoying the cool night air. They extended a good distance, maybe a few miles in all. Athena continued, “Honestly, I just thought your magnetism to strangeness could create a different atmosphere.” 

I don't really see myself as an attraction of some kind, but if she gets a thrill out of me, it doesn't bother me. 

I voiced my skepticism, “If you ask me, we'll just come across a homeless dude at most. I don't think anything weirder than that could happen.”

Maybe it was bad timing or a coincidence that we spotted a fox munching on a rabbit’s severed head by the edge of the woods. It looked up at us with blood staining its maw, then raced off with its meal. It's not weird or anything, just rare that we came across it.

Athena responded with a hint of sarcasm, “Don't you love nature?”

“The rabbit should've paid more attention. Eat or be eaten I say.” Athena clearly showed a look of dissatisfaction. I shrugged my shoulders, and we kept walking. It seemed Athena still liked ‘cute things’ like rabbits, and still hated to see harm come to them. We quietly walked until reaching Athena's hangout spot. She pulled out a little key and unlocked one of the train cars with an equally tiny lock fitted to it.

“What do you think?”

“Looks… cool… I see you've decorated it— in your own way,” I spoke carefully. 

On the floor in a corner were blankets and stuffed animals, and on the walls were a couple posters from some random anime. 

“I'm honestly surprised with what you've done here. For sure, a homeless person should've found their way in.”

“Maybe they saw the lock and didn't want to interfere with another possibly homeless person,” Athena said with confidence. 

“Nah, they were just scared of the anime posters and stuffed animals. If I didn't know you, I'd think you were up to no good considering this spot of yours. Maybe you're actually a stoner.”

She denied it. A lot. Suspicious…

I took a seat in the stoner hideout with Athena and we talked for a while like we always do. We talked for a good couple hours about recent events in our life, anime, and showed each other some music. At about three in the morning, I heard something strange. 

“I just started listening to an audio version of that gas station creepypasta you told me about. Jerry is my favorite charac-” Athena suddenly stopped talking for a moment. “Hey, you have a weird look on your face. What's wrong?”

“It's nothin’. I'm glad you're listening to it. And yeah, Jerry is the best part of the story honestly,” I responded. I stood up and quietly took a peek outside, but I didn't see anyone. It must have just been an animal. “So, where's your weed stash?” I smirked as the words left my mouth.

Athena looked annoyed as she said, “I already told you, I don't do ‘the mare-uh-jew-on-uh’ you ass.” 

I was just trying to play off the fact I was nervous. “We should probably head back, huh?” 

“Yeah or my mom will probably get mad,” Athena said in realization. 

With that, we took our leave, and Athena locked up her little hideout. As we walked along the train tracks, the eerie sounds of the night were only a propellant for my eagerness to leave. “It's been a while since we hung out like this,” I said, smiling. It's a good thing she didn't see my face, I honestly didn't want her to see how big my smile was.

“Mhm, but I'm just busy all the time,” she replied. 

Deep down, I thought that she didn't want to see me often, but I was glad to be hanging out with her so I didn't complain. 

Up ahead, I saw a different black figure than usual: it was in the shape of a wolf and much too large to be real. I could only assume my mind was playing tricks after my recent experiences. Regardless, we were heading straight for it, which was unnerving as hell. After a moment, I responded, “Let's hang out some more soon, yeah?” Athena just nodded.

I was trying hard to ignore the beastly apparition, but it glared at me with yellowed eyes and what looked like a smirk full of sharp teeth. Athena didn't react, so I assumed it was better that I didn't either. As the gap closed between us, I felt the winter winds of a thousand icy tundras down my spine. It felt so wrong to be getting closer to that thing. I couldn't stand it. The sharp taste of copper violated my tongue along the way, further cementing that it wasn't right. Something horrible like that couldn't exist. As our path took us directly through the apparition of the beast, I heard something sprinting at us. I grabbed Athena's hand and ran. The sound of whatever was chasing us only stopped when I turned around. I couldn't see what it was, but I knew it had retreated into the woods. “It's hiding now,” I said through breaths.

Athena let go of my hand and exclaimed, “I don't know what you saw or whatever but I don't think we should be running through the dark like this!”

But something wasn't right; it probably wanted us to keep running. Why else would the fast-approaching threat stop in its tracks after I merely turned around? 

I voiced my doubts, “Athena, what if running is only going to get us caught?”  

“What do you mean? If a homeless dude or something was what you saw, we really should go.”

Athena had always been the reasonable one. In the darkness, I turned to my left. Something crouched, or perhaps hunched over, exposing only a pale… head. “Wait… look, over there,” I pointed, “do you see that?” Athena looked in the same direction but didn't react at all. The humanoid shape was facing away from us for a moment, but its head snapped towards us before we could even blink. On its face were two sunken, black eyes. Its hungry look was telling me that we weren't getting away. “Fuck. That,” I exclaimed with a quaking voice. 

We ran all the way back to Athena's house, my lungs nearly catching flame. I was glancing over my shoulder the entire way, paranoia and fear being my only energy reserve left.

Even if I was only hallucinating, I wouldn't take my chances with a nightcrawler.

“You can stay the night, I know you probably don't want to encounter what we ran from,” Athena assured me as we stood outside her front door. After I agreed, she led me to the guest room, where she cleared out a ton of junk for me, before heading to her own room. Finally feeling safe, and with the stark comfort of reality, I fell fast asleep.