Nightmare

You awake in a dark place. Warm, stuffy, you can barely draw in your next breath, ragged gasps piercing the enveloping silence. You panic and flail your arms madly, only to find walls encompassing you all around. You can barely straighten a single arm in the darkness, so murky and pitch black that you fear you have lost all sense of sight. You can't move an inch. You can't escape. You open your mouth to scream, and it resounds within the prison you find yourself in. Nobody hears it. Nobody is there to hear it. Sobbing, you try to fall to the floor, to curl up and await rescue, but you can't. Not even sweet oblivion is granted to you, as you soon find out. You reach up and curl bloody fingers around your neck, folds of fat parting way beneath crushing pressure. Your windpipe is cut off and you feel as if you are about to burst. You cry tears of pain, but you tell yourself that it would soon be over. Your hand screams at you to let go, you do not. Darkness creeps into the edge of your vision, the whispers of dark gods, or that of your own fear-fuelled madness reach a deafening crescendo. Slowly, it curls around you, and with a last squeeze, it takes you.

You awake again. You aren't dead, although you wish you were. You blink away tears, their salty taste in your mouth off-set by the iron tang of blood on your tongue, lungs ruined by the pressure, the acrid smell of bile wafting about your nose. Despair takes you. You scrabble madly at the walls, imagining them to be coffin lids, screaming, shouting. Begging to be let out. Your fingernails rip away from their places, raw flesh spouting carmine red. Nobody answers. Nobody's there.

An idea reaches your swimming mind. Twin thumbs align themselves along your cheekbones, ragged stumps flowing blood that trickles down your face. You begin to push. Resistance greets you at first, but you do not stop. The pressure is almost unbearable. Your left eyeball bursts in a shower of jelly and fluids, nerves flailing free as the ruined remains of your eyeball flow into the wounds along your headless thumb. It elicits a tortured scream from your quivering lips. But you continue. Your right eye soon gives, a mixture of colourless goo and carmine red flowing and sloshing about the empty cavity. The trauma overtakes you, and the darkness before you laughs, screeching maniacally. You see no more.

But you're still alive. Damnably alive. You crash your forehead into the wall before you, cracking sounds of your skull giving way echoing in the hollow space. You feel shards of bone shift about your head, shattered remnants piercing your brain cavity, before all sounds stop, except for the incessant whispering, as your eardrums burst from the impact.

Why won't you die? You punch and kick, blows no longer directed at the suffocating walls, but instead at yourself. A well-placed blow to your chest causes a cracked rib to erupt through your skin, dripping body fluids. Your feet are damp from the blood gathered about the floor, your head swimming from the pain. You jump from one thought to another, voices chattering in your mind's undergrowth. You listen to their whispers and seize upon their suggestion. Shivering hands grip the exposed rib, and with a great wrench, it bursts free from your ribcage, tearing strips of lungs, arteries and other organs apart in the process. You black out from the effort.

You don't know how long you have been lying there. You scream, but you hear nothing with your torn eardrums. You open empty sockets and feel the smooth bone in your hand. With a swing, you stab your throat with the sharp edge of the bone, and immediately fire erupts through your head. You can't even cry any longer, torn vocal chords flapping uselessly as you try to scream. The bone grows slippery as the blood sprays from your self-inflicted wound, your entire self shakes in agony, you convulse and contort - and finally, darkness takes you.

You awake. You're still alive. How? You're still alive. Still forsaken. Still cursed to be forever trapped here, never dying. Your pain will never end. he laughs at you, falling over himself as hyena-like howls pierce broken eardrums. You are here forever. You will never leave.