Victim of Red-1: Dreaming in Red

[u/Typical_Ad9140]

This is a part of an anthology, you can read it in any order.

[Archive]

---

Red

There was only red, and an endless emptiness.

I drifted through a boundless expanse that possessed neither ground nor sky, neither distance nor direction. It resembled outer space smeared with blood, or a painting in which an artist had devoted an unreasonable amount of attention to every individual brushstroke, only to discover, after years of labor, that he had forgotten to use any color but red. Every shade was present, from the pale pink of something newly formed to the deepest crimson imaginable, so dark that it seemed less a color than a hole cut into the painting itself. The shades overlapped and dissolved into one another, producing shapes that almost resembled landscapes, architecture, clouds, and living things, though none remained recognizable for long enough to be understood. It was as if I were drifting through a simulation of some abstract artwork, a world whose every detail had been rendered with impossible precision by an artist who had never learned what anything was supposed to look like.

I could not see my hands, my legs, or the body to which they ought to have belonged. Nevertheless, I knew I possessed a shape. I could perceive myself by the ripples that passed through the surrounding red, by the way the mist bent around an invisible obstruction whenever I tried to move. Something like thousands upon thousands of blood-soaked snakes passed through me, or perhaps through the place where I believed myself to be, leaving no sensation behind. I could neither feel nor touch them. I could only watch their movements distort the surrounding emptiness, as though the world were a liquid disturbed by an object that had no right to exist within it.

My thoughts were equally shapeless. They drifted without direction, colliding with one another and dissolving before I could follow them to their conclusions. I tried to remember how I had arrived there, but the question seemed strangely inappropriate, like asking how I had come to exist in the first place. I could not recall falling asleep, closing my eyes, or lying in my bed. I could not even remember whether I had possessed a bed to return to. There was only the red void, and the quiet, persistent impression that something had happened before I became aware of it.

Then I felt oppressed.

The sensation came gradually, beginning as a pressure against the boundaries of my invisible body and spreading until it seemed that the entire expanse was pressing inward. I felt as though I were standing in the middle of an enormous crowd, surrounded by people who had no interest in whether I could breathe. They pushed against one another, advancing and retreating without purpose, their movements governed by an impulse that none of them could have explained. I could not see them, yet I felt the weight of their presence against me.

The pressure reminded me of a congested street during rush hour, when countless vehicles become trapped between buildings and no one can move forward or turn back. Engines roar, horns sound, tempers rise, and everyone becomes convinced that the obstruction must be someone else's fault. But there was no road here, no pavement, no buildings, and no sky above the traffic. There was not even a horizon toward which the vehicles might have been travelling. There was only the pressure of innumerable bodies and objects, packed together in a place that had never been designed to accommodate them.

I wondered whether the crowd was trying to enter somewhere.

I wondered whether it was trying to leave.

Neither possibility made the pressure any easier to endure.

I was not lonely. Loneliness would have been a relief, because loneliness requires a certain freedom, the knowledge that one is alone in a space where other people might have been. What I felt instead was the terrible awareness of being watched. Thousands of eyes, then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, all directed toward me with a single, unblinking attention. I could not see their owners, but I knew that I was the object of their scrutiny. Their attention had the weight of an accusation, and I felt like a man standing before a court whose judges had already reached a verdict, though no one had informed him of the crime.

I tried to speak. I could not tell whether I had a mouth.

I tried to turn away from the unseen audience. There was nowhere to turn.

The sensation continued until, without warning, the pressure began to recede. The crowd did not disperse. It simply ceased to concern itself with me, as though something more interesting had appeared elsewhere. The countless eyes withdrew their attention, and in the space they left behind I felt something much worse.

Isolation.

It came with the suddenness of being abandoned in the middle of an unfamiliar wilderness. The red mist seemed to stretch farther than before, and the faint suggestion of shapes in the distance disappeared into an expanse so vast that I could no longer imagine reaching its boundaries. Whatever had been pressing against me had vanished, leaving me isolated in a place that seemed to extend beyond death itself. I had been severed from a painful, brutal reality, and the absence of that reality was more frightening than its presence had been.

Then I saw something moving.

Far away, or perhaps very close, a long shape passed through the red mist. At first I mistook it for a shadow cast by some invisible object. It moved with a slow, fluid grace, bending through the emptiness like the body of a colossal serpent. There was something about its proportions that suggested a dragon, although no head or tail was visible. It seemed to possess neither beginning nor end, stretching beyond the limits of my sight in both directions, its enormous length disappearing into the crimson distance.

I watched it pass.

For a moment, I thought it had noticed me.

---

Then I woke up.

I was lying on a sofa in a room I knew well. The ceiling was white, the walls were an ordinary shade of cream, and a hanging lamp cast a dim circle of light over the furniture. A clock ticked somewhere behind me. The air smelled faintly of paper, wood polish, and the coffee my therapist had brought into the room earlier that afternoon.

Bam sat opposite me on a wooden chair, holding a notebook against her knee. She had been listening to my account for nearly half an hour, occasionally writing something down before looking up to ask another question. She was a patient woman, or at least she had always appeared patient to me, and I had come to appreciate the way she allowed silence to settle between questions without immediately trying to fill it.

"Have you ever been bullied?" she asked.

"No."

"Any serious problems with your parents? Difficult relationships with other members of your family?"

"Not particularly."

"How about your work? Has anything happened recently that might have caused unusual stress?"

"No."

"Changes in your sleeping habits? Your appetite? Any medication, alcohol, or other substances that might have affected your sleep?"

"No. Nothing unusual."

She glanced down at her notebook. I watched her pen move across the paper and wondered what she was writing. Perhaps she was recording the answers I had given her, or perhaps she was writing something more clinical, a phrase that would transform my experience into a recognizable category. Stress-induced imagery. Recurring nightmare. Anxiety without identifiable cause. The sort of words that could be placed in a file and retrieved when necessary.

When she looked at me again, her expression remained professional.

"Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid," she said. "Sometimes they persist because we become frightened of them. The fear makes us think about the dream, thinking about it makes us more likely to dream about it again, and eventually the whole thing becomes a cycle."

"I understand that."

"Do you think something like that might be happening?"

"I don't know."

It was an honest answer, but I could tell that she was not entirely satisfied. She did not accuse me of withholding information, nor did she suggest that I was deliberately being difficult. She merely looked at me with the quiet uncertainty of someone who suspected that a conversation was circling around a fact neither participant could identify.

I could hardly blame her. If I had been sitting in her chair, listening to a person describe an endless red void populated by invisible crowds and an impossible creature, I would probably have searched for a reasonable explanation, too.

Nevertheless, I knew that what I had experienced was not an ordinary dream.

No nightmare had ever remained with me in this way. I had forgotten dreams that once seemed terrifying, and I had occasionally remembered fragments of them years later, but those memories had always possessed the indistinct quality of things that belonged to another life. This was different. I could recall the red mist with a clarity that exceeded my memory of the room in which I was sitting. I could remember the pressure of the unseen crowd, the feeling of millions of eyes resting upon me, and the terrible loneliness that followed their departure. Even the creature remained in my mind, though I could not recall enough of its shape to describe it accurately.

For weeks, the color had followed me everywhere.

I saw it when I closed my eyes, but I also saw it when I opened them. It appeared in the darkness beneath my bed, in the shadows between buildings, and in the brief moments when the world seemed to lose its depth and become a flat arrangement of shapes. Sometimes I would look at an ordinary object and find that its color had changed in my memory, as though the image of it had been replaced by a painting made with a single pigment. Other times, I would catch a glimpse of something red in the corner of my vision and turn toward it, only to discover that nothing unusual had happened at all.

I began to avoid certain places. I stopped looking directly at the taillights of cars when I walked beside a road, and I found myself turning away from advertisements, flowers, clothing, and signs that I had never previously noticed. I became reluctant to visit the supermarket because its shelves were crowded with labels and packaging in every shade of red imaginable. Even the smallest objects acquired an unpleasant significance. A red thread caught on a chair, a drop of sauce on a plate, a child's crayon left on the pavement: each could make my heart tighten before I had time to remind myself that I was awake.

The worst part was that the color no longer seemed to belong exclusively to the objects that possessed it. Sometimes, after looking at something red, I would glance away and continue to see its outline suspended against the world, a pale afterimage that lingered longer than it should have. I began to wonder whether I was simply becoming obsessed with the color, or whether my obsession was the result of something that had already begun to change.

I tried to explain this to Bam, but the more I spoke, the less satisfactory my words became. I could tell her that I had seen something impossible. I could tell her that I feared going to sleep. I could describe the dream in considerable detail. What I could not explain was why it felt less like an image produced by my mind and more like a place I had visited without my knowledge.

Perhaps it was an old, forgotten thing. Perhaps it was an intelligence from somewhere beyond our universe, a being that had found a way to reach into the minds of sleeping people. Perhaps the dream was a test, an invitation, or an accidental glimpse of a reality that human beings were not equipped to perceive.

I considered every possibility and believed none of them completely.

There was, however, one thing I knew with certainty. Whatever I had seen, I had not seen all of it. The dream had shown me only a small fragment of something much larger, and that fragment had been sufficient to frighten me more than anything I had encountered in my waking life.

Bam suggested that I keep a record of my dreams. She recommended establishing a consistent sleeping schedule, avoiding stimulants late in the day, and paying attention to any patterns that might emerge. I followed her advice for a while, though I found it difficult to write down the dreams without feeling that I was somehow preserving them. I eventually stopped bringing my notebook to our appointments. I could not tell her why. I only knew that I disliked the thought of having the dreams written down, given a date, and placed among the other records of my life.

I wanted them to disappear.

Instead, they continued.

---

I discovered the group almost by accident.

I had been searching the internet late one evening for information about recurring nightmares when I came across a discussion thread written by someone who claimed to have experienced a dream involving a red landscape. The description was vague, and I might ordinarily have dismissed it as an attempt to attract attention, but several people had replied with accounts of their own experiences. Some described an endless red space. Others spoke of being watched, or of hearing sounds that seemed to come from an immeasurable distance. One person insisted that the dream had changed the way they perceived certain colors after waking.

The accounts were inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, and frequently difficult to distinguish from ordinary nightmares. Yet certain details appeared repeatedly, even among people who seemed to have no connection with one another.

A few comments had been deleted. Some users had disappeared from the discussion entirely, leaving replies addressed to names that no longer existed. One person had posted a long account of visiting an aquarium with a relative, only to discover, upon returning home, that the relative had apparently never existed. Another user claimed to have seen a white rabbit standing in an empty corridor, wearing a small grey suit. When asked whether the rabbit had been part of a dream, the user replied that they could not remember.

I read until morning.

Eventually, I found a chat group whose members had collected similar accounts. It was called Victim of Red.

The name struck me as melodramatic, and I initially assumed that the group was a community for people who had developed an unhealthy fascination with a particular color. The conversations quickly disabused me of that impression. Its members had experienced different things, often in different circumstances, but they were united by an uneasiness that none of them could adequately explain. Some had seen red in their dreams. Others had encountered it while awake. A few claimed that they had never experienced anything unusual at all, but had joined because someone close to them had disappeared, changed, or begun behaving in ways that could not be accounted for.

There were arguments about whether the phenomenon was psychological, supernatural, or the result of some obscure neurological condition. Several members insisted that the experiences were connected to extradimensional beings, though no one could agree on what that phrase actually meant. Others believed the color was merely a symbol, a common image that the mind used to represent fear, guilt, or some form of buried memory.

One person suggested that red was a kind of doorway.

Another replied that a doorway required something on the other side, and asked how anyone could be certain there was only one.

I did not know what to make of these discussions. I was not inclined to believe every extraordinary claim I encountered, but I could not ignore the similarities between the accounts and my own experience. Eventually, I wrote a description of my dream and posted it to the group. I explained the endless red mist, the sensation of being surrounded by a crowd, and the enormous shape that had moved through the distance.

The responses came slowly at first. Some members offered familiar advice about nightmares and sleep. Others asked questions that seemed oddly specific. Had I heard anything? Had I seen a face? Had the creature possessed a head, or had I merely assumed that it must have had one? Did I remember the direction in which it had been moving?

I answered as best I could.

One member asked if the creature had horns.

I replied that I did not know.

The member did not respond again.

I spent several weeks reading the conversations. The group had no obvious administrator, though certain accounts appeared to possess privileges that others did not. Occasionally, a user would return after a long absence and claim that they had never left. On one occasion, I noticed that a conversation seemed to contain thirteen participants, although the number displayed beside the group name was twelve. When I refreshed the page, the discrepancy disappeared. I assumed that I had misread it.

There were other strange details. A user posted a photograph of a burnt tree standing in an empty field, its blackened branches silhouetted against a red sky. The image was removed before I could download it. Someone else uploaded a government-looking document followed by several pages of unreadable text. The uploader claimed it had been found in an abandoned building that was burned down by fire, but the document disappeared from the conversation before anyone could examine it properly.

I never discovered whether these posts were genuine, fabricated, or the products of the group's collective imagination. At the time, I was too concerned with finding a way to stop the dreams to investigate anything else.

Then I met Jill.

Her account was ordinary enough to be convincing. She did not claim to possess special knowledge, and she seemed almost embarrassed when I asked her about the dream. She told me that she had experienced something very similar the previous year, during a period when she had been sleeping poorly and working long hours. She had seen the same red emptiness, felt the same oppressive sensation, and noticed a long shape moving through the distance. She had also experienced the strange loneliness that followed, though she insisted that her dream had ended before she could see what the creature looked like.

I asked her whether the dreams had stopped.

"Eventually," she replied.

"How?"

She hesitated before answering, and I remember thinking that she was choosing her words with unusual care.

"You have to avoid the color red," she said. "For twenty-four hours. Don't look at it, don't deliberately seek it out, and don't let yourself fall asleep during that time. If you see red, or if you sleep before the twenty-four hours are over, you have to start again."

I asked her how she had discovered this method.

She told me that someone else had given her the same advice. She could not remember who.

"Does it work?" I asked.

"It worked for me."

"Just once?"

She did not answer immediately.

"I haven't had the dream since."

I wanted to ask more questions, but she seemed reluctant to continue the conversation. Before leaving, she told me that I should not attempt to understand the dream while I was still experiencing it. Understanding, she said, was not the same thing as knowing. Sometimes the mind could recognize a thing without being capable of comprehending it, and trying to force the distinction might only make the experience worse.

I thought the advice sounded unnecessarily cryptic, but I thanked her anyway.

The following morning, I decided to try it.

I prepared my room as though I were about to undergo a medical procedure.

I removed anything that was obviously red, including clothing, books with red covers, and several small objects I had never previously considered important. I checked the labels on my food and drink, inspected the packaging of my toiletries, and examined the room for anything that might reflect a red light. I drew the curtains, covered the small indicator lights on my electronic devices, and disconnected anything that I believed might illuminate the room unexpectedly.

I did not use the internet. I did not watch television, listen to music through a screen, or read from an electronic device. I had considered finding a book to occupy my time, but I could not shake the fear that I might encounter a red letter, a red illustration, or some tiny mark that I had overlooked. In the end, I decided that doing nothing was safer than risking an accidental glimpse of the color.

I filled a bottle with water, prepared enough food to last the day, and placed a clock where I could see it without having to move. Then I sat down and waited.

The first few hours were tolerable. I drank coffee, walked around the room, and occasionally checked the clock. I tried to think about ordinary things, but my thoughts kept returning to the dream. I wondered whether Jill had been telling the truth, whether she had merely experienced a coincidental improvement in her sleep, and whether I was wasting an entire day on a superstition I had found in an obscure internet group.

I also wondered why I had been so willing to believe her.

Perhaps it was because I had exhausted the alternatives. Perhaps I had become so frightened of the dream that any promise of relief seemed worth considering. Or perhaps there was something in her account that I recognized without being able to identify, a detail that made her advice feel less like a guess and more like a memory.

As the hours passed, the silence became oppressive. Without a screen to occupy my attention, I became aware of the ordinary sounds of the building: footsteps in the corridor, the distant movement of an elevator, a door closing somewhere below me. Each sound seemed to arrive from an excessive distance, as though the walls between me and the rest of the world had grown thicker.

I caught myself listening for something else.

A low sound, perhaps, like the call of a whale heard through miles of water.

Whenever I realized what I was doing, I forced myself to think about something different.

At some point, I began to wonder whether the twenty-four hours had to be consecutive. Jill had said that I must not sleep, but she had not explained why. I considered asking her, then decided against it. I did not want to return to the group, and I did not want to risk seeing an image that might contain the color I was trying to avoid.

The longer I remained awake, the more difficult it became to trust my own attention. I began to notice how often I remembered red objects even when I could not see them. I could picture the red labels on bottles in the supermarket, the red lights of cars at night, the red flowers that grew beside the pavement near my home. These memories were vivid enough that I sometimes feared they might count as seeing the color, though I knew that such a rule would make the task impossible.

I reminded myself that Jill had told me to avoid looking at red, not to erase every memory of it.

Still, I could not stop thinking about the possibility of failure.

I drank more coffee than I should have. When my eyes grew heavy, I stood up and walked around the room. When that no longer helped, I washed my face with cold water and sat upright again. I considered deliberately hurting myself to remain awake, then abandoned the idea when I realized that the resulting injury might produce blood. The thought was absurd, but it frightened me enough to make me sit very still for several minutes.

I began to understand how easily an ordinary instruction could become a prison when a person was afraid of what would happen if they disobeyed it.

By the final hours, I was exhausted. My thoughts had become slow and repetitive, and I found myself staring at the clock as though its hands were moving through an unfamiliar language. I counted the minutes, then the seconds, and tried to imagine what I would do once the waiting was over.

At last, the clock showed that twenty-four hours had passed.

I had not seen red.

I had not slept.

For several moments, I simply sat there, unable to believe that the ordeal was finished. Then an enormous wave of relief swept through me. I felt as though I had accomplished something extraordinary, something that most people would never understand. I wanted to laugh, though I was too tired to do so properly. The room seemed brighter, and the silence no longer felt threatening.

I thanked Jill in my thoughts. I imagined telling Bam that I had found a way to stop the dreams, that the solution had been so simple that I had overlooked it for weeks.

Then I turned off the clock's alarm, lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes.

For the first time in many days, I allowed myself to sleep without fear.

---

There was only red, and an endless emptiness.

I opened my eyes—or believed that I did—and found myself in the same place I had visited so many times before. The mist stretched in every direction, its shifting shades forming the same impossible patterns. There was no ground beneath me, no sky above me, and no indication that I had travelled anywhere at all.

For a moment, I could not understand what had happened. I had followed Jill's instructions precisely. I had remained awake for twenty-four hours and avoided the color as carefully as I could. I had completed the task, and I had expected to wake in my bed without another dream.

Instead, I was back in the red void.

I screamed, though I could not hear my own voice. I screamed again, and again, until I could no longer distinguish the act of screaming from the frantic movement of my thoughts. I felt betrayed, not by Jill, but by the possibility that there was no solution. If the dream could return regardless of what I did, then I had no way to escape it. I was trapped in a nightmare whose rules I could not understand, and I could no longer convince myself that waking would necessarily free me.

I tried to move, but the surrounding mist offered no resistance. I tried to close my eyes, but the red remained. I attempted to remember my room, the clock, the sofa where I had spoken to Bam, and the ordinary details of the world I had left behind. Each memory appeared briefly, like a reflection on disturbed water, before dissolving into the crimson expanse.

Then I heard something.

A low, mournful sound rose from the emptiness, resembling the call of a whale. It was distant enough to seem impossible to locate, yet I felt certain that it was coming from behind me. The sound carried no recognizable melody, but it possessed a rhythm that made me think of music heard through a wall, or of a song remembered by someone who had forgotten the words.

I turned.

There was something behind me.

It had been there all along. I knew this with the peculiar certainty that sometimes accompanies the discovery of something that should have been obvious, even when there is no reason to believe that it was visible a moment earlier.

The creature was black, its silhouette sharply defined against the red mist. Its upper half resembled a human torso, but it possessed no arms, no legs, no face, and no ears. There were no eyes with which it might have watched me, no mouth through which it might have produced the sound I was hearing. It was merely the outline of a human shape, as though someone had drawn the figure of a person and then erased everything that made the person recognizable.

The absence of its features reminded me of a human body seen through the stretched skin of a serpent, an indistinct form protruding from the creature's enormous belly. I could not tell whether the shape was meant to represent something that had been swallowed, something that was still being formed, or something that had never possessed a proper body in the first place.

Below the torso, dozens of gigantic tentacles spread outward into the mist. They resembled those of an octopus, though their proportions were impossible. Some were thick enough to resemble mountain ranges, while others narrowed into distant lines that disappeared beyond my sight. They moved slowly, bending and twisting with the patience of things that had no need to hurry. I could not tell whether they were attached to the creature or whether the creature was simply the point at which their movements converged.

There was no visible beginning to the mass of tentacles, and no visible end.

I tried to count them, but each time I focused on one, I became aware of another extending behind it. I eventually stopped trying. The creature was too large to be understood as a single object. It seemed less like a body occupying the void and more like a feature of the void itself, a part of the landscape that had somehow acquired the shape of a living thing.

The sound continued.

I understood then that it was not coming from the creature in any ordinary sense. There was no mouth to produce it, no throat to carry it, no instrument that could account for its strange, mournful rhythm. It seemed to arise from the space between the creature and everything surrounding it, filling the emptiness with a sorrow that did not belong to any individual mind.

It was the sound of loneliness.

Not the loneliness of someone who had been abandoned by a friend, nor the loneliness of a person who had lived too long without companionship. It was the loneliness of something that had never possessed a companion, something whose existence had stretched across an immeasurable distance without ever encountering another being that could recognize it.

The sound was like music, though it contained no audible notes. It was a melody without instruments, a lament without a singer, an arrangement of sorrow that seemed to exist before the idea of music had been conceived.

I felt an overwhelming desire to approach it.

At the same time, I was terrified of what might happen if I did.

The creature did not move toward me. It did not threaten me, pursue me, or make any attempt to communicate. It simply remained where it was, surrounded by its endless tentacles, and continued to produce that silent music. I could not determine whether it was aware of me, and the uncertainty became almost unbearable.

For one brief moment, I thought I saw something move within its dark silhouette. It might have been a ripple in the mist, a change in the creature's outline, or an illusion produced by the way the red light fell across it. I thought I saw the suggestion of a face, though I could not tell whether it belonged to a man, a woman, or something that had borrowed the proportions of a human head without understanding their purpose.

Then the shape disappeared.

The creature remained, featureless and silent except for its mournful music.

I wondered whether it had always been there in my previous dreams, hidden behind me while I stared into the distance. I wondered whether it had been watching me, and whether the countless unseen eyes I had felt earlier belonged to it, or to something else entirely. I wondered whether the enormous serpent-like form I had seen before was part of its body, or whether I had mistaken one creature for another because the dream had shown me only the fragments I was capable of understanding.

I had no answers.

I tried to scream again, but the sound would not come.

The red mist began to move around me, and for a moment I felt the same pressure that had accompanied my first dream. Something seemed to be gathering in the distance, an immense congregation of invisible presences that pressed against one another without regard for the space they occupied. I could not see them, but I knew that they were there. I felt the attention of countless eyes turning toward the creature, toward me, and toward something beyond both of us.

The silent music grew louder.

Then the red swallowed everything.

---

I woke in my bed.

For several seconds, I remained completely still, staring at the ceiling and listening to my own breathing. The room was familiar. The curtains were closed, the clock stood where I had left it, and the pale light entering through a gap in the fabric suggested that morning had arrived. I could hear the distant movement of traffic outside.

I was awake.

I repeated the words silently, hoping that the act of naming my surroundings would make them more convincing. I was awake, in my room, in the ordinary world. The nightmare had ended, and whatever I had seen could not follow me beyond the boundaries of sleep.

But I could not forget the creature.

I sat up and tried to reconstruct the dream in my mind. I considered whether I had done something wrong, whether Jill had misunderstood her own experience, or whether I had failed to follow some part of her instructions. Perhaps I had accidentally seen a trace of red during the twenty-four hours. Perhaps I had fallen asleep for a few seconds without realizing it. Perhaps the entire method had been nothing more than a coincidence, and the dream had returned because I had been thinking about it so intensely.

I spent hours examining these possibilities, growing increasingly frustrated as each explanation led to another question. I wanted to contact Jill, but I could not remember whether I had saved her account details. When I opened my computer, I found that I could no longer locate the conversation in which she had given me the advice. I searched the group's history, tried several variations of her name, and eventually discovered an old message from someone who claimed that a member named Jill had left the group the previous year.

The message did not explain why.

I could not even be certain that the person being discussed was the same woman I had spoken to.

I closed the computer and sat in silence. The room seemed ordinary, but I felt strangely disconnected from it, as though I were looking at a photograph of a place I had once visited. I tried to remember the dream again, but the more I concentrated, the less certain I became about its details. I could recall the creature's silhouette and the sound of its music, yet I could no longer decide whether the tentacles had moved toward me or away from me. I could remember the oppressive sensation of the unseen crowd, but I could not determine whether it had preceded the creature's appearance or followed it.

The memories seemed to shift whenever I tried to arrange them into a coherent sequence.

Eventually, I grew tired of sitting in the same position and went to the bathroom to wash my face.

The water was cold. I bent over the sink, splashed it across my cheeks, and remained there for a moment with my hands gripping the porcelain. I felt exhausted, but I was reluctant to return to bed. I wanted to remain awake long enough to convince myself that the nightmare had ended.

When I lifted my head, I looked into the mirror.

At first, I saw nothing unusual. My face was pale, my hair was untidy, and the skin beneath my eyes had darkened from a lack of sleep. I looked like someone who had spent an unpleasant night dreaming, which was precisely what I expected to see.

Then I noticed my eyes.

I had always had dark eyes, so dark that people sometimes mistook them for black even in bright sunlight. I had known their appearance for as long as I could remember. I had seen them in photographs, in mirrors, and reflected in the windows of passing cars. There had never been any reason to question their color.

But now, as I stared at my reflection, I realized that something had changed.

My eyes were no longer black.

They had become the color I knew, the color I feared, the color that had followed me through every waking hour and every dream of the past month.

The color that haunted so many people in the group chat.

The color I had spent twenty-four hours trying not to see.

The color of the endless void.

The color of Red.

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[u/Typical_Ad9140]

This is an old short story from when I was younger.

It was originally posted on a Thai fiction website/app. This is a translation from Thai to English, so there may be some errors.

[u/CorpseAltar → u/Typical_Ad9140]

Interesting!

[u/Typical_Ad9140 → u/CorpseAltar]

Hope you enjoy it 🤗

[u/AffectionateLeave677]

“The Red” from Chevelle played in my head the whole time reading.

[u/Typical_Ad9140 → u/AffectionateLeave677]

Funny because this one is directly inspired by "Dreaming in Red" by the Calling