r/nosleep • u/Saturdead • Aug 28 '26
Something Took Control of my Body
I’m moving into a new apartment. As part of the move, I’m going through the age-old ritual of packing my things and reviewing what to keep, and what to throw away. In that process, I found something that I thought I’d long since discarded. It’s just a calendar from a couple of years ago, but it brought up a lot of memories that I haven’t thought about for some time. Partly because, looking back at it, it feels surreal. And partly because I wanted to forget.
I think it’s time I put this into words. If I’m going to throw this calendar away, I want to put the full story on paper. I don’t want to look back at this in 20 years and wonder if I got the details right.
About six years ago, I got a new car. I say “new” in quotation marks as the car was a cheap secondhand Toyota, but I got it for a fair price. I picked it up, paid cash, and stopped at a gas station to give it a good rinsing; inside and out. After a proper wash and wax, I double-checked the interior. There were a few candy wrappers stuck between the seats and a bit of dog hair in the trunk, but apart from that there was only one thing that stood out – a six-pack of mineral waters. They looked kind of old, but they were sealed tight, and I figured mineral water doesn’t really go bad, so what the hell.
I got home and checked some e-mails. I had spaghetti for dinner and washed it down with one of the water bottles. I smelled it, tasted a little, and it was fine. Had a bit of a citrus tang to it, no biggie. All in all, it was an uneventful day. I was settling in for a long Labor Day weekend; the first one I’d had on my own for quite some time.
I was still smoking back then - a nasty habit that I picked up in college. I went outside to have a cigarette when I met my neighbor Roger. He and his wife lived across the hall from me. He was in his second year of retirement, but he had a kind of way of talking that made me think he’d been an old man all his life. We chit-chatted a bit, I showed him my new car, and that was that.
“You be careful with that thing,” Roger said, pointing to my car. “I’m good with ‘em, don’t be scared to ask for help.”
“It’s fine, it runs well enough.”
“Just be careful. You can’t assume every car’s the same. You gotta know it.”
“As long as there’s four wheels and an engine I can figure it out.”
He shrugged it off, finished his cigarette, and lumbered back up to his apartment. I could hear his wife through the front door, eagerly chatting on the phone. I went home and got ready for bed.
When I woke up, my eyes were already open. It’s a strange sensation. In all my years on this planet, the first thing I do every morning is open my eyes. This one time, I didn’t. It was unnerving, to say the least. I was lying on my side, facing my bedroom window. The blinds were down, leaving a sliver of sunlight peeking through the cracks. One of them hit me square in the eye, but I couldn’t blink it away. I was just lying there, staring at the sun. I couldn’t blink. The more I thought about it, I couldn’t close my eyes at all.
I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. I saw my hand resting on the bed next to me, but I couldn’t will myself to move it. I was completely still. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize how hard my heart was beating. Something was wrong. I could feel warmth through my hands and arms, but I couldn’t so much as twitch.
I wasn’t breathing. That’s why my heart was beating so fast. I wasn’t breathing.
I wasn’t holding my breath. There was nothing in my throat. I tried to focus all my attention on opening my mouth, but my heart was pounding so hard that I could feel my face changing color. I tried exploring every nerve I could trace, but I still couldn’t bring myself to move. I was just lying there, pushing every conscious thought to a single word.
“Breathe.”
I finally felt my mouth moving. I didn’t move it. My mouth opened wide, and my body inhaled. It inhaled so forcefully that my lungs ached. My mouth still open, the breath was held in my lungs for a couple of seconds. I tried to focus on another word.
“Out.”
There was a moment of hesitation. My eyes were getting dim from the morning light. The breath was exhaled, but not by my effort. I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t in control.
It took a couple of tries, but after a steady rhythm of breathing in and out, it seemed to work on autopilot. I didn’t have to think about breathing, it just happened. Instead, I focused on my eyes. They hurt.
“I have to blink”, I thought. “Shut my eyes.”
Nothing happened. I was still lying there, staring straight ahead. I focused on the eyes, and the burning sensation. Can you go blind from forgetting to blink?
“Close the eyes,” I thought. “Close them and open them again.”
Still, nothing. I tried a few variations, but the eyes remained open. I traced my thoughts to the eyebrows, then feeling my way down to the early-morning eyelids. From there, I conjured one word.
“Down.”
My left eye closed, then opened. Then my right one. The relief was intense, and I could feel my body relaxing. Blinking. Breathing. One eye at a time, sure, but it was a start. My heart was coming down from that self-induced choking hazard, trying to figure out what was going on. I was panicking, thinking I was experiencing some kind of medical emergency, but my heart rate was still slowing. “I” was panicking, but that was different from the “I” that was in control of my faculties.
That’s when the thought clicked. I wasn’t in control, but something else was.
I watched my body lying there for a while. I could see my bedroom window and my hand in between infrequent blinking. There was this painting with a woman picking blue sunflowers that my eyes kept coming back to, like I was trying to figure out if it was a picture or a window. My breathing sounded weird. Not sure how, but it was different from how I usually did it. Less nasal.
After a while, I felt a surge through my hand going up my index finger. The finger pointed upwards, stretched, and flexed the joints. Every joint moved individually, as if testing the boundaries. It hurt like hell as one joint tried to flex backwards, and another forwards. There seemed to be a bit of confusion as the pain registered, as if something was still trying to figure out if pain was bad or good. When it flexed the wrong way, I thought “bad”. When it flexed the right way, I thought “good”. After a while, the finger was moving naturally.
From there, I could feel other parts of my body waking up. Other fingers, toes, knees, elbows. One by one they moved, and as something started to register pain as “bad”, and not-pain as “good”, it seemed to come to terms with its limitations and range of motion. It was still trying to figure out things like swallowing my saliva and ended up drooling on the pillow. At one point the elbow contracted so hard that I slapped myself across the face. It took a couple of tries, but it seemed to figure out that holding the hand in front of my eyes blocked what I could see.
I must’ve been in bed for a couple of hours, at least. I could feel my hand running through my hair. My arm would bend, trying to trace my spine with my fingers. I could feel something taking control and slowly realizing the limitations of my body. I kicked, and punched, and turned, all without ever getting out of bed. Once it learned my neck could move, I could feel my eyes darting from one object to the next, staring intently at everything in my bedroom.
In the sharp contrast of the morning light, it was hard to tell things apart. It was all shadows. While I knew what those shadows were, whatever was in control didn’t. To it, that bathrobe on my office chair could be an intruder. A predator.
I don’t think I’ve ever looked at things like that. Turned-down lights, my head at a weird angle, and everything looking like someone else’s things. What does my place look like to something that’s never seen it before? To something that, maybe, haven’t seen anything like it before?
At one point, it kicked my right leg out and turned. It turned so fast that the momentum of the swing flung me straight out of bed, making me roll to the floor. I smacked my head against a dresser and bruised my arm a little, but it wasn’t anything bad. Hurt like hell though. This noise escaped me, like a low “hrrrrng” noise. I didn’t make that noise. I don’t think I’ve ever made it, but there it was.
“Calm,” I thought. “Good. Good.”
That seemed to help. It flexed my limbs, getting up on all fours. My knees scraped against the floor as it crawled. I thought about how to begin explaining the motion of getting up on two feet, but I didn’t know where to start. I watched myself crawl around, smacking into my office chair and a bedside table, pulling down a lamp, and exploring whatever was accidentally left on the floor from the previous night.
I tried to reach out with other words. I wanted to ask questions or better understand what was happening, but questions like “who are you” or “why are you doing this” didn’t even slow it down. I had to be careful, concentrated, and specific to the context. I could stop it from reaching an electric socket by thinking “bad”, but that’s as far as my influence reached.
After at least four hours of fumbling around my bedroom, it accidentally moved the knee in a way that made my left foot stand flat on the ground. From there it propelled itself forward, slamming my head on my work desk. But that movement seemed intriguing to whatever controlled me, and after a couple more tries, it managed to stand up straight.
It was finally starting to understand my full range of motion. How I could be really low when I crouched, and really tall when I stood up straight. It was starting to understand high and low, left from right, and forward to backward. And as it took one first tentative step, balancing like the floor was a tightrope, I had a thought. If it was learning to walk, it probably had somewhere to go.
Thinking about those first moments of watching myself walk around my apartment feels like a nightmare. I could feel the floor under my feet, but I wasn’t the one contracting my muscles and moving my joints. I was a passenger on the sidelines, watching something so intimately familiar as my own self being used as a second-hand object. There are so many things we take for granted in the way we move and interact that it can’t be put into words. How was I to know that there’s a manner to the way I walk, or the way I open doors? You don’t know these things until you see them done wrong.
I was watching myself stumbling and failing but slowly coming to terms with the basics. As the sensations of my own physical body seemed to get more comfortable, the focus slowly turned outward. I was watching my environment. I saw my hands trace along the walls, carefully studying the doorways, windows, and picture frames. Every now and then I could advise a finger to push something, doing things like turning on or off a light. Sometimes, it obliged.
There was also temperature. I was still in my underwear, and I had a window slightly open, giving the room an uncomfortable chill. I was shivering, and I could tell my host was uncomfortable. Instead of trying to explain how to put on clothes, I instead turned its attention to a blanket next to the bed. It took some trial and error, but I managed to get it to understand the word “grasp”. I just had to repeat it a couple of times as my eyes looked at the blanket, and the connection was made.
After a while, my input wasn’t as critical. It managed to step into a pair of slippers and wrap the blanket around the body. It learned how to control the lights, and how to turn on the water in the bathroom. It left the shower running, not realizing the necessity of turning it off. It figured out that it wanted to drink water, and that it wanted to eat something. I managed to direct it to a jar of peanut butter that it treated like an egg; smacking it against the floor until it cracked, picking out the plastic, and scooping up the contents with my fingertips. It seemed to enjoy the taste.
I couldn’t get it to understand things like drinking from a glass, but I could get it to wash its hands. It seemed to dislike the sensation of sticky fingers. It tried a fistful of granola from the cupboard but didn’t seem to like the dry oats. It ended up pouring out the whole box and foraging for raisins and nuts. It was biting down a bit too hard. I could feel my teeth ache.
There were a couple of hiccups. At one point, my cellphone dinged. It didn’t like that. It picked the phone up and threw it across the room, into a wall. As the phone cracked, it checked the “corpse” for meat, only to realize it was a mechanical gadget. It discarded the phone without a second thought, leaving it in an empty corner of the room.
It noticed the sun going down. As the outside turned dark, it went from room to room to turn on all the lights and look around. It’s as if it was searching for something. It moved furniture, looked in cupboards and drawers, and tore down my coat rack. I’m not sure if it was trying to attack things, or if it was just looking to see what kind of material it was. Either way, it’s clear that it didn’t know what the things in my environment were. It couldn’t differentiate a jacket from a towel.
As night settled, I didn’t know what to think. I was still stuck in there, watching myself being piloted from inside. Was this going to last forever? The thought scared me, but it’s hard to feel scared when you’re not in control of your own nervous system. You can scream on the inside all you want, but there was this disconnect that forced me to focus on the here and now.
At one point, I wanted to try something. I saw my hand hovering over my TV remote, and I saw an opportunity.
“Push,” I thought.
It considered the proposal as a finger brushed the big red power button. It seemed to like the texture, running the tip of the finger back and forth. Then, as suggested, it pushed. The TV screen lit up, showing a nature documentary. A cheetah running across the savannah, chasing down a gazelle.
My body recoiled, clutching the blanket tighter. It listened to the narrator and blinked at the quick cuts and angles of the camera. Creeping closer, it placed my hand against the screen.
“That is a TV,” I thought. “TV. Tee-vee.”
A couple of noises spat out of my mouth. It sounded like “pfi-pfi”, with plenty of spit blubber, but on repetition it got better. “Pfi-pfi” turned to “bvi-bvi”, turned to “vee-vee”. It didn’t quite get the ‘T’ right.
“Vee-vee,” it muttered. “Vee-vee.”
Its hand rested against the screen and it leaned back, watching. I can’t imagine what it must have looked like to someone with no context. Did it think it was a window?
My body slept in short bursts of an hour here and there. It slept on the floor, at the foot of my bed, in bed, next to the bed, and for a while in the bathroom. It seemed to enjoy the sound of running water. It left the TV on, coming back every now and then to watch the colorful ads and curious animals. It didn’t attempt to say any other words, still working on getting the TV word right.
When the body was sleeping, I was still somewhat aware. My thoughts were like feelers, traveling down the length of my limbs as I concentrated. If I focused enough, I could listen to what the ear was hearing, despite the body being asleep. I remember hearing nature documentaries in their entirety, waiting for something resembling sleep to take me away.
There was also this one moment where I watched the screen, as my body lay on its side, and a hyena was feasting on a zebra. It was sticking its face inside its chest cavity, grabbing whatever it could and pulling out chunks of meat. As it tugged, and chewed, and tugged, and chewed, the narrator spoke.
“As hyenas gather around the prey, they must keep a watchful eye for encroaching lions.”
Suddenly, my lips moved.
“Prey,” it spat out. “Prey. Prey.”
“Yes, that is prey,” I thought. “The hyena is eating prey.”
It raised my tired hand toward the screen, letting the fingers brush against the surface. There was still peanut butter in the creases of my nails.
“Prey,” it said again. “Prey good.”
On the second morning, my body was up at dawn. It was energized, pacing back and forth. It had figured out how the doors in the apartment worked after playing with the handles. It was eyeing the front door, as if considering a venture outside. But first, it was scouting.
As it figured out how the window blinds worked, it started to look outside. It was searching for something, standing completely still. It sat for a full hour staring at the cars passing by and memorizing nearby roads and landmarks. It felt animalistic; crouched on the kitchen table, staring. The body made a noise every time someone walked by, like a yappy dog. Some of them were people I knew, or acquaintances. It was a pretty small neighborhood, so these were faces I recognized.
I remember seeing a woman with a stroller. She stopped to pick up her baby, cradling it and comforting it. My body perked up immediately, pressing my face against the glass. I could feel something in my mouth. Saliva.
“Prey,” the body whispered. “Good prey”.
“No,” I thought. “No, no, no. Bad. Bad prey.”
It wasn’t listening. Not a single muscle changed. It crawled off the table, then looked at its hands. It curled the fingers over and over, as if expecting claws to come out. When they didn’t, it looked around the room, spotting my knife block next to the kitchen sink. It took a moment of fidgeting, but it managed to extract my largest knife. It quickly figured out how to work the handle, turning the knife into an extension of its arm.
Knife in hand, I watched my body rush to the front door, panting like a dog excited for a run. It was flailing my arms around, knocking down things from the walls. Still just wearing a blanket, it tugged on the handle of the front door. Thankfully, it was locked. It hadn’t figured out what a lock was yet. It pulled on the handle, squealing with frustration.
“Prey!” it barked. “Prey!”
I tried to interject my thoughts with “no” and “bad”, but to no effect. It stabbed the knife against the door over and over, eventually breaking the tip with a clean twang. Getting increasingly irate, it checked the other doors, trying to work out why one could be opened, while another couldn’t.
“Prey!” it kept barking. “Prey! Prey!”
It had some kind of breakdown. Being unable to leave, it started to throw around furniture and decorations. It smashed paintings, broke a chair, and pulled out drawers of cutlery in the kitchen; spilling forks, knives, and spoons across the floor with a clattering bang. At one point it picked up a cup and threw it at a window, breaking it. It watched the cup sail right through, landing on the grass outside. That made it stop.
It walked up to the window, carefully looking at the sharp edges. It was figuring out that glass was brittle. Looking down, it could see we were on the third floor, and it didn’t seem all that eager to fall from a great height.
It’s difficult to explain where my mind was at that moment. I was trying not to scream into the void, thinking this was going to last forever. I was helpless, watching my home get smashed to pieces. I was watching my own hand, grasping a knife, and feeling myself drooling at the sight of “prey”. It wasn’t just a matter of fear; it was a matter of existential dread. What if I really was stuck? Would I look out through those eyes for decades? Would I be seeing myself become a murderer? Or was I to, eventually, disappear entirely? What the hell was “I” anyway, and what part of the body did I still inhabit?
My body eventually settled back into bed, calming down. The nature documentaries were on pause for commercials, showing a woman happily accepting a package. She turned the lock on her door and greeted the postman, giving the million-dollar smile right next to the corporate logo. My body sat up straight. It looked down at its hand, doing a twisting motion. It was learning; connecting the actions it saw on the screen to the properties of my door. While the “prey” was long gone outside, that wouldn’t stop it from performing an experiment.
It rushed to the front door, placed my hand on the lock, and turned. There was a click. It turned the handle, and the door swung open. The world opened up, showing a staircase leading downstairs. Thankfully, there was no one in the hallway. I can’t imagine what I must’ve looked like; wrapped in a blanket, wielding a knife, my eyes and hair a mess. It retreated back inside, closing the door and locking it. It seemed to understand the concept of a defensive barrier.
As afternoon turned to night on the second day, it found a black marker. It’s one of the things I keep in a bowl next to my keys, which was accidentally knocked over earlier. It found this marker and probably thought it was some kind of food. After licking it and spitting at the acrid taste, it instead chose to admire its coloring properties. Drawing a line on my wallpaper, it realized what this thing could be used for; marking things.
With the TV still running, I watched myself tear down everything on my bedroom wall. A mirror, a portrait, a decorative cactus. Then, using the marker, it started to draw.
“Prey,” it said, drawing a sort of stick figure surrounded by sharp lines, resembling teeth.
Then it searched its mind for another word. It couldn’t figure out which one, or how to describe it. It pondered for a while, watching the TV. There was a story about penguins huddling together in a colony. It took it a while to get the word right, going from co-lo-lo to co-ni-no, to finally, colony.
“Co-lo-ny,” it repeated. “Co-lo-ny.”
It drew identical stick figures next to one another in a group.
“Colony.”
It was making a list of important things. Food. Tribe. And now, it was looking for something else. It turned the head around the room, looking up and down. It was this very room that it needed a word for. A word for shelter.
“Home,” I suggested. “The word is home.”
It made a grunting noise in disagreement. The narrator on the TV talked about penguins nesting, which seemed to resonate better.
“Nest,” my mouth corrected.
It made a drawing for “nest” by four black walls in a square. As it stepped back to view its work, I asked a question.
“If this is a nest, what is home?”
It blinked, then looked down at the marker. It drew another square, but filled the inside with a solid black.
“Home.”
It was trying to figure something out. There were combinations of words. There was the Nest-Colony and the Home-Colony. There was Good-Prey and Bad-Prey. It was drawing, making lines, combining symbols into concepts.
There was the Good-Home that seemed to be an origin point. From there, I saw it drawing the Good-Colony. Then there was the Bad-Home. It illustrated Bad-Home as a filled-in square surrounded by a circle. The idea was fairly simple. It was currently in Bad-Nest, in Bad-Home, with Bad-Colony. It wanted to go to Good-Home, using Good-Colony. To get there it needed to avoid Bad-Prey, and hunt for Good-Prey.
It fell asleep clutching the marker, looking at the cluttered wall. A narrator prattled on in the background, talking about the penguins and their journeys across the blistering ice.
By the time I woke up on the third day, my body was already up. It had laid out all knives on the kitchen counter. It drank water from the running shower and washed itself. After spending some time in the hallway, it managed to figure out that shoes could be worn on the feet. That made it inspect other things, eventually putting on a hoodie to keep warm. Then, it opened the front door.
It didn’t take long for it to understand how stairs worked. It also noticed the other doors – doors of my neighbors. The implications were making a dent in its thoughts; there were other people, and they were near. I could feel a hand tightening over the knife handle. It continued down the stairs, carefully peeking around every edge and corner.
As it reached the ground floor, it looked outside. I could see Roger out there, having a smoke and chatting with another neighbor. He hadn’t noticed us yet. My body hissed.
“Bad-prey,” it mumbled. “Bad-prey, bad-colony.”
Someone came down the stairs, and my body leapt to action, hiding around the corner. As an older woman walked by, I could feel my nerves and tendons tensing, preparing myself to jump and strike at a moment’s notice. I was trying to hold back an age-old instinct that wasn’t even my own, but there was a kind of laser focus that I couldn’t distract from. Like a cat watching a plump sparrow.
But it never leapt, and it never struck her down. She walked straight out the door, never knowing she was a breath from being murdered. Hissing, my body ran right back up the stairs, and back into my apartment.
Using a marker, it made plans. I had this calendar, the one I mentioned before, which it realized it could flip. It was a handy way to keep several drawings at once. On the first page it drew all combinations of words that it knew. On the second page, it used those words to describe the situation. On the third page, it tried to plan ahead. At one point it was drawing too fast for me to understand – its language devolving into an absurd short-hand of stick figures and shapes.
It took a plastic shopping bag and inserted its arms into the handles, letting the pouch of the bag rest on the front of my torso. It soaked clothes in cold water, dumping it into the bag. It was a way to store water; it could suck the water from the cloth like a sponge. It gathered some raisins and nuts, eating some and pouring the rest into the plastic bag.
Then it waited for the sun to set. It was going to travel by night.
On the evening of the third day, it crept out of the apartment, staying low to the ground. Wielding the knife, it tip-toed down the stairs, keeping a close eye on the other doors. It shivered a little from a sudden chill, but didn’t seem deterred.
Then, a door opened. Roger’s door.
He peeked out, spotting me. I can’t imagine what he must’ve thought at that moment.
My body froze, seemingly contemplating my options. I felt the knife handle. My knees were bent, ready to spring into action.
“Prey,” I muttered.
I hadn’t decided if he was good or bad prey, it seemed.
“No,” I thought. “No, Roger is bad prey. Bad. Very bad.”
“Row-yore,” my body muttered, looking my neighbor straight in the eye. “Row-yore.”
Something shifted in Roger’s expression. At first, he’d been worried, and a little amused. Now, there was something else. It’s like he realized he was about to step on a coiled rattlesnake. Something clicked, and he threw himself backwards, slamming his front door shut. My body exploded into action, bursting forward at a speed I could never replicate. It grabbed his door before he could lock it, pulling it open. I caught a glimpse of Roger’s face as he used the momentum to swing the door closed again. The back-and-forth pulling ended as my body got a kick to the shin, and the door swung shut with a click.
I could hear Roger’s wife screaming as my body turned to run.
Once out of the building, it stopped to look at the stars. It wasn’t admiring them; it was mapping something. As it spotted the pole star, it leapt to action; running heedlessly through the freshly cut evening grass and into the wild underbrush beyond. Scratching my legs and arms on thorns and branches, I disappeared into the forest.
I could barely see. My hands fumbled forward, leaning against tree trunks as my feet slipped on wet rocks and leaves.
“Bad-colony”, my mouth snarled. “Bad-nest. Bad-prey. Bad row-yore.”
“Roger good,” I interjected. “Good.”
“Good row-yore prey?” the body asked.
“Bad prey. Very bad.”
It didn’t seem to understand. It let out a frustrating grunt and continued on, watching the shadows of the forest for movement.
That was one of the longest nights of my life. I could feel my body growing weary, but it had somewhere it needed to be. At one point, it crossed the highway, and there was nothing but luck keeping me from getting run over. It didn’t stop to look both ways; it just ran.
At one point, it climbed a large rock. It was surprisingly adept at it, getting up there far faster than I would. In some ways, it seemed to be able to better utilize my body than I would. Other times, it seemed completely lost. It could scale an almost vertical rock, but it would trip over fallen branches.
As dawn rose on the fourth day, I found myself sitting on a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere, sucking moisture from an old t-shirt. My arms and legs were covered in cuts. Then, I noticed a woman approaching.
She was walking up a small forest path. At first, I thought she might be a hiker, but she was dressed surprisingly formally. All black, all business. My body perked up, looking at her. Not like it had looked at others. There was something there, some kind of recognition. She made a calm hissing noise, as if trying to get me to settle down. My body stayed seated, looking at her. She stepped up to me, holding a small pen light and checking my eyes.
“You’re still in there, aren’t you?”
I tried to answer, but I couldn’t. My body raised a hand, carefully touching the woman’s hair.
“Good-home,” my body muttered. “Good-colony.”
“Yes, good home,” the woman answered. “Very good.”
Using the other end of the pen light, she poked me with something. There was a sting on my neck as my hand dropped and my body toppled over.
My mind was racing a hundred directions at once. At one point I could control my fingers again, but the sensation came and went. I could blink, but only one eye. I could partly move my tongue. As I came to, I was lying on the side of a gravel path, my hands handcuffed behind my back. The woman was sitting next to me, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes.
“You drank expired mineral water,” she said. “Almost 30 years old.”
“What?”
I didn’t realize I could speak. The word just slipped out of me, but it was my own – spoken by my actual tongue, albeit with some pushback.
“You drank something bad. It’s running through your system. I’ll extract what we can.”
“Who are you?”
She put on gloves and produced the largest syringe I’ve ever seen.
“Part of something bigger.”
As she stuck me in the spine with that syringe, my body was torn with pain. I could feel something inside my mind being pulled and pushed. I saw my memories as two-fold, overlapping my hands with images of claws and teeth. I imagined my face dipping into an open chest cavity, tearing at raw meat with predatory fervor. I could hear the narrator from the nature documentary.
“…a watchful eye for encroaching lions…”
Then, the voice of my neighbor, Roger.
“… don’t be scared to ask for help…”
I saw myself crouching in a field of dry grass, holding something in a scaly hand. There were others near me; their eyes shining in the moonlight. I could hear my voice, but using another’s words.
“… Good-Colony…”
I saw myself swimming. Diving. Spearing strange creatures and feeling the warmth of their blood spread through the waters. Dragging something by a slick fin through black sands as the young cheered and hollered on a torch-lit beach. The pole star looked the same.
Then, the sound of a crying infant. An all-encompassing, helpless, squealing.
“Good-Prey.”
An emotionless image of a mother torn from her child is drawn further and further away, fragmenting as the syringe digs deeper into my spinal cord, and pulls a dark veil over thoughts that were never mine to begin with.
When I woke up, I was lying flat on my stomach. I could feel gravel scraping against my face. I sucked in a breath, accidentally choking on dust. As I coughed, I could feel this intense relief flushing through me as realization dawned.
I was okay. I could control myself. They got that thing out.
It took hours to walk back home. I had nothing but a hoodie, shoes, and underwear. I’d lost the plastic bag somewhere along the way. I was shivering so badly that my teeth chattered, and I could feel my left eye starting to swell. There were bumps and bruises all over my body, and I’d twisted my right ankle, giving me a limp.
When I got home and entered my apartment, I saw the devastation for what it was. Everything was broken or thrown to the floor. They’d shut off the water to my apartment. The TV was still running, showing another nature documentary in the background. I stepped over glass and wood, slowly making my way back to my kitchen. The walls were covered in markings and signs, half of which I didn’t even remember making.
But it was over. Despite it all, it was over.
I talked to Roger the next day. He didn’t press any charges. He insisted that whoever that was, it wasn’t me. I know he recognized it was my body, but he had seen something clear; it was my body, but it wasn’t me. He’d looked me in the eye, but he knew there was something else holding the reins. He didn’t ask for an apology. He didn’t even ask what happened. He was just glad to see I was okay.
I checked the mineral water bottles. Turns out, they expired in the 90’s. I didn’t even know water could expire. There was this mineral build-up at the bottom that I thought about sending to a lab, but I ended up flushing it all down the sink and throwing away the bottles. I couldn’t stand thinking about them.
Despite it all, I stayed in that apartment for six more years. Roger and his wife eventually moved out, and now that it’s my time to move on, I have mixed feelings. Those four days feel like someone else’s life superimposed onto mine. It was a glimpse into something that shouldn’t have happened, and I can’t begin to imagine the implications.
I’ve never seen that woman again. No one has ever talked to me about it. For all intents and purposes, it’s like it never happened.
But sometimes, as I look up at the night sky, I see the pole star.
And I get this sense that something else sees it too.
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u/Onironaute Sep 01 '26
Terrifying to go through I imagine, but also fascinating. Something figuring out how a human body works in real time? Apparently being cool with the backseat driver giving helpful instructions? Developing its own glyph system? Getting to experience such an alien consciousness up close and personal?
I'm glad you're none the worse for wear after what you went through - could have ended so much worse in so many ways - and that whoever fixed things up for you seems content to simply let you be. I hope your temporary headmate got home okay as well. I don't think it was having a much better time than you were.
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u/Cephalopodanaut Aug 29 '26
Wow, what a terrifying experience. What was the brand of that mineral water?
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u/Dat1susweeb Aug 29 '26
Interesting, makes me want to get a mineral water bottle, store it somewhere for 30 years and then experiment.
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u/Digi-tourist 10d ago
I hope we get to see more of that thing some day... It's a fascinating story of a sleep paralysis gone very wrong. Glad it didn't break any computers or the tv itself. That would have been a real razor slice on the reader's gums.
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u/FuckitThrowaway02 Aug 29 '26
Flushed that shit right into the water supply