TITAN

The room was plain. Empty. The floor was white and bare. The walls (were they walls?) were vague and intangible. This room might not have had walls or they were out of reach. There was light and he could see, but there were not any bulbs or flames. The light just seemed to be.

Eric was not sure of anything. Not even himself. He just knew that he was there (wherever “there” was), in a place, and it was not a dream (or was it?). He felt nothing. No wind. No heat. No cold. He did not even feel his own weight. Yet lifting his arms and legs required tremendous effort like moving in molasses. But there was no reason to move. There was nowhere to go. There was only the room and it was everywhere.

Somehow, Eric knew he was not alone. He did not know how he knew this. But he was aware of another presence.

And another.

One was in the room with him and the other was not… but still it was there. It was ever-present. Still, Eric could feel nothing. His heightened senses were unplugged and he was left with only the most basic: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. His body recorded the images around him, but no more. His mind made no judgments or analyses. Eric was restarted in DOS mode; there was only the most basic of functions.

And the room. The room was there. It showed him nothing.

Then it showed him her.

Sarah stood opposite him. She was the first presence. Eric realized that now. Sarah was okay. Not dead. Sarah had never stood before. Her hair was long, deep, and chestnut brown and it flowed around her gorgeous, cream face. Amidst the gray nothingness, Sarah was vibrant. She had color and presence. Her eyes were so green they stood out of her head. A silk white dress clung to her body as naturally as flesh. Her legs were long and toned, not twisted and bent. Her arms were straight and smooth, not curved and broken. Here she was everything she had not been in life: perfect—untouched by pain or deformity.

Finally, Eric felt something and knew it completely: Sarah was beautiful. The thought brought to him a kind of joy so pure and unconstrained by conscious feeling that it overwhelmed his disconnected being.

With that thought, that feeling, he received other things. He saw her and knew this was what she would have looked like. This was who she might have been. Memories came to Eric now. He remembered what Sarah had been like. She had been handicapped with cerebral palsy, microcephaly, and many other maladies. These notions flashed in Eric’s mind like a camera bulb’s flash. Sarah’s shape on the couch burned into his brain. Sarah sitting in her special curved chair burned into his brain. Sarah lying in her bed, surrounded by pillows and oxygen tanks, burned into his brain.

Sarah’s eyes.

Her eyes burned into Eric’s brain. He saw them in his mind’s eye. At her sickest, Sarah’s eyes were always alive. They found you and held you whole. Sarah’s eyes seemed to read your soul. Her eyes were the only things she controlled. Eric remembered thinking before she died: She’s trapped in there. Her body is a prison and she is trapped inside, condemned to stare from bright green eyes that can never participate in the world. But they are pure. Her eyes are jewels of God. A recompense for her imprisonment and suffering from God Himself.

That evaporated. The room swallowed up his memories. Stole them from his mind. The feelings of goodness, of Sarah, and of God were gone. Eric was left with Sarah…

…only…

It wasn’t Sarah. It was the other one.

Her eyes were gone. The beautiful green eyes had died, burned out into white blankness. The color she radiated faded to drab black and white and gray. Except for her dress. Her dress was red. Crimson red. Death red. She changed very suddenly in a burst of crimson light. Eric felt it in his soul. However benign the place had been before, it had changed. It was not a good place.

The absence of temperature that had persisted initially was replaced with cold. A deep, all-encompassing cold. Eric felt it in his bones. His body put off no heat to defend against it. The cold was inside him. It chilled his spirit. Eric felt the changes but did not move. He did not huddle unto himself for warmth, he did not rub his hands or his arms; his body did not react. Only his eyes. They stared out feeling everything his body would not (could not?). They looked to where Sarah had been replaced by something that resembled Sarah…

What happened next burned in Eric’s memory so deep that it would never be extinguished. It could never be forgotten. It became a part of him like his heart, pumping blood through his body—but this thing did not pump blood or life: it pumped the horror of Hell itself.

A line of red ran down from the corner of “Sarah’s” mouth. Like the dress, it was cruel crimson. It gave off color that nothing else did—or could. And just like that, she opened her mouth wider than seemed possible exposing a maw of the blackest sort. This maw was not empty. Blood bubbled up over her lower lip and spilled down her jaw. It did not soak the dress. The dress was made of it—blood. And from the abyss of her mouth, which gurgled of death itself, a sound both deep and terrible erupted. Not a scream or a yell. There was no human interpretation of what came out of her mouth. It was the sound of death. It was evil coming from the throat of the thing that looked like his sister.

What had once been a place of nothing was now everything. Every sense Eric possessed awakened in that terrible instant and he knew terror. This was not a monster under the bed. This was not a creeper hiding in the dark. This was not the unknowable dread beneath the surface of the ocean. This was fear, despair, sorrow, and real horror given life in Eric’s soul. He stood face to face with the death’s head of his sister mewling perfectly despite the waterfall of blood spilling down her chin. And from her, he felt the presence of something terrible and old.

God’s mistake… Evil…

Eric stepped back. The difficulty of movement remained, but impelled by the living face of Hell, he found the strength. It was a bad idea.

The Sarah-thing’s white, dead eyes fixed on him as soon as he moved. Its brow carved a severe “V” between her eyes. The blood running from her mouth ceased. Her lips shaped into the demented perversion of a grin and her lifeless eyes widened. Her arms came up—with fingers curled into twisted claws—reaching for him.

She shrieked.

It was a high-pitched, piercing whine that lasted several moments before dying and then rising again. She snapped forward, seized his shoulders, and brought her hellish howls right into his face trying to close its ghastly mouth around his head. Eric jerked away.

There’s nowhere to run!

Eric ran. He moved, but the room did not. Eric put distance between himself and the Sarah-thing, but he crashed right into her again. It was like being in a Mobius strip—it kept repeating. No matter where he turned, there she was: screaming and spitting rage.

Finally, he fell. Eric crashed into the monster that looked like his sister and she hunched over him hissing terror in his face. There was nowhere to go. As if it had not gotten bad enough, thick, black liquid coursed from every orifice of her face. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and her ears oozed with the oil of death. And still the screaming came. No gurgle at all. Because it was not a throat. It was a gateway to Hell.

Eric scrambled backward and stumbled to his feet. The darkness was closing in. Eric ran to it. Anything was better than staring Hell in the face. He ran and ran. The mewling hatred spewed just behind his footfalls. She was right behind him. Twisted and terrible. Coming, always coming.

Then there was a door with a window. It appeared as suddenly as a flash of lightning does. Eric swung it open and hurled himself through it with the door still clutched in his hands. Then he slammed the door shut to the pursuing Hell. It was quiet now. Back to the way it had been before. Eric climbed to his feet and went to the door.

Its face smashed against the window.

Eric recoiled. The thing slammed itself against the door, drenching the window with its blood and black evil. He was safe, but it was right there. Eric faced terror and fled. He escaped, but not really.

It is always there… and it’s trying to escape.