There was not even the slightest transitions. No gentle fade from being awake to falling asleep. One moment, there was the strained silence of the castle corridor and marbles on the ceiling of his room ; the next, the world dissolved from underneath him without warning. It just didn't feel like a dream.
But here he was, falling.
It was not like a fall through air, the air around him was a suffocating, endless void. A perfectly silent nothingness that swallowed light, sound, and as much as hope. There was no wind to rush against his face, no sense of velocity, only the terrifying, gut-wrenching certainty of perpetual descent into an abyss that seemed to have no bottom. It was not merely an absence of light; it was a physical substance, thick and almost oily, pressing in on him from all sides, filling his mouth and lungs with the taste of static and forgotten things, but again it was nothing.
Just as the silent panic threatened to shatter his mind, the fall ceased.
Not with an impact, but with a seamless, nauseating shift. He was standing. The void was gone, replaced by the familiar, haunting contours of a room he had spent a lifetime trying to forget.
He was in his parents' bedroom.
But he was not himself. He looked down. His hands were small, pudgy with the softness of infancy. His feet, bare and tiny, were planted on the cold hardwood floor he remembered so well. The room swam into focus as if emerging from a developing photograph: the dark oak cupboard with the chip on its lower left door, the high bed stands, the faded pattern of the rug.
And there, before him, just as the memory was burned into his soul, were his parents.
They were splayed on the floor, limbs tangled in a final, desperate embrace. Their lifeless eyes were wide open, fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing. The two perfect, horrific bullet holes in their foreheads were dark, accusing stars in the pale constellations of their faces.
A whimper, high and thin and entirely childlike, escaped his throat. Every fiber of his being screamed at his legs to run, to turn, to hide—to do anything but stand in this sacred tomb. But his body was a statue, a prisoner of the past. His tiny feet were rooted to the spot, forced to witness the crime scene anew.
That was when he saw it.
A darkness began to pool just from beneath their bodies. It was thick, tar-like, and it seeped across the grain of the wooden floor with a sinister, sentient purpose. It did not spread like a liquid; it crept, a shadow given weight and intent. A cold deeper than any winter gripped his heart. He tried to scream, to cry for help, but his voice was gone, stolen by the dream. All his masculinity had been completely decimated, all he wanted to do was to scream out his lungs, but he couldn't.
The black tide reached his feet. It was warm. A terrible, living warmth that soaked into his skin. It climbed, relentless, coating his ankles, his calves, rising to his knees and then his waist. He was being consumed, swallowed whole by this viscous shadow from his past. He could feel its pressure like a dreadful intimacy as it clung to his small body, rising ever higher toward his chest, his neck…
And then, as suddenly as it had come, it began to recede.
The black fluid drained away, pulling back across the floor, slipping back under the bodies of his parents as if it had never been. It left him standing on bone-dry wood, his pajamas untouched, yet his skin crawling with the phantom memory of its touch. The only evidence was the coppery, thick scent of blood that now hung heavily in the air, a smell he now knew had been within the fluid all along.
His wide, terrified eyes were locked on his parents' forms. He couldn't not look away even though he wanted to.
Then, the room began to waver. The edges of the cupboard blurred. The pattern on the rug swam and dissolved. The stability of the nightmare was breaking apart again . With a lurch that stole the breath from his lungs, the floor vanished once more.
He was falling again, tumbling through the eerie, silent void, the image of his mother's lifeless face the last thing he saw.
This time, the end of the fall was different. It came with a jarring, bone-shuddering thud that sent a jolt of pain through his small frame. Solid ground. Cold, hard, and unforgiving. Gasping, he pushed himself up, his child's body aching yet he was grateful, so desperately grateful, for the solidity beneath him.
He staggered to his feet, his breathing ragged sobs in the overwhelming silence. As his vision cleared, he saw that the room had changed. The space was smaller, darker. His mother was gone. The cupboard, the bed, the rug—all of it had vanished. He was in a featureless, dark space, and lying a few feet away from him was the body of his dead father.
Alone.
The world narrowed to that single, terrible point. His feet, once again, were sealed to the ground. He could not move, and could not look away even if he wanted to .
A new odd sound began. A soft, dry scraping.
His father's body had shifted, he couldn't have missed it, his eyes were glued to the scene unfolding.
A low, choked sound of pure terror escaped Matt's lips. This was wrong. This was beyond the memory. This was something new and definitely worse. His grown self would have been intrigued by the newness, but all he wanted to do was, run away .
His father's arm, stiff and pale, moved. The fingers, bony and claw-like, dug into the unseen floor, a foggy surface that looked like the clouds . Then the other arm moved dragging the corpse forward. With a grotesque, jerky motion, the corpse began to drag itself forward. It moved with a terrible, slow inevitability, each movement accompanied by that awful, squeaking scrape of bone and nail on hard ground. It was the sound of something that should have never movef again, forced into a horrible pantomime of life. The face worn by the corpse showed no but pain.
Across the short, impossible distance it came, inch by agonizing inch. Matt could only watch, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, his breath frozen in his chest. The thing that wore his father's face closed the gap, its lifeless eyes fixed on him, his chin sagged
Finally, it stopped. It lay at his feet, its head tilted up. The smell of decay was overwhelming. Slowly, with a stiffness that spoke of broken tendons and rigor mortis, it raised a trembling, skeletal finger and pointed directly at Matt's heart.
Its jaw unhinged, dropping open to reveal a black void within. The mouth worked, lips stretching over teeth in a ghastly mockery of speech.
And a voice emerged. It was not his father's voice. It was a dry, rasping whisper, the sound of dust and dead leaves skittering across a stone floor. It was a sound that came from everywhere and nowhere, bypassing the ears to etch itself directly onto his soul.
"Find me."
The two words hung in the air, a command from beyond the grave.
The ground beneath him did not simply vanish. It shattered. With a crack that echoed the gunshots of his memory, the solid floor gave way.
And Matt was falling again.
This time, the scream that tore from his throat was not the high-pitched squeal of a terrified child. It was a raw, guttural, full-throated roar of absolute primal terror—the scream of a full-grown man completely unraveled. It was a sound of protest, of agony, of a horror so profound it could only be given voice in the absolute freedom of a nightmare.
The child was gone. The man was falling. And the two words—find me—echoed in the endless, eerie void, chasing him all the way down.