Colours merged and changed until I found myself in a dim room, with threadbare blankets carelessly draped across forgotten objects. My heart thudded noisily in the muffled room as I whirled around to see cloth slide silently off of a shape I dimly recognised as a piano; a few sinister notes echoing in the stuffy silence surrounding me. A filmy white shape, who looked achingly familiar, bent over the keys; but made no sound.
Backing away clumsily, I stumbled and my pale hand brushed the wall before I snatched it away, revolted by the feel of swarming cockroaches inching slowly along the wall. I ran to the window, hearing a rat scatter as I neared it. Wrenching the curtain aside frantically, desperate to see something I recognised in this nightmarish place, I found myself transfixed by the scene before me.
Compelled to keep standing at the window, I was horrified by the sight of a slaughtered lamb lying spread-eagled on the colourless lawn below me. Warm blood was making patterns in the dirt as the lamb’s body was mercilessly drained leaving a small shrivelled body with open petrified eyes, frozen in time.
Trying to quench my growing nausea, I tore my eyes away from the corpse and focused on the only remotely familiar thing I recognised; ravens clinging onto a bare branch of a dead tree. Their beaks were tiled towards the dying light of a pale sun slowly sinking beneath the dark, agitated and restless ocean that I could glimpse faintly on the horizon. A raven called mournfully and slowly began to circle the air above the slowly decaying flesh of the lamb below. The call sent a cold shiver down my spine and left me sickened at heart as I gazed, appalled at this tainted world. I had seen enough.
Pale and trembling, I pulled the curtain over the window and slide slowly down the wall with my head in my hands, blinking away insistent tears. I told myself this was a nightmare, it just had to be. I didn’t belong in this ruthless and desolate place. I jumped slightly and looked up fearfully as I heard a lonely howl in the distance. But as soon as I had looked up, instantly the howl didn’t matter anymore.
I tried to scream, petrified at what I saw before me, but no sound came out. Still screaming silently I scrabbled for the doorknob behind me but the door wouldn’t open. The thing before me terrified me more than anything else I had seen here, it struck me to the bone and I had to remember to gulp down gasps of now freezing cold air. It was a rotting corpse, stripped and hung from a rope, revolving endlessly. But it wasn’t that that scared me, I had seen many of them, what did it was the face that was brutally half hacked away but what was left was easily recognisable. It was the same body as the one I thought I recognised at the piano…I was sure I recognised it now.
I couldn’t cope with this, why wouldn’t this nightmare end? Desperate to find a way out I smashed the window with my bare fist, shrieking with horror as shards of glass flew up, ripping at my body. Ignoring the pain, I clambered out of the window and cut open my leg from my knee to my ankle in the process. Sobbing from the agony, I looked up and saw the corpse again. I slowly realised with dread that it had an identical gash on its leg that I had on mine, and the cuts and scratches were exactly the same.
Horror-struck and completely petrified, my vision swam before me and my grip on the grimy window pane slipped away. A cold sweat broke out all over me as beads of sweat ran off my body to the ground far below.
The last thing I saw before I fell was my own dead body, swinging slowly from a rope.
And then I knew nothing.