A Writer's Odyssey

###Chapter 2/ The Beginning II

I found myself standing in the living room.

Everything around me was painted in shades of white and grey. The walls, the furniture, even the faint light filtering through the windows seemed to have lost their colours.

Strangely enough, however, everything felt normal.

Or perhaps I was simply too oblivious to notice that something was wrong.

Suddenly, I stood up.

No, that wasn't quite right.

I hadn't decided to stand up. I hadn't even felt the urge to do so. One moment, I was simply there, and the next, my body was already moving.

Yeah. That explained it.

I wasn't in control of my own body.

Before I could even begin to understand what was happening, I found myself walking towards my mother's room.

Step after step, I approached the door.

I reached for the handle and pushed it open.

Creeeeeeak…

The door swung open unusually slowly, producing a long, unpleasant creaking sound that seemed to echo throughout the entire house.

I couldn't explain why, but the sound made me uneasy.

Nevertheless, I continued inside.

There, I saw my mother.

She was sitting in her room, wearing the same familiar smile she always gave me. For a moment, the sight brought me a strange sense of comfort.

It was my mother, after all.

What could possibly be wrong?

Then, everything changed.

The atmosphere grew gloomy, and the room seemed to darken around me. It happened so gradually that I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong.

But I noticed something.

My mother's smile was disappearing.

The corners of her lips slowly fell until her face became completely expressionless.

And then, without warning, tears began streaming down her cheeks.

I froze.

Mum?

I wanted to call out to her. I wanted to ask what was wrong, why she was crying, and why she wasn't saying anything to me.

But my mouth wouldn't open.

My body continued moving as though I were nothing more than a passenger trapped inside it.

I walked past her.

And what I saw beyond her terrified me even more.

***

My girlfriend was standing right ahead of me.

She was walking away, and for some inexplicable reason, I found myself following her.

The closer I got, the more I wanted to reach out and touch her. Perhaps I wanted to stop her. Perhaps I simply wanted to reassure myself that she was really there.

Whatever the reason, I stretched out my hand.

But just as I was about to touch her, she turned around.

Our eyes met.

For a few seconds, she stared at me with that familiar smile of hers. The very same smile I had grown so accustomed to seeing. The one that never failed to brighten my day.

I almost felt relieved.

"At least you're still here."

But that relief didn't last long.

Just as it had happened with my mother, her smile gradually disappeared. Her expression became completely blank, leaving me staring at a face I knew so well but could no longer understand.

She didn't cry.

She didn't say a word.

She simply turned around and continued walking.

Farther.

And farther.

Until the distance between us became so great that I could barely make out her figure.

I stopped walking.

My hands remained stretched towards her, as though I could somehow pull her back just by reaching far enough.

But it was futile.

She never turned around again.

"Wait…"

I tried to speak, but I wasn't even sure whether any sound had escaped my mouth.

My chest began to tighten with an unfamiliar uneasiness.

Then, all of a sudden, my heart began beating faster.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

What was happening to me?

Why was everyone walking away?

Why was nobody saying anything?

Before I could make sense of any of it, the scene around me changed.

The gloomy surroundings vanished, replaced by a familiar place.

The livestock compound.

It was where we kept all our livestock, the place that had been part of our family's life for as long as I could remember.

I stood there, staring into the distance.

For a brief moment, I thought I might finally be able to understand what was happening, quietly waiting for what might happen next.

But that hope didn't last.

Because something about the place felt terribly, terribly wrong.

The livestock compound was unusually quiet.

The animals were going about their usual business, eating peacefully as though nothing in the world could possibly disturb them.

For a moment, I simply stood there, observing them.

Everything seemed normal again.

Or so I thought.

Without warning, the animals began acting strangely.

One moment, they were eating peacefully. The next, they were attacking one another.

I stared in disbelief.

What the hell was going on?!

Even my gentlest cattle, the ones I had never imagined behaving aggressively, had joined the chaos.

Nothing made sense.

The compound, which had always been a familiar part of my life, had suddenly become a place I could barely recognize.

Before long, the ground was covered in red liquid.

And yet, something about it was even stranger than the sight itself.

The red liquid wasn't simply spreading across the ground.

It was gushing from somewhere, steadily gathering into a pool.

I couldn't understand it.

Where was all of it coming from?

Why was it accumulating like that?

And why did everything feel so horribly wrong?

Strangely enough, even the version of me trapped inside that dream seemed to recognize how unnatural it was.

I looked around, desperately trying to make sense of what I was witnessing.

My hand moved towards my chest, the left side. It was empty. There is no organic matter there. The heart was gone.

"Was this the source of the pool?" I thought of the question quietly.

But then, my vision began to change.

The edges of my surroundings gradually turned red.

I blinked.

Once.

Twice.

It didn't help.

The redness continued spreading across my field of vision, swallowing everything I looked at.

My head began to spin.

I tried to steady myself, but my body felt increasingly heavy, and the world around me seemed to tilt.

What was happening to me now?

I couldn't even think straight anymore.

And then—

My legs gave way.

I collapsed into the pool of red liquid.

SPLASH!

The nightmare ended...