The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

It might happen one morning that you wake up home alone. This could be normal depending on your situation, but this morning will be different. While your environment will all seem exactly the same, you’ll notice that everything is quieter than normal. If you go outside, you will notice a distinct lack of anything like birds, insects… or people. As far as you travel, you will not encounter another sentient human being. The entire world will be intact, but empty except for yourself. There are currently over 100,000 missing persons cases in the United States. Some are just normal cases of murder or kidnappings, but in others, the disappearance cannot be explained and no remains of the person are ever located.

I’m hoping at least /x/ will enjoy this because it’s probablt fucked me up for life. It’s seeming a lot more absurd as time passes (12 days since I moved my shit into my friends place), so I want to get this out there and have people call bullshit and pass judgement, because I think it’ll make me feel better. I’ve moved out all my stuff, I’ve already called the cops, and informed my absentee landlord. I’ve done all the proper things, so there’s nothing left to do but share my little fucked up city living story. About six months ago, my girlfriend and I moved into an apartment in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis. About two weeks after we move in, her grandfather, who raised her, has a fucking stroke, and she ends up going home to Twin Oaks to take care of him. She was living with him full time until we can find out how to afford a nurse or hospice. Anyway, I’d been living in our one bedroom all alone for the last half a year. It’s beautiful, newly remodeled, doub...

Compared to most other towns, the one I live in is pretty high above sea level, and my house just happens to sit on the highest hill there. From my bedroom window I can look out and see the entire town, along with the surrounding mountains. It’s a lovely sight. I don’t know about you, but I actually look forward to waking up in the morning, if only to look out my window and see those mountains. It’s especially pretty after a midnight drizzle, when the air is so thick with vapor that the mountains and buildings are completely covered by fog, with only their dark outlines penetrating the thick mist. On weekends I don’t have work, but I get up early anyway to watch the fog slowly fade away to reveal everything it hides. I watched the thick blanket of fog over the mountains slowly fade away last weekend, just as I had done every weekend before. But this time, the mountains faded away with the mist until both had vanished from sight. Yeah, that was kinda weird. The next morni...

While brushing your teeth in the evening, you catch a glimpse of your wall mirror, covered in fingerprints. Annoyed, you grab a towel and rub at them. They remain. Upon closer inspection, you realize that they seem to be on the other side of the glass.

Don’t dismiss this outright as the work of some raving lunatic. There’s some sense to this story, if you’ll just hear me out… Look, we all wonder if time travel is possible, right? Well, let me tell you something… it is. I’m from the future, actually. I know you probably don’t believe that, but seriously, I’m from the future. It’s a really great thing; getting to see the past, watching events unfold… stuff like that. We know more now than we ever would. Behind all the fun, though, there’s a more serious aspect. We aren’t supposed to go in our own lifetime, and we are NEVER allowed to contact our past selves. Let me tell you, I’m breaking that rule right now. Yes, kid, you’re talking to yourself. Your future self. I’m going to be executed for this, but you know what? I accept that. I’m preventing something by talking to you that is WORSE than death. I can’t tell you outright what to do, because the filters would catch it. This is the closest I can get, trust me. I can, howe...

Hello, beautiful. If you can read this, please listen to my confession. You probably don’t know me, but I’ve known you for a very long time. And I don’t know if I should say this yet, but… I love you. I do, I love you. I do, I really do. I love you so much, that I built your entire world for you, so you may live on and on and on. I built it just after I met you. You were so beautiful lying there, with your dreamy eyes tenderly shut. Your near-translucent skin, which seemed to be growing paler and paler by the second. The way your limbs were twisted, delicately mangled at the joints to form such an unearthly vision of vulnerability. Oh, that must have been such a long fall. Not only did the building possess incredible height, but I know how the most glorious of angels must fall the furthest. Oh, my angel. My contorted angel on the pavement. Your soft flesh had been scraped away in just the right places, revealing your inner body’s artistic formation. No one could ever appr...

If you are reading this, then I am dead, and you are standing aboard a derelict Cyclone class patrol ship, the USS Mistral, with her engines dead and her electrical systems nonfunctional. I am, was, the XO of this vessel, Lieutenant Commander Ryan Simmons. Please read this carefully. If you are an officer or enlisted man in the United States Navy, this is an order: Scuttle this vessel, immediately. Do not finish this letter. Get off the Mistral at once, and send her down. Consider this a quarantine scenario; all hands are likely dead. God help you if they are not. We are eight days out of Kirkwall, tracking an intermittent and scrambled distress call from what appeared to be a Icelandic fishing vessel, the Magnusdottir, deep in the no-fishing zone of the North Sea. We found the vessel, or rather, we found a mile wide streak of oil and fragments, the largest of them still burning. The night before, the enlisted man on watch had reported seeing a flash of light on the horizo...

I awake, as always, to the click and whir of a thousand hidden cameras, and the rising glow of the ambient lights. Over the next 30 minutes, the curtains on my bedroom will slowly part, gliding on mechanized tracks, and the yellow sunlight of dawn will stream into the wide circular room. Like all mornings, I entertain for the briefest moments the thought of hurling myself at the windows and plunging the half mile to the ground. I hold on to the little fantasy of wind and sky and falling for as long as it will remain, dreaming of those magnificent moments of freedom and choice. Even if I were not a coward, there are a thousand unseen barriers and safe guards. I can not see them, but several parents are doubtlessly just outside the door, and would be between me and the window before I could leave the bed. I allow the dream of freedom to evaporate for another morning. The woman next to me, I can not recall her name, shifts and rolls to embrace me. I wrap my arms around her ...

It’s dark. When you don’t know where you are or how you’ve come to be there, even the simplest things can be supremely frightening. So it was that when Walter awoke, his consciousness confused and hazy, the thing that he fixated on was the darkness. A darkness so thick and oppressive that it could’ve been a blanket – perhaps it was, for all that the disoriented boy knew. A quick rustle around his immediate area made it clear that no, he was not bound or covered by anything in particular – it was just… dark. He’d been awake for a few minutes, and his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, as they normally would. In the back of his mind, Walter rationalized that this must mean that wherever he was had a true and complete absence of light – there was nothing for his eyes to adjust to, so waiting around in the hopes that he’d suddenly be able to see where he was going was a rather pointless endeavour. He rose to his feet unsteadily, and reached out to grasp at – what? A wall? Anything, any...

The worst thing I’ve ever done in my life happened about twelve years ago, when I was a sixteen year old kid living in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the early fall, when the leaves were just starting to turn orange and the temperatures were starting to fall, hinting at the freezing chill that was only a few months away. School had just started, but it had been going on for about a month now, so all the excitement of going back and reuniting with old friends had been replaced by the realization that we were captives in a place that only wanted to load work upon us. Understandably, me and my friends were all eager to do anything that might remind us of the worry-free, responsibility-free days of summer. Earlier that year, about the time the last school year had let out, one of my friends from work, (McDonalds, which some people think is lame, but I always had a great time there), had taught me a technique to make yourself pass out with the help of an assistant. It worked something...

There are certain rules in this world that we must abide by. We don’t always agree with them, and they rarely agree with us, but if we are to survive to see tomorrow, we need to place our personal feelings aside and just accept things for what they are. Take rule #86, for instance. Rule #86 states that every time someone speaks your name, it creates a duplicate of you. Consider that. Every time your parents ever scolded you using your full name, they’ve given birth to another you. Every time someone at the doctor’s office told you the doctor could see you now, somewhere in the world, another. Every time a lover cried it out in a fit of passion… another. Think about that. Think about this thing you take for granted. This beautiful gift given to you by your ancestors and forefathers. Your name. Imagine living in a world where your name was a curse instead of a gift. “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” You people are so funny. For us, your name wears *you* out. It hunts you do...

This farm has been in my family for two generations. I’ve always enjoyed the peace and solitude since I was a boy, just me and my folks. Now, there’s just me. They died a few years back, leavin’ the place to me and I’ve been doing my best to keep enough cash coming in to pay the taxes on the land (though why anybody’d want this place but me these days is beyond me). My grandpa was kind of a recluse and wanted a ‘fair piece o’ distance’ between us and the city slickers as he called them. It’s about 15 miles to the nearest town, down a couple worn ruts in the woods, that turn into a strip more dirt than road, before it finally hits the rural route to town. The old joke about ‘You know you’re a redneck when directions to your house start with: After you turn off the paved road…’? Yeah, that always used to kill him. Sorry, its getting hard to concentrate, mind wanders. I’m leaving this recording on the off chance someone from town notices I haven’t stopped by for a bit and s...

[A transcript of the first recorded interview with Subject H270, a victim of the recent "Interplanar Distress Phenomenon" that has taken approximately one hundred reported humans as of this date. Their numbers grow exponentially.] —– MINISTRY FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY WASHINGTON, D.C 17. October, 2005 To: Officer Kathe Waldheim From: Agent Olaf Kaspar-Gottfried, Unknown Beings Examinations Department MIPA FILE NO. 33-4215 LAB NO. 92475683-K NOTES: Subject H270 has been put under sedation and injected with truth serum to ensure accuracy of the report and my own safety. Interview takes place one night after his rescue. Subject remains shaky when regarding my person, yet is otherwise confident reporting the incident. BEGIN TAPE Part I Kaspar-Gottfried: Recount for us the events that led up to your capture. H270: Home… I want to go home… Kaspar-Gottfried: You will be returned to your residence after the investigation, provided you cooperate with...

There is a doorway, one that can be any door, at any time. This door leads nowhere, yet there lies a realm of twisted reality to the opener.  This door exists for everyone – some never encounter it in their lives, others unknowingly open it and step through.  The problem is you can’t tell if the door is open to you, until years after you step through it. You’ll see them, and they’ll finally see you.

Try this. Turn off the music. Turn off the TV. If you have to, turn off the computer. Then go to another room, and sit. In total silence. Do you hear that? That ringing? People say it is your brain making up a sound to explain the silence. People lied. I cant tell you what is making that sound, but whatever it is, you don’t want to meet it. It is trying to break through. Force its way onto our plane of existence. Now try this. Repeat the first steps. Turn everything off. This time, turn the lights off too. Still hear that ringing? Better hope you do. If you don’t, its because they have finally managed to break through. And no amount of running will save you. Credited to TheCoffinDancer.

You could kick yourself. Its the middle of the night–or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it–and freezing cold because you, like an idiot, kicked off your blanket in the night. Nearly entirely off the bed, in fact, with only one lonely corner clinging to the edge of the bed. Sitting up you take it in your hands, feeling that familiar fear from your childhood: that if you don’t find something to cover yourself up, you are leaving yourself open to all sorts of supernatural horrors. You shrug it off with a chuckle and give the blanket a good hard tug, trying to pull it all up with one go. No luck. It seems to be stuck. Another sharp pull seems to free it a bit, and you work, tugging it back up and trying to ignore that silly feeling of growing dread. Tug. Tug tug tug…. There! Finally! The blanket is mostly back up on the bed and you are safely beneath it once more, teasing yourself mentally for getting all worked up over nothing. Until, just before you drif...

If you’re lucky, you’ll never know about it.  Your life will be spent in the bliss that can only come from the ignorance of the dark horrors that scratch and gnaw at the edges of reality. You’ll never hear the dark whispers coming from the closet; never feel the cold chill creeping along your spine.  You’ll never pause at a turn in the hallway because you know that if you look down it, you’ll see something that shouldn’t be there.  Something that creeps, stalks, and skulks in the shadows. Something that, once it sees you, will never stop coming for you.  It won’t come for you when you are sleeping. It wants you to know it’s there. It wants you to hear the relentless sound of its footsteps, the panting of its breath. It wants to smell your fear, to hear your whimper, and to see the horror on your face as it approaches. If you’ve any sense at all, you won’t try to find it. You’ll never pay attention to the sounds. You won’t try to catch sight of those thing...

I don’t even know why I’m writing this. I can post this in a million different places, it won’t matter. There’s still nobody there to read it. Nobody left to hear my story. Yet this might be my last chance to do this, so I will. The feeling won’t go away. They’re watching. They’re watching and getting closer every second. They can feel my terror. And I know they’re enjoying it. It has been about four months since everyone disappeared. And I mean everyone. I woke up one morning for school. I immediately noticed the time. School started three hours ago. Must have just hit the alarm clock still half-asleep, and fallen right back to sleep. It happens to me sometimes. Why hadn’t my parents woken me up? Probably just went to work early. The first time I started to notice was at the station. I usually take a train to school, since it’s the fastest way to get there. I hadn’t seen anyone on my way to the station, but I lived in a rather quiet area of the town, so going was slow a...