There was nothing.

Nothing was good. It was an improvement, actually. Before the nothing had been a bright, splitting pain that started somewhere central and then radiated out into the limbs. It was like being eaten alive from the inside, or maybe being impaled through the breastbone, or maybe that’s just what it felt like to die. Emily wasn’t sure, and there wasn’t anyone around to ask.

A sea of nothing didn’t make a whole lot of sense, because she had a clear memory of being somewhere before, though she could not recall where that was. She could remember cold, and hot, and cold again, the sound of wind in grass, the smell of unwashed bodies, and screaming in a sleeting rain. Unordered, all at once, a torrent of sensations and memories that burst in confusion, came and went, and still left only nothingness when it passed.

It was overwhelming sensation to try to focus on any one thought, so she decided just not to remember anything.

She realized, after a time, that the nothing was changing, had started out as a black void, but was turning gray, as if the sun were peeking over a horizon–yet there was no sun, no horizon, just the black turning to uniform gray all around. Brighter and brighter, until it was a nothing of white, rather than a nothing of black.

Above her, in maybe what was the sky, she thought she could see red lines. Writing, perhaps, that floated in a strict circle, with her at the center below. The message was in the process of being written. New lines and rows appeared below the first, and more below that. They were too small or far away for her to read, and trying to focus on them brought back that splitting pain. She felt a strange certainty that she would not have been able to read them in any case. She had no idea what it meant, but found she hated it instantly.

She was standing in a small room. No, that wasn’t quite right, she was standing in her own living room. Her living room. The old one. The one from before–before something. Everything was there, the furniture, the appliances, the house plants, all where they should have been. But everything was without color, just shades and outlines of white, as if covered in a uniform coating of wet paint.

It exuded the feeling of home, of safety, of pleasantness, and she dared not to touch any of it.

Her home, the real one, had windows that looked out over the wide river. It was not a great view, there were other buildings between it and her, but on a good night when the wind was just right, the air was fresh, and the fog low and glowing from the city. It wouldn’t be there, anymore. None of it would. It seemed important to look anyway.

There was no city. Instead the windows were awash in a strange shade of green, unnatural, viscous, bubbling, as if the entire apartment were submerged in a vat. She hesitantly tested the glass, but found it was not warm or cool to the touch. She was still unwilling to touch anything else, for fear that her hands would come away with something worse than white paint, or perhaps would not come away at all.

“They don’t remember any of it,” came a whisper. Or no, maybe not a whisper, maybe a shout from far away, muffled. Maybe from the green outside the window, as if someone were on the other side of the glass, in the fluid. There was nothing there, person or otherwise that she could so. Just the bubbling acid green.

Emily thought that it should have terrified her more, to be hearing voices, but found no malice in it. It was afraid and pleading for her attention, not menacing. There were snatches of words, too, all the same voice. She did not recognize it, but it was persistent. It reminded her of lying in bed, as the dreaming half of the mind talks to the last of what lies awake, speaking nonsense words and phrases before it pulls the rest under.

“You used to be someone, too,” it babbled. She thought it might be masculine, though couldn’t quite be sure. “I have an idea.”

“Hello?” she asked. Somehow, her voice piercing the strange space brought clarity, casting away and dissolving the last of the false calm the little room tried to emulate. The furniture was oozing now, and gave off a chemical, sulfurous smell.

“How much do you remember?” the babbling green asked.

The pale shadows in the room seemed to be darkening, as if an unseen light-source were growing stronger. Overhead, through the ceiling, she could still feel the red lines writing. They buzzed in a way that ached the teeth, invisible but present, marching downward.

“I know what you’re trying to do. You’re too late. They’re already here,” the voice shouted at her through the window, more frightened now.

Buzzing, buzzing, flaring a hotter red with each whisper, the words above wrote. The shadows detached from their parent objects altogether, gathering and swelling into a single mass in the center of the room, things without substance somehow building into a form.

“Help me,” the whisper said.

“How long do you intend to hide from me, here?” the mass of shadow asked, becoming the solid shape of a gnarled, hideous figure.

“Help me!” the whisper insisted.

Staying in nothing would have been better.