Bogleech.com's 2017 Horror Write-off:
snow
Submitted by Δ
The date is November 5th, 2015, and I feel alone.
Everyone else is still here, but they all feel oddly lonely too. The lonesomeness of the desert, of the empty plain.
We've lost the sun. We've lost the moon. We've lost noon and night and dawn and dusk.
We've lost the sky.
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The date is November 6th, 2015, and things are getting better.
I've always wondered how people would react to an inescapable change.
A meaningless, sudden thing.
It turns out they don't respond well. Anarchy's a powerful thing.
But people like peace, too. We adjust. We go on as normal, after a while.
We play, we talk, we go to work.
Normalcy is our mantra.
Also, does anyone else not like static? It feels darker than dark, blanker than a sheet of paper.
Emptiness incarnate. Void, nix, null.
I've never found it truly frightening, but it does make me check behind me.
I've been doing that a lot recently.
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The date is November 7th, 2015, and today I learned something new.
The tides have stopped. No moon pulls them out to sea and back to land. Is the earth asleep?
Everything seems to wait, holding its collective breath.
Actually, slumber seems like a nice option now. I didn't get much yesterday. I'll be right back.
Didn't sleep, actually. Just browsed on the laptop.
Apparently some scientists from somewhere think the new sky occasionally looks familiar.
A corrupted view of the microwave background can be seen, every now and then.
It all looks like static to me. The world between stations.
Dan came over today. He didn't seem himself.
Normally he's energetic. Occasionally sad, but mostly happy and excited.
He wasn't like that today. There was something missing, or something extra.
I asked him about it. He said it was dread. I thought it was excitement, just expressed differently.
Who can say?
He's not taking this well, that I know. I'm not the most comforting person out there, and that I know too.
Ah, well. I tried.
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The date is November 8th, 2015, and there's more things going on.
The government's fully up again. It's about time.
School's still out, though. I, for one, am glad.
Apparently they'll give it a month. If the sky doesn't go back before then, we'll keep on going to our classes.
I was browsing again today. Some other scientists now. They all seem excited about this, I think.
I'm glad someone is learning, in a time of confusion.
They said there's patches of the sky that are changing faster or slower than the rest, and move slowly and steadily.
They think these are objects whose origin is this new sky.
It's later now. Apparently, they managed to track them and get a reading.
They're a couple of miles up. The researchers still can't find out their shape, for some reason.
At least we know something.
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I was trying to contact Ron today. He picked up, but said he was sick and couldn't see me.
He didn't sound sick. I think he just needs time.
I was wondering today, looking into the sky, when I saw something darting around one of the trees.
It looked like some sort of grey large bird, an eagle or something, then I looked closer.
It looked sort of like an angel. Or a hawk. Or a jellyfish. I couldn't quite tell.
But I do know that it was the same texture as the sky, and left quickly.
Did it see me? Should it have?
I went online, and a couple of people are asking about these objects (creatures? I don't know). A couple of blurry pictures sit vigil next to the posts. General consensus is photoshop and lies.
Today is November 9th, 2015, and I don't know how to feel.
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Dan came over again today. We were talking about a game he got - an island of the normal - when one of my cats began meowing at the front door.
Dan stayed where he was as I went to let her in.
Lo and behold, Misty had caught something.
It looked like a mouse, but with too many legs. It was hard to tell, as it had no shading.
It was made of sky-stuff. Spasmodic, teeming, VHS snow.
I took it to my room, put it in a box, and went back to Dan. He didn't even suspect.
It smells like petrichor and is still warm.
Today's the 11th, I think. I could check, but I don't really want to. At least I know it's 2015, November.
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I woke up to a power outage. When it finally went away, half the news stations were off.
More static. Hiss. Hiss. I'm growing to like it. I have to.
All of them were covering the same thing. The presence of the static-things had been recognised at large, and more and more had been appearing, both in private and in public. Most containment attempts had failed, in various ways. Either it's disappeared when no one was looking, or escaped, or drifted away through holes smaller than the width of a hair.
The box is empty. I checked.
I tried contacting Dan. He didn't even pick up. Ron, however, came over uninvited. He seemed more normal than he normally is, to be honest.
He adjusted, I suppose.
A lot of others aren't, though.
After the shapes began appearing, people decided that it was close to the end.
Lawlessness, crime. You know the drill.
I'm embarrassed, to be honest. It's just change.
We wouldn't be responding like this if it happened before, right?
Right?
I saw one in my chimney, swirling like a mote of dust.
Today is a day sometime in November.
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More beings. They're harmless, but they're all over the place.
More chaos outside, though.
Not just people.
The static is going faster.
I wonder how to feel. I think I should be afraid.
The entities. Are they here to threaten us, or to warn us? Are they a threat, or will they be?
Maybe the sky is made of them.
Maybe it's a wall. Maybe they're protecting us from something. From a lot of somethings.
The scientists have gone quiet now that we need them. I can't blame them. It's daunting to have the world's eyes on you.
For now, I'll wait, just like the world on standby, until we tune back into a station.