After a time of futile struggling, all the while with that grotesque eye staring unblinkingly at me, I finally calmed down. I can’t say whether five minutes or five hours had past, but my muscles burned and sweat was pouring from my brow. Panting heavily from my exertions, I stared back in to the depths of the eye. I couldn’t escape, so I may as well face whatever this place was until I could get out. Just as words were forming in the back of my throat, a question as to purpose, I heard a voice. For some reason I knew it came from the eye, even though there was no mouth to speak. I can’t even say whether or not I actually heard anything, or if the speech was simply something heard in my own mind, or implanted in my memory. It was a deep voice, with a strange, almost purring quality to it. Like a cat addressing its trapped prey.
“Good, good. Your fear tastes sweet, despite how unfortunately fleeting it was.” Slowly the chair I was sitting in began to rotate, though no obvious force moved it, the motion was slow and constant, as if there were no friction to inhibit its motion. Rather than follow me around in a circle, more eyes popped up, each one an identical copy of the last one, until I was slowly spinning, surrounded in a circle by large, twitching blue eyes.
“But it’s not quite fear we are after. Oh no, not simply fear, not by far. You see, you are here so that we can find out what will…break…you. How strong is your mind, we wonder? How easy is it to snap that fragile bond you have with sanity? Let’s see what will break you. Some people don’t even make it this far. Consider yourself lucky.”
As I digested these words, their implications and threat, strange black dots began to pour out of the corners of the eyes. I looked closer. Tiny black insects were crawling their way out of the tear ducts of each eye. They had flat round bodies and tiny heads, each one no bigger than the nail on my pinky finger. The began to pour out by the hundreds, their wingless bodies making barely a sound, but their number was so great that soon all I could hear was the scratch scratch scratching of their legs as they flowed out of the tear ducts of the eyes. Slowly they moved as one amorphous mass towards me. I renewed my struggles once again, but once again the proved futile. They began crawling up my legs, a steady wave of glossy black. I watched in terror as a great number of them began burrowing under my skin, but still continuing their upward journey through my body. Watching those lumps moving just underneath my skin reminded me briefly of watching the eye as it flowed across the flesh-walls of this hellish place, but such recollections were fleeting as my neck and head were soon swallowed up by these insects. I could feel them penetrating into my ears, bursting into the aqueous humor of my eyes, crawling into my sinuses through my nose, methodically marching down my throat and tearing up my vocal chords as they vibrated in a shriek of fear.
Suddenly the bonds that held me to the chair were gone. I was lying on gravel; the insects that were defiling my body had disappeared. I jumped up and began to twitch my whole body, trying to fling off the bugs that weren’t there any more. Running my hands through my hair, checking my eyes and ears. I sucked in the cold, stale air of this new place, and let it out in a mist of life. I brushed my hands through my hair one more time, and took stock of my new situation. The pulsating flesh-room was gone, as was the eye and the chair. I was somewhere outside, the moon hung low and full in the sky, with a few tattered clouds to make her decent. Rusty railroad tracks extended far into the horizon to both sides of me, and an impenetrable forest of pines lay to either side. All in all the effect was like that of being in a tunnel, despite the open sky above me. Strangely enough the faint smell of coriander still lingered, although much weaker than before. Here it mingles with the smell of wet gravel and flaked rust. Shivering, I drew my arms close to myself and hunched over. Seeing as the woods looked so foreboding, I decided to simply follow the track. Perhaps it leads back to a town, to people. Maybe it would even lead back to something that resembled a sane world.