Home.

It was the light that woke her first. The neon green seeped in through the cracks in her curtains, covering everything in a luminescent glow. Was she dreaming? Her dreams often took on an eerie quality when she fell asleep after 2am. Nothing good ever happened in the small hours of the morning.

Hailee rubbed her eyes and pinched herself to break herself out of slumber, but nothing happened. The light continued to crawl across her room, and work its way over every available surface. She checked her clock: 4am. The world was silent, so she couldn't blame the lights on some rager Nate and his brother were having next door. Perhaps she was just sleep-drunk.

As she closed her eyes and willed sleep to return, her ears began to buzz. Waves of sound seemed to implant themselves into her ears, rather than travel on through, causing a metallic, tinny thrum to emanate from inside her head. That's it, she thought, I've officially gone mad. Throwing off her covers, Hailee rammed her fingers into her ears and tried to shake the sound out of them. No luck. By now, the combination of the sea of green in her room and the buzzing somewhere beyond her skull had turned her all shades of green herself. Maybe she just needed some air to exorcise whatever early morning demons had skulked into her room during the night.

Hailee didn't realise that the view from her window had all but disappeared when she first pulled back the curtains. The green glow was instantly transformed into a piercing neon beam that blinded her to the point of tears. With one hand clutching the curtain, she shielded her eyes with the other, and took a deep breath. Blinking them open slowly, shapes began to form around the light that had invaded her eyes.

Metal outlines jutted out at every angle, contorting into arms on one side, and pentagons on the other. The buzzing in her brain mutated into echoes of the mechanical cranks of each moving part outside of her window, close enough for her to reach out and touch...if she hadn't been rooted to the threadbare carpet that lined her room. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light assaulting them from beyond the window pane, Hailee began to take in the enormity of the machine whirring in front of her.

Its metal shell seemed to ripple like snakeskin, as if breathing and primed for the attack. Its shape-shifting limbs grabbed up at the sky as if sucking the light from all the stars above, whilst its legs...its...legs. This machine had legs. Not of the human kind, of course, that would be crazy. These legs were spider-like in their curvature and number, yet otherworldly in the way that their metal scales interlocked and moved apart withe every minute twitch. They reached out in every direction, asserting dominion over the cornfields that had once made up the entirety of Hailee's bedroom window view. This machine was a monster.

Fear pushed through her veins as she watched the head of this beast rotate and splash its lime green beacon across the surrounding fields. When the light returned to fill her bedroom, it dimmed to a hallucinogenic glow, and Hailee's thoughts began to command her on a loop. Outside. Outside. Outside. It was as if her brain had been sliced into the logical and the insane, with the latter clearly winning some unwanted battle within. As mechanically as the machine in front of her, Hailee slipped on her shoes and cracked open her bedroom door. Everyone was still asleep.

Creaking down the stairs, she could see that her whole house was now cloaked in green. The everyday landmarks that she lived with had become foreign objects, transformed into an ominous viridescent landscape unknown to her. As her hand came to rest upon the latch, her logical mind gave one final push to win the fight. She could go upstairs, close her eyes, really, really close them, and soon it would be a normal coloured morning.

And yet she opened the door.

The sound was unbearable. Metal creaked, crunched, and oscillated all around and above her. Legs rose up in front of her, giving way to the slants and sharp points of the body that stood in front of her. As she craned her neck up towards the endless angles of metal, Hailee's saucer-shaped pupils began to make out a sheet of undulating water pushing its way through the machine's hull. The water rippled faster and faster, as if moved by unseen winds, until a hole started to take shape at its centre. A hole with what looked to be eyes. A hole with what looked to be a face.

The liquid stop moving abruptly, and the eyes moved forward as if to push out from behind the pane. All four of them. The six holes that lay beneath them expanded and contracted independently, as if each searching for something to inhale and consume. Hailee's heart was no longer beating in her mouth. She feared it had completely stopped.

From three of the holes, vines of deep purple launched out and snaked their way down a spider leg, coiling their way closer to her. Unable to move, Hailee watched as the ropes slithered across the grass and then halted at the tip of her Converse. The ends snapped open with a jolt, tongues protruding, forming three unearthly mouths, that spoke in disarming unison.

'We've come to take you home.'