I heard a voice in my house

Words fail me. I don’t know what to believe. I'm just going to try and preserve what happened to me. I hope by writing it down I can clear my thoughts.

It was a typical day that everything happened. I had just gotten home from work. And I was preparing to go through some documents in the study of my house. At the time I was living alone in my old family home. A rackety building in an ancient neighborhood, it had been abandoned for a while. Me and my siblings had left the city in search of faraway places. And I hadn’t been back there in well over a decade.

My job involved travel and so this was just a business trip. No need to rent a hotel. The house was still ours. My family had been renting it out for several years but it was currently devoid of tenants. Except for me that is.

Imagine my surprise when I heard a voice from upstairs.

“Danger” A man spoke in a harsh tone.

I sat there for a moment not knowing what to do, then I ran up the steps to the second story. There was no one. The dust in each of the rooms was undisturbed.

“Who are you? Get out of my house!” I shouted

But then I heard the same voice from downstairs. “Collapse” The voice echoed.

It was impossible that I had missed the intruder. There was only one staircase.

I quickly ran back down to the kitchen where I knew the voice had come from.

There was nothing.

And then I heard the voice again. “Sancta tori nota” echoed distantly.

The voice was coming directly from outside the kitchen window. The problem was I was looking right at where the noise had come from and there was nothing there.

“How are you doing that?” I said. My words were shaky as I grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter.

The voice spoke again. It’s source emanating from empty space.

“Harvest. Capricorn. Tangerine. Cannibal. Vitriol.”

There was a door in the kitchen leading outside and I went through it. I was now in the open air by the side of the house. I looked around for the person speaking. Still, there was no one.

But then I heard a different voice, another man. It was gentler, more calm. This time undeniably coming from an empty space in the air a short distance in front of me.

“Kill the mailman”

And just like that, the voices were gone.

I just sat down for a moment holding my head with my hand. This must be some stress induced paranoia I thought. And so I called my doctor. He’d be able to see me next week.

Great, I thought in a sarcastic tone. And so I just went back to work at my old wooden desk in that decaying house of muted colours and old peeling wallpaper.

The next day though something happened again. It was the afternoon and I had just got back from my job. I was pouring through papers at my desk when I heard something. A ring of the doorbell.

I went downstairs and answered it. Slightly annoyed at being disturbed.

There was a man outside. He had an almost sickly appearance about him. His pale skin appeared feverish. He was a guy with severe black hair and a beard. He was a mailman.

He looked at me and barely whispered a few words in a soft vehement voice. “Package for you”.

He took something out from behind his back and presented it to me. It was an unwrapped wooden box. Old and decayed.

I stared at the strange mail carrier for a moment before I took it. There was no return address or any information of any kind with it. “Thanks” I said as I took the package from his hands.

The man stayed there staring at me as I closed the door in front of him.

The house was silent as I took the box towards the kitchen, sat it down on the kitchen counter and opened it. Inside there was some paper. Sheets of dirty printing paper covered in messy black handwriting.

There were no words on the scraps, just English letters randomly arranged to look like words. It looked like an incomplete parody of what a letter should look like. There were little images in the corners that looked like they were meant to be stamps, but they were just drawn on in ink.

I went back out to the door to ask the mailman about the box but he was gone. There was no one there

I turned around to head upstairs but the minute I did I heard the doorbell ring again.

And so I opened the door.

It was another mail carrier. This time it was a woman. She had wispy brown hair and her eyes were different colours. One was bright green, the other was deep blue.

She looked past my shoulder and inside my house.

“Package for you” She yelled at me.

I was taken aback. But something else that confused me was that she wasn’t holding a package. But then she reached behind her back. And pulled away a parcel that was dripping red liquid. “Package for you!” She yelled again. Shoving the thing towards me.

The parcel fell into my hands. It was damp. “What is this?” I asked

But just then I blinked and I was in my kitchen. I didn’t remember walking here. The room was full of people. Polite guests walking around and chatting. There was a party.

For a moment I was confused beyond belief but then something strange happened. My thoughts changed. It was as if everything was fine and that was how things were always meant to be.

Of course, how could I forget the party? I thought. The party of course, of course the party. I stood up and went to go chat with my guests.

The vibrant red wallpaper looked beautiful with the newly varnished hardwood.

I chatted with my guests. Pointless and delightful words I seem to have forgotten. But the more I spoke and the more I walked around my house the more I thought something was wrong.

I held a cup in my hand. It was made of bone. Beautiful polished ivory.

My chandelier was made of bone also. Many bones interlocking together. And so was my table, and so was my lamp, and so were the chairs.

Hundreds of bones lined up beautifully to form magnificent furniture. Why, how lovely, how stylish I thought.

I can’t say I remembered buying them, but oh how fashionable they looked! The human femurs provided great support, they were an incredibly useful material. I glanced out the window. The sky was an orange crimson colour, and at that moment the world above appeared to be caving in. Pieces of the sky were falling to earth.

Delightful! I thought.

But then I heard a voice. From far away. One of the voices I had heard before. The voice I remembered hearing so long ago. “Somethings wrong,” it said. “The guests, look at the guests”.

I stood there for a minute. Puzzled.

And then I saw it. The guests were eating each other.

Daintily and carefully with little forks occasionally they just seemed to take a piece out of each other and eat it. They did it playfully and with little laughs as they stole little chunks of flesh.

No one bled, but they were all covered in little red marks. And I realized so was I.

I screamed and threw my hands in front of me. And then suddenly I wasn’t in my kitchen. I was at my front porch and I had just tossed the mail carrier's package onto the floor. The damp red parcel hit the concrete path with a thud.

The mail carrier looked at me. Disappointed. “Didn’t you like it?” She said, “I think we should go back”. She stepped towards me.

I backed away. She stepped forward more, advancing into my house.

I stared for a second at her. Then I ran.

I dashed through the hall of my house and into my kitchen.

I ran to the kitchen door.

I pulled the door knob. Then I realized in horror that the kitchen door was gone. The kitchen wall had stretched over the space where it should have been. The tiled pattern looked as if it had been elongated to cover the space. Dragged and fitted as if made of clay. Blocking the exit so nothing but the door knob remained. The rest was buried behind the stretched tile. And then I realized the same had happened with the windows. They were gone. Covered by the stretched and distorted wall.

There was only one place left to go. I ran upstairs. After a mad dash I slammed the door of my office behind me and pushed the old wooden desk in front of it.

I armed myself with an old chair leg I broke off from the seat that had been at my desk. And then I heard it.

Something sounded on the other side of the study door I had just barricaded. The ring of a doorbell. I heard a raspy screeching voice from the other side. “I have a package for you”.

The door began to shake. Violently it moved in a repeating rhythm. Someone was hitting it from the other side with something heavy. I saw wood splinter near the hinges.

I went to escape out the second story window but just like the first floor the walls had stretched and elongated to make it nonexistent.

But then I heard the voice I had heard before, I heard it in my head, loud and ringing. Thoughts not my own. “Kill the mailman”.

“It’s possible, just don’t touch another parcel” The voice said

A second later the door broke, and behind it there wasn’t a human. There was a thing. A vague approximation of what a human looked like. But not quite. No feature or proportion had been captured quite well. It was a twisted horrific caricature of a person. On its face there was a row of giant square teeth below two massive plate-sized eyes.

I charged at it. Jabbing the splintered chair leg into one of its eyes. It screamed and lunged at me. A scratch ripped open my arm, but I kept fighting. I stabbed and bashed, and was cut and was maimed, but I didn’t stop. I kept on stabbing it, painting the room bright scarlet in terrible splatters.

The violent combat took everything I had and I never stopped, even as the pain overwhelmed my thoughts. And then eventually I was covered in cuts and wounds, and blood. But I had done it. The thing in front of me was nothing but a pile of gore on the ground. One of it’s massive eyes fixed forever staring at me.

I sat on my knees and stared at it. The blood pooling around my legs. “Why is this happening to me?” I thought desperately. Why did this happen. Why? Why? Why? My breathing was erratic as I sat unmoving.

And then that voice in my head spoke again. A calm and distant tone. Contemplative and peaceful.

I’ll never forget what it said.

“The base nature of reality, of your world is collapsing. True reality is a place as close to hell as can be made.”

“In this place nightmarish things beyond your imagination feast. Havens were built to escape them. But now they’re all crashing down. Disintegrating. Failing. The defences are gone. My haven was destroyed. But it was once like yours.”

I sat there in silence as the voice spoke. Not daring to speak. Not daring to think.

“You have some time before it all breaks completely. But know this. Holes in the fabric of everything will start appearing and soon they will start leaking through. Small encounters at first. Like this one. But eventually, the end begins.

The voice paused for a moment.

“Make of this information what you will. I have others to help. Others to warn. I wish you luck.”

Then the voice was gone. Gone from my head and gone from my life. The walls around me had fixed themselves. There were windows again. The corpse of the mail carrier in front of me was gone. Replaced by nothing but a stack of scattered envelopes.

It’s been several weeks since that happened. But now I can tell. I can see them. Weak points in the whole of everything. The realm outside bleeding through. I can tell they’re there. Watching, waiting, devouring. Just beyond vision, just beyond reach. Hiding until just the right moment when they can sneak into our world.