Hell…What is it? As a child I was told that people went there; that Hell was a place where bad people were sent. A place so horrible that our minds wouldn’t be able to comprehend the horrors. Creatures that are next to impossible to imagine would roam and unbearable things would happen to people.  Wherever I am, this must be hell. I was not a bad person. Why would I be here? I don’t know how long I have been here. With my dead eyes I tell myself that there is no escape. My name is Jeremy, and this is my story.

I should start from before I entered this place. I was a high school student and pretty much an average one at that. I had friends; not too many and not too few. I was never one to stand out when it came to academics and the social scene. There was one thing, though, that separated me from the rest of the high school students. I am an exceptional drawer. The only problem is that I can only draw things that I see in my dreams. If you could call those dreams.  In these dreams I would be exploring an eerie building filled with creatures of unspeakable horrors. I would see myself with these creatures but it wasn’t me. Maybe it was me, but my eyes are dead and I would help these creatures do horrible things to people I couldn’t see. If it was me in these dreams, why was I with these creatures? Why was I aiding them in torturing the poor soul that I had never seen before? The strangest thing about these dreams is that I was watching myself do this and at the end of each dream, the dream me would point to where I’m standing and shriek a sound that haunted me during the daytime.  These dreams occurred on a nightly basis, and each night it ended the same way: me with dead eyes pointing to where the real me is and shrieking that horrible noise. After a while I began to worry about these dreams.  One morning I woke up like I did every morning. I ate, showered, and got ready for school. When passing by my bedroom mirror, I did one final check to make sure I looked okay. What I saw in the mirror was my reflection and it was staring back at me with a different facial expression than the one I was wearing and completely vacant eyes. I leapt back in surprise and in a blink of an eye my reflection was back to normal. I started to move around the mirror to see if the me in the mirror would do the same thing. It mimicked me exactly. I walked away believing it was my imagination, hoping it was my imagination.  For a while I avoided that mirror. I couldn’t get rid of the image of me staring at myself with that face. That week my dreams also took a turn for the worse. They seemed more real than they’ve ever been before.  About a week later from that experience I decided to look into the mirror again. I walked up to it with a straight face and stared at my reflection. Again, it had dead eyes. After a moment it cracked an eerie grin across its face, the eyes got wide, and its arms moved straight out of the mirror. I stood there, frozen with fear. He grabbed my shoulders, brought his face up to mine, and then he said in a voice far different from mine, “Welcome to my world.” and then he pulled me in.

I must have passed out from the initial shock of what just happened because I awoke in a dim, yet familiar, room. My body felt weak and at the same time I felt like I was torn apart by sharp, yet rusty, teeth; almost as if I were chewed up. I tried moving my arms but found that they were strapped down to whatever I was on top of. I tried moving my legs but found that those too were strapped down. I started at the ceiling in a dimly lit room hoping that maybe I could sort out what happened. I didn’t know what to think. I spent a good minute trying to figure out what was going on in my head when a cold chill went through my very soul. I knew this room. I had seen it every night in my dreams. As I came to that realization I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Horror struck me when I turned my head. It was me. I was looking at a figure with my face. It was standing next to me as I lay there, glaring at me with dead eyes that could pierce through your soul. I just lay there, not knowing what was going to happen, stricken with fear as I stared at myself. Then my reflection shrieked that god-awful shriek and his head started to move irregularly. His head jerked insanely and his neck was almost like rubber. It had to be to allow movements like those. Then he stopped and stared at me with those empty eyes. He leaned over me and said, “There is no escape.” He smiled and then the creatures appeared. He stepped back as the creatures walked forward. One of them opened its hand and immediately impaled my stomach with it. As I let out a scream I hear the other me let out its shriek again. The creature then are above me, attacking me.  I died…or so I thought.

I am strapped down to the table for what seems like weeks. Every hour or so the creatures come and do horrible things to me. Sometimes they attack me relentlessly. Other times they perform experiments, or what I believe to be experiments. Other than the fact that I’m in my own worst nightmare, something still doesn’t feel right.  I don’t ever get hungry. If its been as long as I believe it has, I should have felt the slightest bit of hunger. But nothing at all. Another thing that doesn’t sits well is the fact that I am somehow alive. They do so much to my body, I feel the pain every time they do something to me, and yet it’s always alright when I wake up again. My limbs have literally been torn from my body but when I wake up again my body is perfectly fine; no scars, no marks, no signs of any abuse. I should be dead, yet I live. One day, when I wake up again, I find that my arms and legs are not strapped down. I lay there not knowing what to do. One part of me told me not to go anywhere, only more horrors can await. The other part of me told me to get the hell out of there. I decided to get up and run.  I cautiously sat up not knowing if anything was in the room. I scanned every inch of my confinement and found it was clean. I stood up but my legs gave way almost instantly. I collapsed onto the floor like a rag doll. I slowly got up and when I got control back to my legs I started to walk. It wasn’t exactly easy. I was supporting myself on whatever I could grab. My heart skipped a beat when I eventually found a door. I grabbed the knob, twisted it, and slowly pulled the door open not knowing what I would find on the other side. When it was wide enough I took a peek outside and found a familiar hallway. It wasn’t very well lit, but still, a step up from the previous room. I slowly and cautiously walked out of the room and was thankful to find that there was a handrail to clench. It seemed too good to be true.  At the end of the hallway was another door that looked like it could be an exit. The second I gasped in excitement I heard a roar, the last sound I wanted to hear. I looked behind me and my jaw dropped. It was the first creature that I ever put on paper. The last one I wanted to see. This one was different than the others. It had the arms of a human, the legs of a beast, but it ran on all fours. Its lower jaw was double the size of its top jaw but both were filled with rotting, yet sharp, teeth and it had hair on its hunched back that rose almost straight up. It roared one more roar and then started running my way. I started to run, or do the best I could do. I was gaining speed but the creature was gaining on me very quickly. I looked back to see how far away it was from me. It was coming in on me fast. It ran and then jumped onto the side of the wall and started to go even faster. I was nearly at the door when my legs gave way again. In a panic I started to pull myself towards the door using my arms. I quickly grabbed the handle and opened the door, went through it and closed and locked it as quickly as I could. I felt relieved as I felt a giant thud hit the other side. I was safe. I stood up and turned around to notice the room was pitch black. I felt a terrible chill go through my body.

Then a terrible shriek filled my ears. The lights flipped on and all I could see was mirrors. They were everywhere; as far as the eye could see. The room seemed to be infinite. I stared at the mirrors and then my heart stopped completely. I watched in horror as I saw my reflection slowly crawl out of each mirror. Some were shrieking, others were twitching involuntarily, and all were coming towards me. I fell to my knees, mouth gaping, eyes staring into the reflections’ dead eyes. One of them walked right up to me shrieking and leaned down to my level. It’s eyes widened and I stared directly into them not knowing what to do. Its face was less than an inch away from mine and I passed out.  I woke up in a dark room, strapped down again. All that was in the room was my reflection standing next to me, staring at me with its empty eyes.  “What is this? Who are you?” I would have asked more questions but it simply raised it’s arm and spoke calmly, this time in my voice. “This is your tomb. You cannot escape no matter how hard you try.” Then he raised his hand to a wall and I saw my body lying down motionless, surrounded by machines. I then saw a doctor walk into the room and my parents close behind him. The doctor then said, “He is in a deep coma. He does have a chance to come out of it but that chance is very slim.”  My parents simply nodded and said “We will keep him on life support. All we can do is hope for him to come out of it.”  It was at that point that I started to yell. I shouted at them, telling them to pull the plug but they couldn’t hear me. Tears were streaming down my face. I couldn’t help it.  “What the doctor doesn’t know is that there is no chance of you waking up. You are here forever. This is your tomb.” It said looking at me with a somewhat sympathetic look on its face.  I shouted, cried out to him. “Who are you?”  “I am you. You try to run, I know where you’ll go.” he simply says. Then the creatures started to surround me and he slowly backed away, smiling tauntingly, almost telling me to try to escape. I wailed as the creatures surrounded me.  To this day I am trapped here. I try to escape every chance I get but I am always found. I don’t know how long I have been here.  With dead eyes I told myself that there is no escape.