Another Grey Day

 I awake to another grey day.

It is not the grey of a cloudy morning, nor the soft, muted tone of a coastal fog. It is the grey of dead television static, a flat, oppressive veil that has smothered the world outside my window. There are no birds. There is no wind. There is only the weight of the air, pressing against the glass like a heavy, unseen palm.

I sit up, my joints popping like dry kindling. My bedroom is exactly as I left it, yet subtly wrong. The dust motes dancing in the stagnant air aren’t moving in currents; they are hovering, suspended in a geometry that defies physics. I reach for the light switch, but my fingers stop short.

The switch is warm.

I press it anyway. The bulb flickers, not with the harsh yellow of tungsten, but with a rhythmic, pulsing violet. It beats like a dying heart, three times, then settles into a dim, sickly glow.

I walk to the window and pull back the heavy, moth-eaten curtains. The street below is gone. There is no asphalt, no sidewalk, no neighbor’s manicured lawn. There is only the Grey—a churning, curdled soup of nothingness that ends abruptly at the threshold of my front door. It is as if the world has been surgically removed, leaving my house floating in the center of an infinite, lightless void.

I turn back to the room, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs, and that’s when I see it.

On the floor, exactly where my feet landed when I climbed out of bed, are wet prints. They aren't human. They are long, thin, and possess too many joints, tracing a path from the closet to the foot of my bed. I follow them with my eyes, my breath hitching in my throat. They don’t lead out of the room. They lead under the bed.

I haven't moved in ten minutes. I am standing in the center of the room, listening to the silence. It is not empty. It is heavy, thick with the sound of someone else’s breathing—a ragged, wet, rattling sound that syncs perfectly with my own inhalations.

I don’t want to look down. I don’t want to see what is pressed against the underside of the mattress, waiting for me to realize that "another grey day" is not a time of day, but a state of entrapment.

Then, from beneath the frame, a hand emerges. It is grey—the same shade as the world outside—and its skin is slick, like wet parchment. It doesn't reach for my ankle. It simply rests on the floorboards, palm up, fingers twitching as if testing the temperature of the reality I’ve woken into.

A voice, sounding like grinding stones, drifts from the darkness beneath the bed.

"You're late," it whispers. "We’ve been waiting for the light to turn violet."

I look at the switch. The violet glow has stopped pulsing. It has turned a deep, bruised black.

The sun has set, and it has only been awake for a minute. The grey is starting to seep through the seams of my floorboards, rising like a cold, hungry tide. I realize then that I am not in my house anymore. I am in the stomach of something much older, and today, for the first time in a long time, the beast is finally beginning to digest.