Jacob Roebuck looked at the scab on his leg and wondered what it could have come from. He had no recollection of ever hurting his leg, yet on his leg was a blackish-red splotch that meant he must have done just that. He worked at a computer all day and then sat around his apartment scrolling through TikTok on his phone all night so there weren’t many opportunities to injure himself. Maybe if he worked at a more traditionally manly job he’d be used to coming home with unnoticed cuts and bruises but he was a data entry specialist.
He must have gotten it in his sleep he reasoned. Regardless of how it happened it didn’t seem like a big deal so he finished drying himself off, brushed his teeth, and hopped into bed. It’d probably be gone by the morning.
It wasn’t.
It wasn’t gone and it wasn’t morning.
An aching in his leg woke Jacob up in the middle of the night. It felt like something burrowing into him. He had seen videos of botflies laying their young in people’s skin. This felt like how those videos looked except much, much bigger. His mind flashed with images of rabbits and gophers’ digging tunnels.
He took a deep breath to steel himself against what he was going to see. Then he yanked the blanket off.
No video he’d ever watched prepared him for what he saw.
There was no longer a scab on his leg. Where the scab had been there was now a hole. But it didn’t look like he had been stabbed or run through with something. There was no blood flowing from the hole, nor did it reveal the disquieting pinkness of human gore. The hole was black. Not black as in the darkness of the night or closed eyes. It was black like the emptiness of the void, black like the sight of the anophthalmic.
Jacob blinked twice.
Then he shrugged and went back to sleep thinking “What a weird dream I’m having.”
Jacob’s eyes shot open.
He didn’t need to look at the clock to know it wasn’t morning yet. It was going to be a miserable day at the office tomorrow. There was no sign of the pain he had felt previously. Weird that he had registered pain in his dream. He couldn’t recall ever having done that before, not that he dreamed very often. Maybe he hit his injured leg in his sleep and that woke him up?
That made sense to him. But if that was the case then what woke him this time?
He pulled back the blanket to check on his scab. He was worried that it might have bled on the blankets if he had struck it like he figured.
The void was still there. But now it was larger, much larger. Far, far too large. It seemed somehow as if the hole was larger than the leg on which it rested. It hurt Jacob’s head to rationalize. A throbbing, aching pain that shot through his temple and down his spine. It must have been a trick of the light he finally decided not because he believed it but simply to be finished thinking.
The hole was just as black as it had previously been, but now there was a sort of texture in the blackness like the walls of some obsidian cave. It seemed almost to ripple with nearly imperceptible shudders. Like waves of pleasure lapping against the shores of an alien planet.
Jacob sat up in bed so he could look down into the hole. It was like looking into a well with no bottom in sight. His insides knotted up in frustration, begging for him to scream. But he did not. There was something inviting about the hole, something that overwhelmed his primitive fear. Something he couldn’t escape.
He climbed inside the hole.
It was large enough that it was easy to just let himself fall forward into it. First his hands and then his head were enveloped in the darkness and he was shocked to find that it had form. It was some kind of liquid. He panicked as he worried that he would drown, but his terrified hyperventilating revealed that he could still breathe. In his panic, he had pulled his torso into the void. Finally, his left leg followed.
Of his right there was no sign.
This made sense to Jacob. The scab had been on his right leg. How could it follow into the hole that it contained?
There was no fear in the realization that he was now crippled, only a concern about the logistics of traversing the void that engulfed him. His worries were assuaged by the ease through which he was able to move. The void was empty after all so there was no fear of falling and injuring himself further. Nor were there any objects to be avoided.
There was only emptiness.
“I must go deeper,” Jacob thought, “to find something.”
He moved through the void first in a leisurely pace and then quicker and quicker as he realized just how empty it was. The very concept of going deeper was brought into question. With no object upon which to anchor his perspective he had no idea if he was going anywhere at all. In theory, he reckoned, he should be able to tell his distance by comparing it to the hole through which he entered. But the hole didn’t appear to be visible from inside.
Jacob scratched at an itch on his arm as he considered what he should do. He had to go deeper, to find something, didn’t he? There must be something to find after all. There just had to be. He wanted to weigh his options to consider the best path forward but his arm just would not stop itching. With a frustrated sigh he looked at the itchy patch.
There was another hole. This one was on his left wrist. It didn’t look quite as big as the one in his leg had but he was able to squeeze into it with a little effort. Just like his leg last time, his arm stayed behind.
He had simply wanted to look into this hole, not go through it. Weird that it didn’t seem like it was up to him anymore.
But he couldn’t complain. He had wanted to go deeper after all and now here he was deeper inside of himself. Surely there would be something to find here, would there not?
There wasn’t. If anything the void had grown darker. That seemed impossible and it hurt his brain to think about it, so he didn’t.
It was getting easier to stop thinking about the situation. It even felt natural to just let the experience wash over him. Jacob had never dabbled with drugs but he was sure this must be what they are like. It was like a chemical was washing over his brain and rewriting not just the rules of reality but his response to them so that what would have once worried him no longer did.
Yet drug trips were always bright and colorful. At least the movies he’d seen throughout his life gave him this impression.
This was nothingness.
How deep would he have to go before there was anything to find?
He would go as deep as he had to, as far into himself as was necessary. After all, a person couldn’t be completely empty. Could they?
His leg itched.
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