Day 695

It isn't the first time you've felt like you're sleepwalking, like your lungs are full of water and your bones are made of air. No, not the first time for all that but it is the first time you've heard something while moving.

As usual for these times you drowsily slide out of bed and head for your door, hoping you'd remembered to lock it but it seems you haven't. The hallway doesn't look like it's yours and a tiny part of your mind (perhaps your conscious self) begins to panic that you aren't even in your own home. Strange though, your old family photos are still on the walls, your boots lying where you kicked them off before entering your bedroom but everything else is utterly unfamiliar.

The wallpaper is a grimy beige, the same colour of your school's changing room floors made muddy by too many pupils and too few cleaning staff. It smells like rotting fruit which is odd, you haven't dreamt a smell before. Perhaps you're finally having that stroke people keep warning you about? Or was that smelling toast? It isn't enough to stop your feet from steadily plodding down the corridor.

You can move your head, you find, glancing back at your bedroom door and wanting to return. Your feet won't stop walking down the hallway, to some destination unknown to the rest of you. The faint sounds of preaching reach your ears as it narrows, leading to a singular door. You know it's preaching, the old Vicar used to sound so similar in that droning way of his that told you that you were loved and damned in the same breath.

Come to think of it, the rotting fruit smells like it's been mixed with that same musty church smell you remember so well from your childhood. Old books, old people and old building mixed together and topped with the faint aroma of the communion wine still seems to bring a shiver down your spine as you remember how vacant the old people looked in their pews.

Your hand grasps the door handle so hard you see your knuckles turn white with the pressure. Strangely though you don't feel the pressure - come to think of it you don't feel your feet either, just your neck.Were you numb this entire time or is this a recent development that further proves you're still asleep and you're actually walking into your bathroom or something?

The door opens stiffly, your hand jerks it open enough for you to squeeze through and closes it behind you. It's the old church, just how you remember it as a child. The pews come up to your shoulders and are crammed full of faces, some you vaguely know and others you recognise as your own family. None of them move. Not even their chests move to take breaths like yours does (you glance down to check just in case).

There right at the front, barely lit by the candles that you don't remember ever being lit in reality (assuming that this is still a dream, and at this point it must be), not even for funerals, stands the Vicar. His droning voice echoes out a Biblical verse you swear isn't real but sounds like it could be.

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. Be thanks to God, for he cast out the traitor Jesus and in his place crowned us his faithful ones. Through Him all things are-

He stops and peers down at you, looming as he always had. Up close like this his face looked like it had been made out of clay and roughly slapped onto a vague approximation of a human's head. Before you can fully comprehend that he isn't exactly a human his jaw drops, literally disconnecting from his skull with a loud crack and falls to the floor.

His mouth is probably big enough to swallow you and before you can open your own mouth to scream your face goes as numb as the rest of you. You are left a pair of eyes flickering around wildly, trying to escape from your own body as your feet step forward and into a mouth that reeks of rotting fruit and old books.