18TH DECEMBER 2009

I thought it was going to be a normal day.

We had all planned to meet at a shopping centre that our age group usually frequents, and then go to watch a movie. Things went well up to the point when I arrived at the shopping centre. First of all, I managed to get myself lost, though full blame cannot be placed on me due to the fact that the place was undergoing renovation and thus certain parts now looked different. Especially the section that I was walking through, once a row of couture hotspots turned into, of all things possible, a supermarket. I wonder how all those designers managed to suck in their lips and clear their racks to make way for canned beans and mushroom soup?

I was walking around slightly fascinated by how much the place had changed, when I started to feel peckish. I then decided that I should look for something to eat since I had not had my lunch (or at least I presume I hadn't). I walked past the fresh vegetables on display, ignored the yoghurt and daily products on the right, and headed straight for a tall shelf full of packaged burgers of all sorts. There were triple cheese burgers, garden burgers, burgers with yoghurt in them and many others, but I just wanted a simple cheeseburger. The notion of eating a burger that had been sitting around for more than 6 hours, strangely, did not seem to perturb me, so I called over a salesgirl who was standing near a booth where they hand out free samples of food for people to try.

She came over with a smile, wearing a striped pink top and dark brown long pants. Her hair was short and straight cut in boy's fashion, and the sides were neatly tucked behind her ear. Though she had a nametag pinned to the left of her shirt, I do not remember looking at it to find out what her name was. After managing to get a burger and thanking her, I exited the area, found my friends on the opposite side of the building from where I stood. I ran over to them excitedly, meeting up with them and chatting while walking. In total, the people there were Joanna, Yoko, Genevieve, Mariah, Leigh, Celeste, and Shanice. After what seemed like a really short time, Yoko suddenly told us that if we did not hurry to the cinema, we would not be able to get in, so we all rushed toward the escalator that would take us there. This was where the shopping centre that I knew started to change.

The place started to change from dark blue to white coloured walls, and there were more windows, bigger and longer. The place suddenly gave the feel of an airport, and we could see escalators that stretched from the 1st to the 5th floor. That was the one that we had to take, and I was not looking forward to it. We did get lost initially, taking the wrong escalator or turning the wrong way. I even bumped into a large group of girls all cosplaying as the character Sheryl Nome from the anime Macross Frontier, but paid little attention to them. Upon finally reaching the cinema (and going through the nauseatingly long escalator) I handed the usher my ticket, and was about to follow all my friends into the cinema, when the vision blurred and disappeared. The next time things came into focus, the movie had already supposedly ended, and we were all standing outside talking about how we found the movie. I guess my imagination isn't wide enough to support an entire feature film. We said our goodbyes after that, the rest leaving first, and finally myself. I stuck myself into a cab on account of the fact that it was late, and I had no intention of sitting through the massive jam at that time of the day. I probably made the stupidest mistake ever getting into THAT cab.

The driver looked like a retired gangster. His head was shaven clean, he had beady eyes, didn't smile, and I could swear a saw a scar on his cheek. He seemed to be constantly scowling, and when he did speak, he sounded like he was part of the mafia. He was driving toward the address of where my old home used to be, and to get there from the direction that we came in, required the cab driver to make a sharp U-turn that was easy to miss. Of course, usually by telling the driver to look out for the turning, they would be able to catch the turning, but this driver missed it on the first try, insisted that he didn't see it on the second try, and ended up going around the area so many times that he turned off the charge meter and restarted it at one dollar. I was so frustrated, I tried to explain that if he would only let me guide him, he would reach my place faster and I could "GO HOME!" . He then agreed, but then said the strangest thing. He said that he had to run an errand first, and that I would just follow him since I was stuck in the cab. I do not know why I didn't just get out of the cab then, but maybe my dream just didn't let me do that.

We arrived at a housing condominium, and made our way up to one of the floors that was somewhere in the middle. The house was the very last one at the end of the corridor, and you only needed to walk straight down from the lift area to reach it. We both entered the house without even knocking or ringing a bell, and the cab driver headed to one of the master bedrooms while I hung around in the living room. Deciding to be of some help to the cab driver (he claimed he was there to do laundry for the owners) I walked further into the apartment, and looked into one of the rooms. A naturally light brown skinned girl came out then, presumably around my age. She asked me if there was something I needed, and I told her that I was here to help with laundry, and offered to do anything else. She smiled and led me to the living room, he long fringeless brown hair not even swishing as she walked. A dog, more like a puppy, followed after her. At first I had thought that it was a french bulldog, but then I realised that it was a highland terrier, with white fur and black patches that made it look a little like a cow. The girl suddenly asked me if I would like to play with her doll, which eerily resembled herself. I politely refused, trying not to show that I felt something was odd with her. She hadn't asked me to do anything, so I decided to make some light conversation with her while the cab driver did whatever it was he was doing in the bedroom. I asked her what school she went to, to which she replied that she her "school" was in the forest.

Weird.

For some reason after that, she asked me if I would like to stay the night, to which I obviously refused. I barely knew her, and furthermore I should have already gotten home a good two hours ago. My attention shifted to the dog, for I saw something that greatly convinced me that it couldn't be a normal dog. It was picking the lock to the front gate. It literally was standing on two legs, leaning against the metal gate, and using its front paws to maneuvoure a piece of metal wire around the keyhole. I stared at it, my mouth hanging open in utter shock. Just then, I turned back to the girl, and confirmed what I had thought all along.

That isn't a girl.

She had on a smile that was more than chilling to behold, something in her eyes didn't seem human, and she was just clutching the doll in her right hand like how a serial killer would hold a knife just before they stab the unlucky person they target. Her face started to deform, and turn slightly green. An ugly stench filled the apartment, a smell I had never thought could even exist. An overwhelming atmosphere of fear filled me, I thought I was actually going to die. Just then, the cab driver run out from the room, used some object he was holding in his hand to hit the "girl", then grabbed my hand and fled the apartment. A little piece that was to blame for the stench was poking out from the door that the girl had come out from earlier. It was a human hand.

I wanted to throw up, and scream, and even thought of jumping down from the building, but I surpressed all those thoughts and focused on keeping my legs in a running order. Right, left, right, left, breathe in, breathe out.

I don't know how this ended, but I'm very sure we managed to escape.

I took the dog.