Taken

The wind is cold, chilling my joints so that they are stiff when I awaken. I am not sure how long I have been asleep; I know that when I finally dozed off, it was somewhat close to midnight. I have no way of telling time, sadly; my watch broke a few weeks ago and I haven’t had the drive to go get it fixed or to get another one. I don’t want to replace this watch; it has a lot of sentimental value to me. It was given to me by my now late girlfriend, two days before she was killed by a coked-up fiend robbing her house to try to find something to sell, so he could go score some more coke.

The police tried their best to find the guy, but they never did. Not that I expected them to, mind you; my town’s police force is inept at their best days, and downright homicidal at their worst. The town I lived in was called Decesne, a small town in the northern part of New Hampshire. The locals had a different name for it, though. They called it Purgatory, mostly because anyone who moved there soon wanted to get out, but couldn’t. It was like it sucked you in and left you there to rot for eternity.

Needless to say, nothing interesting really ever went on there.

Slowly, my senses start to come back to me. In a few minutes, I am fully awake- though not to say I am rested fully, not in the slightest. I open my eyes. It’s still dark outside, so my eyes take a minute to adjust to the lack of light. When they do, I’m surprised to find myself outside. I suppose I shouldn’t be; when I was eight, I was clinically diagnosed with somnambulism, or sleepwalking as it is most often referred to as. I’ve been taking medicine for it for awhile, and it’s helped somewhat, but occasionally I’ll have a recurrence and wake up someplace where I don’t know where I am.

I look around to try and figure out where I’m at. Normally, I can at least see one or two identifying landmarks, and then I’ll be able to deduce where I find myself. Here, though, all I can see are trees. That at least tells me I’m in a forest somewhere. That in and of itself is odd; whenever I sleepwalk, my body takes me to some urban area, without fail. I think it knows that if it just left me out in the wilderness when I awoke, I would never find my way out. So why did it do this to me this time?

I stand and stretch. My joints protest in silent agony, but soon they capitulate and begin working properly again. I move them around a bit to get the blood back flowing to them, shivering just about uncontrollably the entire time.

It then hits me: when I fell asleep, it was the middle of summer. July 24th, to be precise. Five days before my 26th birthday. The weather was hot and muggy, like it always was that time of year. So how the hell am I now shivering uncontrollably, buffeted by chilled winds?

Where the hell am I?

I look around some more, trying to see if there’s anything else besides trees in my current line of sight. No such luck. I sigh and pull out my cell phone to use the GPS tracker that I have on it. It was really the whole reason why I got a smart phone in the first place, just in case my sleepwalking hits and I need to find my way back to my house.

My phone, however, is dead. Another weird occurrence; I fully charged it right before I fell asleep. There’s no way it should be-

Wait. I was in my house, with the phone on the charger, resting on my bedside table. So how on earth did it get into my pocket? I must have grabbed it subconsciously before I left; it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve taken things with me before I go on one of my sleepwalking journeys. But my cell phone? That’s a first. I’ve never taken it with me before.

With no landmarks and no way of finding out where the hell I am, I simply decide to start walking. Maybe soon I’ll come across something I can use. Until then, I pray my legs don’t fail me.

One foot in front of the other. Step, step, step. I walk slowly at first, bracing myself against the chilly wind. Soon, though, I pick up the pace, as my body starts to ever so slowly adjust to its surroundings. Evolving, if you want to use that term.

On a whim, I call out: “Hey! Can anyone out there hear me?” I don’t expect an answer, and my expectations are fulfilled. Not a single sound can be heard out here, if you don’t count the biting wind whispering all around me. I sigh and keep going.

I begin to notice things as I walk along what maybe used to be a path a couple hundred years ago, but is now just another part of the forest bed. For starters, it feels like winter temperatures out here; there should be snow on the ground, or at the very least a thin layer of ice. My boots, however, crunch nothing but the dried branches and twigs that have fallen to the forest floor.

The next thing I notice is what I am wearing, and more specifically that it isn’t what I was wearing when I dozed off. I had gone to sleep in a pair of thin pajama pants and an old cut-off T-shirt that had been passed down to be by my dad before he left my mom and I. It is one of the only things I kept when he left; everything else of mine that used to be his, I tossed in the trash. I wanted as few reminders of his betrayal as could possibly exist.

But back to my current predicament. What I am wearing now, resembles nothing that I had on at the house. I am now wearing a thick long-sleeved shirt, with army-issue fatigue pants and combat boots. All of them are the traditional camouflage pattern. I own none of these things back at the house; my dad does, from back in his army days, but I have never wanted anything to do with that stuff, and besides it was all way too big for me. These clothes fit me perfectly, like they were made just for me.

It's all very strange.

I shiver again. I can feel the cold seeping into my skin, chilling me from the outside. I was never a “big kid.” Hell, right now, I’m standing at 5-foot 8, and barely breaking 130 pounds soaking wet. Needless to say, I am not an imposing presence, and neither am I one that could just shrug off the effects of cold. I have no real fat on my body to speak of, mostly just flesh and undeveloped muscles. So this cold is really getting to me.

I call out again to try and get a response. Again, nothing. I sigh, watching my breath condensate in the air before wisping away like it had never been there. I pull out my cell phone to check it again, just to see if by some miracle it was working now. It wasn’t.

I am just about to curse aloud, when I see something skitter to a halt in front of me. I look up from my phone to see what it was, and I about empty my lungs out. What is in front of me is obviously something that does not exist at all on this planet, not anywhere that I’ve heard of at least. It has six legs, spindly like a spider’s legs, but the front two were raised off the ground (and thus useless for walking) and ending in sharp scythe-like claws. Its body is furred like a rat, and the head seems like a cross between a lion’s head and a lobster’s head.

This thing is ugly.

I shout at it to get it to go away. It shouts back and charges me. Yelling out loud, I scramble backwards to avoid it, but end up tripping on a tree stump and falling flat on my ass. As it keeps on coming towards me, I fish awkwardly in my pockets, trying to see if there’s anything around for me to defend myself with, against it. Luck is not on my side today; my cell phone is the only thing I have on me.

It keeps coming, and I pray to God to save me. I have never really believed in God, but now that I was about to die, it seems like a pretty good time to start.

When it is about five feet away from me, it snarls again and jumps. It looks like it’s ready to kill me, then eat me for lunch. I cry out one more time as I await my final breath, and close my eyes so I don’t have to see what it’s doing to me.

Seconds pass, and no rending of flesh is occurring. I chance a glimpse to see what is going on, and I see it suspended in mid-air, a pinkish glow surrounding it. It’s not moving, though I can tell by the muscle tension that it’s struggling mightily to escape.

Suddenly I hear a voice from beside me: “Oh wow this thing is nasty… Are you ok?”

I look beside me to see something else I’d never seen before. It looks like one of those miniature horses you see as a part of a circus, the ones they let really little kids ride on for a dollar a ride. Except this one was a lilac purple color, and its mane was three or four different colors. Not to mention the weird design on its flank.

What the hell is this thing? Well, at least it’s trying to save me.

“I’m not hurt,” I answer. “I think I can owe that much to you.”

“You owe me nothing,” the creature says. She flicks her head, and the creature vanishes. It’s only then that I see that she has a horn. So this thing is a unicorn? I suppose I should be more shocked than I am. I see that her horn is glowing with the same pink light that the creature was, before it disappeared. A second later, the light around her horn faded into nothingness.

I look at her oddly. “Thank you,” I say.

She smiles. “I couldn’t let that thing hurt you.” She is studying me up and down as she speaks. “I must admit, I have never seen anything like you before.”

I laugh softly to myself. “I can say the same for you.” I look around us. “Where are we?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” she says. “I was asleep in my house, then I woke up out here in this chilling cold.”

Obviously, that is exactly what happened to me, and I tell her as much. She seems to be very concerned that something as odd as this could happen to two separate entities at the same time, seemingly randomly.

“Where to now, then?” I ask. She shrugs. Apparently she doesn’t know the lay of the land any better than I do.

“I guess we’ll keep walking, then,” I say. She nods, and we walk off together. We try to stay as quiet as we can, just in case any of those things are around, that she wasn’t able to find. At least, I assume it’s a she; I’m not just going to out and out ask her what her gender is.

What I do ask her, though, is what her name is. She says she’s Twilight Sparkle. I think that’s kind of a gay name, but again I keep that bit to myself. I tell her my name is Matthew Keenan, and she says it’s a pleasure to meet me. I’m not sure if I echo those sentiments, but for pleasantries’ sake I tell her the same.

She shivers. “Have you seen anything that remotely resembles a house?” I shake my head, and she grimaces. “Nor have I…” She starts to look up in the trees, and I do the same. I estimate we’ve been walking for about half an hour now.

Suddenly, she stops, and I do the same. She points up to one of the tree branches, and I look as well. When my eyes catch on to what she is pointing at, I can hardly believe my eyes. Sitting on that branch is what appears to be a full-on one-story house. It’s not acting like it’s balanced precariously or anything; in fact, it seems to simply be resting there with no troubles at all.

We look at each other and nod, then begin to climb the tree. In a few minutes, we’re up to the house, and she knocks on the door. No answer can be heard, not even footsteps coming to the door to see who is disturbing them at such an ungodly hour. She tries the doorknob; it opens, unlocked.

We both walk inside. The house is heated, thank God, and I immediately start to feel better. I close the door once we’re both in, to try to keep as much of the cold air outside as we possibly can. I check to see if I’m wearing anything underneath my outergarments; I do have a pair of underwear and a pair of socks on, but no shirt. I’m not about to keep this long-sleeved shirt on, though; I’ll be sweating my balls off in a minute or two. So, I take the shirt off and toss it on the couch.

She comes back into the main room. “It doesn’t look like anyone is here at all. No clothes, no nothing… The beds don’t even look like they’ve been touched in a very long time.”

That doesn’t make sense. Obviously there’s still electricity, or the lights wouldn’t be on. Obviously, there’s some kind of gas power being pumped into the house, otherwise the heaters wouldn’t be working. For all intents and purposes, somebody lives here.

I go to the kitchen to check on the food supplies. Here is where I encounter what I think is our first real problem, aside from being in a completely unknown location with negative-degree temperatures and freaky rat-monstrosities trying to kill us. On top of all that, there’s no food in the house. Nothing in the cupboards, nothing in the ice box. There’s no real refrigerator to speak of, but I assume that’s what the ice box is for. I holler out to Twilight and tell her what I’ve found.

“No food??” she responds, sighing. “We’ll just have to go out and get some more in the morning.”

“From where?” I ask.  She gives me a look that says she doesn’t know, but we will figure it out. Suddenly, I feel very tired, even though I just woke up not too long ago. Maybe it was because of the heat. I tell her that I’m going to sleep, and she says she will be doing the same. I go to the couch and arrange it how I like. I lay down and feel myself drifting off almost immediately.

I can’t tell how much later it is when this happens, but later on I feel something light settle down on my chest. I open my eyes and I see Twilight curled up on my chest, breathing deeply and evenly. It strikes me now that in spite of the fact that I’ve never seen anything like her before, she is a beautiful creature. I smile and close my eyes again, and drift back into oblivion.