You can't feel, or see anything. The only thing you can hear is your heartbeat pounding in your ears, and the only thing you can taste is your sweat as it drips onto your lips.

It's almost as if you're wrapped in pure, dry liquid blackness that invades your lungs every time you take a breath, sticking to your insides and spreading throughout your body like a parasite.

The darkness squirms between your fingers and inserts itself in all the little crevices in your skin, and it's not really there, you know it's not, but if you concentrate hard enough, you can feel it thrumming against your skin.

You want to scream, but you know if you do, the darkness will crawl into your mouth and make it impossible to breathe anymore, so you keep quiet, curled up and try not to make any sound.

Everything seems to slow down as you screw your eyes shut (you think you did, your vision remains the same either way) and the darkness seems to gently pull at your fingers, extending them until you close your fist again.

It's quiet, so, so quiet, except for the vague skittering you can hear, that you're sure is just an auditory hallucination. You're all alone here, for better or worse.

And the dark, it's not sentient. It's not alive, it just feels like it is, and somehow that's even scarier.

Small, oddly misshapen dark-coloured spots dance in your vision as if you'd just stopped looking at a bright light, but you know that's not the case.

The feeling of something crawling on your skin is a hallucination too, whenever you try to catch whatever imaginary bug is scurrying across your arms and legs, there's nothing there. So, it can't be real.

You're just going crazy. It's okay. If you're crazy, you're still alive, you still exist.

If you're crazy, the dark hasn't yet claimed its next victim.