I only turned my back for a second, and they all died. All of the hot girls, dead.

This party had suddenly taken a very bad turn.

What could I have been thinking? Rat poison is, by definition, poison, and who was I to say which small amount might be safe and which would not? Which would bring a nice high and which would bring death?

As I moved my hand over their bodies to check for any remaining signs of life, of hope, it was as if darkness flowed out from my fingers and onto everything around me. I could no longer see their faces. This might normally have been considered a good thing, what with them being dead and all. But this time, this time it was not. For as I reached to check for a pulse, I instead found the toothy grimace of agonizing death, seemingly about to bite down and rip at my flesh. Instead of the faintest of breaths, I instead found hands contorted by pain into claws that seemed to grasp at me, as if to pull me in with them.

But it was only my imagination. The dead do not bite. The dead do not grasp.

The darkness flowing from me continued to spread. The lamp in the corner served only to illuminate itself - its light no longer reached the walls, or the floor, or the ceiling. Or the grotesque scene on the bed.

I knew that I had to get away from there, from that macabre display, from the darkness.

So I ran.

I ran, and the darkness continued to flow from my body. It became an expanding wake of nothingness which I pulled along behind me.

I ran faster.

I ran as fast as my legs would carry me, but it was not fast enough. I bent forward, and I began to use my arms as well. I dug my fingers into the ground and I pulled with my arms as mightily as I pushed with my legs. I became something else. Something no longer human. A beast. Running from darkness that I myself had created, that I myself continued to spread.

A moment of clarity struck me.

I stopped.

The darkness caught up with me, surrounded me, enveloped me. It began to contract and flow back into me.

As I stood, panting, in that shrinking circle of darkness, I saw lights in the distance.

Then I woke up.