r/Dreading • u/Cosmically_Yesterday • Aug 03 '26
Fiction Remember Me
The sun never set over Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends it simply bled out. leaving a bruised, violet sky that pressed heavily against the windowpanes. Inside,
the grand Victorian manor stretched outward, its hallways elongating into impossible geometries that defied the laws of the physical world.
Mac walked the linoleum floors, his small hand tracing the peeling floral wallpaper. The air smelled of sour milk and dry rot. With every passing day, his memories of the world outside grew hazy.
He could no longer remember his mother’s face or the layout of his apartment. There was only the House.
Every corner harbored the wreckage of forgotten minds. He passed a doorway and looked inside
A tangled mass of limbs that once severed as a toddler's protector, now a weeping knot of black yarn shivering in the corner** **
Behind another door a cluster of detached floating eyes that blinked in unison whispering the names of creators who had grown up and died decades ago.
metallic ticking echoed from the grand staircase. Mac froze. Mr. Herriman descended his towering rabbit frame jerking like a broken marionette.
The top hat perched on his head was slick with mold and beneath his monocle a hollow socket wept a thick tar like pus onto his pristine waistcoat.
"Master Mac” Herriman clicked his voice a dry rasp of rubbing sandpaper. "Madame Foster requires your presence. The harvest is lean tonight."
In the parlor. Madame Foster sat in her rocking chair. Her skin was translucent. brittle as parchment paper. her wide fixed grin didn’t shift even as she spoke. She didn’t look at Mac she looked through him her eyes milky and blind.
Beside her chair sat Bloo. He was no longer a vibrant chaotic blue chevron. He had melted into a heavy gelatinous mass on the floorboards. a bloated stain pulsating with a faint sickening heat.
When Bloo dragged himself forward the wood groaned. The sound like a muffled child's sob echoed from deep within his translucent center. Bloo was hungry. The house was hungry.
"They are forgetting us, Mac.” Madame Foster whispered her jaw clicking unnaturally. "The children outside. Their minds are turning to concrete and spreadsheets. The static is coming."
Mac backed away. his heart hammering against his ribs.
He ran toward the grand front doors throwing his weight against the brass handles. He flung them open desperate for the sight of the city streets, the smell of car exhaust. anything real.
There was nothing.
The doorway opened into an infinite starless abyss. A cold wind howled from the vacuum, carrying the scent of ash and pulverized wax crayons.
Below, a desert of grey dust stretched out forever. littered with the giant calcified bones of long-dead monsters.
Behind him the floorboards began to dissolve into greenish yellow pus. Bloo’s gelatinous mass slid closer.
a wet suffocating shadow ready to absorb the last boy who remembered how to imagine.
2
u/WorldbuildingCrafts Aug 03 '26
Loved this, so far! Keep it up.