Being a skinwalker's victim

I was walking up the stairs to my apartment, tired after a long day studying the library. If it wasn’t for Emmy, Ashley and I just wouldn’t have gotten anything done. She’d even picked up coffee for all of us and organized the study session to begin with.

I smiled thinking about her. She was so cute sometimes, she might act all indifferent, but she really cared about us and wanted us all to do well. Ashley too, turning up late and acting the ditz, but really her notes were the most organized out of any of ours, and she’d always been leaning over to help me get over any concepts I was struggling with.

A hand grabbed my mouth from behind and my pulse doubled. Cold and clammy, cold and clammy and strong! My thoughts began racing as panic set in. Who was that? At my neck came a sharp pain, like my skin was piercing apart, or like I was being injected with something. I tried to scream but I couldn’t, a cold fear settling into my body as my arms and legs started to feel more and more like jelly.

“Oh my God, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been injected with something, I’m dying, or I’m being kidnapped, oh my God, what are they going to do with me??”

I tried to move my hand and reach for my phone, anything, if I could just get a call out…!

But there was something wrong with my hand. It looked like it was flattening, like all the substance and mass was disappearing from it, like a juicebox being sucked dry. I tried and tried to scream and a deep terror banged in my heart, but it was as if my vocal chords were made of jelly, too soft and pliant to vibrate and make any sound at all.

It was then that I heard it; a low rolling grumble of a laugh, that just when I felt I could recognize it, or knew who it was, would shift and go high pitched, before warping back around again until I couldn’t make it out.

The horrible, strange condition of my hand had spread fast and consumed nearly my whole body by now. Some small tears left my eyes as I felt it reach my head, that same emptiness and absolute loss of heat and energy and substance that had started in my fingertips and consumed every part of me. The last thing I could feel was hands grabbing my hair and pulling me inside my own room before everything went dark.