A "vertical slice" of fiction.
Presence
His mind raced. Fear and panic consumed him, voiding him of any rational or critical thinking. Understandable given the current situation.
He had completely lost track of the ability to tell time by this point. Had it been seconds? Minutes? Days? It was hard to get a bead on anything because all of his senses were suppressed. Did he even have senses now? The image of the black tendrils working their way up and around him, holding him in place and consuming him, played over and over in his mind.
He remembered the cords forcing their way into his mouth and down his throat. There had been a lot of unusual sensations through his torso soon after that. Not so much as a pain, but it wasn’t natural.
Eventually he fatigued from his struggling, from trying to breathe or scream for help, not that there was anyone nearby who could have helped him.
A cold sensation grew in his chest and reached out towards his neck. It seemed to move and explore, reaching up and behind his throat, reaching towards the base of his skull, from inside him.
A sharp pain split his consciousness suddenly as the cold sensation wrapped itself around his brain, he could feel somehow feel something finding space between his brain and his skull, building pressure in his head. He started to seize but the tendrils held his body rigid now.
This seemed to go on for a long time.
After who knows how long, the pain and “noise” he was hearing in his mind seemed to coagulate and clarify into something more distinct, something akin to thoughts. It was like the static of bad reception while trying to lock onto a signal, words and sounds breaking through incoherently. It was too much for his mind to process and he eventually passed out.
_
Some time later Jackie returned to consciousness. A lack of any report from his senses disconcerted him and he would have panicked again were it not for a surprising intrusion. He heard a voice in his mind.
Not really a voice, more of a feeling, a thought, except that it didn’t come from him. It was projecting a message into his being, a message it repeated over and over like a thought nagging at the back of his mind in a bad dream.
The message finally distilled into a clear thought: “We have within you.”