The Hunger

It happened overnight. 

One evening, the whole world was bathed in the rich hues of a setting sun, the sky painted in oranges and purples. The next morning, everything had turned gray. Not just dull or faded, color itself was gone. The trees, flowers, ocean, even people’s skin and eyes had become mere variations of black, white and gray. It was if reality had been drained, leaving behind a lifeless, monochrome wasteland. 

At first, scientists tried to explain it as some anomaly in human vision, a mass hallucination, an unknown pollutant in the air. But when they dissected plants and animals, their tissues were colorless at a molecular level. Screens, paintings, dyes, nothing could produce a single shade beyond the grayscale spectrum. 

Then, people started disappearing. 

It wasn’t like normal vanishing. There were no signs of struggle, no footprints leading away. One moment someone was there, and the next: gone, like they had been erased from existence. The only thing left behind was a faint, smudged shadow on the ground, as though they had begun to dissolve before vanishing entirely. 

Escher had been watching it happen for weeks. He kept a notebook where he marked every missing person in his town, tracking patterns, trying to make sense of it all. At first, the patterns were unclear, just a slow trickle of missing people. 

The painters, the poets, the dreamers; those who had dared to whisper about color, to grieve its absence were the first to go. Then, it was the children who still dreamed in color, their small voices describing the impossible: a sky that wasn’t gray, a sun that burned gold. Each one disappeared without a sound, leaving behind nothing but that eerie, smudged shadow. 

Now, Escher could feel it watching him, lingering just at the edge of his vision, a weight in the air that pressed against his skull, cold fingers at the nape of his neck. The more he thought about color, the stronger it became, like a slow, suffocating whisper wrapping around his mind. 

He had a theory, but it curdled in his stomach like rot. 

What if whatever took the color away... was still here? 

And what if it didn’t want anyone to remember what had been lost? Escher kept his theory to himself. He had seen too many people vanish after speaking too freely. But in the quiet of his apartment, under a single flickering bulb, he scrawled his thoughts into his notebook, pressing the pencil so hard against the paper that the tip snapped. 

That night, sleep came in restless waves. Dreams of golden sunrise, of green forests and sapphire oceans, flickered behind his closed eyelids. Something else lurked there too: a whispering void, pressing at the edges of his vision. A presence that noticed him. 

He woke with a start, heart pounding. The bulb above him flickered more erratically now, casting sharp, jumping shadows across the walls. Then he saw it. 

A smudge, one of those gray stains on the floor near his desk. It hadn’t been there before. It looked like the others, the ones left behind by the vanished. But he was still here. Escher reached out a shaking hand, brushing his fingers over the smudge. Ice shot up his arm. His breath hitched, his vision wavered, and for a split second... he saw something. 

A figure. A shifting mass of darkness standing in the corner of his room. Featureless, faceless, but watching him. Waiting. The moment passed, and he yanked his hand away. The thing was gone, but he knew it had been real. 

He flipped open his notebook with trembling fingers. If he was right, he had limited time before it came for him. He needed answers. Somewhere out there, someone knew the truth. Someone who was still alive. 

- 

Escher didn’t sleep again that night. He sat at his desk, staring at the smudge on his floor, waiting for it to move. It didn’t, but something else did. A creak in the hallway. Slow, deliberate. His breath hitched. He lived alone. 

The sound came again, closer this time. A dragging shuffle, like bare feet sliding across wooden floors. Escher reached for the nearest object: a rusted letter opener. Pathetic, but it was something. He moved toward the door, silent, his pulse slamming against his ribs. He pressed his ear against the wood. 

Nothing. 

Then, a whisper. 

Not words. Just a sound. Something wrong, like wind whistling through hollow bones. Escher yanked the door open. The hallway was empty, but the walls weren’t. Long, uneven handprints streaked the wallpaper, dragging downward, as if something had clawed its way along. The air was thick, pressing, like he had stepped into a vacuum where sound and light had begun to fold in on themselves. 

Then he noticed the door at the end of the hall: Apartment 203. No one had lived there for months, but now, it was open. A sliver of darkness yawned beyond the threshold, impossibly black, deeper than shadow. Something was inside. Watching. Waiting. Fingers slowly emerged from the darkness, wrapping around the edge of the door. 

Not quite human, too long, too thin, curling around the edge of the door. The skin wasn’t just gray; it was wrong, shifting like static, like it wasn’t fully real. 

The fingers twitched. 

Escher bolted. He didn’t stop until he was outside, breath steaming in the cold air. The city was dead silent, buildings looming in their grayscale monotony. But something had changed. The streetlights flickered, and for the first time since the color vanished, Escher saw something new. In the distance, above the rooftops, high in the night sky- 

A single, pulsing red light. 

The first color he had seen in weeks, and deep in his gut, Escher knew: It was calling to him. He had two choices: run the other way and pretend he never saw the red light, or, go to it. Every survival instinct screamed for the first option, but something deep inside, something primal, pulled him toward the second. It was the first color in a world that had been stripped bare. It was wrong, unnatural... but it was something. 

His feet were already moving. The city was eerily empty. Cars abandoned at intersections; their windshields coated in dust. Storefronts remained open, shelves half-stocked, as if people had simply walked away from their lives. 

The red light pulsed, steady and slow, coming from the tallest building in the city: the old communications tower. As Escher approached, he felt it before he heard it. A deep, low hum. Subsonic, just beneath the range of hearing, but strong enough to feel in his bones. The streetlights flickered in time with it. A shadow moved up ahead. 

Escher froze. A figure stood in the middle of the street, facing away. Motionless. 

The man, or what had been a man, wore a tattered suit, its fabric faded to gray like everything else. Something was wrong with him. His arms hung too long at his sides, limp and lifeless. His head titled slightly, as if listening to something Escher couldn’t hear. And then, slowly, the man’s neck snapped back, bending at an impossible angle.

His face- 

Escher sucked in a deep breath. The man’s eyes were gone. Just smooth, gray skin where they should have been. His mouth hung open in a silent, gaping O, like something had hollowed him out from the inside. And then, without moving his lips, a whisper slid from his throat: 

“You shouldn’t see the color.” 

Escher ran. His breath came in short, sharp gasps, feet pounding the pavement. The communications tower loomed ahead. The hum grew louder. The streetlights died. Darkness swallowed everything, except for the red glow above, pulsing faster now, more urgent. Something was chasing him. He could hear it, a skittering, impossibly fast, limbs scraping against the pavement. The tower doors were open. Escher threw himself inside and slammed them shut. 

Silence. 

His heartbeat thundered in his ears. He took a shaky breath, turning to face the interior. The building was empty. An old stairwell wound up in the dark, leading to the roof. The red glow pulsed from above. There was a voice. Not from behind the door, not the stairwell, but from inside the room. A whisper, slithering through the air like a breath against his ear. 

“You were not supposed to remember.” 

Escher finally realized. The red light hadn’t been calling him. It had been warning him. He turned slowly; his breath shallow. The room was empty, but the whisper had been right next to him. The red light pulsed above, faster now. Urgent. He forced himself forward, gripping the stairwell railing. He had to reach the top. He had to see whatever was waiting for him. 

The climb was endless. The hum grew louder, vibrating through the walls. His vision swam, his skin prickling like something unseen was brushing against him. The climb ended at a door. Rusty, slightly ajar. Beyond it, the red glow bled into the darkness. Escher pushed it open. He walked out onto the roof. The city stretched out below, dad and colorless. At the center of it all, perched on the tower’s antenna like a grotesque, broken thing- 

Whatever it was, it was not a machine. It was alive. 

A shifting, writhing mass, its surface pulsing with sickly veins of red light. It had no defined shape, no eyes or mouth, just an undulating, wet mass of twisting tendrils, each one ending in something horrifying. 

Faces. 

Not full heads. Just faces, half formed, stretched and distorting, mouths open in silent screams. They flickered in and out of existence, as if trapped. Escher knew, deep in his bones, these were the ones who had vanished. Not erased. Not destroyed. 

Absorbed. 

His stomach twisted and his knees nearly gave out. The red light flared, and suddenly, he remembered: The color hadn’t been taken. It had been consumed, and the thing, was still hungry. 

A shadow loomed from behind him. Escher turned just in time to see the eyeless man from the street standing in the doorway, but he was different now. His face was... melting, the edges smearing like wet charcoal, his features slipping away. The man took a step forward. Then another. And with each step, his body blurred, losing detail, like he was being erased in real-time. 

“Join us,” the voices whispered. 

Escher staggered back. The fleshy mass of faces quivered, responding to the movement, its tendrils stretching toward him. The eyeless man, if he even was a man anymore, took another step forward. His form blurred, warping like wet ink, his face melting away completely. Escher tried to run, but something grabbed his ankle. 

Ice shot up his leg as a tendril snaked up his calf. It wasn’t solid, not exactly. It was like touching static, buzzing, shifting, eating away at him the moment it made contact. A dark gray substance was oozing out of his skin like ink in water. He kicked, thrashed, clawed at the rooftop, but it was pulling him in. More tendrils lashed out, latching onto his arm, his torso, his face. 

Cold. Deep. Endless. 

His vision swam. Shadows moved at the edges of his sight. His skin tingled as something deeper than pain rippled through him. Like he was being unraveled. The voices rose in a distorted, guttural chorus. 

“Join us.” 

Escher gasped, and for the briefest moment, he saw everything. Not just the city. Not just the rooftop. Beyond. The world before color disappeared and the thing that had come before that. Something vast. Endless. Watching. Waiting. That fleshy thing of faces wasn’t the beginning. It was only a fragment of something much, much worse. 

The red light pulsed one final time. Then... It went out.

Silence. Darkness. A whisper, rippling through the void. 

"Now… we are free."