Naruto opened his eyes but the air was still dark. He sighed and breathed back some of that thick, night air. It was tasteless and lifeless, just swirling nothing. Still mostly asleep, Naruto rolled over and glanced at his clock just a few feet away. The two hands glowed weakly green and pointed somewhere to the bottom right side of the face.
Three, four, five? Somewhere in there… but why was he awake? He shouldn't be getting up for another couple hours.
He didn't think much more on the matter before lying back and relaxing again. The air wasn't particularly cold, but Naruto still pulled the blanket tighter. A creaking from above said that somebody was still awake and moving around on the next floor. Naruto just hoped they wouldn't be too loud. A dim memory of loud neighbors above slipped through his head, and nearly formed the basis of a new dream before he found his eyes opening once more to stare mostly blind at the darkness.
Naruto grumbled to himself, some half words born of annoying insomnia. He glanced over at the clock and struggled numbly to understand why he couldn't fall back asleep. The clock's hands both pointed straight to twelve. Midnight…? Naruto didn't know yet if that was good or bad, if there was more than enough time to fall back asleep or if he just might lie awake for hours until the sun rose.
Frustrated by that though, Naruto screwed his eyes shut and tried to sleep by force. This attempt lasted just a couple seconds before he fell to staring around again. He hadn't really expected that to work, but what else could he possibly do? Naruto sighed and examined the clock, hoping that maybe he had only woken up a few minutes too early. Annoying yes, but not so much lost sleep as anything else. The hands pointed to something like two o'clock, two forty something.
Naruto sat back and sighed, then sat up suddenly as the oddity occurred to him. He was bolt upright in an instant, and glancing over with some strange, sleepy dread. The hands pointed in dead opposite positions, so what was that?
Five fifty five
"What the heck is going on?" Naruto groaned into the empty darkness of his room. He raised one fist to wipe at his eyes while swinging both legs off the side of the bed. His eyes stung, but seemed a little more awake. Naruto leaned out over the clock and examined it once again. Eight fifteen on the dot. Naruto cocked his head to the side automatically and let out a small noise, a "huh?" into the air.
One hand fumbled toward the lamp a couple feet away and, upon reaching it, struggled to find and twist the switch. Finally, with a faint snap, the lightbulb popped into life and a dim light was cast across the room. Much of that was lost quickly, leaving shadows to fill all the room's corners and casting a near invisible eerie haze across everything scattered on the floor.
Naruto stared around, wincing in the new light. He coughed once and that noise disappeared immediately into the strange, still air. Something about the scene seemed wrong, and itched subtly in his senses. Somehow it was the same as always, and equally, absolutely alien.
"What the hell…?"
His voice slid out into the strange calm and quickly faded to nothing.
Above the faint reverberations of his words, Naruto detected something scraping and crackling like a fire. These hissing sounds of movement fell down from above, and Naruto froze in his slow examination of the still room. With one hand still clutching the blanket, Naruto glanced upward and nearly choked. Something was suspended, twisting all around the ceiling like a cramped snake. Its body was all black and segmented, sending out a sharp whisper as the creature curled in upon itself.
Before Naruto could take another breath, a pair of eyeless jaws erupted from the dangling mass, diving toward him on the bed. His hands jerked shut and his muscles tightened until the lamp was torn up and thrown against the hard, fast body. The lightbulb shattered into dust, plunging everything back to darkness even as Naruto rolled sideways off of his bed.
The floor clutter jabbed into his sides and stomach, but Naruto ignored that, instead scrambling across it all toward the hiding place for his kunai. There was nothing to see in such absolute darkness, but that fact only drove his senses to focus on the awful sounds of that creature, its tense creaks and slick, sickening groans of movement. The bed groaned too, protesting beneath that monstrous weight.
The air seemed frozen as Naruto's fingers closed around the cool metal handle, as those horrible sounds all aligned to another stab of assault. Naruto gripped tight with both hands and rolled aside. Something smooth and tough brushed against Naruto as he moved, and shoved him further off in that moment of contact. Its slick touch was enough to make his stomach churn.
He was shoved hard against something, and Naruto moved frantically to get atop it and avoid being crushed. Just a moment against the torn blanket told him where he was, and Naruto fought upward. Working his fingers around the object in their grip, Naruto grabbed ahold of his curtains and tore them open.
Instead of the moonlight he had expected, there was nothing. Black, depthless nothing without texture or time. Even if the moon was dark, there should have been lights visible somewhere in the village, but there were none. No clouds or stars or any village.
Another creak told Naruto to drop aside and, in obeying, Naruto felt the heavy whoosh of that creature pass him on one side. A short, preliminary crackle spoke in the millisecond before the air was full of shattering glass.
One further expectation fell aside as a fluorescent grey sludge began to pour past the creature, shedding faint, shifting light onto the slightly reflective surface of its body. Naruto stared gaping at the strange flood and then pushed himself off the side of the bed.
Naruto twisted to land on his feet and looked around at his room once more, taking in all the surreality which had slipped into it. The whole scene was ominous now, and he shifted as the glowing liquid began to flow sickly cool against his bare feet. That and sounds of the monstrous creature shifting around among crackling glass and splintered wood, those were what drove him out finally, pushed him to fling open the door and examine the swirling hall, the fog and sick colors, the vast darkness inside every surface. Hissing, popping sounds caught up to him, urging Naruto to step out into that otherworldly hall.
He shut the door before moving on, and was alarmed when that produced immediate silence. The creature's struggles and the slow, grey flood both seemed a world away by that instant. Naruto fought down chills and took a few uncertain steps out into the shifting corridor.
There was no end in sight.
Naruto looked back at his door as if judging which nightmare to face, and found the choice already made for him. His door was gone, dissolved or displaced, he couldn't tell, only that there now existed an infinite hall stretching out both ways.