This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/choke76w on 2024-11-07 03:26:43+00:00.
I run an old apothecary shop in Millbrook, selling what my grandmother called "chromatic remedies." I used to think they were just colored water and lies. I was wrong.
Last month, a man named Marcus walked in holding a dying chameleon. Luna, he called her. Her scales were wrong—not the healthy green they should've been, but a sickly translucent white that made my stomach turn. You could see her veins pulsing beneath, like dark rivers under ice.
I should've told him my grandmother's remedies were placebos. Instead, I gave him the midnight-blue bottle from the highest shelf, the one she'd labeled "For those who see too much." Three drops at moonrise, I told him. I thought I was selling hope in fancy packaging.
He came back weekly. Each time, Luna's colors grew stranger. Not just greens or browns, but colors that shouldn't exist—shades that left afterimages burned into my vision. Colors that made customers nauseous. Colors that cameras couldn't capture, showing only static where Luna should be.
Then Marcus told me about his wife, Sarah. How she'd died painting their nursery "future's promise pink." How Luna had been hers. How the chameleon had turned that exact shade of pink the moment Sarah flatlined.
I found my grandmother's real grimoire last night, hidden under the floorboards. The pages weren't recipes for colored water—they were formulas for distilling emotions into visible spectrum, extracting memories into liquid form. The final entry, ink still wet after decades, was about a chameleon who could see the true colors of souls.
This morning, Luna turned a color I can't describe. It hurt to look at, like trying to see through time. Marcus called in a panic—the nursery walls were pulsing, and he could hear Sarah's voice in the colors.
I rushed over. The entire room rippled with impossible shades. Luna sat in the center, turning colors that made my eyes bleed. And there, in the corner, something was taking shape—a figure made of colors that shouldn't exist, wearing Sarah's face like a mask of shifting light.
I tried to run, but Luna turned to look at me. Her eyes rotated independently: one fixed on me, one on the color-thing that used to be Sarah. She turned a final color then—the color of truth, of reality unraveling.
I'm writing this from the hospital. The doctors say there's nothing physically wrong with my eyes, but I keep seeing colors that don't exist. They leak from the corners of my vision, pooling like mercury on the floor. The walls pulse with them.
Marcus isn't answering his phone. The neighbors reported strange lights from the nursery window last night. And my grandmother's bottles, all of them, have turned that same impossible color Luna did at the end.
I can see it now, creeping under my door. It has Sarah's voice, and it's calling my name.
My grandmother wrote that some colors exist before light itself. I think I finally understand what she meant. And I think it's too late.