You may remember slender shadows batting at your windowsill on an otherwise enchanting evening of childhood. There may be that distinct, cold hand that you could swear brushed across your shoulder, even when you know you are alone. Or perhaps there is the mind-crushing terror of seeing a huge, towering darkness before you, and nobody else seems worried, nobody else is screaming, nobody else can feel the paralysis in their soul. Because nobody else can see it.
We scrape against the boundaries of hell every day. The tiny tears and lacerations are imperceptible to the sane and functioning mind, and we walk along our sidewalks and bump shoulders with the very evils, the barking madness, the dangers of beyond that we deny with our last great gasp. The scientists might think in dimensions or galaxies, the religious in planes or powers. But delimiting the crawling umbra, fastening names to the phenomenon, attempting to force becoming on the massive, hungering unbecoming that we cannot fathom or grasp with the vaguest bridge of our rationality or imagination: these are the errs of the mortal ego, attempting to staple immortal flesh to the sky.
The rumblings of The Hunger have been felt before. For it must be a Hunger, for it devours the fabric of consciousness, for it consumes the numbness of precision and knowledge, for it grins eagerly with gnashing teeth at explanation, hope, and life itself, glaring with its abyssal absence. Whenever mankind, the first to feel The Hunger's breath upon its neck, has brushed against the unthinkable shadow, the world has birthed a new religion. Whenever its echoes resound across the vacant hills or from the trembling mountains, when the familiar warps into the unknown without a moment's notice, when dizzying lines blur across the stars and rob the sane of their orientation, The Hunger has been felt.
What I attempt today is not a discussion on semantics or of the nature of this pervasive perversion of the natural order and function of the universe. Nor is it a succinct examination of the sprawl of this corrosive, corruptive chaos into the realm of light and life. Instead, I shall attempt a tentative sketch of the nearest strands of this encompassing horror, an incomplete description of the innumerable and unnamed terrors that lurk beneath the skin of the cosmos. Do not trust my visions, do not trust my words, and for the sake of your sanity and your functionality, I advise not to trust yourself. The senses lie to hide what lies beneath.
L. Doe
The Splinter
The beginnings were inconspicuous. The slight quaking of a stop sign, Louis Armstrong blaring on cassette tape. A note had changed. A very little thing, really. Easy to make a mistake, the recording was old, and even though I'd heard the note a thousand times, maybe I had heard it wrong. It was supposed to be a C. It now sounded as a C sharp. Half a step, not even worth mentioning, right?
Except this was just the beginning of the problem. Now all C notes became C sharp. I can't explain how, but I went to my grand piano, I played C, but the key would only play the sharp. C sharp also played C sharp. They were the same note. I had my piano tuned three times and nobody else could hear it, nobody else could feel the sensation of slipping down a filthy drain into the depths of a C-less world.
I had been a musician in my youth, and I knew the difference. I knew the difference. I truly knew it. I wasn't tone deaf. I really wasn't.
And now I peered into every songbook and heard entire symphonies of C sharp, C sharp in Beethoven, even the Beatles playing C sharp, it made me ill, made me vomit, made me pale and green and bug-eyed.
But as I said, it was only the beginning.
I frantically called my nearest friend, wanting unconditional advice, wanting counsel, wanting an opinion on my state of mind. Curiously, strangely, absurdly, her phone was unavailable. Line did not exist. The number was wrong? Her service terminated? What could be the explanation of a very simple problem?
The sidewalk was filthy, trash blowing across the doorways of old women and dirty men and the mud puddles from the rain were leering back at me, and as unsettling as it was, I needed to find her, I needed to ask and let her know that things were not well. I needed to see if she could hear C. It wasn't about the music, it had nothing to do with Louis Armstrong, I was just losing what little hope I had to some unnamable thing that was clawing at my back and shrinking my spine, slouching my shoulders and placing hot coals within my pavement-scuffling shoes. And then I was stuck.
To say "stuck" is disingenuous: I was entombed. My feet would no longer shuffle forward, they had become pinned to the concrete, sinking slowly into the sidewalk, gnawing on my ankles, strangling the screams from my throat. Slowly, slowly, I could feel myself melting, melding into the sidewalk, I watched as the crowds bustled past, as they sneered and shoved me deeper into the quagmire, deep into the hungering beast this walkway had become. I hated them. I truly did. I hated them more than I had ever known I was capable of.
And as I felt the very last vestiges of my body blur into the sidewalk, scraping along someone's shoelace with my fingertips, sinking, sinking beneath everyone, everything, beneath the weight of this mighty uncertainty...
...I was sprung, released from the cage, standing on the sidewalk as if nothing had happened. A large man thrashed me with his shoulder and I resumed my nervous gait, though I had only the vaguest recollections as to my destination.
The rest was a blur.
A creaking door, a screaming child, blood smeared along the walls
Every time I try to put the pieces together, my mind goes cold, my body shakes, my eyes twitch shut, and my tongue begins to shake off words in a language I've never heard to a person I can't see.
I know that the doorway was too wide, and it pushed open instead of pulling shut. I know that the place where my friend lived for five years never really existed, that the man from the street with the shoulders was standing there naked with empty eyes (not black, empty, the mind creates blackness where really there is emptiness, we cannot understand the emptiness but in my terror I saw a glimpse of the endless nothingness that lies beyond the bordered conscious of the universe) and then there was nothing except
a screaming door, a blood-smeared child, creaking walls, maddening, pouring together, burning, building, bashing, blushing in the gold-tinted vomit of the afternoon
and then I saw him.
Impossibly tall, an enamel face, two long rubbery hands that wove through the air and hung, suspended, throbbing veins and a pulsing, misbegotten face; emptiness between his two half-open eyelids, a vast mouth of razors, shifting and bending in shape with every word, a black-and-white tongue that curled and slithered and two spiked, rising shoulders-- the rest of him shifts, changing, morphing and unstable, crawling in your peripheral, defying explanation, blurring and mocking an attentive glance and crawling beneath my eyeballs, cold, dead...
Do you know what happens when you realize everyone in your life has been replaced?
Your neighbor, your grocer, your boss, your nephew, even the news anchors and actors on TV have been switched.
They think you wouldn't notice. They think they can pull one on you. But Aunt Irene never had that nervous twitch. And the guy playing the cashier has the voice all wrong.
This is just the start. This is only the genesis of realizing what The Hunger can do to you. But I digress.