By thirty-eight, Dr. Robert Miller has lost his wife to a rain-slick road and his daughter to something he builds with trembling hands. Margaret teaches high school English. Miller works at Caltech—subatomic theory, quantum behavior, the kind of work that lives in chalk dust and sleepless nights. Their life is quiet, steady, full of small rituals and shared routines. Emily is six. She likes puzzles, peanut butter, and the way her mother sings while folding laundry.
After the accident, everything changes.
Emily doesn’t cry at the funeral. She holds her father’s hand and stares at the casket like it’s a puzzle she can’t solve. When the priest speaks, she doesn’t blink. When the mourners weep, she looks confused, as if grief is a language she hasn’t learned yet.
Miller stops teaching. Stops publishing. Moves Emily to a quiet house in coastal town in Oregon, far from colleagues and questions.
In 1982, Emily is diagnosed with macular degeneration. Not one form—three. A rare, overlapping cluster: Stargardt, Best, and cone-rod dystrophy. Like three knives carving the same path. Doctors are baffled. Miller is not. He doesn’t grieve. He builds.
The glasses come slowly. Not prototypes. Not experiments. They’re crafted like relics—hand-soldered, dark metal, warm to the touch, as if they remember being held. He calls them quantum corrective lenses. Says they’ll restore her sight. Says they’ll show her what the eye can’t hold.
He never explains how they work. Only that they aren’t meant for everyone.
She wears them for the first time in August of 1983.
By October, she stops sleeping.
By December, she stops speaking.
In March of 1984, Emily Miller gets admitted into the Briar Hills Institute. Her visions became worse, she screamed relentlessly until one day, she just vanished from the hospital. Just, gone. Left behind were her drawings—hundreds of them—sealed in a box marked non-replicable trauma. One depicts a city made of membranes. Another, an eye stitched into a wall.
Robert Miller seemingly driven insane by grief vanishes in 1985. No note. No body. No glasses.
It’s February, 1989.
And something is stirring beneath the city.
Something Emily saw.
The city at night isn’t silent, but it feels like it’s forgotten how to speak. Sodium lights bleed jaundiced over cracked pavement, shadows crawling like spilled ink across faded graffiti and boarded-up windows. A siren wails somewhere distant—not urgent, just disinterested.
She moves through it like she belongs to the hush. About nineteen. Threadbare hoodie, worn boots, eyes sharp enough to be mistaken for innocent. Her name is Lisa. Her breath ghosts in the chilled air as she leaves the main drag and enters the skeletal remains of the forgotten block.
Lisa is intelligent, a born skeptic, and what some might call sarcastically abrasive. In other words, she doesn’t have many friends. Emily was her best friend. Hell, her only friend—and she was the only one left who cared about Emily and her dad.
Well, her and maybe the detective that slipped her the tip that a man fitting Robert Miller’s description was rumored to be hanging around some old apartment building on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
The building stands like a scab on the city’s skin—crumbling brick, windows shattered like gouged eyes. Its archway sags, bowed and broken. She advances without hesitation. No stolen glances. No gathering of nerve.
Lisa has come here on a mission.
Inside, the dark unfurls—narrow and wet. The air tastes old: mildew laced with roach dust, like memory surfacing. Her flashlight cracks on, slicing a narrow beam through the black. Dust motes spin like dead stars.
She steps into the elevator lobby, where the walls sweat and the floor is littered with crumpled flyers, broken glass, and something that might’ve once been food. The elevator doors gape open, frozen mid-scream, their insides rusted like a wound left to fester. Her boots slap against the tile, each echo unwelcome.
The hallway stretches—long, low, claustrophobic. Apartment doors line both sides, shut tight, some splintered at the edges, others sealed with caution tape or prayer. Trash bags slump against the walls like bloated corpses, leaking sour fluid. A child’s toy blinks once in the dark, then dies. The building holds its breath—thick with dry rot, rat droppings, and the ghost of cheap cooking oil.
Above, ceiling panels sag and gape. Wires dangle like veins, insulation clings in ragged clumps like flayed skin. Something unseen drips steadily in the distance, rhythm too precise to be natural.
Something flickers at the edge of perception—not a sound, but a shift. Pressure builds in a space with no wind, no movement. A prickle runs up her spine, instinctual and automatic. She crouches near a pile of collapsed drywall, low behind a rusted radiator jutting from the wall like a broken rib.
The air has changed—not sound, exactly, but the absence of it. A hush stretched tight enough to hum.
Then comes the scrape of something unseen—shallow, measured. Not rushed. Intentional.
She shrinks lower, heartbeat thudding like wet cloth being wrung out.
Lisa exhales—slow, silent. Keep moving. Stay small.
Pivoting, she scans the shadows—then spots it: a stairwell door tucked behind a sagging utility cabinet. No signage. Just a rust-lined frame and a smear of something dark across the handle.
She advances—careful, cat-footed, each motion a gamble. Her beam dances across peeling wallpaper and warped floorboards, slicing through dust and scattered debris. She presses into shadow.
Something moves. Not a person. Not a rat. Just the building, perhaps—shifting in its sleep.
Sneaking her way, Lisa reaches for the handle and pushes. No resistance. No squeal. Just a silent hinge opening into a black throat of concrete and steel.
She vanishes inside.
As she crosses the threshold, something brushes against her—not skin, but soul. A whisper beneath thought, curling up from the edge of a dream. Subtle. Soft.
She glances sideways, instinctively. Nothing but thick air and cracked concrete. Still … something changes.
The stairwell sags beneath fluorescent rot and mildew-stained walls. Worse than the hallway—more decayed, more wrong. Ceiling panels hang in limp strips like shedding skin. Rust spreads across the handrails in vein-like patterns—puckered, bleeding color. The walls sweat. Not moisture. Something slimier.
Lisa descends a short flight, boots brushing past wrappers older than she is. The grime speaks louder than her steps, each one echoing into a cavern of silence that listens.
Then, the door.
It gives beneath her palm without resistance, opening into an alley smeared with shadow and grease. No wind. No motion. Just the stale breath of the building exhaled into open air.
Lisa steps through.
And sees it.
Stealth ruptures. Her lungs stretch wide with a scream—raw, animal, scraped from marrow.
“What the fuck is that?!”
She reels backward, spine smashing against a rusted dumpster. Her knees buckle, folding her to the ground—a heap of tangled limbs, palms skidding across oily pavement, eyes locked on the impossible.
A shriek slices the silence—not near, not far. Unplaceable, as though the sound has no mouth to leave from. It doesn’t travel through air, it reverberates through bone.
Above her, the sky sags like a membrane stretched too thin—dark, veined, trembling with unseen pressure. It doesn’t hold stars. It holds tension.
Where the moon should hang, a massive eye hovers—deep blue, lidless, watching. Its surface shimmers faintly, as if submerged. The pupil dilates wide enough to swallow thought. It casts a glow like moonlight, but its gaze presses down with the weight of eternal hatred.
The membrane sky pulses, breathing in tandem with the thing below. Every flicker of movement on the ground mirrors above. The eye isn’t just observing—it’s remembering.
And Lisa stands beneath it, exposed.
The trees don’t sway—they crane. Branches curl inward like fingers, gnarled and arthritic, reaching not to touch but to sense. Bark splits in places, revealing slick knots that glisten like eyes—unblinking, wet.
The rocks lean. Subtly. Impossibly. Drawn toward Lisa’s presence. Even the soil feels alert, flexing beneath her boots like muscle bracing for impact. The air recoils with each breath she takes, thick with a presence that doesn’t belong to wind or weather.
It’s as if the world has skin—and Lisa walks across its nerve endings. Above, the membrane twitches. A slow spasm ripples through the clouds. The eye dilates, then constricts—rhythmic, syncing with her heartbeat.
It doesn’t blink.
It doesn’t need to.
It absorbs.
She feels it—feels them—inside her thoughts, brushing against memory, peeling back layers of self with surgical precision. The pavement pulses beneath her hands. Fluid oozes upward, scented like breath bottled in lungs for centuries.
Her skin prickles. She presses a hand to her chest, fighting for control. Each breath comes damp. Heavy. Like she’s the last guest at the table.
“Okay, get your shit together,” she whispers, voice trembling. “This is just … a dream. You were drugged. Or maybe you’re dead.”
A shape slithers across the wall ahead—vertical and slow, like a shadow relearning how to walk. It makes a sound—deliberate. A reversed lullaby, layered with shrill whispers in a language made purely of threat.
Her teeth ache. Each one vibrates like a tuning fork struck by some alien signal—roots driven deep into the moment.
“Not real,” Lisa hisses, clawing at her arm for pain. Flesh. Proof. “This place doesn’t exist. It can’t.”
But it can.
And it does. What Emily had seen, was very real.
Beneath the thunder of her heart, a pattern emerges in the distant cries. A call and response. Creatures shrieking in chorus—to each other.
Lisa is the announcement.
She forces herself upright. Legs gelatinous. Skin tight, no slack—as if something inside stretches outward, trying to occupy more space than her body can contain. Buildings loom with hunger. Shadows bend toward her with intent. Even the silence has appetite.
She creeps forward into the ruins, each step a fleshy squelch against the shrieking quiet. The world around her—gnarled, dripping, mutated—pulses like a body flayed open to the air. This isn’t a place. It’s a condition. A diseased hallucination carved into the spine of a nightmare.
Her head twitches, pivoting constantly, trapped in a loop of paranoia. Every shadow threatens mass. Every echo hints at motive. The path ahead writhes beneath a slick film of grime, and the buildings lean close—voyeurs made of rust and cartilage.
She moves fast. Her feet skim the ground. Fingers clenched tight.
She doesn’t want to meet what hunts here.
Not its shape.
Not its intent.
“Keep walking,” she breathes, voice thinner than paper. “You’re alone. That’s good. Alone means alive. Just … keep your shit together.”
She clips a twisted lump of something—not quite trash, not quite artifact—and it clatters open, revealing a rust-eaten can that rolls across the pavement with a brutal clank. The sound echoes like a scream strangled by time.
She drops, knees smacking filthy, soft, wet ground behind the remains of a parked car. Its surface is wrapped in thick folds of membrane, darker than the sky—wet and gleaming like muscle peeled fresh from bone.
It pulses once.
She gags.
Distantly, something scrapes. A low skitter. Then a gargled click—like jaws chewing silence. Then stillness again. Too still. The air presses inward, rancid and suffocating. Her skin prickles—perforated, like the atmosphere is testing her for weakness.
She strains her ears.
And understands: the entire world is breathing.
Then she sees it.
A thing that was human once, but now wears humanity like a costume rotted from within. Its posture sags, limbs jagged and long, flesh stretched tight and ripped across a skeleton too feeble to run. Swollen black veins snake across its chest, pulsing erratically beneath parchment-like skin.
Its face has grown a warped mask of bone, fractured to expose a nest of tendrils twitching like scent-hunters. Glowing, jaundiced eyes gleam with sickly awareness—intimate and old.
And behind it, vast coils of sinew and muscle drag from its spine like a tail stitched together from war crimes.
It lumbers toward her, each step deliberate—obscene in its patience. Like it knows the longer it lingers, the more her sanity will unravel.
Lisa freezes. Her mind stutters, claws at logic like a drowning woman reaching for breath.
The silence screams.
Her breath snags in her throat, strangled by disbelief.
Then comes a wet grunt—rasping, close.
Another one.
This one moves with awful momentum. Unlike the first, it still wears meat—tattered remnants hang from tendon and bone, echoes of agony left to rot. One eye socket is hollow; the other weeps something black and steaming. Its jaw sags crooked, trembling like it might speak—or swallow.
She spins, stumbles backward, heart galloping toward collapse.
This isn’t a dream.
Fever can’t conjure detail this vile.
Hallucination doesn’t drip.
Every corner of this place wants to devour her.
And she has lost her silence.
She runs. Pure instinct, limbs obeying terror more than will. Her feet slap pavement with reckless rhythm, each stride a frantic race against the impossible. It feels endless—this sprint through nightmare terrain—seconds stretching into eons as her lungs blister, legs lock, tendons scream, muscles on the edge of mutiny. Her heart rampages, rabid and unsustainable, like it might burst from sheer demand.
Eventually, her sprint unravels into a staggering crawl. The world spins in nausea-soaked frames. Her eyes dart through darkness, feral and hunted. Then … she stops—unable to go farther, unwilling to fall.
Her breath saws in and out, shallow and strained. The air pushes back—thick and punishing. Each inhale a negotiation, every exhale a sacrifice. It tastes wrong. Breathing has become battle, and she’s losing.
She moves—not with intent, but with the wounded shuffle of prey already claimed. Her boots drag across damp terrain, sponge-like ground clinging to her soles. Everything is swathed in sick membrane—translucent, veined, twitching—stretched like dead skin over a living wound. It glistens beneath the warped glow of a moonlit eye above—not a light source, but a watcher. Always watching.
The flesh of the ground shifts beneath her—moist, bloated, tense—muttering wetly with each step, as if it loathes the weight of her passing.
The silence presses in like a vice—thick, sentient. It doesn’t just surround her; it invades. It wraps around her skull like damp cloth, crawls into her ears with slow, deliberate pressure, and settles behind her eyes. It smothers everything except the ragged sound of her breathing.
Then, the whispers begin.
They slither through the silence—thin, brittle threads of sound. Not language. Not voice. Just the shape of speech, malformed and wet, like something trying to imitate human thought through a mouth full of fluid. They scrape against her hearing—too faint to grasp, too constant to ignore.
They don’t speak to her.
They speak into her.
Each whisper curls around her psyche, tugging, unraveling, loosening the knots that hold her mind together. They nest in the soft places—behind her thoughts, beneath her fear—pressing against the edges of sanity like teeth testing flesh. Her breath hitches. Her vision blurs. The world feels thinner, stretched too tight over something that wants to come through.
She staggers. The whispers follow.
They multiply, overlapping—a chorus of broken murmurs filling the space inside her head with static and suggestion. Her name surfaces once—not spoken, but felt, like a cold finger dragged across the inside of her skull.
She doesn’t respond.
They don’t stop.
Her eyes twitch, frantic—devouring every shift in the gloom. The terrain claws at logic. Trees don’t grow here, they recoil. Warped trunks bend backward in retreat, bark rupturing down the grain, hemorrhaging black fluid that steams like exhaled death. The air hangs damp with it—thick enough to taste.
Structures loom across the landscape like grave markers—barely architectural. Slumped. Sagging beneath heavy shrouds of fibrous membrane and industrial decay. Half-swallowed by the earth, as if the world has tried to digest them and failed—leaving them to rot in shame. Twisted girders jut from crumbling husks like shattered bones. A few walls still stand, but none with purpose. They lean like bodies posed for mourning—unnaturally still, too perfectly arranged to be vacant.
The decay isn’t passive.
It thrums.
Its color. Its texture. Its psychic weight.
All of it infects thought like a virus without shape.
And nothing screams.
That shatters her. No cries in the distance. No ambient moans. No skittering chaos. Only breathing silence—and the gnawing awareness that everything watching is just waiting for its mouth to close.
Her movements shrink—deliberate, strained. The membrane beneath her boots stretches with slick tension. It flexes as she walks, murmuring threats through its surface. Warnings. Pressure spoken in tremors.
Up ahead, the landscape splits open. Where trees once stood, there’s only suggestion—twisted silhouettes, collapsed beams jutting like snapped limbs. Debris clusters thick at the edges—organic and mechanical, decomposed past recognition. Shadows nest in the folds of terrain like predators waiting for her to blink.
She moves—not with intent, but with the wounded shuffle of prey already claimed. Her boots drag across damp terrain, sponge-like ground clinging to her soles. Everything is swathed in sick membrane—translucent, veined, twitching. It glistens beneath the warped glow of a moonlit eye above—not a light source, but a watcher. Always watching.
The flesh of the ground shifts beneath her—moist, bloated, tense—muttering wetly with each step, as if it loathes the weight of her passing.
Lisa steps further in, her boots sinking slightly into the fleshy floor. Her gaze snags on familiar shapes: chrome stools twisted into warped spines, a menu board drooling letters down its surface:
“Ch–ck–n M–lt.”
Recognition spreads quickly as fire.
It was a diner. Once.
Now it’s a cavity.
A wet remembrance.
The whispers tangle in her skull.
She sits briefly, the booth wheezing beneath her. The air clings to her skin, thick and sweet with rot. The whispers dull, curling inward.
She rises and moves toward the kitchen. The doors sag, fused at the edges. She shoves through.
Inside, the metal has warped. Counters blister. Racks hang limp, dripping rust and meat-slick residue. The freezer is sealed shut with a crust of tissue.
On the prep table: a knife. Large. Not as rusted as it should be. Sharp. Its edge catches the low light like a signal.
She picks it up. It feels placed.
She turns, eyes scanning the walls. The membrane here is thinner. She steps close. Beneath the skin, things shift—slow, constant. Veins pulse. Shapes press outward.
She touches it. It twitches.
There are bones under there.
And teeth.
She moves along the wall, blade ready, eyes tracing the shapes beneath the skin. One form holds her—round, swollen. A head, almost. Lips sealed. Nostrils puckered. A limb curled beside it, limp and glistening.
She leans closer.
Its eyes snap open—milky, bulbous, too wide.
It inhales.
The membrane stretches, ballooning with breath, then releases a cry—wet, shrill, like a newborn drowning in tar. The sound scrapes her spine.
Lisa lunges from panic. The knife tears through the membrane. A burst of blood sprays across her—oily, red and black. The thing writhes, shrieking louder. She stabs again. The wall convulses, veins bulging, fluid pouring.
She drives the blade in a final time. The creature sags. Its cry chokes off. Eyes glaze.
She steps back, soaked in its blood, breath ragged. She stands frozen, the knife slick in her grip. The membrane sags where the creature died, its fluids pooling.
Then comes the sound. Not from the kitchen. From outside.
A cry—distant, massive, layered. It rolls through the diner like thunder dragged through a throat. Another follows. Then more. Dozens. A tide of voices, broken and wet, rising from the city beyond.
The walls tremble. The floor pulses faster, erratic, like a heart panicking in its cage.
She turns toward the entrance. The membrane has darkened, thickened, twitching with movement. Shapes press against it—faces, limbs, mouths. Not trying to enter. Just reacting. Responding.
The cries grow louder. Closer. The city is waking. Screaming.
The air shifts—hot, sour, vibrating with pressure. Outside, the sky groans. Buildings moan. Something vast is moving, and everything is answering.
She steps back. The floor rises to meet her boots, soft and sticky, trying to hold her.
She runs. The whispers in her skull become sirens. And behind her, the world begins to howl.
She stumbles into the kitchen, heart hammering, the cries outside swelling into a wall of sound. The diner shakes with it—walls twitching, ceiling sagging, membrane rippling like muscle under strain.
She scans the room. No windows. No vents wide enough. The freezer is sealed shut, the prep stations warped and useless. She considers hiding—curling beneath a counter, behind a rack, anywhere.
But the sound keeps rising. It isn’t searching.
It’s claiming.
She grits her teeth and turns toward the back. A service door looms behind a curtain of membrane, thick and veined, pulsing with slow rhythm. The handle is barely visible beneath the translucent flesh.
She steps closer.
The wall twitches.
She raises the knife.
The first cut releases a burst of fluid—warm, black-streaked, reeking of copper and rot. The membrane recoils but doesn’t split cleanly. She carves again, sawing through layers of tissue, each slice met with resistance and a wet, sucking sound.
Behind her, the diner groans. The cries outside press closer—vibrating through the floor.
She tears the last strip of membrane free, revealing the door. Her fingers slip on the handle, slick with blood and fluid. It turns with a shriek.
She doesn’t wait.
She throws her weight against the door and bursts through, stumbling into the alley beyond. Steam hisses around her ankles, thick and sour, and the air trembles with distant movement.
She runs.
The diner exhales behind her, a wet, shuddering sigh.
She bolts from the alley, lungs clawing for breath, the stench of rot still clinging to her skin. But the street ahead offers no reprieve—only another nightmare.
From the torn facade of a collapsed structure, they spill out like smoke—three figures, skeletal but not yet corpses. Their flesh clings in slick, mottled sheets, stretched tight over jutting ribs and knotted joints. Eyes like wet coal gleam from hollow sockets, and their movements are wrong—too fast, too fluid. Not the sluggish lurch of the dead she escaped, but something feral. Hungry.
The central one drops first, landing in a crouch that depresses the membrane beneath it, sending a ripple outward like a stone striking flesh. Its limbs are too long, fingers splayed like broken antlers, twitching with anticipation. The other two slither out behind it, half-shadow, half gristle, their mouths stretched in silent screams.
Lisa doesn’t stop. She can’t. These things don’t stumble—they pursue.
Their feet slap wet against the membrane, leaving trails of steaming fluid. Their mouths gape open, revealing rows of teeth that look grown, not placed—organic spirals of bone and enamel, twitching as if tasting her scent.
The ground pulses beneath her, resisting her stride. It wants her slowed. It wants her caught.
She darts sideways, boots scraping against slick stone, heart hammering like a trapped animal. The three figures close in—angular, deliberate, their limbs bending wrong, their movements too smooth. She can’t fight them. Not all. Not now.
Lisa lunges toward the narrow gap between two broken pillars, her shoulder clipping the jagged edge. One of them surges forward—too close. She spins, knife flashing, and drives it into the nearest creature’s side. The blade sinks just enough to catch, not enough to stop it.
It hisses—a wet, rattling sound—and leans in.
She slashes again, this time across its face, slicing its eye. The cut opens like a split seam, and a spray of black-red fluid spills out. The creature lets out a sound that doesn’t belong in any living throat—a scream tangled with a growl, fluid and feral. It clutches at its damaged eye with a clawed hand, fingers twitching against the gash, blood oozing between them.
The other two pause, heads tilting toward their wounded kin. Then they turn back to her, stepping forward in unison.
That’s when it comes.
A sound—no, a force—rips through the air. Jagged and layered, like iron plates shrieking against wet stone, threaded with a deep, vibrating pulse that feels like it comes from beneath the skin. It isn’t just noise.
It’s a presence.
A warning.
The kind of sound that makes the air feel sharp and the bones want to fold inward. If she could move, she’d cover her ears. But she can’t. She’s locked in place, every muscle seized by the sheer wrongness of it.
The creatures stop. Slowly, they turn their heads upward, toward the eye. Then back to her. Their mouths curl—not quite a snarl, not quite a smile. Something in between. Then, without a word, they turn and begin to walk away. Not retreating. Not fleeing. Just … leaving. With purpose.
The sound comes again. Louder. Sharper. It cracks through the air like a falling cathedral, and the creatures pick up their pace, steps heavier now, more urgent.
Lisa stands there, arms limp at her sides, breath shallow and broken. Her legs give out and she drops to her knees, the knife clattering beside her. A sob escapes—raw, brief. Her face twists, tears streaking down as panic claws through her chest.
But she doesn’t stay down.
She can’t.
The world is still shifting. Still watching.
The sound comes again—closer, louder, as if the air itself is being peeled apart. It scrapes through her skull, makes her jaw ache, her vision blur. She wants to run, to scream, to claw at her own ears.
But her body refuses.
She’s frozen in place, a figure carved from fear.
The creatures are gone now, swallowed by the dark. But the eye remains. High above, vast and lidless, it blinks. Just once. A slow, deliberate motion. A slick, translucent film slides across its surface—wet and glistening. It doesn’t close. It doesn’t rest.
It simply blinks.
As if acknowledging her.
As if sealing something.
And then everything goes still.
No sound. No movement. Just her, alone beneath that gaze.
She can’t breathe right. Can’t think. The silence presses in, heavy and absolute. Her limbs won’t respond. Her voice is gone. The world feels locked, like a door slammed shut behind her.
She isn’t escaping.
Lisa stands paralyzed in the middle of her sanity-breaking nightmare. Panic soaks her skin like cold oil, and deeper still—beneath muscle, beneath thought—she just wants to go home. To wake up. To be anywhere but here.
The silence, once suffocating, ruptures.
It doesn’t break with relief. It splits like overripe flesh, and something begins to leak through.
A sound reaches her. Slick. Intentional. Not footsteps. Not claws. It’s the wet drag of something boneless pulling itself across concrete—flesh against stone, slow and obscene. A gurgling growl follows, low and wet, like a throat full of rot trying to speak. Then another. And another. The noise multiplies, echoing from behind the walls, beneath the street, inside the air itself.
Lisa’s breath stutters—shallow bursts that barely reach her lungs. Her body refuses to obey. Legs lock. Spine taut as wire. She’s a statue carved from panic, every muscle clenched against the urge to flee.
The sound grows louder. Closer. A chorus of wet friction and meat-thick growls, dragging themselves through the dark like hunger given form.
They’re coming.
The first emerges from the gloom—a grotesque hybrid of corpse and insect. Its upper half is skeletal, hunched at a sickening angle, jaw unhinged in a frozen scream that stretches its face into something almost pleading. Strips of decaying flesh cling to its skull and chest, mottled and sagging, swaying with each twitch like damp curtains in a poisoned breeze.
Below, its body spills into a segmented mass—a millipede’s nightmare, slick and glistening. Dozens of needle-thin legs pierce the translucent membrane with each step, their movements slow and surgical. The surface flexes beneath them, dimly lit from whatever pulses below, each step leaving behind steaming trails of black fluid that hiss and bubble like acid on skin, as if the ground itself recoils from contact. The creature moves with the slow certainty of something that has never needed to hurry—something that knows its prey will break long before it does.
Then another follows. And another.
A horde.
They drag themselves forward in a synchronized crawl, a grotesque tide of bone and glistening segments. Their gurgling growls begin to harmonize—low, wet, and rhythmic—forming a chant that vibrates through the membrane beneath Lisa’s feet. It isn’t language. It’s older than that. A sound meant for nerves, not ears.
She doesn’t know if they can see.
She only knows they don’t need to.
She needs to disappear.
Lisa crams herself into an alcove, knees drawn to her chest, spine grinding against the slick wall. One hand clutches the knife, pressing it tight against her thigh—not for use, not yet, just to feel its shape, its promise. The membrane behind her pulses faintly—warm, wet, and breathing. It clings to her shirt like a second skin, exhaling in slow, rhythmic bursts that match nothing human. She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move. Her eyes lock forward, wide and burning, as if even the smallest twitch might summon attention.
Smaller creatures—like the first ones Lisa saw—gaunt, skeletal things with hollow sockets and twitching limbs—dart from the shadows. They scramble across the floor in erratic bursts, limbs flailing as they collide with walls and each other.
Their movements are desperate. Insect-like.
They aren’t hunting.
They’re fleeing.
The millipede horrors don’t chase.
They simply reach.
Then the reaching becomes feeding.
One snaps its upper torso forward with unnatural speed, clawed hand closing around a fleeing creature’s spine. There’s no struggle—just a wet crunch, a shriek cut short, and the sound of tearing. Its remaining flesh peels like fruit skin. Lisa sees only flashes: a limb flung against the wall, a jaw still twitching in the creature’s grip, the rest swallowed into its gaping maw.
Another tries to climb the wall, scrabbling for purchase with broken fingers. It makes it halfway up before a millipede-thing rears up, segmented body flexing, and slams it down with a sickening slap.
The wall pulses from the impact.
Lisa feels it through her back. She bites down on her knuckle to keep from screaming.
The feeding continues. Slow. Methodical. The millipede creatures don’t rush—they consume with the patience of something that has fed for centuries. Lisa catches glimpses through the gaps in the alcove: a face dragged across the floor, leaving a trail of teeth; a ribcage split open like a flower; the twitching remains of something that once begged.
She doesn’t know how long she stays there. Minutes. Hours. Time dissolves into the sound of gurgling and wet friction.
And then, silence.
Not relief. Just the absence of movement.
The grotesque street is empty again—except for the smear of what had been.
Lisa uncurls slowly, joints aching, breath shallow and uneven. The membrane behind her gives one last exhale, then stills. She presses a trembling hand to the wall beside her, slick with something that isn’t blood. She drags herself forward, one foot after the other, into a street where madness struts naked and unashamed.
She stumbles forward, legs barely remembering how to hold her.
Fragments of the smaller creatures lay scattered—jawbones stripped clean, limbs gnawed to splinters, torsos hollowed out like husks. One skull stares up at her, eye sockets wide and empty, mouth frozen mid-scream. A single twitch still lingers in its fingers.
Lisa gags but doesn’t vomit. Her body is too wrung out for that.
She moves like prey—low, slow, silent. Her eyes dart to every shadow, every corner where something might still be waiting.
And somewhere deeper in the dark, something else is breathing.
Not the millipede-things. Not the scavengers.
Something larger.
Something patient.
She walks—not steadily. Each step a negotiation between terror and instinct. Her breath hitches. Her fingers clench the knife, slick with sweat, the blade a fragile promise of control.
Then the whispers return.
Not sudden. Not loud. Just there—like mold blooming in blackness. They curl around her thoughts, soft and persistent, threading through the cracks in her focus. No words. Just the shape of them. The suggestion of meaning. Like someone speaking underwater, just behind her ear.
She flinches, but there’s no one there.
The sound isn’t outside. It’s in her—threaded through the stagger of her steps, the throb in her throat, the slick, obscene squelch beneath her boots. The whispers don’t speak so much as press, insinuating themselves into the soft tissue of her thoughts, tugging at the seams of something already splitting.
They don’t shout.
They sink.
Each whisper is a quiet erosion—like memory turning against her, truth curdling in her mouth.
They remind her of things she’s seen.
The things she hasn’t.
The things waiting.
She tries to hold herself together.
But the whispers know where to pull.
She grips the knife tighter, but it feels smaller now. Less like a weapon. More like a relic from a world that no longer applies.
The whispers don’t stop.
They don’t need to.
They’re patient.
And Lisa keeps walking, deeper into the dark, her sanity trailing behind her like a loose thread.
Then—she looks up.
It’s still there.
The eye.
She’s forgotten it for a moment, lost in the crawling textures of the world below, in whispers that gnaw and flesh that pulses. But now, as her gaze lifts, it greets her like a memory she’s tried to bury.
Vast.
Still.
Suffocatingly blue.
It hangs in the sky like a god’s pupil, rimmed in its membrane socket, lidless and eternal. Watching her. Its gaze is not light but weight, pressing down on her skin, her thoughts, her breath. It sees everything. Not with curiosity. With intimacy. As if it has always known her, even before she was born.
She doesn’t move.
Can’t.
Her body locks in place, as if the eye’s gaze has turned her to salt.
Her mouth opens, slow and trembling, and a sound slips out. Not a scream. Not a sob. A laugh—thin, splintered, wrong. It scrapes past her teeth like something rusted and sharp, a noise that doesn’t belong to her anymore. It echoes off the membrane walls, brittle and wet, like bone cracking under pressure.
It isn’t humor.
It isn’t relief.
It’s the sound of a mind fraying at the edges, of reality losing its grip.
A thread snaps inside her, and the laugh keeps going—quiet, involuntary, the kind of sound that makes the shadows lean in.
Then she swallows it.
Staggers forward.
What else can she do?
Madness doesn’t wait.
The whispers return.
Not voices. Not thoughts.
Intrusions.
They slither through the folds of her mind, speaking in languages she almost understands—fragments of memory twisted into accusation. Her name, repeated in tones that mimic love, then curdle into mockery. A lullaby her mother used to hum, now sung backward in a child's voice that bleeds static.
She clutches her head, but there’s no escape. The whispers aren’t in her mind—they are her mind now. Parasites wearing the shape of thought.
Shapes loom in the distance. Not buildings. Not creatures. Just masses—some tall, some wide, all wrong. They shimmer with a wet sheen, twitching, as if waiting for her to notice them. One splits open as she passes, revealing a cavity filled with teeth that don’t bite, only tremble.
She wants to scream, but the sound won’t come. Her throat feels packed with ash.
She stumbles. The ground gives slightly, like stepping on a lung. Beneath the membrane, something shifts—slow, deliberate, aware.
There’s no path. No signs. No sky. Just the endless stretch of living terrain and the distant, pulsing glow of something that might be a heart, or a trap.
She whispers to herself, just to hear something she can trust. But even her own voice sounds borrowed.
“Please,” she says. “Please, just—”
The world answers.
Not with mercy.
With laughter.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere, a chorus of broken mouths, dry and wet and ancient. It doesn’t mock her.
It welcomes her.
She runs.
But the membrane doesn’t care. It stretches, it pulses, it swallows her steps like they’re offerings.
And the whispers follow, louder now.
Eager.
She begins to run. Not toward safety—there is none—but away from the sounds.
They rise around her like a tide: wet clicking, bone scraping, the low moan of something vast and unsatisfied. One sound, close and sharp, like claws raking across stretched flesh, makes her stumble. Another, a rhythmic thumping, too deliberate to be footsteps, echoes from somewhere behind.
She doesn’t look back.
Shapes move at the edges of her vision—limbs without bodies, bodies without faces, dragging themselves across the membrane with purpose. Some hiss. One gurgles. Another lets out a sound like laughter choked in blood.
The city of membrane opens before her, its structures taller now, more intricate. Veins run up their sides like scaffolding. Openings pulse, beckoning. She passes one that exhales a cloud of spores, and the whispers in her head scream in unison.
She veers toward the tallest.
It looms like a spine torn from something ancient, its surface slick and ridged, twitching faintly as if aware of her approach. The entrance is a vertical slit, rimmed with twitching cilia, and she hesitates only a moment before pushing through.
Inside, the air changes.
It’s warmer. Thicker. The walls pulse with slow rhythm, like breath held too long. The floor slopes upward, spiraling into darkness, and she climbs because there’s nowhere else to go.
Behind her, the sounds grow louder.
Something follows.
Not fast.
Not clumsy.
Patient.
She presses forward, deeper into the structure, the whispers now whispering up, as if the building itself has thoughts—and they’re waiting for her inside.
The air grows heavier, thick with wet decay. Each step feels like a sentence—slow, deliberate, punishing. Her breath comes in ragged bursts, scraping her throat like wire. The walls pulse around her, not with light but with breath, exhaling a damp rot laced with something sweet and wrong.
She reaches out, fingers grazing the slick membrane that lines the corridor, searching for proof of solidity, of reality. Beneath the thin layer, sections of brick bulge through like bone under skin—raw, exposed, too warm. The surface twitches at her touch, recoiling as if the structure itself rejects her presence.
She calls out—words, names, nonsense—anything to drown the voices that aren’t hers.
They answer anyway.
Not in language, but in rhythm: a wet clicking, a low hum, a child's giggle stretched too long.
Her sanity frays at the edges, unraveling thread by thread with every echo that doesn’t belong to her.
She stumbles into a corridor, narrower than it should be, her shoulders scraping both sides. The light—if it’s light—flickers in pulses that match her heartbeat, erratic and cruel. She claws at the dark, searching for a door, a hatch, a crack in the world that might let her out or let something in. Her nails split.
She doesn’t feel it.
There’s no logic left.
Only instinct.
And instinct screams.
She lurches forward, shoulder scraping brick through the membrane, the corridor narrowing until it feels like a throat.
Then—space. A sudden pocket of stillness, wrong in its quiet. Her eyes adjust, barely, and there it is.
A body, slumped near a sealed doorway, half-swallowed by the wall.
It sits crooked, legs splayed, torso collapsed inward like something has fed and left it unfinished. The clothing hangs in tatters, layered and rough, the fabric stiff with age and filth. Threads curl like dead vines, clinging to the body in places and falling away in others, revealing skin gone slack and waxen. The membrane has grown over parts of it—thin as film—anchoring the corpse to the brick like a parasite claiming its host.
In its arms, another form—smaller. A younger person’s body, curled tight against the chest, limbs limp, head tucked beneath the chin of the larger corpse as if in sleep. The smaller one is dressed too—grey hospital clothes, now in tatters. One slipper remains, dangling from a foot turned inward. The skin is pale, almost translucent, and the membrane has begun to creep across her back, binding her to the embrace.
The jaw of the larger corpse hangs open, frozen mid-scream or mid-expulsion. Familiar glasses still cling to the face, absurdly intact—one lens fogged with rot, the other cracked clean through. The background around them seems to absorb light, textured in the same rough decay as the bodies themselves, as if the structure has grown to match its occupants.
She knows exactly who they are. She begins to sob to for the loss of her friend all over again.
Something in her moves—unbidden, unthinking. Her hand reaches out, trembling, and plucks the glasses from the corpse’s face.
She stares at them, breath caught, unsure why she’s taken them, unsure why her fingers refuse to let go. The cracked lens shimmers faintly, catching light that shouldn’t exist here. Her pulse thuds in her ears.
The door behind the larger corpse remains closed. Unmarked. Still. The only thing in this place that hasn’t pulsed or whispered or breathed.
She doesn’t know if it leads out or deeper in.
She doesn’t care.
But the glasses do.
The cracked lens shimmers again—just once, just enough. Not a reflection. Not light. A movement. Like something behind the glass has shifted. Like the corridor itself has leaned closer.
Her fingers tighten. She tries to drop them. Doesn’t.
The warmth spreads—not outward, but inward, up her wrist, into her shoulder, like the glasses are remembering the shape of the last person who wore them. Her pulse stutters. The membrane around her pulses in sync.
Then the whisper comes.
A suggestion.
A tilt.
She raises the glasses. Not because she wants to. Because the stillness of the door, the silence of the corpse, the shimmer in the lens—all of it points forward. Toward the moment where she will see.
She slides them onto her face.
The corridor doesn’t change.
It clarifies.
The membrane that lines the walls—once just slick and pulsing—now reveals its anatomy. Beneath the surface, a network of veins emerges, delicate and grotesque. Capillaries spiderweb outward in twitching clusters, their movements erratic, like they’re reacting to her presence. Arterial lines run thicker, deeper, pulsing with a slow, deliberate rhythm that matches nothing in her body.
They aren’t decorative.
They’re functional.
She steps forward, and the glasses sharpen the detail. The membrane isn’t just alive—it’s circulating. The veins flow in one direction, all of them, like blood drawn toward a wound. Some pulse faster than others, some throb with a sickly yellow hue, but all converge toward a single point ahead.
She follows.
The walls lean with her, subtly, guiding her. The floor softens beneath her boots, damp and yielding, and the air grows warmer—thick with the scent of iron and something sweeter, almost floral, almost rotten.
The veins grow denser as she moves. Thicker. More erratic. They crawl across the ceiling now, down the far wall, converging into a knot of vascular mass that pulses like a heart.
At its center: a window.
Not glass. Not open.
A membrane stretched thin, oval-shaped, trembling faintly with each beat of the room.
The veins feed into it, disappearing beneath its surface, nourishing something on the other side. She stops. The glasses show everything—too much. The window pulses harder.
She stares at the membrane. The glasses reveal its anatomy in obscene detail: veins pulsing beneath the surface, capillaries twitching like nerves, the whole structure trembling with a rhythm that doesn’t match her own. It’s alive. It’s watching.
She doesn’t hear it enter. No footsteps. No breath. Just a shift in pressure—barely perceptible. She turns. It’s already halfway through the doorway.
Tall. Bent. Wrong.
Its skin is translucent, stretched tight over a scaffold of twitching muscle and exposed veins. Fluid leaks from ruptured vessels along its limbs, trailing behind in thick, hissing ropes. Its arms hang low, ending in clusters of finger-like appendages that writhe independently, tasting the air.
Its head is smooth. Featureless.
Then it splits.
A vertical seam tears open down the center, revealing rows of grinding plates and twitching cilia. The scream that follows isn’t vocal—it’s chemical. A blast of heat and rot, a sound that vibrates in her teeth and makes the membrane around her pulse in sympathy.
She staggers back.
The creature charges.
It doesn’t run—it collapses forward, limbs folding and unfolding with insectile precision, its body a blur of wet muscle and twitching sinew. The distance between them vanishes in a heartbeat.
Then it’s on her.
Its weight drives her backward, slamming her into the membranous wall with a wet, yielding thud. Veins burst beneath her, spraying fluid across her back. Its limbs wrap around her torso, tendrils tightening like ligatures, pinning her arms.
She screams.
Too late.
Its head snaps downward, the vertical seam gaping wide. Grinding plates part, twitching cilia flare—and it bites. Not a tear. A shear.
Its mouth clamps just above her left wrist and slices through flesh, tendon, and bone with a wet crunch.
Her arm detaches.
She sees it—her own hand, still twitching—disappear into the creature’s mouth. It swallows in one convulsive gulp, throat bulging, fluids spilling from its seams.
Pain detonates through her.
She screams again—raw, animal, furious. Her right hand breaks free, fingers slick with fluid. She grips the knife and slashes.
The blade tears across its neck seam, slicing through translucent skin and rupturing a cluster of veins.
The creature reels, then lets out a growl so deep and wet it vibrates through the floor. It staggers back, limbs flailing, fluid gushing from the wound in thick, black ropes. Its torso convulses. Muscles twitch.
Then it reaches back.
Its right arm arches behind it, trembling violently. The fingers spasm, curl, then split. From each tip, a jagged claw erupts—gnarled, yellowed, wet at the base. They extend fast, cracking through flesh, dripping with mucus and blood.
It lunges.
The clawed hand slams into Lisa’s face with a force that cracks bone. The glasses shatter instantly—plastic and circuitry exploding outward. One claw drives deep into her left eye, tearing through the socket with a sickening pop. She screams, high and broken, blood pouring down her cheek in thick, hot streams.
The impact lifts her.
Her body snaps sideways, flung like a ragdoll by the sheer violence of the strike.
She doesn’t fall—she flies. Hurled to her right with bone-breaking speed. Straight into the membrane’s focal point.
The place where every vein and artery converge—taut, trembling, thick with vascular mass. It pulses like a heart, fed by the walls, ceiling, and floor. She hits it. The membrane ruptures. Veins snap. Arteries tear. A spray of hot fluid explodes outward, coating her in a wave of blood and mucus. The membrane peels open like wet paper, and she is through—driven by the force of the blow, her body trailing blood, her scream swallowed by the living walls.
The crash comes like thunder. Lisa tears through the front window of the gas station, glass erupting inward in a glittering wave. Metal shelves buckle beneath her, scattering canned goods and plastic-wrapped snacks across the floor. A rack of folded maps spins once, then collapses in a heap.
A woman behind the counter screams, stumbling backward into the coffee pot. A man near the magazine stand dives aside, knocking over a cardboard display that crumples like paper.
Lisa lies in the wreckage, twitching. Her body is broken—skin split, eye socket collapsed, one arm twisted behind her like a discarded doll. The other ends abruptly at the wrist, a jagged stump slick with blood. Her clothes cling to her in wet folds, soaked with fluid that shimmers darkly under the humming lights.
She gasps. It’s a raw, wet sound. Her fingers—the ones she still has—scrabble against the linoleum, slipping in the mess. Her remaining eye darts wildly, trying to make sense of the rows of travel kits and chewing gum, the stunned faces staring down at her.
No one moves. No one speaks. The radio behind the counter keeps playing—soft, forgettable. The world hasn’t noticed she was gone.
She tries to speak.
Then she collapses, limbs twitching, breath shallow.
The cashier finally moves, fumbling for the wall-mounted phone. Her hands shake, but she manages to dial 9-1-1.
The city hasn’t changed. Not really. The sodium lights still bleed jaundiced over cracked pavement. The sirens still wail—distant, disinterested. The shadows still crawl like spilled ink across boarded windows and faded graffiti.
But something has come through.
And something has stayed behind.
Lisa lies in aisle seven, between the travel kits and the chewing gum, her blood mixing with the dust of a world that never asked for her absence and doesn’t know what to do with her return.
The cashier sobs into the phone.
The man by the magazines whispers a prayer.
The radio keeps playing.
And outside, the sky remains intact.
No eye.
No pulse.
Just stars.
But somewhere, beneath the linoleum, beneath the concrete, beneath the skin of the world—the membrane twitches.
Not in pain.
Not in warning.
In memory.
Because some doors don’t open.
They rupture.
And some journeys don’t end.
They echo.
Zachory "Mick" McAllister is a writer, electrical engineer, and U.S. Navy veteran, which means he knows his way around wires, waves, and the occasional existential crisis. Born in Reno, Nevada, he spent his formative years consuming DC Comics, Stephen King, and Orson Scott Card, unknowingly training for his future career in storytelling (and possibly surviving post-apocalyptic scenarios).
After navigating the high seas with the Navy, Mick transitioned into electrical engineering—because what better way to balance the chaos of creative writing than with the soothing logic of circuits? Though writing was an on-again, off-again endeavor, it always lingered in the background like an overenthusiastic sidekick waiting for its big moment. His first publication, Lost Soul, appeared at Subject And Verb Agreement Press.
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