Cover image credit: Aaron Cooper
In The Beginning
I have a routine. It starts right before bedtime. From my wardrobe, I pick out a suit I’ll wear the next day and hang it on the hook right outside the shower, and I go to bed. My alarm blares me awake just before dawn. I shower and put on my suit and leave my house with my wife and child and two dogs and one cat all sleeping soundly within their various chambers.
This part of the routine has remained unchanged for several years now, but the next part is unique to the last couple of months. Instead of going to work, I walk past the part of the city where the buildings remain. I walk past where cars languid the streets. I walk to the place where houses are set back from the roads and the sidewalks are sporadic and hours can pass without seeing a vehicle or another person. I walk here because the creature of black, fuzzy static who can only be seen in reflections of water or glass wants me to scour the roadside for discarded bottles and break them against stop signs or speed limit signs.
Unknown to me until it was known to me, this monster had been controlling me for years, though its persuasion was less than it is now. What I assumed was my conscious speaking to me since I was a boy was actually my monster, whispering its blaring instructions from afar, easier to ignore then than now, but that voice loomed always.
As a young boy, I found myself in the black-shadowed kitchen with a knife in my hand in the middle of the night with no recollection of how I got there. I stored away the knife and told nobody about my overwhelming desire to murder my parents, which I shrugged off as a normal feeling of childhood. I now know that feeling was no feeling at all but the mid-sleep whisperings of my monster. And growing up, a war waged within me between this whispering entity and the values taught to me in my household and schools. Neither side gave ground.
A spot in my vision formed during my junior year of undergrad, a distant blackness partially obscuring my sight. I shrugged it off at first as a trick of my mind as this wasn’t an obstruction I always saw and it was so far away when I did. Mostly, I noticed it when looking in the rear view mirror while driving or as a spot behind me in my reflection in a storefront window. It flickered brilliantly during rare sun-showers, the dark counterpart to a rainbow.
But the spot moved closer and the inner voice telling me what to do spoke louder. I went to an ophthalmologist and calmly described this spot that haunted me as if it were the disease or optical abnormality I thought it was. She referred me to a neurologist. Neither found anything wrong with me, of course.
Since I first saw this black smug, my experience with it has been divided almost exactly in half. For the first six years, I sought answers from medical professionals as to what this affliction might be. For the last seven years, I have sought answers from anywhere as to what this monster might be. Science, religion, ancient texts; internet rumors – I’ve searched everywhere.
The day the idea occurred to me that this was not an optical malady but a creature was the best worst day of my life. As I’ve mentioned previously, I can only see my monster through reflections in glass or water. For whatever reason, reflections in metal or plastic or whatever else hid the creature from sight, so I stood in a long hallway at my work, like a serpent stretched to full length, and I stared at the static black thing in the handheld mirror I kept with me at all times.
My monster spoke to me in The Language Of All Things. My coworkers would be arriving soon, yet I allowed myself to weep, falling to the ground, tear-blurred static quivering in the mirror. This was the first time I connected the voice that spoke to me and the lightless spot trapped in my vision. They were the same entity. No doctor could help me.
I have, of course, attempted to communicate directly with my monster with the hope it would answer any and all questions regarding its existence and purpose. Though it acknowledges my attempts at communication, no answers reflect back to me, so most of what I know about this creature and its intentions are things I have inferred from its instructions or learned from various outside sources. Yes, that would make the following information suspect, but I have gotten to know my monster pretty well over the years, and it has signaled to me through The Laughter Of Approval that all I am about to share is true. At the very least, it wants me to share this, which is more or less the same as being true.
The Monster
As you have probably surmised by now, my monster is an interdimensional being not of this world, bound by physics of a different time and space. The creature’s true form is not at all the static blackness I observe in mirror reflections but rather something unobservable to beings such as you or me. What I see in the mirror is just one, small portion where the physics of its universe and the physics of our universe overlap, creating what is essentially a leaf rubbing with a monster in place of the leaf.
I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, so I could not begin to guess at what the physical structure of my monster’s universe must be, but I read “Flatland”, so I know enough about extra-dimensional objects being observed in lower-dimensional universes to explain why my monster is barely observable.
Imagine you are you, and you wake up with the power to create two dimensional universes. So you do just that, and the universe you create looks a lot like the original “Super Mario Brothers” on NES. The creatures you have divined into existence can move up, down, left, right and diagonal. This is all they know, and if you stuck your three dimensional hand into their two dimensional world, they wouldn’t see a hand with the added dimension of depth. They would see a cross section of your hand. It would look like a piece of meat sliced as thin as possible, completely flat.
While I have no idea if my monster is our God, this is how it appears to me and would appear to you. Though it exists in dimensions we cannot imagine, we see it only in our limited three dimensions – height, length and width. We see it as a leaf rubbing with the mirror as paper.
The Master Plan, As I Know It
Who the fuck am I, really? By chance, I am one of the few people who can observe a creature not of our world. That makes me pretty important among humans. Hell, that makes me pretty important among all the creatures in our universe, but being among the one percent most important beings in our universe means mostly nothing to me.
Humans aren’t great. Our universe kind of sucks. I’ve set my standards a little higher than caring about my standing here, although I admit it’s easy to say that considering my standing is at the very top. What I care about is my standing with my monster and the creatures of my monster’s realm. Nothing in our universe could make me happier than serving the ultimate purpose of this creature that has stalked me since my birth.
But because I am nobody compared to my mas…onster… Because I am nobody compared to my monster, I will not pretend to understand the ultimate goal the dark fuzzy lord has in mind. I am nobody, and my monster is everything. What I understand of its plan is nothing more than a leaf rubbing of the actual thing.
Much of my time spent doing my monster’s bidding involves breaking things made of glass. At first, this puzzled me as glass appears to be one of the main gateways for these interdimensional creatures to come to our world. But I realized that each shard of glass is its own reflection. The more glass objects I break, the more shards I create, meaning the more portals from their world to ours.
That’s fucking rad!
Even though my monster doesn’t always specifically instruct me to do so, I find myself breaking glass objects at every possible moment. The reason I don’t go to my job anymore is because I may have gone a little overboard with the glass breaking. Inspiration overcame me, and in an out of body experience, I ran from desk to desk in the office, smashing glasses and glass mugs and computers and awards. Anything that might be glass, I broke. My boss got pretty upset about that and wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain the very good reason for why I smashed everything.
Glass is only one part of the plan, however. The other part is creating vassals for our monsters to embody. While this might be my least favorite part of The Master Plan, it is probably the most important part. This is where I really prove my worth.
Unfortunately, creating vassals for our mas…monsters happens to be a messy job, but with a little bit of ingenuity and a lot of murder, I think I’ve done pretty well at it.
Of course, I mean “murder” in a figurative sense here. I am “murdering” a person’s human form, usually through strangulation but many times through blood loss from multiple stab wounds. But this is only murder in the sense of a butterfly murdering its caterpillar form. I kill what the person used to be to make way for what a person will be, which is an interdimensional being.
But for that to happen, I must cut the heart out of the vassal and place a single shard of glass in the place where the blood organ used to be. I know a place where nobody goes, and this is where I bury the vassals while we await the transportation day that will soon come. When our monsters arrive, they will fill their vassals with their being and merge with those human forms.
Much respect to the first wave of monsters as it is a thankless job to take the disgusting form of human flesh after having lived a full life as an omni-dimensional being. I’d give anything to become one of the monsters, so I can’t imagine actually being one and choosing to take a human form even if it is for the greater good.
From what I gather, the first wave will melt what is left of the polar ice caps to flood Earth with as much water as is possible. They will then section off the water into a planet-wide grid of water portals that will allow for the second wave to arrive in our universe. These monsters will not need vassals to come here as their portals will be more sophisticated than the rotting meat sack portals I am currently creating. Though we may not be able to see or comprehend them fully, they will come here in all their glory and power.
Where the plan goes from there, I do not know. It is not up to me to worry about nor is it your worry. Let’s just stick to the task at hand.
The Way Forward
All of this sounds great, I know, and you are probably wondering how you can help. Getting involved is easy:
- Break anything glass. Creating more shards is important.
- Create vassals for our monsters. Just make sure you don’t get caught. If possible, use people who are willing to be vassals.
- It is very important to melt the polar ice caps, so pollute as often as possible. If you can vote to oppose environmental regulations, even better. The less work our monsters have to do when they get here, the sooner they can get to work.
- Share this article! The more people who can help, the better.
I am only one man, and I cannot do this important work by myself. Some may even oppose this plan and try to stop me. If that happens, I’ll need others to carry on in my stead. Remember, the only thing at stake here is everything.