Lacerations.
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It was a ripple, as one might describe it. A small, momentary thing. Within the blink of an eye, it was gone; yet still it was noticed. My mind moved like clockwork as it often did in the early mornings, and I stared towards the two sheets; stapled to the ceiling as they were, a necessity to stave off the heat. Perhaps in that moment, had I been more awake, or more alive, I would've reacted more viscerally to the movement upon the other side. Yet as it stood, I merely watched in a moment of thoughtless silence. In-fact, I was in such an exhausted state that when I eventually got up to leave the room, I had completely forgotten about the subtle ripple that had moved across the curtains.

This state of willful forgetfulness was not going to last long, and somewhere within the depths of my mind, I knew that. But there was work to do, friends to say, and all the other things a busy mind would say. That night it came back to me, but not in the way of some sudden and jerking remembrance. Rather, it was through that state just before dreams. One might describe it as a singular moment; upon which the weight of the world sits upon your chest. But not like some shackled demon, rather in the sense of the weight of the world slumbering over every thought you've ever held. It was in that particular moment that the ripple once more revealed itself to me. Although I imagine it would be better described as some finger; a hand just barely tracing the fabric. It felt… purposeful in some way that I cannot quite put into words.

Again, my morning was rather ordinary. The only thing that felt changed in any particular way was the fact that my Cat, named affectionately, Robert the Hideous, Hideous for short, seemed utterly intent upon not entering my room. Which was more than strange, as that was where he had slept every day since he was a kitten. But in my haste to rush for the door after feeding him, I thought nothing of it.

Truth be told, I had not walked behind that makeshift curtain in over a year. It had not occurred to me, over such time, that something could have simply decided to move in. Yet, when the ripple appeared across the fabric that night, I was fully awake. I'd spent an hour attempting to convince Hideous to enter the room. Just as I'd gotten him to cross beyond the edges, the fabric shifted. Unlike the night before, it was not the delicate movement of a finger. And unlike the night before, I caught a glimpse of the thing waiting upon the other side.

It was not human. I couldn't fully describe it if I even dared to. Where the barest glimpse of the creature moved, there was a glow of something that could not be describable as a color. I felt vomit rising within my throat as I took a step back. Inevitably, just as my cat had done before me, I rushed from the room.

Within the mirror was a haggard man. I stared towards myself in-silence as I wiped the last of the vomit from my lips, and the blood from my nose. The non-image from behind the curtain still seeped into the pores of my thoughts. If I tried, I would describe its body as a vast amount of… Shoe-strings; as if someone had dipped millions of intertwined pieces of string into blood and just threw it upon the ground. But, but each piece moved, shifted and shuttered, some horrid stuttering of what I could only think of as muscle and fibers.

I resolved that night to walk beyond the pale, to fight whatever horrid thing had made my home its nesting ground. There was the lock box I kept, upon which I pulled out the only pistol I owned; a gift from my dad before he lost his fight with cancer.

The room was quiet, which did nothing to settle my nerves. I'd been hoping for the raving roars of a monster, something to settle my nerves. But I heard not even a footstep, not the slightest hint of the heavy breathing one might imagine from such a thing. Just as my nerves had begun to fade, I rushed through the slit that was the opening and found… nothing. There was no blood across the floor, there were no hidden horrors with monstrous teeth.

My eyes glanced into each and every corner, and still there was nothing. For a moment, my ears rang from the silence, and then all at once I began to laugh. Truly, how stressful had my week been for me to imagine such things? I stepped away from the widened gap within the sheets, and calmly placed my gun upon my nightstand. Although, as I started to drift off to sleep, I couldn't help but wonder why my cat still refused to enter the room.

For a week after that, I knew peace. A new normal was established; the only real change being my cat's bizarre refusal to enter the room. But I thought nothing of it. Perhaps some other stray cat had moved into the neighborhood, and he smelled some remnant of that cat's scent upon the breeze. It didn't matter overmuch to me. All that mattered was that I, in-fact, was not haunted, and could live in abject peace.

It was the night after that particular train of thought that everything went wrong. Specifically, it was the weekend, and I had decided to stay up. After all the terror I'd gone through, I deserved the chance to play a video game or two, did I not? So I settled forwards within my room, the controller in-hand when I saw it from the corner of my vision. A ripple, and something moving from beyond the edge. It was the wrong decision, but I tried to ignore it, tried to focus upon the game; only, perhaps that encouraged it. The next sound was something that froze me in my tracks. What I heard wasn't the howl of a monster, it was the sound of waves and wind.

I didn't want to, I didn't feel like I should. But despite myself I glanced over, I glanced over and stared towards the thing now standing directly above me. Its body was not made of the sinew I'd originally thought. Its body was made of lacerations. Horrid ripples that distorted the very air around them, pulling in every direction. I saw images of thousands of places, all over the world and some beyond.

The thing did not speak, it didn't need to. I felt it as it moved forwards, as my body began to split. Agony crawled across the surface of my skin as the thing pushed me into thousands of different places at once. Any questions of why were already long gone by the time the center of its body wrapped around me.

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