Everyone thinks they have an idea of what madness is, but in reality, you don’t. I’ve come to accept that our physical death is nothing compared to what happens in the other plane, and there is nothing we can do about it. An unseen world that we share with our counterparts. The madness I will never understand. Yet, I was able to realize at a very young age that they will take us all a lot sooner than we think.
You won’t see or feel these creatures take you from this world. I don’t even know why they do. They just exist to do whatever they so choose from what I’ve gathered over the years. It all started when I was five years old. I was that kid that thought everything I didn’t have was cool.
I used to put on my fake retainer in the morning, wear my mom’s glasses even though they made me blind and would touch everything and anything in reach. It definitely stressed out my parents like no other. Especially the day I fucked my whole world up on a family vacation. My parents took me to Disneyland one summer, and we lasted no more than an hour.
We were walking through the shop area at the entrance when my mom had to use the restroom. My dad and I just waited outside as usual. I was just kicking my legs, minding my own damn business when I noticed a contact lens on the ground. Curiosity kicked in like no other. My mom had some that changed her eye color, and I wanted to be like her.
It grosses me out knowing I didn’t even wipe the thing down, but it’s not like it mattered anyway. Nothing matters. I popped that thing in my eye, and started wailing. I screamed so much I fucking passed out.
Ended up waking up in the hospital a few days later with an eye patch. They had me heavily sedated while they tried to figure out how to fix my eye. Up until they realized there was absolutely nothing they could do. My parents were devastated when they heard that.
They were afraid to extract it, or even tamper with it in any way. They have yet to see such a phenomenon. The contact had fused to my eyeball, and the eye itself was pitch black as if my pupil took up the whole thing. Every time they touched it the infection would visibly grow. Therefore they decided to leave it alone with the assumption that antibiotics would do the trick. They were very wrong.
I was on and off those things for years, and the infection didn’t subside, nor did it grow. It just was, and that’s what I lived with. I didn’t look at my eye for so damn long. I guess I was scared since I always had it in the back of my head that I’ll look at it again when it got better. But, it didn’t get better.
Don’t get me wrong, I would open it when I had the patch on because I didn’t have to look at it. The first time I opened my disgusting eye without the patch I thought I lost my mind. I was ten, and decided to open it in the mirror before I got in the bath for fucks sake. I was confused and mortified. I saw myself, and someone who looked like me, but they weren’t.
His features were almost exact except for his long hair which I did not have, and he had a smile that was cut from ear to ear. He didn’t even look at me. At the time, I thought he was looking up at something. I still don’t know if they have a consciousness of their own considering we follow the same path from what I’ve seen. Just in different planes of existence.
I fell right on my ass before I scurried away from the mirror. That’s when I got a good look into the madness itself. Everything had a yellow hue to it as if the world was stained with cigarette smoke. The first thing to catch my attention was the tube of toothpaste.
It had a different logo on it that read, ‘Grest Bilepaste’. Second was the bathtub. The water was a greenish, brown color filled with all my action figures. The thing was, those action figures looked like small humans that were pale as can be with blue lips wearing plastic garbs.
They all reached out to me with their mouths wide open like they were drowning. I started screaming while I scrambled to find my eye patch. By the time my mom and dad kicked the door in I was huddled up on the floor crying. It took a few years of therapy to get the courage to look under my patch again. Seven to be exact.
High school came around, and with that came peer pressure and fitting in. My patch surprisingly made me quite popular. Sympathy or not, I never had issues making friends. Some of my friends and I decided to take a trip to the boardwalk. We even got our buddies’ older brother to get us some beer before we headed out that way. It was the first time I had a beer outside of my dad’s supervision, and of course I over indulged.
Not like I was throwing up or anything. We were all just lounging until one of my friends got the bright idea to snatch off my eye patch. We were drinking so it was all just fun, then they asked if they could see it. Out of all these years the only people to see my eye were the doctors, my parents and myself that one time, so I said, “fuck it. Why not?”
I opened my eye and there it was. They looked in amazement as I looked in horror. Both eyes saw a different, but similar face on each of my friends. One was missing their lower jaw with their tongue whipping around like a snake. The other had a quarter of his head missing with rotten bananas sticking out of his skull. One of my eyes saw them looking at me while the other saw their counterparts staring at the sky. They kept asking me what was wrong, but I was too busy taking in the view.
There was a couple pushing a stroller with their intestines hanging out the back of their shorts that dripped a blue substance. There were insects buzzing wildly above the stroller getting picked out of the air, one by one, by a green tongue. Naked vendors wore the pattern of their normal selves clothes on their leathery skin as they passed out hotdogs with buns that legitimately looked like a butt with a cylinder of cement inside of it. Beach goers leaving pieces of themselves that would scurry away as they ran through the sand to jump into the dingy, yellow ocean. All looking up towards the sun that wasn’t there with a smile painfully stretched across their faces.
The reason why I keep saying they were looking at a sun that wasn’t there is because it was replaced with some sort of eldritch being. A being that I have come to assume is a god due to my lack of understanding. It was far closer than the sun could ever be. It was a pink mass that sat where the sun should be with tentacles reaching out in every direction. The only tentacles retracting had one of our counterparts in its grip with their arms stretched as if they were embracing it.
The tentacles would bring them close to its shapeless mass until they were simply no more. They just vanished. Those few minutes felt like hours before I was finally able to snap out of it to close my infected eye again. Just to see my friends staring back at me with my normal eye. I could feel their sympathy.
I don’t even think I blinked. At least they asked if I was okay. I just played it off like I was messing with them, and just left it at that. It was nothing more than another gaze into madness. Over the years I would take off my patch to see both worlds for what they were, and that’s when I began to accept what was going on.
Whenever I looked through my infected eye during the day the pink god in the sky would be closer, and our counterparts couldn’t be happier. I also realized that the tentacles were taking those that have passed by another’s hand. Not sure if it matters if you meant to kill the other person or not, but I watched a man get smacked by a car while I was people-watching with my infected eye. The driver looked like an elderly woman in clown makeup looking out at the god who floated over the café. She just looked so happy it was sick.
The counterpart that was about to be struck almost seemed like they knew it was going to happen. He embraced the impact as soon as he stepped out into the street. It was very unsettling. He got hit, and one of those pink tentacles whisk him away when he hit the ground.
In our reality I watched an old lady hit a man with her car, and he couldn’t have been more terrified. It was almost as if he was filled with fear to the point where he couldn’t move out of the way. It’s pointless to make sense of it. Do our counterparts embrace death while we fear it? I thought I knew until I took my patch off at night. I was always scared to, but there always comes a point of bravery or stupidity.
Regardless, curiosity just confused me even more when I spent the night in my backyard. I laid there looking up at that night sky with my infected eye for the first time. The pink tentacles seemed to reach from the other side of the world, plucking our counterparts like they were nothing, and they loved it. The moon was a god of its own, and was just as close.
There sat an orange ball of fuzz where the moon should be. I initially thought my infected eye was finally dying out assuming it had developed a cloudy spot, but that wasn’t the case. Our counterparts were stretched thin through a purple beam. Each one reached back for the earth while they let out a silent scream in the night.
I got a closer look when my neighbor’s house was hit with that purple beam of light. It was like in the movies when aliens ships would abduct cows and whatnot. It made everything look like it was doused in purple paint. Who knew light can drip?
Shortly after, my neighbor Roger’s counterpart floated up from their bedroom window. I’ve seen his counterpart plenty of times before. One eye was bigger than the other, and I believe his nose was inside out and upside down. Can’t forget about those two left feet. Ironically that’s something his normal self would joke about on occasion.
He was in his bathrobe he usually wore that was made of lint roller sheets. It always was covered in chip crumbs and critters whenever I saw him wear it. Anyway, he was holding on to the window of the house while his body just stretched. All he could do was scream in terror, and no one was able to hear him.
He was stretched so thin that he looked like a piece of fleshy rope. All until he touched the orange ball of fuzz and turned into ash from the top down like a bolt of lightning striking the house. Word around the block was that Roger had a heart attack that night in his bed laying next to his wife who found him dead the following morning. It was hard to sympathize knowing what really happened. I was more scared than anything.
I became more and more comfortable over time walking around with both eyes open. It wasn’t necessarily pleasant to look at, so I was often avoided. It did get confusing at times, but I needed to know how much time we have left. I couldn’t just leave the patch. Everyday before that was a fight to not take a glance back into the madness to see their gods grow closer while all of you went about your normal lives. While your counterparts happily waited for their impending doom with smiles on able faces in a world that made no sense.
Now, I just spend my days in and out of cafés, or laid out on the beach withering away with my shitty eye staring right at the sun. At least that’s what you’d think, but that isn’t the case at all. I see a pink eldritch god, alien or something just ripping more people everyday. Everyday it gets closer. Everyday feels more hopeless than the last.
Even with how close it is I still could not tell you what it is. It covers the sky with its pink mass taking our counterparts as they silently cry in happiness. All while those taken in the night cry of pain and fear. It’s like our troubles are its food, and it is the madness that drives us.
Or is it the anguish of dying alone that seems to stretch on for eternity until you are no more? I don’t know, but I just needed to let this be known. They’ll be here sooner than you think, and there is nothing we can do about it. So if I must suffer, then why shouldn’t you?