But Something Changed 

My fingers shake involuntarily as I slouch like a giant insect and type this on the computer. I don’t want to write it, but I have no choice but to document what happened here. I could write it slowly, thoughtfully, and clearly, but I can’t—I’ve never been a writer, and I’m in no position to turn this into a professional essay. After all, I have to hurry, we all have to hurry. The pieces of plaster that have fallen from the walls are starting to move like little cockroaches, which means I don’t have much time left. I have to finish this before it gets to me.

I can hear the crackle of iron in the pipes behind the wall being replaced by the squelching of entrails… this is bad, this is very bad. I must, MUST end this before it gets to me. I don’t care if you think it’s trite fiction, I don’t care if you ridicule it and forget about it in a moment, I don’t care if you call it the ravings of a lunatic—in fact, I’d be glad if it turned out to be me who went crazy, not the world around me. I will still do my best to spread it everywhere I can, on every site, on every forum, on every public topic at least separately suitable. I don’t care if it will be deleted and blocked, I don’t care if I will be banned, I don’t care about your opinion, because sooner or later it will affect you all. And when it starts, when the world around you turns into an unimaginable nightmare, when our whole species gets squashed like a bunch of cockroaches, you’ll remember me, you’ll remember me. So do me a favor and just read it, okay?

Most of these stories have a clear beginning, but I have never been able to identify the event in my memories that undoubtedly started what I am about to describe. I could tell you who I am, where and what I lived, what I dreamed about and what I hated, but nobody is interested in that, and it has no practical relation to what we are talking about today. What I am going to tell you about began so quietly and imperceptibly that even the most direct participants of those events did not understand their full picture until the very end.

I caught the first “incident,” which clearly had a certain relation to everything that happened, in person, and even then I could have realized that something wrong was happening. I could have run away, I could have taken appropriate measures, but I did not. I did nothing, and now I’m paying the price. To give you a rough idea of the background of this particular case, I need to say a few words about one of my hobbies. It’s not exactly unusual, but it’s what made me see what I saw.

You see, I just love aimlessly “wandering” around the surrounding neighborhoods of my city. Yes, exactly wandering—going in a random direction without any clear goal and just enjoying the world around me. There is something soothingly beautiful in it—to have an opportunity to break away from all your problems and affairs for at least half an hour, while the whole world around is absorbed by its needs.

There is something self-affirming about it—to walk calmly through the streets while everyone else is running around like ants, two-legged ants that rustle packages, rattle keys, pick through thousands of objects, performing purely mechanical actions, the meaning of which is dictated only by physical need. There is something beautiful in it—to have your own little island of calm in the raging sea of human lives. Society is, you know, also a kind of organism, an organism whose veins are the streets, whose organs are the factories and offices, and whose flesh is you and me. It is a huge, rigid, and merciless organism of metal, electronics, and concrete, and the opportunity to free myself from my role in it for a while is perhaps the highest benefit I can get in this life.

And so, on one of the days in the fall, when I was taking advantage of a day off, I made another of my “rounds” and went to the oldest, closest-to-the-forest part of the city where I live.

The aforementioned autumn simultaneously gave this activity a unique atmosphere and, at the same time, darkened my spirit with vague changes, impending changes that, by their very existence, instilled in me a nasty feeling of gnawing fear. Autumn was the era with which I had the deepest relationship. This great and nightmarish epoch, which for centuries stirred the minds of poets and writers all over the world, tormented and cured, poisoned and renewed, killed and revived me every time it came. I hate and love it at the same time; I wish to see every new fall and at the same time I am deathly afraid of it.

I know it’s wrong and weird, but I can’t say it any other way. How can I say otherwise about an era that has inspired and driven me to the depths of despair for years? How can I be silent about something so meaningful to me and to this story? It is in this cursed and blessed time that the world painfully dies to be reborn again in all its splendor. It is in this terrible and beautiful time that the old flesh of creation falls away to give birth to a new, beautiful and magnificent one. Grass and leaves on trees and shrubs are colored in the most unimaginable combinations of yellow, red, and gold only to gracefully fall down and rot. Their rich, dying hues sound like a final “goodbye” from an entire dying era. And I listen to their farewells, for autumn for me is a signal, a signal to sum up the life I have lived.

And so I walked along the oblong streets, looking at the dozens of different, meaningless buildings that pressed on my brain, filling me with a sense of my own insignificance. The trees growing on the edges of the roadways had already shed their leaves, the remnants of which, mixed with the rain and mud, were turning into unnatural masses of something amorphous. It had been raining for about three days in a row, and I had learned to ignore the omnipresent dampness that covered the world with a film of vague abomination.

I looked up and saw a gray sky covered with endless clouds, which loomed over it all as a dazzling crown of creation, filling my soul with a vague fear. It was as if I felt with all my body that something was going to change, that something was going to change once and for all.

At that moment, I was passing by one of a dozen two-story houses of Stalinist type, which for God knows what reason still remained relatively intact. The residents of this house had already been offered to be relocated, but the pensioners were clinging to their nests with a stubbornness I couldn’t understand. My gaze leisurely looked over the graffiti-stained hulk of this building, paying attention to every change, every piece of fallen brick, every crack in the window, every wound that people had inflicted on the body of this house, until my eye was attracted by the stirring in the wet bushes.

I took a step forward, motivated only by interest, to look at the one who had caused the shivering in the bushes that dotted the place. When my right hand pushed back the bush blocking the view, I saw a dog.

The first thing that caught my eye was the dog’s posture—it was lying strangely spread sideways on the ground, its hind legs stretched out at full length and barely moving, while its front legs were jerking compulsively in different directions, its body also shuddering in a way that gave it a disgusting worm-like appearance. The dog’s skin was even stranger, its entire texture covered with irritation, as if it had lain in cold water for a long time and then been exposed to the hot sun; all the folds were oddly protruding forward, pressing into each other and giving it an even stranger appearance.

And worst of all, there were holes in the skin—hundreds of small, almost identical holes covering the dog’s skin at the back, revealing the inflamed, throbbing flesh beneath them. The dog’s ribcage was bloated, the ribs straining the skin as if they wanted to tear it from the inside out. I involuntarily took a step back and only then looked at the dog’s head.

And that was the sight that made me realize that I had stumbled upon something terrible. The dog’s eyes were open and bloodshot, his pupils were running erratically in different directions, and his gaze gave away only the animal, dull pain that was gnawing at the creature from the inside. The dog’s mouth was bleeding from the inside out, broken teeth protruded forward like barbed wire teeth, and a piece of its own tongue, bitten off in a fit of agony, lay near its right cheek, staining the ground nearby a dirty red.

I clutched at my stomach, feeling my mind and my body rejecting the abomination in one accord. But fate was clearly not on my side that day. While I was trying to suppress a fit of vomiting, the dog’s body trembling intensified and I clearly heard the crunch of broken bones. At that moment, at that bloody moment, I saw a sight that I had previously thought physically impossible.

The dog’s mouth suddenly opened wide, his throat puffed up, and I saw his own organs begin to spill out of his throat. They looked as if they had been cut and stitched, cut and stitched several times in succession, turning them into a completely unnatural mass from a biological point of view. A piece of lung had grown a tumor into the intestines, the stomach had merged with the kidneys into one disgusting piece of flesh. The whole mass, twitching like a living organism, was squeezing itself out with a monstrous force, tearing the dog’s throat. A lake of scarlet blood flooded the grass around it, and the lump of entrails fell to the ground with a squelch, as if buried in the surrounding mud. Then the last life left the tortured dog, finally giving him peace.

Cold sweat broke out on my forehead. I couldn’t move, my body paralyzed. In that instant, my sense of nausea was overridden by another, far more irrational feeling. I felt with all my soul that this could not be, that what I was seeing contradicted not biology or anatomy, but the most fundamental basis of reality. It was something that felt absolutely wrong, impossible, something that was guilty of the very fact of its existence.

And yet this impossible thing was here, smiling and laughing at me in the form of a mutilated dog. I felt disgusted, as if the sight before me had defiled and maimed me on a fundamentally different level, one not familiar to the human race. I felt the weight of this metaphorical guilt, the guilt of a witness who dared to look at the unnamed.

I was squeezed from the inside out; at that moment I could feel every movement in my stomach, and my mind involuntarily drew parallels with the fate of the dog and my current feelings. I could have sworn I could feel my own intestines moving, moving inside me like giant worms. I could almost physically feel them rubbing against the walls of my stomach, I could almost hear them mumbling something with their mute mouths, I could feel them desperate to burst through and join their brethren on the ground.

I knew it couldn’t be, I knew there was nothing wrong with my insides, but I clutched at my stomach anyway, as if hoping to hold on to what was inside. Finally, the bile rushed from my stomach straight to my throat, bringing my agony to its natural end. I vomited properly, emptying my stomach and exposing the contents of my diet to the world around me. However, even as I curled up and squeezed the contents of my stomach onto the asphalt, I could clearly distinguish the jerky, jellyfish-like movements of the dog’s organs. And that was the last straw.

My mind went completely blank, and all I wanted was to get away from that thing as fast as possible, as far away as possible, at any cost. Anything to get away from it. I don’t remember well how I ran at an amazing speed even for myself, how I ran and screamed, ignoring the remnants of vomit on my lips, how I ran and groaned, continuing to run despite the fatigue and pain in my legs, how I ran and gasped, not seeing people and transportation, how I ran forward and only forward, not hearing the threats and screams of those I hit and pushed away.

Streets changed each other, cars flashed before my eyes, echoing the kaleidoscopic dance of houses and other buildings around me. The silhouettes of people and trees turned into one continuous haze, but in spite of that, in spite of everything around me I kept running, running and running again.

When I saw the hulk of my home ahead, I struggled to get the keys out of my pocket and frantically opened the front door, rushed up the stairs, and when I finally reached the apartment, I instantly flew inside, locking the door.

I thought I’d feel better at home. I thought that, like a typical creepypasta, I’d be able to recover quickly from what I’d seen and live as if nothing had happened. But no, not at all—it didn’t get any easier. My mind was still moaning and screaming, screaming and burning, just not accepting that something like that could exist in our world. I felt tainted, defiled, corrupted by the very fact of WHAT I dared to see. It hurt me, vivid and almost palpable pain.

I couldn’t understand what had just happened. I couldn’t imagine WHAT could make a dog’s body behave like that. I wandered panic-stricken from one corner of the room to the other, pondering the potential causes of the unimaginable phenomenon I had witnessed. I ran through all the possibilities and options in my head, but none of them fit. Mutation? No, what the hell kind of mutation would cause its owner to spit out his own organs. Parasites? No, I haven’t seen any foreign bodies, or the organs themselves have become foreign…

So, forget it, forget it. Now is not the time for doubts. A virus? What kind of virus can turn a host’s body inside out and make their bowels move? Then what is it, what is it?! What the fuck was that?! I don’t know, I don’t know, goddamn it! The feeling of this metaphysical rot inside me kept growing, spreading my consciousness from the inside.

I felt that something had fundamentally changed, that I had opened the veil of the universe itself, and that what was behind it had stained me with its ichor. I couldn’t rationalize it, I knew it wasn’t normal, but I couldn’t resist the urge. My whole soul seemed like a disgusting, pus-oozing slug, and I wanted nothing more than to rip it out. A mad, instinctive desire to protect myself from something I couldn’t even understand was slowly taking over.

My hands reached up and I, trembling like a drug addict after withdrawal, slowly threw off the street clothes I was wearing and then gathered them into one bag. I didn’t understand the meaning of my actions, I didn’t know if they would help, but I had no other option, so I gave myself over to the madness that enveloped me. I didn’t scream, I didn’t cry, I didn’t yell—I just didn’t have the energy or time for that. I had only one thought in my head: “I had to save myself, save myself at any cost.”

Almost immediately afterward, I rushed to the bathroom with an almost instinctive urge to wash off whatever was left of the incident. I needed to cleanse myself, I needed to get rid of the stigma of being impossible, I needed to tear the rottenness off of myself and just freaking live like I used to! Cleanliness, cleanliness of body, cleanliness of mind, cleanliness and cleanliness again—that’s what I needed most.

So I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed my skin, as if I wanted to peel off everything that could remind me of that day. The water ran down my body as I scrubbed something I felt in my gut over and over again. My mind couldn’t even imagine the agony that dog had suffered, and I tried to avoid that fate at all costs. But the feeling of defilement, wrongness, and contamination of my essence did not go away; it kept me in the grip of my fear and made me keep rubbing.

I was clearly convinced that I was still under the influence, that the dog was a victim of something nightmarish and unimaginable, and if I didn’t protect myself, I would die the same way. I felt like something else, something rotten and corrupt, something I shouldn’t be. So I kept rubbing, kept rubbing, ignoring the sensations of pain that were slowly building up in my flesh. I wanted to scrape off my own skin, to tear away muscle, to break bones, to claw at my own throat and choke, choke, choke until my rotten, drugged brain came out of my ears.

My consciousness was as if separated from my body; it was in a frenzy, devoid of any common sense and driven only by one goal—to purify myself, in any form and by any means. It was madness, pure madness that devoured me from within, and I was powerless, absolutely powerless against it.

I only woke up when, rubbing my skin with a sponge, my nails dug into it hard enough to make it bleed. I woke up, as if snapped out of a trance, and, examining my skin, which was almost flesh-colored, I realized what I had almost done. I should have been scared further, I should have screamed in pain, but I felt only an inner emptiness. My psyche had probably had enough of the shocks, insanity, and crazy desires for the day, so it just “shut down,” leaving me empty inside.

Having no more moral or physical strength to do anything, I slowly turned off the water, crawled out of the bathroom and, barely reaching the bed, fell into crazy, generated by the most horrible abysses of unconsciousness dreams.

God, these dreams, these disgusting dreams. I’ve never seen anything like them before, and I hope I never will later. When I write, speak, or even think about them, I feel guilty—guilty that anyone but me would know about them. But still, I have to talk about them, too. What if it makes a difference? Maybe they mean more than I realize. Well, so be it.

In these dreams, I was crawling through a ditch filled with broken, jointed bodies of people and animals that stretched in an uneven line across the gray, dead earth. I felt only fear and disgust; I wished to get away from this place, I wished to see no more of this nightmare before me. But I was forced to crawl forward, crawling over the mutilated flesh of hundreds of living creatures, falling through and covering myself with a disgusting mixture of pus, blood, and feces.

I couldn’t see beyond my own hands, not because of the darkness of the space around me, but because of what filled it. I can’t fully convey it, I can’t explain it or try to describe it, but I will try. It was a light—a black, almost tangible light that permeated this entire space. And that light was making my movement a living hell.

I didn’t know what I’d run into, I didn’t know what I’d see after the next time I moved my body, and the uncertainty was driving me crazy. Crushed tins and broken arms, ripped-open rib cages and broken legs, stomachs torn from the inside and perforated crotches—it all jumbled before my eyes, appearing as a single kaleidoscope of ugliness and suffering.

In brief moments of respite, I would raise my head and look up at the black sun that blazed from the sky, which seemed almost as black in its cloudless cruelty, as if reflecting the light around me. But in spite of that, I crawled on, clinging to and crawling over the dozens of bodies that came my way. These bodies were horrible—mangled and broken, as if they had gone through all the circles of hell to be there.

The bodies in the dream were always different, but the outcome of the dream itself was not different—sooner or later, I would get out of that disgusting trench and climb up, only to see… it. Space, I can’t describe it any other way. Up there was nothing but space, a mad rolling wasteland, as if made entirely of bloated, hole-punctured skin.

I saw no beginning, I saw no end, I saw nothing but this disfigured skin that pressed on itself in layers, producing sores of monstrous proportions. I looked into these titanic holes of inflamed, pus-filled flesh, but I could not see the bottom of them. The location of the skin was always different, the size and number of the sores always different, but one thing was constant: I realized that I had climbed out of exactly the same gigantic sores on the skin of a creature of unimaginable size.

It was this moment that filled my soul with a mad, almost animalistic fear that made me wake up in a cold sweat, screaming something inaudible. And so it was almost every damn night.

I spent the next few days scouring the internet looking for information about something like this, but I never found it. I read various sites about the paranormal, but found in them only dull fictions of anonymous and superstitions of the citizens of our vast country prone to mysticism (ironic, considering that it is on such sites I will try to publish this). I climbed hundreds of forums but found only charlatans of all stripes: healers, witch doctors, witches, and other gore-mags that their existence only mocked my problem.

I will say in advance—the feeling of inner rot gradually left me, but this process was monstrously painful and accompanied by agony, unseen until now by me. Neither in a day, nor in a week, nor even in a month did symptoms similar to what happened to the dog appear, and in this, I was “lucky.” However, my consciousness did not become easier from this; rather, on the contrary, because of the absence of an immediate threat, my split brain was constantly in a state of tension, waiting for this threat to catch up with me.

The remnants of the “filth” lingering inside my mind were only adding oil to the fire, as if by their very presence whispering to me that everything was just beginning. All that month, I lived in a silent, hidden fear that was eating away at my soul from the inside. It seemed to me that the symptoms were about to manifest themselves, that I would die like that dog and maybe even worse, that my existence would come to an end.

And I looked for salvation. I tried to find a way out. I fought it as best I could—strange, illogical, and crazy combinations of actions of hygienic-mystical nature were tightly lodged inside my brain: I washed my hands with supposedly therapeutic oils found on the Internet, smeared myself with disinfectant ointments from herbs, and ate packs of various drugs and herbs, the meaning of the action of which I did not fully understand.

I know that I was stupid. I know how much money and opportunities I lost and how many quacks I fed. But still, the prospect of doing something, even if it was something so strange, seemed better than inaction. I needed hope, even something so miserable. When the side effects of my “medications” made themselves known—making me vomit in the toilet five times a day, shudder with terrible stomach pain, or break out in a fever in broad daylight—I stopped using them, but immediately found new ones. Obeying my unnatural urge to act and fight the abstract threat, I made these mistakes over and over, over and over, over and over.

My daily life was spent in constant anticipation of something nightmarish. As soon as something associated with this “something” appeared nearby, my sanity would immediately crack. I was panic-stricken about eating too much food. I was afraid to touch other people’s skin, not wanting to find unnatural folds on it in an instant. My mind was like a patient in a mental hospital, hysterical at the sight of any cluster of holes.

It seemed to me that soon I would lose all contact with reality, that a little more, and I would finally fall into the abyss of madness, but it never happened. Time went by, and the smog of madness slowly, step by step, receded—just as the feeling of dirt in my soul receded. I acquired a dozen or two phobias, got the reputation of a mystic paranoid obsessed with mysticism, and finally closed in on myself, but nevertheless crawled back from the state of insanity.

I don’t know how I didn’t go completely insane, why I didn’t lose my job and drink, how I managed not to die from so much crap, which I so diligently injected into my body. I never realized what miracle had kept my life relatively stable, but I wouldn’t say I was grateful. Thinking back on those thoughts now, I realize clearly that I would have been better off if the source of all this had been some disease that infected me, if I had lost my job and become homeless, if I had died in any possible agony but had not seen what I saw next. For everything, everything in this world—every evil, every nightmare, and every darkness—is nothing compared to THIS.

But okay, I’m getting ahead of myself, as I always do. Back to business. While I was at my worst, there was no suspicious news of any incidents in the neighborhood. I had been waiting for them, preparing for reports of epidemics and quarantines, expecting news of mass deaths in every new report, but all I found was emptiness—an emptiness that mocked me.

I was beginning to think that everything that happened was just a figment of my sick mind, and believe me, it would have been even easier for me. It would be the greatest joy for me now to get a free trip to a psychiatric hospital with a statement about schizophrenia or some other disorder distorting the perception of reality. Because in that case, it turns out that I was the cause of everything—that is, I was the only one who was abnormal, and there was nothing wrong with the reality around me.

Damn it, I was really going to make an appointment with a psychologist and finally put a stop to my own mental health, but everything was interrupted by one event—or rather, one news.

Something did happen in that old neighborhood, and to be specific, one of those Stalinist-type houses was forcibly resettled. Well, it would seem, resettled and resettled—what do you care? But here is one detail—the reason for the resettlement specified unfavorable epidemiological conditions. Can you feel the catch already? What if I told you that it was that damn house, under the walls of which the yard dog agonized from unknown forces? Do you see the connection?

And here, the final touch—the decision on resettlement was made after the death of one of the tenants, or to be more precise, one pensioner from the bottom floor, from, as it is written in the official report, “unsanitary.” That’s all right, but it’s HOW she died.

There were few people who saw the process of opening the apartment, and those who wished to share with someone like me even less (most of them just sent me away, and if the communication went through the Internet, then even blocked). But even such fragmentary evidence, in conjunction with the official report, was enough for me to lose a healthy sleep.

According to the few eyewitnesses (mostly neighbors), they called the police after the smell started gradually coming from the apartment. Initially, it was barely perceptible, but it gradually grew, soaking everything around it. The smell of a corpse was not a pleasant odor in itself, but what stank from that apartment was more disgusting than any of the normal odors.

People always named different associations: “the musty smell of human sediment mixed with incense… rotten oysters… masses of pig manure mixed with buckets of human slop… tons of meat left to decompose under the summer sun…” However, the general gist is always the same—pure filth.

When the police were called, protocols were drawn up, and the door was opened, the apartment was in such a state of disrepair that the question arose as to how many weeks ago the pensioner had died. There was no light anywhere—the light bulbs had been simply unscrewed. There were pieces of bags, rotten food, and God knows what else on the floor. There was a layer of dust on all surfaces, but the most important thing was the smell. The smell was so strong that a couple of witnesses, according to their own stories, threw up and immediately left the place, not wanting to see what would happen next.

What happened next I was told only by some suspicious grandfather, whose manner of communication gave him away as a lunatic, but we have what we have—the grandmother literally grew into her bed, in the most fucking direct sense. According to the grandfather, the old woman’s body was as if dried by something from inside. Her yellow, as if waxy skin was strangely bloated and, like a huge slug, stuck to the bed in the area of the pelvis.

The organs inside her abdomen were gone; the remnants of her spine and ribs peered freely through the mass of skin and whatever else was underneath. The only relatively normal part of the body was the head, except that the eyes were white as a dead bird’s, the mouth was open, and the jaw was sideways. But that was nothing compared to everything else.

I don’t know if there were holes in the skin, and I don’t want to know. And I don’t want any revelations about how much the old woman suffered and whether it would have been the same for me if I’d been around that dog longer. The mere fact that it happened in real life was enough to put me in a near panic attack. I could try to write it off as the ravings of a crazy pensioner, and it would even be logical—what’s the point of believing the strange stories of some random grandfather?

But, as always, there is one catch—in one of their local city sites for real estate sales, someone (apparently inherited relatives—I don’t know and I don’t judge) published a photo of the apartment after it was cleaned. And it was the detail on this goddamned piece of pixel masses that finally undermined my already flimsy faith in the stability of existence.

Captured in the photo, long as a train carriage and wide as a classroom, the main room—which at the same time was a bedroom—stretched to a large window. Visible in the camera angle, a surprisingly small ledge with a door, which formed the entrance hall, was crowned by a corridor leading either to the kitchen or to the bathroom. In the center was an old green sofa, opposite to which was a TV cabinet.

What’s the big deal? Well, as always, the devil is in the details. First of all, in the right corner of the room in the photo, there is an unnatural-looking empty place, which looks as if something was recently taken out of it (I assume that the bed), and on the floor under this place, there is a badly painted dark spot.

I looked into this frame for a long time and never understood what frightened me more—the strange red-black color of the stain or its shape, resembling a regular hexagonal star. When I looked at it, my gut clenched from inside, and the desire to throw the phone out the window for the very fact of the presence of this abomination on it grew steadily.

But the most important “proof” that this nightmare was real was the window—a bloody old window whose bars looked as if they had been melted and bent, whose pane of glass was strangely blackened closer to the ground, and whose very shape was as if it had become blurred. The window frame, made of carved wood, looked damp and swollen, as if it had lain in the mud for a long time.

One look at the strange corruption and unnaturalness of the structure was enough to tell that it could not have happened by itself, and certainly not as a result of human or animal activity. It was something else—as if some creature or phenomenon had subjected this mangled piece of matter to a series of influences hitherto unknown to the world.

That would have been the end of my story. I could have said that I was safe now, clarified that I had seen nothing else, and written the end in the style of, “You never know what you will encounter in this world—take care of yourself and your loved ones.” But to my great regret, it was not so. Nothing here from now on is like that.

I will not go into details about how my consciousness reacted to all of the above—I think you can understand it all. The important thing is not that, but that I finally got an answer to the question that had been tormenting me for so long.

Paranormal paranormal paranormal paranormal and no one canceled the everyday life. I was (and still am) in not the best financial situation, so neglecting work I could not neglect under any circumstances. My bosses sometimes refused to give me time off for normal reasons, so if I started to tell them what was going on, I would have been fired.

On the other hand, I am even grateful to them—it was the need to concentrate on practical tasks for most of the day that helped my creation to stay afloat in the most difficult moments. “Labor is liberating,” what can I say?

In one of the relatively calm days, I was offered an interesting “part-time job”: to take a set of documents from one sick employee and the next day take them to the bosses. Of course, for extra pay. I, wanting to unwind, agreed, and I hate myself for it to this day.

That employee lived on the outskirts of the city, and no, it is not about the old neighborhood (there I would not for any pennies go), and the exact opposite end. From my home to the destination was far away, and I had to go right after work to meet the deadline, but the anticipation of the promised money gave strength.

Having reached the place by cab and having successfully picked up the necessary documents, I found a problem—now it was about 23:30. The only necessary bus flight at this time is no longer running; there was no money for transfers and cabs, and I had nowhere to spend the night.

After some time of thinking, I found a way out—to cut a significant part of the route through the city park, then sit at the stop of another, approximately suitable flight for me. Eureka—I’m at home.

I’ll tell you right away that this park had no reputation as a dead place. All the paranormal happened in a completely different place, so I was afraid of wild animals and drug addicts, not the horrors of the unimaginable.

After passing through a couple of unsightly courtyards and a couple of streets, I finally entered the park. The gloomy, oblong paths, flickering lights, and rows of trees were not uncomfortable, but I wanted to get out of the park. The trees had become more crooked, their twisted trunks pressed down, creating a sense of impending danger, and it seemed as if one of them was about to collapse and crush my mortal body, ending my existence.

Almost no sound was heard around—only sometimes trees creaked somewhere nearby and another car passed by on the highway in the distance. The rare lanterns shone so dimly that they barely managed to disperse the darkness that had descended on the world, what to speak of any atmosphere and coziness.

But despite this, I walked relatively calmly. It seemed that I would get out of this place without incident. Moreover, without any sounds, the environment gradually began to bring peace. I was already relaxed and thinking about how well I would be able to sleep tonight after I got home, but the end of my peace came as suddenly as it had come.

I clearly heard a noise among the tall bushes to my right. It sounded strange, as if someone disoriented was moving through the trees and sparse bushes. I couldn’t make out anything beyond the light of the nearest flashlight, but I could clearly make out movement.

My body tensed, and I began to accelerate, but the movement kept up. I realized that whoever was there was coming across the street. I tried to turn to another path, but it was too late.

A man came out of the darkness, revealing himself to me. He was clearly homeless, his body wrapped in a long red-and-black scarf over several layers of dirty, indistinguishable rags. I took a step back, expecting this individual to be a drunken debauch or trying to shoot some change. But then the bum raised his head, and the light illuminated his face.

It was fucked up. His skin was pale and seemed to consist entirely of folds, covered with abrasions, bruises, scratches, and God knows what else. Holes—fucking holes that had haunted my nightmares for dozens of nights—covered his face, especially concentrated in the area close to his eyes.

Jesus Christ, his eyes—these chaotically running from side to side eyes seemed empty, devoid of life, dull, colorless, dead… But worst of all was his mouth. The lips were completely absent, as if they had been torn off with meat; the flesh nearby was inflamed and consisted more than entirely of some bloated crusts.

His movements were strange and jerky, as if he did not know where he was. His demeanor, his look—everything about him screamed that this man had completely lost his mind. He was convulsively turning his head in different directions, as if trying to see something in the landscape around us.

I don’t know whether I imagined it or not, but the holes in his face widened and narrowed in time with his breathing. I was paralyzed. I knew I had to run, I knew I had to save myself because nothing good was going to happen, but I couldn’t. My body felt iron-heavy and unwilling to move; my brain was covered with a nightmare and I was unable to make an adequate assessment of the situation.

Sooner or later, the inevitable happened. The homeless man’s eyes focused on me, and he froze. Even the breathing of his holes seemed to stop completely when he froze, like a predator freezing before a jump. He opened his mouth and let out an inarticulate hiss—I can’t even make out a fraction of the sound, but it was like a man trying to make a grasshopper chirp. And then he rushed forward.

With surprising speed, the pus-stinking carcass traveled the meters between us and slammed into me, knocking me to the ground. I tried to dodge and avoid the collision, but it was too late. The bag with the documents was knocked out of my hands and fell nearby; my head slammed into the pavement, causing the back of my head to respond with a terrible pain.

The taste of blood filled my mouth, and I tried to scream, but I only let out a pitiful wheeze. The creature was on top of me, its greasy, dirt-encrusted fingers clamped around my neck, cutting off my oxygen supply. He strangled me, wheezing and shouting something inaudible.

I couldn’t make out the words, and even if I could, it wouldn’t make any difference. The only thing I realized was that the creature in front of me was no longer human, and the cadaverous smell and the anatomical impossibility of its throat finally opened my eyes and filled the rest of my mind with horror.

Consciousness was slowly leaving me; memories came to me in an inarticulate mess before my eyes. It seemed a little more, and I would finally lose consciousness, but this time I had enough inner strength not to give up. Anger—cutting through the veil of numbness—consumed my consciousness.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want my life to end here. I didn’t want to die at the clutches of an unknown curse-infected piece of meat! I wanted to fucking live!

I tensed up and began to push the mad beast off me. My hands scrabbled around on the nearby ground, looking for something to defend myself, and I was lucky. My fingers touched something hard. I pulled the object toward me and felt it—a stick, not very large but quite sharpened, fit perfectly in my hand.

I was running out of time, and I could barely think, but I had enough strength for one last push. I clenched my eyes shut, jerked my arm up, and thrust my improvised weapon into the monster’s face.

A scream of inhuman pain cut through the silence of the night park. Rotten, musty blood splattered on my face, and I opened my eyes to see that the stick had hit the creature squarely in the right eye. The creature clutched at its face and shriveled up, just as I’d expected, and I took another leap and threw the bastard off my body.

It fell, hitting its back on a dirty brick and still trying to pull the stick out of its eye. I got up and lunged at it. Hunting instinct, multiplied by rage, was burning in me, screaming at me to kill this thing, to rid the world of this abomination, and I did not want to resist it. Now I was a predator, wild and crazy.

I kicked the creature’s arm aside, grabbed the stick, and yanked it out of its eye only to stab it in again, again and again. I punched, punched, punched, and punched again until my face was stained with pus and the monster’s face was a mass of torn flesh. The stick broke long ago, and the body stopped showing signs of life.

The rage receded, and I felt fear—another, natural fear. Have I killed a man…? Did I kill a man? But still, I had killed this creature brutally and mercilessly, and I doubt anyone would have believed the stories of self-defense.

I tossed the remains of the stick aside, climbed off the body, and sat down on the dirt with my hands on my face. What am I going to do now? What would happen to me? Despair consumed my mind, and I realized that my normal life could end here—end once and for all—not because of the supernatural madness of boundless nothingness, but because of quite natural and even ridiculously ordinary reasons.

And at the moment when I thought that the situation could not get worse, at the moment when I seemed to be ready for anything, out of the shrouding field of darkness stretched forward…… extremity? Though even the word “limb” would be a compliment to this hideously unnatural appendage that cut through the darkness with its whitish-cool color, moving with the slowness of a predator that had stumped its prey.

The thing clung to the center of the path with many pairs of formations that replaced its fingers, gripping the depressed ground tightly. It moved silently, making absolutely no sound, but it was perfect. The marks on the ground clearly showed me that.

Compared to anything my fragile mind could imagine, it looked as if dozens of cadaverous marble-colored worms had simultaneously released wasp stings from the ends of their inflamed bellies. When its hand was firmly fixed in the ground, it sprang forward with a speed that was in direct contradiction to its former idle slowness.

The arm that crawled toward me was like a long hose with sagging flaps of skin; it had many elbows, but they were all broken backward. Their backs were thrown forward with every movement like spades, while the elbows that bent backward made a clanking sound like the clattering of a child’s teeth dying of cold.

These actions took only seconds for the creature, but for me, they stretched out in time like a thread of fate that desperately refused to break, condemning my fractured mind to more agony. One limb was followed by another, and then another, and another, until there were six.

All the limbs tensed, involuntarily displaying muscles that looked like bulky bundles of tubes, and pulled their owner’s body forward. At that moment, his whole face appeared before me—slow, regal, as if he wanted to stretch some sadistic pleasure.

The first thing that caught the straying gaze of my inflamed eyes was his chest. A sunken, skinny rib cage with ribs that looked more like clusters of giant spiders’ legs. Moving my eyes lower, I saw a belly that looked like a pregnant woman’s belly, and then another… another… another… and another. About five human bellies hung down, creating a monstrous contrast to the creature above.

The skin on the bellies was bright pink, only slightly white where they connected to the rest of the body. The creature’s appearance was anathema to biology, nature, and the world I knew. Its hideous limbs served as both arms and legs; its body expanded evenly toward the clutch of abdomens like a colossal larva and narrowed toward the chest. The chest itself was almost insect-like, while its underside was practically human.

I couldn’t look at it. It wasn’t meant to be! It didn’t make sense—its whole structure, its whole being, all its features didn’t make a bit of sense. It shouldn’t be alive; it shouldn’t be moving; it shouldn’t be walking on this earth! It has no right to exist; it is madness, pure madness; it should not live among us.

The shape of the creature was an eyesore; the feeling of wrongness that had terrorized me all the previous times returned, and this time it consumed me completely. I wanted to run; I wanted to kill the creature; I wanted to burn myself and burn the whole place down; I wanted to smash my own head on the pavement just so I wouldn’t be around it anymore; I wanted to tear my eyes out so I wouldn’t have to see it; I wanted to tear its eyes out so it wouldn’t defile the world with its gaze; I wanted it to never fucking happen again; I wanted this world to never happen again.

I couldn’t; I just couldn’t bear it—this sight, this creature. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand. Please, God, why? The whole world swam before my eyes, rotting and dissolving into the impossible madness that stared back at me.

My eyes blurred; my hands sought support from behind. I tried to crawl backward, anywhere but away from him. But nothing worked; nothing ever did. The dirt beneath my body had no hold on my flesh, and I fell on my back.

The creature moved forward once more, and this time I was allowed to see its god-damned face. And it was the sight, the revelation, that finished me off. His face looked uncannily like the mangled face of a drowned baby whose body had been in the water long enough to swell but not long enough to rot.

His cheeks looked like greasy sacks full of water; his skin like swollen, sagging piles of unwanted flesh; his eyeballs like inflamed from some nerve-wracking disease. Those eyes—those red, insane eyes—watched the world around it in their unchanging predatory hardness.

It opened its mouth, and I saw hundreds of small black needles that served as teeth. I could tell that the creature was in no hurry to act. I could say that it saw and felt my helplessness, that it fed on my fear, that it enjoyed it, but that would not be true. It didn’t care what I was; its gaze lingered on me for a split second before sliding to the body of the homeless man.

I was nothing to him—just a cockroach, an insect so easily squashed. Its fiery eyes stared at me without interest, as if it found me too pathetic to kill. It stepped toward the body and lifted it with one of its limbs. Only then did I realize how tall it was—it was five or six meters tall.

And then—IIIII still shudder to think of that nightmarish, mind-bending spectacle. It lifted the homeless man’s body above it, squeezed him with its two forelimbs, and then sank its teeth into the trembling remains of his face. With many bites, it recoiled, showing me for a moment the very holes it had riddled me with.

And then, I don’t even know how to describe it. Mankind has created nightmares for centuries, but there is no sight that the human mind can imagine that compares to what I saw coming straight out of the unimaginable abyss.

The dead flesh began to quiver and twitch; the bum’s limbs shook in the air. And then the shards of his head simply opened like the center of a horrible flower of inflamed flesh and bleeding muscles. What stretched out from this “flower” was horrible—horrible in every detail of its hideous nature.

It was like a snake—no, like a tentacle, like a tangle of threads, with human organs as its material. This disgusting outgrowth bent forward, and the creature responded. It opened its mouth, stretching it to a physically impossible width, and then something comparable only to an emaciated and inside-out minnow emerged.

The two outgrowths merged in a nightmarish dance of inflamed masses of flesh, exploding into expanding shapes that twisted and merged, engulfing, distorting, and spewing each other over and over again. I could no longer look; I could no longer see anything like it, for it was beyond my mind.

The flesh kaleidoscopically twisted and twisted, changed and fractured, merged and created, dragging me into an inescapable madness. I wailed, wailed desperately and madly, clutching my face and curling into a rocking motion. I shook and cried and wheezed something inaudible, wanting only one thing: for it to end.

Gradually, the squelching sounds subsided, and slowly, almost humbly, I looked in that direction again. The body of the homeless man was lying on the bloody ground as an empty husk, and the creature stood over him triumphantly, almost solemnly. I don’t know if I imagined it, but one of the creature’s bellies had gotten bigger.

With one last look at me, the god-awful brand on the body of a dying world stepped back into the darkness, taking its victim with it. I should have screamed, but my mouth wouldn’t open. I should have sobbed, but my eyes were dry. I should have been afraid, but inside my soul was nothing but pus.

What I had witnessed had ripped out something fundamental from me—something that had previously only dared to wound me with the deepest torments of this world. I had no strength left; I had no fear left; I had no feeling other than the sensation of something different, something not meant for our world, around me.

That metaphorical fire—the flame of life in me—was poisoned, poisoned once and for all. I silently got up, automatically picked up the bag with documents, and wandered senselessly forward.

I don’t remember how I got home. I don’t want to talk about how I passed out right in the hallway. I don’t want to say what an absolute agony the sensations inside were for me. A strange and inexplicable feeling of impending catastrophe—a global and inescapable catastrophe—was weaving its dark net inside me, finally depriving me of the last shards of sanity.

I felt that something was dying out; something was screaming and choking in my soul, and the world around me was choking in its place. I felt, I felt the filth around me and traced its source. I understood; I realized; I felt a huge, monstrous mass hanging over everything I knew.

I had been an idiot before. I had thought I had seen evil in all my past encounters, but now I realized clearly that I had only seen a shadow of its shadows. The sensations of the creeping nightmare of other realms filled me to the very core. The ordinary world faded before my eyes, for it overshadowed it. All actions became meaningless, for it gnawed its jaws through our world. Reality itself dissolved in my eyes, for I knew how little time we had left.

I knew, felt, and understood only one thing—it was getting closer, closer and closer. I cut off all my contacts one by one. I locked myself in my house and waited—waited, being immersed in the abyss of my nightmares.

And one day, on the last day of my even remotely normal existence, it came. I felt it at once—the irregularity, foreignness, and unnaturalness of all the sensations around me pierced my senses from the moment I opened my eyes and pulled my brain out of the space of the dream worlds and into the real world.

The yellow paint color of my ceiling had shifted, inflamed and curled into itself, becoming something different—something alien. The corners of the ceiling warped and bent, divided and merged, taking on the shape of impossible proportions. The whole world—the whole damn world—had changed, stripped off its old skin and put on a new one that gave me nothing but fear and pain.

I threw off the blanket, which now looked more like a mass of torn hair, in disgust, and stepped slowly, cautiously, and uncertainly onto the floor. The sensation was horrible, as if I were not laminate, but a mass of bones boiled in gastric juice, bending and twisting beneath my feet.

I shrank inside and out. I wanted to scream; I wanted to run; I wanted to eat myself; I wanted it to stop. I couldn’t stand it. With all my being, I felt hundreds and thousands of visual, overtaking, and tactile stimuli that I don’t want, can’t, and don’t understand how to describe.

Every second, my consciousness was tormented by vague half-images with indefinite outlines, which covered the world I knew, drowning it among the swamps of seething chaos. I fell to my knees, unable to bear it. I called, begged, and prayed to all the gods I knew and begged, desperately begged for it to be a delusion.

But no gods, no demons, and no one else could hear me—the names sounding only like silly, meaningless whispers. It was as if this whole planet, this whole galaxy, this whole tortured world had been ripped from the control of the known gods and forces and given as a gift to other, alien and inexplicable gods and forces.

Slowly, I stood up and looked around. The deformed angles and shapes shook, hurting my eyes with their impermanence. I looked at the window and saw only shivering darkness, in the midst of which twisted and twisted the trunks of naked and bruised trees, now looking more like the tentacles of unknown creatures.

Slowly, tentatively, I stepped through the polygon of the door and into the hallway. Slowly passing the curved and similar-to-the-inside-of-the-stomach corridor, I looked in the mirror… God… It wasn’t me in the mirror. That disgusting, god-awful thing couldn’t be me. I swear, I swear it wasn’t me!

What I saw, though bipedal, leaned forward in a strange way and looked remotely like a dog, a hyena, or some kind of insect. Its body was covered with a hideous, almost clay-like skin, and its fingers looked like a hybrid of inside-out octopus tentacles with scaly claws and hoof-like feet, while the arms holding those hands were disproportionately protruding forward and the legs were bent backward.

The texture of the body itself was different—ugly, alien, and inhuman—and I can’t even convey this abomination properly. I couldn’t look at it; I couldn’t see those lumps in his skin; I couldn’t look into those insect-like eye sockets that drowned in his sunken eyes; I couldn’t look at those expanding and contracting holes that served as his ears.

I brought my hand—I brought that hideous, alien appendage of biology forward—and smashed the mirror with it. The sensation of the mirror shards piercing my skin pierced me, bringing strange and previously unknown sensations. I laughed, sobbed, thrashed, and trembled as this disgusting body shook on the floor in pain.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it happened the way it did. I don’t understand what it is and why it chose us, but it doesn’t matter now.

I’m sitting at my computer writing this, and as I write, I can’t help but notice how the letters, the symbols, the words change. Much of what I’ve written is gone; much has changed; much has appeared. The floor beneath me seems to breathe—breathes and gasps like a cancer patient. The chandelier on the ceiling looks more and more like a mixture of beetle legs and scraps of cat skin. The squelching inside the walls gets louder and louder, clearer and clearer.

Behind the walls of the world, there is a shuddering mass that looks like the fused bodies of dying people, like a cluster of dog organs, like the black sun of my dreams. It flows from outside and flows into me. It screams with the gnashing of my claws, the crying of my hundreds of eyes, the squelching of blood in my veins.

But I must endure. I must ignore them. I must end it. So close, so far, so much, so little—just a little more, just a little more…

I don’t know who will read this or if they will read it at all. I don’t know what you are, if you exist or how you exist. I don’t know how you think or if you can understand me, but if you can, I want to tell you one thing.

You may not believe me. You may think I’m just another grief writer from the Internet. You may mock this text and everything I say and have said. But listen to me—listen to me for the first and last time:

No matter how terrible your world seems to you, no matter how much you hate your life, no matter how much you curse your existence—appreciate. Appreciate what you have. Appreciate and hold on to it as the last thing you have. Because the world doesn’t stand still. The world changes, changes, and we change with it. There is always something worse. There are always new stages of nightmare and new faces of the end.

So appreciate your life while you can. Because the world always can change—and you won’t like it.