by James Robinson
~ 6100 words
TIMESCALE: PRETTY MID
When Jimmy woke up, he found himself nestled in the crevice of an unfamiliar couch. This in itself was not strange. Being a bit of a couch connoisseur, Jimmy had woken up plenty of times on hitherto unknown specimens. This particular couch seemed to be of reasonable quality, with plump cushions and plenty of room to sprawl.
He felt … fine. Quite good, actually. He found this surprising. Usually when he woke up in the crevice of an unknown couch, he was not at the pinnacle of health.
“Bleh,” annunciated Jimmy. After extracting himself from the crack of his makeshift den, he got his first proper look at the couch. “Huh,” he said. His casual tone did not reflect the sheer panic of his internal state.
The room was the couch. Or, perhaps, a fusion of couches. From the spot where he sat, Jimmy could see a host of identical couch-frames encircling him, punctuated at regular intervals by plush armrests. The couches all faced inward towards themselves, their cushions stretching forward a ridiculous length until they fused together in the middle.
It must have been, what, forty feet end-to-end? It was certainly a whole lot of couch. Nor did it stop with the seat-cushions. The backs of the couches also stretched far past reasonability, curving upward and inward until they formed a cozy ceiling above.
Also, the couches were purple. While this was surely a minor detail next to the room’s incomprehensible architecture, Jimmy still noted it as odd. He didn’t have anything against purple, of course. It was actually his favorite color. For a couch, though? It just didn’t seem right.
As Jimmy surveyed the couch enclosure, he noted a lack of gaps. He could spot no other objects, no outside light leaking through. It was all couch.
He clambered to his feet. After a moment standing, he promptly flopped back down. There was nowhere else to go. Indeed, he could clearly see the totality of the enclosure. A soft purple glow illuminated the space, emanating from the couches themselves.
Eventually, he turned his attention to himself. Though his body felt fine, he couldn’t shake the feeling that some fundamental aspect of himself was … off.
Well, he had clothes at least. Historically speaking, this was a fortuitous sign. He wore a gray hoodie, worn out jeans, and simple black sneakers. While the items aligned with his usual generic wardrobe, he didn’t recognize any of them as actually being his. Also …
“Ahh!!” said Jimmy, staring at his hands. He frantically pulled at other bits of clothing to reveal his forearms, his legs, his stomach. They all confirmed it. His body was now purple. Since the couch-room lacked a mirror, he couldn’t get a look at his face. All things considered, this was probably for the best.
The lesions certainly didn’t help. On every visible portion of himself, he found a smattering of ugly scars—jagged lines of puckered purple splitting the mellow violet of his skin, their lengths ranging from a few inches to almost the span of his forearm.
Jimmy stared at himself. He stared at the strangeness around him. He stared at himself again. He found himself wholly unable to decide which element of his circumstances should overwhelm him first.
In a tremor of nervous habit, he reached for his phone. He did not find it. What he did find, however, was a letter. It crinkled as he pulled it from his pocket.
The paper was silvery white, the text a flowing black script.
When he started reading it, a friendly feminine voice echoed loudly in his brain.
The first line said: Greetings Demigod! The second line said: Welcome to the Pocket Infinium. The rest of the lines said quite a bit else.
As Jimmy read through the letter, his eyes opened wider and wider.
Upon finishing, he took another cursory glance around the expansive couch. He returned to the letter, reading back through a few choice sentences. Then, he flipped the paper over and skimmed through the FAQ.
He folded the letter into a crisp little rectangle before stowing it in the pocket of his jeans. He crossed his arms and stared at the couch. Alas, it was the only thing at which he could stare. Time passed. Jimmy chewed on his lip. He picked at his cuticles.
Eventually, he managed to say something.
“Nuh-uh,” he declared.
Well said. Except … what part was he refuting, exactly? Was it the bit about everything being virtual? Or the bit about the earth being gone? Or was it that he did accept all those wild claims and merely rejected the supposed reasoning behind them?
Jimmy sighed. His higher brain functions were not known for their performance under duress.
Probably better to believe none of it, right? Yes. That felt safe. Rejecting every single bit of it seemed like the fairest precaution to take.
For, if he were to take the slip of paper at its word, it would mean dismantling his entire conception of reality. He decided he wasn’t quite ready for that. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else for him to do.
He tried flopping and flipping across the plentiful cushions. He tried burying himself in a vegetative lay. He spent some time pushing against the couch-frames, searching for any element of the room that wasn’t sealed. He picked at the strange lesions that pockmarked his purple skin, which he was surprised to find did not hurt to the touch. It seemed they were scars, not fresh wounds.
Were they though? How could a scar be a scar when skin wasn’t skin? Since allegedly none of this was real anyway, which had to mean …
Nope, nope, nope. He wasn’t doing that. Acknowledging even a small breach of actuality would lead him down a slippery slope.
Alas, regardless of his comprehensive rejection of everything around him, he still wanted to leave this room. Wasn’t there something in the letter about a compass?
Just like that, a shape appeared in his hand. Indeed, ‘shape’ was the closest he descriptor he could find. He stared at the thing, stunned.
It was beautiful, almost incomprehensibly so. Where it touched his hand, Jimmy felt a warm, incorporeal buzzing sensation against his skin. At first glance, it looked to him like a ball of oscillating silver, though in reality this wasn’t the case. It could only be called a ball if that ball were also a clock, and the clock were actually a celestial cloud. The fluff of this apparent clock-cloud contained an excess of strange geometries. Cryptic widgets rotated through delicate fitted grooves. Silver gizmos coiled up and shifted to form a series of patterns that looked as organic as they did mechanical.
Also, it wasn’t quite silver. Well. It was silver—sleek and metallically so—but also it was so much more. The way it reflected light gave hints of every color imaginable, like an aura unable to make up its mind.
It was also impossible. Each of its composite shapes maintained a sense of impossibility, forming bonds and connecting across themselves at angles that defied space. Like those uncanny images of optical illusions, except these he could grasp in his hand. Despite the chaotic and baffling angles, there was a sheer flawlessness to it all: a perfect, unachievable template that no possible reality could match.
This, in its way, was the first evidence he could not deny. He had seen couches before. Messed up skin, too. Not to mention sheets of paper making bold claims. So what if it was all a bit … weird. Chalk it up to a psychotic break. But this? He found himself incapable of shrugging it away. Such perfection—and paradox!—did not exist in the real world. Nor did it exist in his imagination. Any image he might think up on his own merits would be a pale imitation of what he now saw. Such sharpness. Such clarity. This, without a doubt, was beyond him.
“Well … shit,” said Jimmy. It seemed his sanity-preserving bulwarks were failing.This, it seemed, was how things were.
He still managed to fend off most of the deeper implications. His emotions could usually be counted on for a strategic shutdown. Sure, they would double back with three times the angst and four times the force, but that was a problem for later.
He studied the alleged compass, still mesmerized by its intricate motions. So … what now? How was this supposed to get him out of the room?
Just like that, the apparatus in his hand began to change more rapidly. Impossible shapes buzzed and interlocked, producing some satisfying clanks and clunks. What had once been something of a ball now became a flattish circle. The various spindles of silver clicked and coalesced, forming words in crisp mechanical font.
Would you like to … ?
I. Locate key
II. Exit starter pocket
III. Other
Jimmy stared at the shimmering text, feeling both relieved and somewhat confused. He eyed the options. Probably … exit, right? Despite his affinity for couches, he’d had quite enough of this one.
To exit starter pocket
…
Follow intuition
He frowned. Wasn’t this supposed to be a compass? He began to muse on how useless a compass would actually be in an environment where poles had long since been abandoned. Unfortunately, this soon took his brain into dangerous territory. Nope. Time for his full crisis later. Right now, he just needed to get off the couch.
Something caught his eye. It was nothing at all that did it. Just a crack between two upright cushions, same as countless others surrounding him. Nothing differentiated it except … a feeling.
Deciding nonsense was a fine guide after sense itself had abandoned him, Jimmy chose to trust his strange new feeling. He crawled over cushions until he arrived at the crack in question. Of course, he had no idea of what to do once there. After a moment’s thought, he glanced at the compass. It still displayed the same set of words.
Was there a button hiding somewhere? Some secret door that would open up? A cheeky sub-cushion trapdoor?
While Jimmy weighed his options, he noticed something about the crack. It was different. To be clear, it already had seemed different. That’s what had drawn him here in the first place. But now, it differed even further from its earlier difference.
Something about the cushion-crack’s dimensions. Or perhaps its size? Certainly not its texture—that was just classic couchness—and the purple color remained constant. Though, admittedly, it was growing on him. Why shouldn’t couches be purple? It was a lovely color in many other contexts …
The longer he stared, the more the crack differed. Then, he realized. It was opening without opening. Growing without budging an inch. While his eyes saw dimensions that were perfectly unchanging, his mind’s eye gazed into an ever-expanding maw. The crack subsumed him, dominating his world, until cavernous purple fuzz had enveloped all he could see.
There! Past the purple darkness. He could see twisting columns and gnarled features towering far above. At first glance, it all looked enormous. A gargantuan monument of superstructures, as if he were inside a pinhole peering into an impossibly large world.
The intuition that had brought him to these cushions now suggested he step forward. So, lacking anything better to do, he did. He moved his foot. The couch enveloped his consciousness. The crack was all he could see now—along with that strange grand world on the other side. His foot came down on something grainy and soft. He took a second step. Then, with no more fuss than walking through a doorway, he left the couch behind.
His final step felt vaguely uphill, and by the time he had placed his foot down, his environment had changed completely. As he took in his new surroundings, his brain searched for some appropriate expression of awestruck profanity. After a few quiet moments, he eventually managed an “ugh.”
Jimmy found himself standing on the side of a forested path. Or—perhaps ‘forested’ was a bit of a misnomer. It was certainly a path. Maybe twenty feet across, comprised of a black substance both powdery and firm. The texture existed somewhere between dust and soot and sand. Jimmy could only see so far in either direction, as both sides became lost around sharply curving bends.
That was the path. As for the ‘forest’ surrounding it? Well. It certainly could be said to loom, as certain forests were known to do. It also looked like it had been grown, not built. Aside from that, well … at least some of it was brownish, or greenish. The rest of it seemed to be comprised of every color’s off-shade, the sight of which forced Jimmy to blink. While each ‘trunk’ consisted of only a single color, they had grown together into a multihued tangle.
They looked as much like textured noodles as they did proper trees, their forms encircling each other like so many balls of twine. Branches wrapped branches to form complicated knots, out of which sprouted fungal-esque protrusions. Caps and bulbs. Funnels and discs. Each of them glowed, soft and turquoise, providing the path with its only source of light. Jimmy couldn’t see any sky. The gnarled pseudo-trees meshed together with such thickness that nothing above the forest could be seen.
The effect was eerie, to put it mildly. The sounds did not help. Rhythmic chatters. Smooth whistles. The tones seemed to strike somewhere between a cockatoo and vintage fictional robot, though admittedly he had never heard either in person. While none of the sounds were particularly loud, that did not make them less off-putting.
He did his best to take it in stride. If everything was already nonsense, what harm was a little more of it? Sure, he was standing on a path of granular darkness surrounded by parodies of plants. Sometimes that’s how things went. However, if he was to be candid, he did think he preferred the couch.
The couch. Jimmy whirled around, searching for any sign of the setting he had so recently left behind. No sign of it. Just more of the black sandy-ish stuff and that tubular rainbow of trees. Strange. Also, where had his little compass thingy gone—
Never mind. As soon as he’d thought about it, the gizmo appeared in his hand. It whirred without producing any text, feeling both hot and cold against his skin. What a strange little bundle of … whatever this was.
He spent a moment staring at it. “So.”
That seemed to be enough. The silver impossibilities quickly scattered and re-tangled, assembling themselves into a new configuration with a chorus of audible clacking. Jimmy could make out new words:
Would you like to move your starter pocket?
I. Yes
II. No
III. Other
Jimmy surveyed the options, not quite knowing what to make of them. Eventually, he shrugged in vague assent. Back in his prior life, he had generally let inertia take him where it wished. He saw no reason to stop now.
The compass appeared to discern his assent, compressing the Yes with a satisfying thunk. Mechanisms swirled and the words disappeared. Then, the compass opened.
It looked like a blooming flower. Silver petals shimmered with prismatic light. Inside the compass moved gears and keys and spirals, rotating together in a lattice of perfect harmony. So delicate. So secret. It was, without a doubt, the most exquisite thing Jimmy had ever seen—so entrancing that it almost made him forget about everything else.
In a passing flash of insight, Jimmy intuited that he should kneel. His legs stirred up dark puffs of dust. Then, he noticed a small glimmer on the path. He stared at the glimmer. It began to warp his vision. The longer he stared, the more his vision warped. For a moment, he swore he could glimpse a flash of purple upholstery flickering on the other side.
Suddenly, the glimmer moved. It floated up towards the open compass, then quickly darted inside. Moments later, the compass snapped shut. In a flurry of mechanical motion, it returned to its prior rounder state. After a few more clunks and clicks, new words appeared.
Would you like to place your starter pocket?
I. Yes
II. No
III. Other
Jimmy considered this. Probably … no? Right?
The compass selected No before returning to its wordless equilibrium.
“Wait, um. Other?”
?
There were no words, just the question mark. “Um.” Jimmy paused, scratching at one of his lesions. What did he want? Unfortunately, the answer to this question depended on his honest appraisal of the situation. Would he just blindly accept the existence-shattering words of a random letter or …
“How do I get out of this place?” he asked. Good. Noncommittal. This ‘place’ could indeed be anything, including plenty of options that were not … you know. Indeed, there was no way to know anything right now. Right? So no need to collapse his sanity prematurely.
The compass whizzed through several configurations before providing a directional arrow. “Oh.” He moved the compass, and the arrow moved accordingly, clearly pointing down one of the path’s directions.
Jimmy decided to follow the arrow, once more deferring to the breezy flow of inertia. His steps in the soot-sand did not make a sound. The path continued winding back and forth, while noodletrees entwined semi-grotesquely overhead. Now and then, Jimmy would hear a strange croak or creaking in the darkness.
He wasn’t scared. He was far too stunned for such subtleties. Even so, he did find himself tacking closely to the path’s center.
The more he journeyed, the stranger he found his surroundings. The questions why and what the hell were foremost in his mind. He felt like he’d been dropped into a rave crossed with a tacky theme park. Except, of course, this place wasn’t actually loud. The general pervading silence now remained broken only by faint rustlings that sounded far too alive.
The ridiculous neon trees also had an indisputable naturalness to them, a haphazard tussle of trunks and vines battling each other for space. Space for what, though? Space to soak up more light? Light from the sun, which totally for sure existed?
Anyway, why would they need light in the first place? Since this whole environment was allegedly … you know …
Regardless. Whatever their aesthetic, these trees were obviously artificial—a word that could allow for a range of interpretations.
Sure, but—why this? Who could this ridiculousness possibly have been constructed for? For him?
Within the steady consistency of winding bends and silent footfalls, Jimmy’s thoughts crept further. There was no guarantee of anything, was there? Whatever rules had once applied to the world, whatever explanations he might now come across, there was no sure way of knowing how things actually worked. All bets were truly off.
What if this was it? What if this was all of it? Would he be destined to spend the rest of his days strolling through this clown-tree grove?
Jimmy was sufficiently consumed by such thoughts that he did not notice the path turning narrower. Then, after a few more rumination cycles, he nearly walked face-first into the pane of a rotating glass door.
“Huh,” he observed.
He looked backwards to confirm that he had indeed just walked through an impossible alien forest, only to now be confronted by the sort of revolving door one might find at any large hotel or mall. It had four perpendicular panes of glass set in frames of silver metal, the lot of them embedded inside a grand cylindrical awning. The full door stretched the width of the path, forming a tight seal with the overgrown forest. Through the glass, Jimmy could see glimmers of bright fluorescent light.
“Huh,” he repeated, making the most of his shallow verbal arsenal. He took another look at the forest behind him. He looked again at the door ahead. He squinted at the bright industrial light permeating the other side, then back at the ethereal glow of the trees. Eventually, he shrugged.
He pushed at the door. As it rotated forward, he noticed it had a fringe of those little black ruffles at the bottom, tracing curved lines through the sandy soot. The doors themselves rotated smoothly, and soon enough he was through.
“Huh.”
It looked like a mall. Or, perhaps, what every mall wished it could be. The levels were plentiful, linked by an entourage of escalators, well lit beneath a sweeping ceiling. Glass sparkled. Marble marbled. The well-polished floor, patterned with tiles of slate and beige, stretched to such a width that it might as well have been a stadium—and that wasn’t even mentioning the length. The length of the mall was … actually, probably best to leave the length unmentioned. It stretched out to a distance that made Jimmy feel funny inside.
“Well then.” He glanced at his empty hand where the compass had once been. No sooner had he wondered about it than it suddenly appeared, clicking and clacking into existence. Its arrow spun and settled, pointing straight down the primary path of the mallscape.
“Sure,” said Jimmy. “Let’s browse. Why not.”
Here on the tile floor, his steps were not silent, with his sneakers producing a steady squeaking. For some reason, he found this to be a relief.
No people around, but the stores were properly open with plenty of goods displayed. It was a lot of clothing. Mostly clothing. Actually … nothing but clothing.
The storefront signs displayed no words. Instead, they all had cartoonish pictures of whatever it was they sold. It was always one single product, it seemed. He saw a shirt store full of shirts, a pants store full of pants, a sock store full of socks. Baseball caps and fedoras each got their own real estate.
Jimmy continued on for the time being, more or less content with his current wardrobe. Still, he had taken to frowning. Despite the environment’s cheery beauty, there was something eerie in its emptiness. Also, something about the mall’s complete lack of food or beverages had unfortunately caused him to crave both.
Primarily the drink, of course. Jimmy had, first and foremost, always been a beverage man. His purple lesioned skin and alleged unrealness hadn’t changed that fact. He did take his thirst to be an indicator of something vaguely positive. If this environment wasn’t … whatever it wasn’t … then why would he be feeling thirsty?
Quite thirsty, actually. After a multitude of shop-lengths filled with choice socks and belts and scarves, Jimmy found himself feeling notably parched.
His sneakers squeaked. His mouth felt increasingly dry. Why, though? Why was he actually thirsty?
Well. He had admittedly walked pretty far, if the fatigue in his legs were to be believed. There had been a good bit of forest and a much greater bit of mall. All in all, he had covered quite some distance.
Distance. Sure, sure. Here he was, Jimmy the human, out here with his tired legs and purple lesions, covering some real bonafide distance.
Whatever. Real or not, supernatural or virtual, he was more than over his growing sense of dehydration. If only he had some means to …
Oh. Right. He looked down at his hand, and the compass materialized.
“Hey, listen, so I was wondering,” said Jimmy, unsure of where his bashfulness came from, “any chance you know where can I get a drink around here?”
Immediately, the compass clicked and clacked. It spun around itself until its arrow pointed in a slightly new direction. It still pointed down the main thoroughfare of the mall, just a bit more … leftward? And … uppish?
Jimmy took an escalator—a bizarrely mundane experience in the midst of everything else—up one floor. The compass leveled out, and he kept following it vaguely leftward, ignoring sandals and handbags galore.
Eventually, he spotted the door. It was an unassuming door, which in some ways made it stand out more. Also, it had a proper round doorknob, which looked out of place in a glossy retail space full of handles and push-bars.
He made his way to it. He eyed the round metal knob. At its center, there lay a formidable looking keyhole.
He tried the door.
It was locked. Very locked. So much so that the door itself did not budge in the slightest. The doorknob neither jiggled nor wiggled, nor did the actual door do any sort of rattling against its frame. It did not move. Comprehensively. Down to the atoms themselves, as far as Jimmy could tell. It felt like every bit of the door had been completely frozen in time, refusing to engage in even the slightest kinetic compromise.
With a quiet sigh, Jimmy gave up on the door. Onward then. It seemed that further ground would need to be traversed in this parched land of commerce.
He continued on, past the diverse yet repetitive shops. Nice lights glinted off of nice polished surfaces, but their bougie charms were lost on him. It was all too empty and all too quiet.
Sweaters. Blazers. Sunglasses.
The sunglasses did make him pause for moment, as he currently lacked a good pair. Eventually, he decided against it. Whatever this whole business was, it seemed largely a skyless affair.
As Jimmy walked on, he kept checking his compass. It continued pointing him back towards the impossible door. Lovely. It seemed the compass was no use either.
Trudge trudge. Squeak squeak.
Finally, he gave up. He stopped walking and slumped against the glass-metal railing that overlooked the floor below. All of this, he decided, was stupid. Pointless, as well. So there he sat, sulking and sullen, refusing to participate any further.
Alas, he still felt thirsty. On top of that, he was starting to get properly hungry too. He really would prefer not to be feeling this way, all things considered. Perhaps further action would be required.
He supposed could try a different level, or maybe double back to the forest, or … what was that?
His gaze had been drifting over the mallscape, listless and unseeing, when something had caught his eye. Jimmy straightened up. Yes, indeed it was: an illustrated sign that looked quite a lot like a soda can. He pushed himself to his feet.
The doodle clearly represented a beverage. What’s more, a beverage with bubbles! Any liquid would do at this point, but he certainly preferred carbonation. At the bottom of the sign lay a directional arrow, kindly guiding prospective beverage-seekers towards a small offshoot hallway.
Jimmy glared at his compass. “Lot of help you were.”
The compass did not respond. It kept pointing backwards. Jimmy sighed and continued forward, approaching the soda-can sign. Only when he got right beneath it did the compass spin around and point down the corresponding hall.
Before Jimmy began exploring, he noted another sign nearby. Smaller than the soda-can, hanging right around the corner—a strange warning outlined in yellow and black.
Jimmy studied it. Weird. It had actual legible text on it, which he hadn’t seen anywhere else in the mall. It looked a lot like one of those ‘Caution: Bears in Area’ signs you might see near forests, with corresponding illustrations of bear-shaped silhouettes. Except this message read CAUTION: THIN-THINS IN AREA. It did not contain any bear-related images, nor representations of any animal he could recognize. The image was more like a … face? A crude cartoonish one, with simple eyes and a simple mouth. Kind of like a smiley-face, minus the round outline. Grimacing with teeth exposed.
He stared at the bold yellow sign with its stark black shapes, noting that the teeth themselves were colored in white. Such attention to detail.
Jimmy frowned, weighing his options. The sign didn’t tell him much about these supposed Thin-Thins. Mostly just that they had eyes and a mouth. But wouldn’t that include, like, pretty much everything?
So that would mean … what. Anyway.
He didn’t love taking risks, but neither was he particularly averse to them. Riskbivalent, one might call him, depending mostly on how much he despised life on a given day.
Today he felt … meh. Whatever. Whether or not his soul had been uploaded and the world had ended did not, in fact, impact his current need for a drink.
Anyway. Either this environment was a crazy hallucinatory dream, in which case—whatever. Or, alternatively, things around here were actually how that original absurd letter had described, meaning this whole place was … what it said it was. A theory which, to be clear, Jimmy had not yet accepted. To do so would mean fielding off certain unsavory follow-up questions—such as ‘What was he?’ or ‘What had become of everyone he cared about?’
Anyway. Even if the aforementioned unlikely scenario were indeed the case, wouldn’t that mean this whole place was built for him? Or, at least, for the broader them? In that context, how bad could anything possibly be?
So, he decided. He walked down the hall. Aesthetically, it looked similar to the broader layout of the mall, if a bit miniaturized. Bright and sterile. Polished and modern. Similar to the homogenous retail passageways he’d traversed in his previous life.
Funny. Things could be so different—cosmically so—indeed more different than anything could possibly be, and yet. Sameness found a way.
Admittedly, the first sharp bend he approached was a bit unexpected. The second, even more so. Neither phased him all too much, though, because soon he saw his prize.
They were vending machines. Rows upon rows of them—stacked tight together on both sides of the hall. Indeed, there were far more of them than could have been justified by any real sort of demand. They extended down the hall for as far as he could see before disappearing around another bend. Jimmy smiled. While he had no money on him, under these particular circumstances he felt at liberty to break some glass.
The machines all hummed. Each was stacked to the gills with chrome cans sporting pink hearts at their centers. Unclear if the icons were advertising health or love, but Jimmy wasn’t picky.
Hm. It seemed glass-breaking would not be necessary. There were no slots or readers asking for any sort of currency, and there was only one button on each machine. Naturally, it was in the shape of a heart.
Jimmy pressed it. Not long after, a can was duly vended.
“Hell yeah,” said Jimmy.
It was then—or perhaps sometime around then—that Jimmy heard the noise.
Gnarn.
He turned. He saw. In those first brief moments, he wasn’t sure if he should be afraid or not.
It was … a catacomb of sorts? One of those things with the structure and the holes …
Like a beehive? Kind of? Except quite a bit larger. Also, it was bone-white. Stuck like a wad against the wall above one of the vending machines. Except … it was whiter than bone. Blanched, bleached, whatever. It was pale.
Jimmy did not mind the paleness. What he minded were the eyeballs.
There were only a few at this point. Still. They were very clearly peeking from the holes.
Gnarn.
He watched the catacomb. Then he, slowly, oh so slowly, pressed his hand through the folding door thingy of the vending machine. He wrapped his fingers around the can. Health or love or none of the above, he needed a fucking beverage.
Gnarngnarn
“Look, please, I just—“
The contents of the catacomb swarmed outwards.
“Oh no,” said Jimmy, backing away.
GNARNGNARNGNARN
Jimmy ran. He should have fled much earlier. He was the biggest fool on earth. Earth—ha! His fingers felt feeble. The heart-drink slipped from his hand and cracked against the ground, its essence fizzing through a haphazard dent.
GNARNGNARNGNARNGNARNGNARNGNARNGNARNGNARN
God, they were … fuck.
They were mouths. Endless mouths, pouring from whatever that nest was. Gnashing, disembodied, viscera-dripping jaws without a beginning or end, tangled up in a bloody web of eyeballs and optic nerves.
There were infinite of them. There was only one. A single gaping maw that fractured into endless chomping miniatures.
He screamed as he ran.
For certain fleeting moments, each thing would be a thing of its own: a pair of jaws paired with a pair of eyes that would multiply in number and strangeness, ranging from realistic human corneas to sensory tentacle nodes.
In the next moment, all the mouths would tangle together into a single quivering mass. Countless eyeballs wriggled while they stared upon him, constantly bursting and reforming from an optical jelly soup as they were pulverized by ubiquitous jaws.
“GNARNGNARNGNARN—” sounded the Thin-Thins.
He stumbled away, crying in impotent fear while the Thin-Thins swarmed his flesh, gleefully disassembling him bite by bite. It felt like ending. It felt like brain-gouging pain. It was as if his very nucleus were being minced and stripped of dignity before getting puked up in front of his eyes.
Each crack of those disembodied jaws clashed with enough force to destroy not just the eyeballs but also the teeth themselves. Whenever a tooth broke, it shattered into a skittering cloud of countless smaller mouths, mouths who enthusiastically set to work consuming the larger, and who in turn were shattered and consumed by their own hungry components, each time degrading themselves further and further in an endless chomping fractal, an insatiable bug-eyed spiral of grinning appetites who swallowed themselves. It happened quickly, the thorough self-destruction, until the bloody chattering sludge reformed into mouths and eyes anew.
He tried to escape, tried swinging his hands at them in stupid comical swats, but of course this accomplished nothing at all, as if they weren’t already gnawing on his deepest most atomic levels …
Each chomp left an impression:
Degrading death;
Pointless hurt;
Absolute violent waste;
Still, he tried to escape. Back the way he had come?
Out the hall. Down the hall. Back to … what?
A flash of intuition spiked through him. He latched onto it with the desperation of the damned.
The door. He did not know why the door mattered. He only knew that it did.
Slip slip, squeak squeak, gnarn gnarn.
“Why!?” screamed Jimmy.
“GNARNGNARNGNARN,” replied the Thin-Thins.
Each giddy chomp felt like a biting taunt carved deep into his soul, growling and whispering in menacing staccatos: We’re gonna eat you up and shit you out and forget you ever existed—nomnom little bitch—
The more they consumed the more clearly he saw: festering gums split by bony teeth tangled in exposed fibrous nerves.
GNARNGNARNGNARN—
He sobbed as he stumbled. Towards what? A door that couldn’t be opened?
The Thin-Thins did not waver, following him in a continuous fluctuating flood. Sometimes they were humanoid, and sometimes they were other, but always they consumed.
They filled the air around him, no matter how fast he ran. Despite their morphing tendencies, the Thin-Thins maintained a horrible preternatural crispness, a sharp and unreal detailedness that cut through the thresholds of sight. They felt uniquely certain. Uniquely inevitable. Always changing, always chomping, never sated, never steady. The only constant was the teeth.
In a vision bigger than the entire universe, Jimmy saw the infinity of consumption and immolation, the starving worm in the apple’s core. He saw how the furthest deepest levels contained only empty deeper levels, with nothing of substance the entire way down, no deeper truth except a hunger for everything and itself.
Then he saw the door. He’d made it back. The stupid fucking impossible door. Intuition slapped him. It wasn’t the door. It was the …
Jimmy dove into the keyhole. Somehow, it worked.
He collapsed onto a layer of wood, his purple essence leaking and combining with certain sadness-inspired fluids to form a small pool on the floor.
“Whoa man,” said a voice. “You’re definitely not getting in looking like that.”