#mindscrew

As such, much of what he recalls is vast reams of gibberish noise to anyone with the normal complement of senses. But flashes are comprehensible.

There is a percept that is a little like a bond of blood, but only insofar as the clear sound of a bell is a little like a bright sky blue. There are peripheral echoes in the other senses. The smell of thick smoke and burning skin. Terrible heat. Pain. The sound of scales moving across scales. Laughter, mocking and inhuman. All these are but pale echoes of the truth.

It is a little like what might exist if the concept of jealousy grew fangs of guilt and stalked the night as a predatory beast. It is a little like a spider plucking on the strands of a web that spans worlds, trapped flies dancing as they struggle against their bonds. It is a little like intimacy with a furnace-flame.

It is not much like any of these.

It exists in more dimensions than three, brushing up against the thin, thin skin of the world and reaching through with claws-that-are-not-claws to play with the living. It is in all places and in none. It treats time as a maze to wander at will. It cares as little for the laws of physics or causality or common sense as it does for the constraints of morality or decency or fair play.

And Tacitus was in love with it.

And in the memory it is alive. It sees the intruder in Tacitus’ mind with a gaze that is like yellow-hot skewers and like the highest, purest note of an agonised scream and like liquid hypnosis. Its attention is weighty with malevolent, inhuman intellect. It sees the intruder and without a mouth it smiles.

Tacitus is fighting back now, trying to wrench his memories and his mind out of the intruder’s grip. In the real world he is screaming, high and wild and terrified. He is more afraid of the daemon than he is of the hands holding his frail body. And he’s almost more afraid for the mind rifling through his thoughts than he is for himself.

When the bond breaks, he falls silent, shuddering, back arched, gasping for air. His eyes are wide and unseeing with terror. There’s nothing alien lurking behind that blank stare. There’s nothing reaching out from Beyond with claws of malice. The air is still and cool.

I’m no idiot. I didn’t go out there. I assumed he was a serial killer or something, so I began making plans for how I would escape, because I would have to walk right by that truck eventually if it didn’t go away. 

Later, I was thinking about the events of an episode of my favourite anime that I had watched in real life the day before, and I casually looked out the window to see if that pickup truck was still there. It was still there, but it looked like it had moved. The same guy was in there, but now there was also a few other people, who weren’t moving or doing anything, and I couldn’t see their faces. The guy in the driver seat was looking right at me, and he beckoned for me to go to the truck again. 

I looked away, and then looked right back out the window. The truck had somehow turned around, and there was nobody in it. I could see a yellow mesh bag with a closed zipper in the back of the truck. The bag was too small to fit a dog in it, let alone a person, but I could see... you know when you crumple up multiple pieces of paper at the same time, and they look like they’re kind of stuck together and also bent out of shape, but they can also be separated from each other if you want? Yeah, I could see that in the bag, with the people in the van. 

I briefly saw some sort of vision of a note that had a mini-poem written on it, that talked about the people trapped in there, that they couldn’t escape, and that they “take those who” i can’t remember what it said next. Every line of it started with “we” like it had been written by the sealed people in that bag. 

I looked at the bag, and I could see some of them moving a little. The guy from the drivers seat was there, and I could still see his face but not the others’. He noticed me and then the truck turned around in a split second (without moving or appearing to be driven) again, so I couldn’t see the back, but I could see the guy in the driver seat again, and this time, no one else. 

That was when I realized that a) I probably wasn’t intended to see that and b) the people I saw weren’t actually in that pickup truck, they were normal people who had seen that white pickup truck, gone outside, talked to the projected 3D image or induced hallucination or whatever of the guy, and then had ended up trying to open the bag and been trapped themselves, alive but unable to ever escape, which driver seat guy and possibly some others intended to happen. 

I kept looking out at the truck, and then the license plate changed- first it showed some marks that didn’t look like letters, and then it changed to my name. And not just my FIRST name, either- it had my first and middle initials and my last name. 

I ran into the kitchen, screaming for my mom to call the SCP Foundation. Before I could finish explaining why we needed to, I suddenly woke up. 

In particular, there’s a post that’s been living rent-free in my head today.