Things that should not be seen inside of the parameters of this reality
The river was broad, shallow, and slow. Anyone who cared to could easily jump in for a swim, but Tom would never do that on his own volition. He tried to avoid gazing in to the water for too long; Tom had a fear of murky water, and this wasn’t helped by his knowledge of the teeming masses of horrors writhing along the bottom of the river floor. Things with shapes no human could conceive of, things with bodies that are exactly suited for paralyzing you on sight, unknown things that devoured parts of you that you didn’t know existed; these were the horrors Tom knew, or else imagined, were waiting for him in the river. These horrific creatures were not unique to this river bed, nor even to any body of water.
Tom saw them everywhere.
Protruding from the stomach of a passerby, swarming police cars, pulsating and bubbling up through sewer grates, or even flying from the mouth of a screaming child; anywhere he went, they were there. The only exception Tom knew of was the sky. Any time he needed to, he could look up to see the great open blue dome of the atmosphere, populated with or without clouds, and be free of the horrific visions.
Tom used to think he was insane. When he started seeing these things (at the age of ten) his parents had, at first, thought him to be having nightmares or an overactive imagination. His therapist had, in no uncertain terms, told him these things were not real; his brain must have a defect for him to see such things. This made it fairly easy for Tom, during his formative years, to ignore the odd visions. It was easy to rationalize away the infrequent disturbances as an overactive imagination or a brain defect when the hallucinations were so clearly out of place against the backdrop of reality. It wasn’t until he was older that he started noticing patterns, almost ineffable but still there, to where and when he saw these things. To this day he still didn’t have any tangible support, however on more than one occasion he had seen these waking nightmares affect reality.
The first time the reality threshold had been crossed had been a hard experience for Tom, and it was not a event he described readily. When he was 15, their family pet was diagnosed with a terminal illness. They’d planned to wait until the animal was no longer capable of moving or eating on it’s own, or otherwise indicated it was time with behavioral symptoms. This plan seemed to placate the young Tom; it gave him time to cope with the loss beforehand while also letting him spend wisely the days he knew would be the last he had with his friend.
Unfortunately, Tom began seeing things born of that nightmarish medium attacking the animal. Although the helpless creature looked at and seemed to recognize the beasts, it lay helpless as they cut at it with shadowy ligaments and clicking, sharp appendages. It was only a few days before Tom couldn’t stand it any longer; he insisted they put her down immediately. His parents, ever sensitive of his condition, told him these things couldn’t be true. It was selfish to euthanize an animal before it needed to be put down just because it was hard to see. Tom agreed with them in some part of his mind, the logical and rational part that knew these hallucinations couldn’t be true. And yet, his pet looked upon the faceless, unnatural beings as they tore at it, slowly and with purpose, eating away the will to live.
A week went by before the animal began crying out with pain. The small family had then euthanized their pet; Tom, unable to leave her alone, watched all the while as greedy, evil things tore at his friend on the exam table. They did not stop when the animal was finally dead. Instead, their hunger and wildness seemed to increase with the lack of living prey. They screamed in excited, almost human screams in the small, confined space with the doctor, the nurse, his parents, and his dead friend. Tom too, had started to scream. He couldn’t control himself; he watched the things continue their now futile attack, as his friend was lying on a table never to return. Tom had fallen silent by the evening, and he would continue to be unresponsive for days.
The second crossing of these creatures into reality had occurred in a similar manner surrounding his father’s death, which Tom felt largely responsible for one way or another. Tom had kept to himself the knowledge that, orbiting his father’s head for several months prior to the suicide, was a living alarm clock. It had taken the shape of numbers on a typical electronic display alarm clock, however the lines which shaped the iconic angular digits had been made with otherworldly mammalian fingers that were severed, bleeding, and contorting to indicate every second that counted down. When Tom came home from school on the day the countdown was to reach zero, he’d found his father in their office with a gun wound through the head. In shock, he wasn’t able to stop himself from examining the wound closely; the entry and exit points had become tiny oases for mite-sized, gorilla-like creatures made entirely from what appeared to be sections of the same fingers, and the pools of fluid and tissue in the room had also been claimed by hordes if the small things. Again, Tom had begun to scream, smashing at the beasts and sending bodily muck flying as he broke them and tore them apart. In the aftermath, Tom was hospitalized in a mental health clinic; he would live a good portion of his life there before convincing the staff that his visions had subsided, and that he could facilitate his well-being enough to live independently.
These were not thoughts Tom liked to dwell on. In fact, Tom liked to do just about three things every single day: barter for breakfast, barter for dinner, and wait out the day in his boat, makeshift anchor made from a set of barbells keeping him roughly in place, lying on his back, looking at the sky. Of course, his days were also littered with writing stories and poems, but even as he wrote he could look up to the sky (or even out at the shore most of the time) and be free of the terrible figments living in the broken parts of his mind. His preferences were, as it would turn out, unfortunate for the reality he would be experiencing.