I awoke in the night. And it was standing over me.

Hidden in pooling moonlight from the open window, the form of this watcher was shrouded in darkness, save for a few features of its face. It looked over me, unmoving. I thought only for a minute that this watcher might not be a watcher at all, for it wasn’t shaped like a man. But soon I realized my mistake. For no beast, creature or entity need be shaped like a man to wait and watch.

I did not move. I waited in my bed, looking up with startled, wide eyes. But when I blinked, it was gone. I saw nothing but the many wooden planks of the ceiling.

Climbing out of the comforts of my warm bed that morning was far more difficult that I’d like to admit. I was unsure if the terror that had taken me in the night was just that—a night terror—or something far worse, either corporal, or an illusion produced by a tumor or wound in my very brain. I went about life as normal, heading down to the fish markets of Windle Rock so I could put together dinner, and then reading alone in my leather chair until sundown. But come night I was loathe to turn off the lights and shut my eyes. I kept telling myself that I was being silly, bothered by nightmares and nothing more. Eventually I did climb into bed, and sleep did come.

But yet again I awoke, and it was watching my slumber once more.

This time it was not standing upon the ground, out before my window. It was hardly a visible thing, from where it was watching. Through the crack in my door it looked in at me, more light hitting its face this time. I saw one wide, bulging eye, and a horrendous expression of twisted, surmounting pleasure in just how much fear this being was causing me.

I shut my eyes. The sweat had started to make my bed a dread-place, so uncomfortable, so hot and murky with stick. But even so, I did drift. My dreams were filled with disquiet.

The third night, I did not sleep. I waited for it to come, for it to do its worst and collect my soul, lest I be cursed with a watcher beside my bed, or at the door, for the remainder of my years. And eventually, it did come. I heard nothing when it did. It simply appeared at the door, slinking down the hall and sticking its ghastly eye right through the crack of darkness, all in a blink.

I watched it head on. And suddenly, a many great disturbances seemed to happen around me. It felt like I was being slowly touched from behind, with six pairs of wriggling, snake-like arms slithering around my shoulders, my waist, my neck. The shock of it left me inane and inept, a frozen old man forcibly molested by the great power of infinity. Like the waving light you see in your vision from a migraine, or the encompassing sensation of a panic attack, I saw this thing before me but felt it behind me.

And it forced upon me many grisly noises and visions. I swear I could hear the sounds of tortures; throats squeezed shut and last breaths expelled as looped-ropes closed in a knot around the necks of innocent souls. Rats, scuttling in the walls, down from the ceiling to the floor, where they would gnaw holes in the drywall and come for me in my bed—climbing up my draped comforter—using their sharp, bacteria-laden teeth to chew through my chest and belly, a mincemeat person who suffers and dies like the many throttled souls I was hearing, all while being watched by a single, inhuman tormentor.

My door creaked open just an inch further.

I was speechless. The corporeal bounds of reality cannot describe the steep drop of my sanity, for it was nothing that could be grasped or understood. It was a portrait of utter madness, framed by captivity. There was nothing I could do about the thing that slowly stalked further into my bedroom, nowhere to run or hide. For it would follow, it would never let me out of its sight, it would scour the globe—to the very ends of the earth—to torture me until my soul spilled from my body like paste. But in this horror, as the thing approached, there was knowing. I knew this would happen to me, because I could see it. It was showing me visions of past hunts. The throttled souls. Innocent, young, poor souls, none of them died from the hands of a madman with rope. This entity had taken them in the night and choked the life from their bodies itself, and the anguish I felt from these visions and noises had done their work in incapacitating me, too.

It got closer.

I could smell ozone on its breath. Stale, cold air—hydrogen and helium, seawater salt and rotten-egg sulfur. It looked so much like a man—but not quite—that I wanted to scream. Its face was plastic, false. Angled poorly. Its gait was that of a mannequin, movements a kind of death-stiff. Its eyes…

Its eyes!

It came for me, and I saw. The crushing, empty infinity of the universe blasted apart my very ceiling, and he looked down at me in my bed and watched my horror as I saw the endless abyss of the cosmos above. I perceived it all—that I was no more a man than it, or he, and the two of us were tiny flies—smaller than flies, smaller than the parasite in a fly, smaller than the wriggling amoeba in the body of the parasite, smaller than the cells in the amoeba. Then smaller than atoms, protons, neutrons. But it wasn’t just me. T’was also the planet—the solar system—the galaxy—our pocket of the universe was smaller even than that, when compared to the dream of—

No! No!

I can’t relive it!

I can’t say it! All of it is fake! All of it is false! Our world! My life! Our histories! All the Faces of Ki! The man in the center of the folds, who watches and waits and comes for us all! The prince, the girl! The artist, the engineer! The boy on the bike! Their world and yours, and the planet of yellow, the sea and star and sun of yellow! All of it is the dream of HE, HE who SLEEPS, who SLUMBERS like I, and HE is bigger than the ever-rolling expanse of creation—still barreling away from the center of The Big Bang, at speeds unknown, incomprehensible to all but the largest and most malevolent of Great Old Gods, GOD! GOD! Gods! The bodies of the Dead Ones that float among the stars, so profane even black holes spit them out! The Kingdom of It! OF… it!

Gods of Infinity watch Ki and Consume it All!

Gods of Infinity watch Ki and Consume it All!

Gods of Infinity watch Ki and Consume it All! Gods of Infinity watch Ki and Consume it All! Gods—

…

They broke down the door of Old Man Byrne’s house at three in the morning.

They rushed into his room. Even when they appeared before him, he was still screaming. He was alone… but he bore claw marks on his shoulders, waist, and throat, repeating a phrase at the top of his lungs:

“KH’LATH DRO’CTELHO NI NAWAR GOZHOKAH’LL MEIARGWATH’O MARGHKAI!”

He said it over, and over. The Garda Síochána, Ireland’s police—in suits of neon yellow and slanted caps of blue—carefully restrained him with handcuffs, putting away their pepper spray and batons. One of them pointed the beam of his electric torch right into the old man’s eyes.

The officer jumped, for his eyes were so dilated that one couldn’t see his irises at all. Light did not make them shrink back. And even still, as they bound him and put him on a stretcher, he kept shrieking an incomprehensible phrase, and never once spoke to them in Irish or English. Until, that is, they pulled him from his house. Until, that is, they put him in the ambulance. For then, before he died, he spoke only five words.

“The King in Yellow watches.”