When would it end?

Abby had watched the poor children trapped within the concrete prison, the creature outside lighting bulbs as it passed.

Abby had watched the red-haired girl return to the stage, walking into a forest… only for her soul to be ripped from her body by a fiendish, evil revenant.

Abby had watched the spirits of the damned haunt a freezing, empty ship, tormented by the rotting mass of their own bloated bodies.

When she awoke the eighth day, eight days in a row of horror after horror, she felt as if she hadn’t awoken at all. Like reality was a spinning nightmare, locked in the depths and shroud of endless fright. That the world could be full of such monsters and anguish, pain and fear, and it should continue on and on and on and on and—

“Have you signed this petition yet, Abby?”

Abby looked up from the table. Her homework was spilled out over it, like the poorly photocopied packet worksheets one would get in grade school, and the test, upon test, upon test of middle school, and group projects and art and science and English and math in high school, none of it had faltered, none of it had waned, it had continued on and on like the terrors and injustices of the world, the horrors and demons and ghouls and beasts compounding until—

“Abby, are you listening?”

Her friend was on her phone. And soon, Abby’s phone buzzed in her pocket.

She withdrew it. A petition to sign to stop… something. Alien invasion? Residual hauntings? The Jersey Devil? Just another something, another something in the endless stream of somethings.

Her chest felt heavy from the presence of the Glider. Her head felt hot from the presence of the Basilisk. Her colors were out of wack from a reality altering drug she’d been forced to take, a drug of awareness, a werewolf, a where wolf, a wear wolf, aware wolf—

“Don’t just sit there,” said her friend. “Do something. The longer you sit there, the more people might be eaten by a werewolf. Or turned into vampires by Dracula, and his son. You have to make a difference. You have to do anything you can to—”

She went on and on, but Abby was already filling in her contact information on the petition website. Donating money, what little money she had… those werewolf hunters needed silver bullets, after all. Why feed yourself when others needed it more? Why worry about your problems when others didn’t have the privilege you did? After all, some people would have to watch as hundreds of others were chewed and regurgitated by winged black demons. Some would lose their dog to the hunger of a strange blue beast. Some would get lost in the forest and never return, and some…

Some would…

She looked down at her phone. Why…

Why had it gotten so slow?

Back in her dorm, she tried texting her mother. For some reason, the keyboard responded slowly to the taps of her fingers, and her phone was hot. Sometimes it typed out nonsense, just random letters all jumbled.

She closed the app, but it reopened on its own

The screen flashed. A tiny portrait of what she could see on her screen now shrunk down into the corner, and she realized it had taken a screenshot.

Again.

What is going on?

A face appeared on her screen. A twisted, mangled, screaming face.

Jesus Christ!

The face screenshotted itself. It sent to her mother.

Then, dozens of her other apps opened at once. The weather. Notes. A dating app. Twitter. Her photos.

Without touching her phone, it scrolled up into her photos.

And she realized—

I’ve been hacked. Using that website got me hacked.

She watched for ten horrible seconds as it opened a web browser, and started typing something very, very illegal in the Google search bar—all on the college dorm WiFi.

She held down the power button. Her phone switched off…

…but who knows how much they now knew?

Sending her screamer photos, certainly harassing or threatening her mother, attempting to so much as frame her for looking up a crime so heinous. Why? Were they trying to ruin her life?

They know my face. My contacts. My accounts, my photos, my emails, my interests—

—my location—

She felt lightheaded… none of those vampires, or werewolves, or ghosts or witches mattered anymore… now a living, breathing person was out for blood.

So that night, lying in the darkness, she had just one more thing to worry about. She was almost too exhausted to sleep, and certainly too scared. But somehow, she did. And finally, her real troubles truly began.

…

Abby looked upon the stage.

The yellow curtains had not yet opened, but she could see red light pooling on the stage behind them, all from the little sliver beneath where they hovered over the floor. A dark mist began to seep.

Suddenly, someone gently grabbed her neck.

“Don’t… move…” he said.

Abby froze. Menace like no other slipped deep into her veins. They were the hands of a man. Rough, callused. With a voice much older than her. He held the back of her neck as if to choke her, hard enough to induce intense discomfort. She felt him shift to his knees, putting his lips to the back of her ear.

“I know where you live, Abby…” he said.

She winced, shaking.

“I know where you sleep, Abby…” he said.

Her breathing came and went in quick bursts. Her chest was heavy with the weight of so many other terrors—

“I’m…”

And he got in close…

“…going to violate you, Abby.”

She felt tears streaming down her face. She could not feel her limbs, her hands, her feet, nor even her head—only his hands tightly wound around her neck.

He sighed deeply. Vile, stench-strong breath caught in the jagged angles of transgressive lust. He held back a kind of laugh, and instead let out a little whine—

“And afterward, Abby,” he said, tongue on the rim of her ear, “I’m going to slit you down the middle… like a bearskin rug…”

A switchblade knife sprung open by her other ear, clenched in his fist.

She shut her eyes, but he reached around with his fingers and opened them. She felt everything, now—the air of the dark, haunted playhouse burned her eyeballs dry.

“…And then It can have you, too…”

She heard herself sobbing, unable to blink, breath catching and catching and—

It?? What is It?? What is—

And then the curtains opened.

And she saw. She saw It. She did not see the alien field of eyestalks behind it, nor the swirling white void above. She did not see the mangled cultist, doctor, child, or security guard bodies; nor the scientist behind It melt like putty into the field of nerves within which he stood. She saw none of these things, only It, so mutilated, disfigured, otherworldly and eldritch—

Abby tried to bite her tongue. Hoping she would die.

But the man stuffed his disgusting, unwashed hand into her mouth, gagging her—

She pulled and bit down, wriggling, but even with one hand he was too strong. It, festering a bloated madness on the bleeding stage, seemed to be looking at her all the while. If those… those things were even eyes—

“GET OFF ME!” –but his hand was in her mouth, it didn’t come out right—

He laughed, and held her tighter—

Let go! Let go!– “Mmmf!”

And he put his disgusting lips to her very ear, and whispered—

“No.”

She whipped around, leg stuck in the armrest of her seat, body twisted—she heard—

Dim Carcosa.

Dim Carcosa.

The shadows are long in Dim Carcosa—

And, head pulled around with his unwelcome hands, she finally saw his face—

…

Abby awoke.

She was breathing so hard she tasted a hint of blood. As if dehydrated, running in the cold without end. She shifted in her bed—

Her door was slightly ajar.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She stayed in bed until the sun came up, refusing to open her eyes, hiding beneath the covers. Safety to a child, but not for her.

The horrors of the world had infested her dreams. Every waking moment was the pinching, endless hell of a nightmare.

She could still taste his hands. Feel them. His breath. His promises.

It had been no dream.

She had no idea what to do. What could she do? She’d tried everything, everything she could to help, to lend her actions or voice, and the horrors of the world had infiltrated anyway. It was no game, she realized. These horrors were very real, and she could not sit by doing the bare minimum… they would take her, if she did. Consume her, inside and out.

Carefully… feeling all forms of violated… she got out of bed, and dressed. She closed the door of her dorm, and locked it.

She did not go to class that day. She sat on her bed with her broom, having taped a stapler to the end. She waited. And in this time, she saw his face everywhere. Emerging from the dark. Getting close, speaking to her, leaning in for an unwelcome kiss. Every flicker of the shadows could be him. Every tap on her window, and thump in the night.

Hours passed. Dusk fell. She had done nothing all day but sit and look at the door.

When her clock clicked over from two fifty-nine a.m. to three, she heard light footsteps behind it. Whoever was there tried the handle, to no avail. But soon, she heard the jangling of a metal prong in the keyhole…

Quietly, but frightened beyond all belief, Abby stood from her bed and tiptoed quickly to the corner.

As the door opened, and a man in a mask poked his head through the door, Abby brought the stapler end of the broom down against the top of his head.

He gasped and fell—the impact had sounded like a dropped brick.

She stood over him—lifted the broom—brought it down against his head again, using the same amount of force one would need to drive a stake into hard, stable soil with a large, flat mallet. This time it’d sounded like the wet collision of a melon dropped from a great height, only to splatter in pieces upon the cement below.

Abby watched his body wriggling in the dark, head and arms jittering slightly.

Then he died upon her dorm room floor.

…I did it, she thought. I did something. I did something about one of the… the things—

She stumbled back onto her bed. An ever-growing pool of blood had soaked into the short, hewn carpet. She could see the outline of an enormous hunting knife, sheathed with a leather wrap, sticking out of his pocket.

“You won’t be hurting me ever again,” she said.

She turned on her phone, then. He wasn’t around to mess with it anymore.

But the first app open, when she turned booked it up, was the camera—the forward-facing camera. In the dark of her room, face illuminated only with the light of her screen, she saw another face in the dark, hovering behind her.

She stood and whipped her broom, knocking her clock off her nightstand. It—and the lamp above it—went crashing to the floor.

“Get away from me!” she screamed. What was it? The Basilisk? The Glider? The man? Was he alive somehow? Had he gotten behind her?

She heard the sounds of other students waking up, shuffling in their dorms. Lights going on in the hall.

She shut her door, and locked it, turning on the lights—

But for some reason, they didn’t come on.

She flicked the switch up and down, but the darkness continued.

A knock came at her door. “Is that you, making all that noise?”

She said nothing.

Someone else came into the hall, and she heard them whispering. But soon enough, they left. Which was more than just relief. It was as if every worry had been plucked from her life. Knowing the man who had come to ruin her was dead on her floor put her in a state of peace. She stepped over him, and climbed into bed…

And had only a single thought of clarity, before seeing it—

Why do I feel this way?

—when she noticed The Yellow Sign.

Burned into her ceiling. Three yellow loops. Crackling, as if the last burning embers of a bonfire log. She stared at it, but thought, no, that man is gone, and none of the other horrors can hurt me… adding one more doesn’t make any bit of difference…

…until, that is, she fell asleep.

It seemed as if no time had passed. She awoke in the center seat of the theater again, quicker than an eyeblink. On instinct, the same instinctual way she’d known she awoke in a theater in the first few dreams, she realized that the man that had come to take her life was no longer there. But it was a hollow victory… for, looking at the closed yellow curtain, mists of shining golden light spilling slowly from beneath it, she could feel—and hear—all of them.

The Basilisk. The Glider. The many other demons and phantoms and ghouls her friends had forcibly told her about, forcibly showed to her, but—

No, no—

She felt a hand reaching up for her hair… stroking it…

She dared begin to look around.

“…Don’t,” came the haunted, hollow voice of a little girl.

Abby froze.

Her accent, she thought. Her accent—

It had to have been Scottish. And—

She saw. Just a little hint of the hand that had touched her, as it retracted.

It was blue.

In the back of the theater, she heard flapping wings. The nasty, wet sounds of lips smacking in hunger, cloaked in the newfound stench of corpsemeat.

And a fishy smell, accompanied with the dull glow of purplish light from the seats behind her—

The shuffling of possessed people, children and doctors and security guards and cultists in the seats—

She stood and whipped around.

And saw all of them. Everything. The specters of the ship and their bloated bodies, the tortured cultists, peeled and twisted and maimed—the eaten, rotting corpses of innocent children—the thing that had watched the sleeping man from his doorway, from beside his bed, and—

It.

It that feeds.

And all the other things she’d known were there, all of them—

Her phone rang. It startled her, terribly so. She withdrew it, answered it—

“Have you ever heard of the Devil’s Tri-Tone?”

“No,” she said. The voice was her friend. “Stop.”

“Have you ever heard of the Fermi Paradox?”

“Stop it, please,” Abby begged, every Horror of Windle Rock staring at her—

“Have you ever heard of The Black Hope Curse? Or the Watchers of Mount Shasta? Or The Bloop? Or what about the red rooms you can access on the Dark Web, where abducted people are—”

“STOP IT! STOP TELLING ME ABOUT THESE THINGS! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!”

She threw her phone on the ground, and stomped on its shattered shell. The voice of her friend fizzled out into a low, electronic hum.

Then she heard the curtains behind her open, drowning the ghoulish patrons in yellow light. Up in the top corners of the stage, the antlered skulls began to rattle, and microphone interference so loud, so high pitched, screamed out from their mouths. Abby had to clasp her hands over her ears.

For a moment, there was nothing.

She sat in her seat, terrified of putting her back to the many horrors of Windle Rock again, but having no choice. Their collective silence was infinitely worse than if they had been murmuring, speaking, screaming.

She looked up onto the stage.

There was no back wall. The stage led out to a murky beyond, although somehow she could see it clear as day. A wretched, alien city of castle spires and shallow graves. Some of the city was black, or goopy golden brown, but if not, then yellow. Yellow was everywhere, in the soil and the sky, in the structures and bricks and light and wind. Stalagmites rose from the ground of this plane, piled sludge-obelisks of sharp yellow sand. Stalactites hung from the sky, merging seamlessly from the burnt yellow clouds, some so large they dwarfed the city’s eldritch highrises. Hanging from nothing.

She could see two black suns, floating in the sky. Like eyes.

For a while, no one took the stage. But soon enough, the speakers shrieked, and music played.

Deranged circus accordions, truncated tubas and rusty woodwinds.

A book had appeared in her lap. Large, old, paper torn and bleached, its cover the color of daisies, sunflowers, gold coins, sunlight—unbrushed teeth, dug-up bones, foul urine, the jaundice eyewhites of a failing liver—

And its name…

“The King in Yellow.”

Beneath the title were the triple loops she’d seen before falling asleep.

The speakers rang again, and the demented carnival tango ended, fading into…

I was working in the lab, late one night…

Abby couldn’t believe her ears—

…when my eyes beheld, an eerie sight…

Abby gripped the book and listened with unbridled shock, as yes, it truly was the song, and yes, the chorus went—

He did the mash!

He did the monster mash!

The monster mash!

And she burst into laughter.

All of it truly is a dream! she thought. There had never been any horrors at all! All of it had been a product of her overactive imagination, nothing had actually been around to harm her, all of it was just a bad, sick joke. So she sat back and watched, knowing that even though she could move and feel and think as if awake, everything was just a horrid nightmare and would soon be over.

But when the song ended… she heard a voice.

Why did you not come up to dance, Abby?

Holding the book, Abby paused.

Do you need a different song?

The tumbling of a Halloween xylophone fed into the speakers, and

Spooky, scary, skeletons—

Abby laughed even harder, gripping the book to her chest as if it were a security blanket or pillow.

But no actor took to the stage for a show of dancing horrors.

No monster appeared either.

And I know why, she thought. I know why no one is there yet.

Yes, replied the voice, you do.

So holding the book, ignoring the ridiculous children’s pop of All Hallows Eve, Abby stood from her seat, and walked up the stairs of the stage, into a world of a paranormal hue. A hue that sends men frantic and blasts their lives.

Dim Carcosa.