Act 3, Chapter 91: Monsters, we are all monsters

Day in the story: ??? Zero hour

Gertrude Monkey

Harbingers were the first to come.

All of them—or just all of it, depending on whether it was one bloody organism jolting from between the tiles, columns, and walls, or multiple disjointed ones. They all moved slowly, but constantly beneath the surface. I wasn’t sure at first whether that surface was physical or something more primal, merely made to look as if they were seeping through the cracks of the building. Until the space where the people gathered somewhere deeper in the hall parted right through them and things crawled from that tear in reality toward me.

They looked like the monstrosity that caught Penrose not long—or very long—ago. I wasn’t sure about the passage of time in this place anymore. Each was a mass of muscles and tentacles that moved like snakes, trying to catch whatever needed its memories erased.

When the floor to my left—just inches away—parted as if it were opening an eye, and those protrusions came crawling out of the pinkish mass underneath to move over my still body, searching for the smallest sign of something less than permanent and finding none, I wondered.

It was the briefest of fleeting thoughts. Were those eldritch beings so primordial in their fleshiness and so full of writhing tentacles and mouths and teeth and eyes because of how we perceive pure nightmares, or are those nightmares the way they are because of contact with them?

And yet, despite it, I remained unmoving, unblinking and unbreathing.

I needed no air, and instead this body, working on borrowed power, burned through pure Authority to support itself. Not that it required much when it pretended to be a fucking statue, but still.

Even the thoughts I was thinking were relegated outside of my body into the head of one of the statues outside of my aura I envisioned to contain my brain and then lent the Authority to do so.

In front of the monster that searched for the faintest sign of anything less than centuries-old, millennia-old, or outright eternal, I remained perfectly still. Tentacles crawled across my body in search of a flaw and each conveyed a different sensation. Some moved like snakes, smooth and deliberate. Others wriggled like centipedes or worms, their countless points of contact sending shivers through me as they searched for the smallest imperfection, the slightest weakness, any place where they could gain purchase. But in my stillness, I was a weapon—a bloody hell of a gun ready to be smoking after its discharge.

“That’s fucking scary,” Thomas whispered to Penrose from the side, far, far away from me.

They could see my body being overrun by this pink mass as it crawled across the floor from seams in the fabric of space. I saw it myself through the eyes of the paper spiders I had left in the corners of the hall, overlooking everything around me. I heard it all, through the pretend hair on their imagined skin.

“Silence,” Penrose replied, raising one finger to his lips.

They were all stationed safely away and watching, waiting for the main thing to show itself so it could be struck down properly. Even the drunkard had moved to a corner of the hall beneath the large aquarium, where he sat with a bottle in his hand and drank himself half to sleep. Perhaps bored of nothing happening or fearing the storm that would come because of this calmness.

And though the freezing pressure working against the spirit of my being felt like it was at its peak, I remained perfect in the way I endured, because it was all about performance, about creation through simply being and existing in an arranged space and time.

And this stand of mine was exactly that.

Those shadows of people—or shadowspawn, whatever they were—had been forbidden from coming anywhere close to me by the promises of violence made by Penrose, Thomas, Ramirez, and Rei. This was important. I needed them the fuck away. The floor was completely empty, and the only being there was me, surrounded by ten statues portraying equally unmoving guests of the hotel. And contrary to them, caught in poses suggesting action—reading a book, running, walking, talking, playing, or whatever else they had been doing—I was simply sitting and waiting, the most passive thing a person could be.

Even lying on one’s back evoked more action in the imagination, with all the adjustments, snoring, breathing, and turning. Sitting in a meditative position, emptied of thoughts, I had become a total void.

And it must have been agitating to the being, because it probed and squeezed me with all that pink flesh of its. It reached beneath my clothes and moved toward fucking places I’d rather it not go. It slid up my nose and forced its way into my mouth and ears, but never pushed too far. It wasn’t trying to kill me—just irritate me enough to elicit a thought, a memory, or, hopefully for it, a movement.

When it found none of that through those peripherals of its, reality finally answered the call of the being behind the nightmare of this place and tore asunder right above me.

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The thing that came for me was an embodiment of impermanence.

It emerged from a single point in space, intruding through the fabric that made it whole. Reality seemed to thin around it, folding inward as though some unseen membrane had been pierced from the other side. From that impossible wound rose a mass of pink, undulating wheels made of living muscle. They rotated around one another in endless layers, hundreds of them sliding, folding, and intertwining in ways that made no anatomical sense. Together they created the illusion of a sphere, yet every moment threatened to reveal that it was something far stranger—a shape too complex to exist properly within three dimensions.

It continued to move into our space until it hung high above me, nearly ten feet across in diameter of how it physically presented itself to me.

The flesh that composed it never stopped moving. Muscle fibers contracted and relaxed in ceaseless rhythms. Folds opened only to vanish beneath other folds. Entire sections seemed to age, wrinkle, and renew themselves within seconds. It was as though every part of the creature existed in a constant state of becoming and un-becoming, trapped forever between creation and decay.

Along the surfaces of those rotating wheels were thousands of tiny follicles and from them protruded strange whiskers. They emerged in twitching bursts before vanishing again beneath shifting layers of flesh. Some were thin as spider silk, others thick as roots. They writhed and probed the air endlessly, never resting and never fucking settling. They did not move with purpose so much as instinct, searching by touch through a world they seemed incapable of seeing.

And yet they were not blind—or bloody deaf, rather.

Whenever a sound echoed through the corridor, the whiskers reacted immediately. Entire clusters vibrated in unison. Ripples traveled through them like waves passing through a field of grass. They tilted toward distant cries and collapsing furniture with uncanny precision, sensing vibrations the same way a spider sensed prey through strands of silk or the hair on their tiny bodies.

The hallway offered no shortage of stimuli: people screamed, children cried, doors slammed, feet pounded against the floor in frantic retreat, someone shouted prayers and someone else cursed. At the far end of the corridor a man drew a gun and emptied the magazine into the thing.

The gunshots cracked like thunder, yet the creature did not react with movement. Not a single wheel changed its rhythm. Not a single whisker turned toward the shooter. The bullets simply vanished into the folds of flesh, swallowed by the endless movement of muscle and sinew, forgotten the moment they touched it.

It also felt as cold as death and only then did I truly realize what that shivering feeling really was. It wasn’t the lack of warmth that touched the soul. It was how that spiritual part of being oneself interpreted the true absence. The cold of things abandoned by whatever concept those Eldritch being were praying upon.

Oblivious to the revelation that happened in a mind removed from my main body, the being lowered itself toward me, descending with terrible slowness but inevitability, until it hung directly overhead like a grotesque parody of the sun. The countless rotating rings resembled a halo made from living tissue. For a brief moment it reminded me of descriptions of angels from the book I’d found in de Marco’s estate—those celestial beings made of wheels within wheels.

Its whiskers finally reached for me. The first brushed against my hair, as the pink flesh of the harbingers receded escaping back to the crevices it crawled out of. Then another touched my forehead and more followed. They slid across my skin with nauseating gentleness, trailing slime that glistened like frost. Every contact sent vibrations through my body. They explored me patiently, tracing the contours of my face, my neck and my shoulders.

They were so hellishly cold that the sensation became heat and the places they touched burned as though pressed against frozen iron. My skin blistered and numbed simultaneously. Tiny crystals of frost formed along their paths before melting seconds later into droplets that steamed against my flesh.

The whiskers lingered, searching for any sign of impermanence within me and yet despite the pain, despite the alien wrongness of the creature looming above me, despite every instinct screaming for me to run, I remained still. My biological processes put to a halt by the Authority of my magic, my thoughts cast away into the embraces of pretended brain within the statue. My feelings moved through a proxy of a bridge made from pure Authority.

And with the god watching from above, poised to strike at the first crack in my supposed permanence, I too was ready to spring the trap I had laid for it. Today—whatever the fuck today even meant in this place—I had become a spider, and this entire lobby was my web.

Because with the power I had been given, I too was a monster. One wearing human skin on the surface, perhaps, but this was no longer the time for pretenses. That outer layer had become exactly that—me posing as human. Pretending to be part of a world inhabited by creatures with two arms, two legs, a head, and all the other pieces necessary to walk around and fuck things the way humans did.

That no longer applied to me.

In this space, carefully curated so that this being could have an audience with me, I would show it the power of artistic creation. Not through paintings or sketches—I felt no connection to those, trapped within the frame of mind and attitudes that contained me. Nor through music—I had brushed against that art form in my struggle for survival against the Rhythm, but I felt no allegiance to it either.

I was a performer. A machine honed through years of training and brutal upbringing to do exactly that: perform, be a tool, complete the task, use body and environment alike as artistic mediums and create beauty through action.

The thought made me laugh internally, because my greatest second act would be exactly that—but in reverse. I reached out with my aura as far as it extended within this space. The invisible currents of shadowlight flowed through that liminal realm between things, brushing across every inch of the emptied floor, every abandoned bench, each immovable statue, the motionless air untouched by a single breath, and finally my own body—a lure devoid of even the slightest twitch.

Then I grabbed the universe by its fucking throat, with my will alone.

And I squeezed.

And squeezed.

And poured my Authority into a single, uncompromising command: become the perfect unchanging stillness.