Something Broke the Fourth Wall of Our Reality

They say a day of disclosure is coming soon. A day in which the public will learn the truth about aliens, about UAPs, angels or demons–that’s all nice, but honestly, I don’t care anymore. I’ve met the Other. I think everyone else has, too.

At one point, I thought it was distraction. But it’s not.

When the time is right, and the full moon slips between two dark stars, in a moment of brief but brilliant alignment; that’s when their impossible gaze shines through.

I had my second grand mal seizure on my twenty-first birthday, just the other day. We were stargazing, Mel and I. Looking for confirmation of that esoteric force that we believed lurks just behind the veil of reality. We were searchers, the two of us, coming together after a gnarly Dimethyltryptamine experience that scooped the core out of both of our worlds. On her living room floor, in the quiet afterglow that followed our momentary communion to the Screaming Abyss, I admitted to her that I’d already been there, done that, long ago.

“Done what exactly?” she murmured. “Met the… the elves? The aliens? Whatever that thing, or those… things… really were?” She sounded uneasy. Like she already knew.

“You know what I mean. Didn’t you feel it? Feel it looking at you?”

She swiped her auburn hair from her eye and stared at the ash tray on the floor, her cigarette aloft, the cherry smoldering. “I don’t know exactly what you mean. I mean. I think I do…”

“It’s from outside,” I said. I motioned vaguely at the hazy bedroom all around us. Our whole universe. Our own little abyss. Our temporary womb, carved out of the world itself.

“Have you ever wondered how you can fall asleep for a short nap, ten minutes or so, but it can feel like a whole lifetime has passed?”

She looked up from the floor. Her hazel eyes were wide. I’ll take that as a yes, I thought.

“That’s because the mind isn’t matter. Like the materialists all say?–they’re all wrong, you know. It isn’t matter, and it isn’t space or time. See. Your mind is like a body. One that stands outside this reality, but somehow, it warps it. Like mass warps gravity. This place? This reality we’re inside? It belongs to its mind. Its mind is the ocean of reality we swim inside.”

That was when I told her the story of my first grand mal seizure, when I was just a kid. How I’d met something before. Something inexplicable. And ever since, just like it claimed it would, this something had followed me. Its impossible gaze had in fact shined through, again and again, ever since.

I was a child. My parents had been fighting. Shrieking at each other, throwing things around the kitchen of our old trailer. I was lying in my bed, staring at the darkness of my bedroom, listening to them tearing each other apart. I was begging for something to take me out of the room. To sweep me out from beneath the comforter and to take me away. And that was when my eyes happened to drift to the window. To the stand of jack pines, all mercury and shadow, at the very edge of the yard. And then my eyes found it: a star. Hovering over the timberline. And it seemed to be staring back.

I was transfixed. This glowering little silver eye, cycloptic and awful, staring. I could feel it, feel that it was watching me.

And then it began to shiver. To expand. I froze inside my covers. Couldn’t look away.

That was when the phone rang. Out in the living room, just down the narrow hall. I snapped out of my trance, waiting for my parents to pick it up. Only that wasn’t right–because really, I’d been snapped from trance by the absence of their shrieking as much as the shrill sound of the ringing.

I listened. It rang a third time. In each interval between the rings, I heard nothing. A cold interstitial silence. Not only were my parents not shrieking, I couldn’t hear them moving either. Couldn’t hear anything at all, but each next ring of that old cordless phone. As though they’d been sucked from the trailer.

For a reason I cannot fully explain, I pushed the covers off myself, and stood. Then one leg lurched forward, awkward and cold. The other followed. A strange and stilted gait. My center of gravity swung about recklessly, like I was carried on the legs of lilting newborn.

Ring. Now silence.

The hallway wasn’t the hallway. A secondary mind–a mind that was my own–noticed the changes. Only, the mind that noticed was hidden somewhere else, perhaps somewhere else in the trailer and in another house entirely. (Ring, ring.) But the mind that was suddenly steering the motors of my body, this new body, was not afraid. These new eyes were fine with the hallway as it stretched, stretched and narrowed, telescoping snakelike into the hazy bluish glow of the living room. Ring. Then more silence.

I lurched into the living room. (The new living room, because the old one was hiding, crouched in some other part of the world.) I looked at the couch. On it sat a boy and a girl who were my siblings. (But that was impossible, because I am an only child… or was I an only child?). One was older than I was and the other one was younger, but I couldn’t tell which was which. They were drenched in the pale bluish glow of a TV screen that showed only static. When I looked at them they stopped grinning at me with those wretched teeth, rows and rows of stubby baby teeth, gnashing, gnashing, then and they turned back to the TV and they were no longer smiling.

When I looked at the TV, it wasn’t static at all anymore. It was a man, a man I knew very well but one that I had never met. He was lying on the dewy midnight grass, in the throes of a grand mal seizure. He did have my hair color, I thought numbly. Those looked like clothes I recognized, but I didn’t know how.) I turned away.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

At last approached the nightstand. Reached out and picked up the phone. When I pressed it to my ear I heard a voice, or many many voices, awful voices, and all of them were saying this:

“Outside. Come outside and find me. My name is The Author, and The Author is this whole place. Everything inside it. Come outside and find me.”

Then they hung up.

My newborn legs staggered their way into the kitchen, where my parents were suddenly waiting. But I couldn’t tell which of them was my mother and my father–they seemed be wearing each other’s features, wearing the other’s limbs. “Come here,” they were saying. “Your mine, our mind, come dissolve back into us.” And of course, I knew better, but I came to them.

For one small second, when I looked up at her before she embraced me, she really was my mother (but then again, she couldn’t be, because she was hidden, hiding somewhere in some other part of another house entirely). When her arms wrapped round me so wide, however, she was not herself at all, because she had far too many hands, so many hands sliding greedily over my small body, and most of them did not feel human. They were the hands of those terrible darkling creatures that crouched gibbering in the dark of the forest. There were the hands of marionettes, wooden fingers clasping me tight. There were the hands without skin, hot and greasy, the painful jabs of fingerbones. I felt someone’s toes curl around my thigh. A weird and flukelike tendril slid wetly down my cheek.

It was at that moment my parents began to sing to me a song we sang together, sang together on the long open road during our summer vacations. But it was only the tune to This Land is Our Land. The words were all wrong:

“This world is my land, no longer your land

one day it ends man, in a war with Iran

I’ll watch you seizing, come down from heaven

I’ll be your vision, in two-thousand eleven…”

At that moment I pulled myself her. I felt the hands slide away. When I looked back at them the hands and limbs were gone and they were both turned away, facing the TV screen now, watching the man seizing on the dewy midnight grass. Until the eye in the back of my father’s head opened and blinked hugely at me through his shaggy blond hair. Then the eye opened its mouth and screamed.

I burst out the door, horrified, hoping for some sanity. I looked up, immediately, to find The Author. But then I saw that I was very much in The Author. The dewy midnight grass seethed with life. Things without bodies rose the soil and yowled in pain. Faster than the eye can blink, lightless beings rushed to and fro in a flurry of motion, like the shadows of shooting stars. The earth writhed in agony. The jack pines dissolved into their own roots and the amanitas had formed many broad circles where within the ground rose and fell in ragged breaths. At last I looked up to the blackest welkin I’d ever seen.

No longer were the stars set in their constellations, but dripping to earth and bursting in furious violet nebulas. There was only one that remained still, only one which I could point to, and it was called The Author.

“I am the mind that is the ocean in which you swim,” it hummed into my consciousness. “And now you know, that I see you. When the time is right, and the full moon slips between two dark stars, in a moment of brief but brilliant alignment; that’s when their impossible gaze shines through.”

And at that, I was back inside my normal body, at seven years old, and I was seizing on the kitchen floor. Not my real body, because in some terrible way, the New Body, that world, had felt realer than reality itself.

When I’d finished the story, Mel looked ghostly white. “So that was your vision,” she said.

I nodded.

And ever since that strange trip in two thousand eleven, that trip in which I’d met, once again, with the keeper of this world who is called The Author, we’d waited for the war with Iran. And now, here it was. When, on the night of the full moon, I received a text message. I thought at first it had been sent to everyone, to the whole nation. The White House had announced a real alien, a true UAP, would arrive on this very night for everyone to see, I’d called her up that instant.

“It’s The Author,” I told her. “I know it is. This is its realm. We are actors on its stage. It’s always watching.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t get the text? The White House text?”

She told me she was worried about me, but she agreed to meet me. I told her to meet me in my yard, where the stars would be clearly visible.

Later that night we stood, gazing up at the stars, feet planted in the dewy midnight grass, I pointed. “There it is,” I said. Mel had been very quiet the whole night through. I was vaguely aware of a noise emanating from behind me, something wet, the cracking of bones perhaps, the tearing of viscera. High above, the star was already shivering. In its great haste to expand, to swallow me in all its vast changes. But when I turned, Mel was gone.

Where she stood, it stood now.

Maybe it was an insect. It was difficult to look at, like the creature was glitching, somehow digital and crackling, a composition of flesh and what appeared to be silvery floaters of the eye. Some kind of mantis, perhaps. Maybe it was Mel, but rearranged, all her features, her limbs, her body disassembled and then put together again as this new and terrible entity. Her pincers of light and bone clicked and snapped. The wretched mouthparts opened:

“This is not world, this world is my land,” it sung in the voice of a thousand shrieking agonized souls, only some of them human. Then, speaking softer, not to me but to them, to the Others:

“So do you see the truth of your disembodied dreams, your glimpses of the Other, your fairytales and conspiracies–they all lead back to me? The truth too terrible to reconcile? There will be no disclosure. Won’t they burn it all down before they unveil the reality?”

I’m not sure now if there was a Mel. I think she was always the great being, The Author, helping guide me to this place, to this time at last. I looked back up at the star as the earth began to recoil, the jack pines began to weep and gnash their teeth in fury.

I was only partially aware that I was, in some inexplicable way, standing there as the New Me, the Second Me, and seizing on the dewy midnight grass.

I could almost hear the hypersonic missiles, likely on their way here.

So I closed my eyes, felt the cool breeze land as locusts on my skin, numberless little skittering things, absorbed by my crawling viscera.

Eyes shut, I saw it:

That single star was staring back at me through the dark of my own mind, its impossible gaze shining through.