§-E-1

§-E RECOVERED ENTRY

NARRATOR: Unidentified

DATE OF RECORD: REDACTED, 2028

CLASSIFICATION: Variable Morphology / Behavioral Parasite

CROSS-REFERENCE: §-E Researcher Overview Log; Entity Overview: The Gluttonous

IDENTIFYING TITLE: [Decision Paralysis]

—

I stood in electronics for longer than ten minutes. Ten was just when I started noticing.

The AAA games, the RPG’s, or something else. I'd been circling the same three cases like a vulture, and my body had settled into that stillness a while ago without asking me first. Weight even on both feet. Hands loose at my sides. The stillness of someone reading, not the stillness of someone deciding. Someone in a blue vest asked if I needed help finding anything. I said no, and meant it, and stayed exactly where I was.

The case in front of me held six interesting titles behind glass, and I'd read all six in order at least four times. First left to right. Then right to left. Examined the box art for the most intriguing, in case that changed anything. It didn't. My reflection sat over the top of them, translucent, doubled with the overhead lights, and somewhere in that doubling something moved that wasn't the lights.

A flicker at the edge of the glass. I told myself refraction. I went back to the games. The flicker came again, closer to center this time, and I let myself hold on it instead of looking away.

A thread. Silk-fine, pale, catching the light the way spider line does when it's strung across a doorway you walk through face-first. It ran off my reflected shoulder and up, out of the frame the case glass gave me, toward wherever the ceiling would have been if the reflection went that far. I checked my actual shoulder. Bare. Nothing there but the strap of my bag and a little dust from the parking lot. Back to the glass. Still there, still climbing, still motionless.

I noted it and moved on. 

—

DVDs sat two aisles over, and the decision paralysis found me again almost immediately, like it had been waiting there instead of following me. New release, or one of the boxed sets I already half-owned in pieces. My chest had gone tight in that specific way—a held breath with nowhere left to go, the kind of tension that makes a person feel like they should be sprinting somewhere instead of standing still.

I picked up a case. It didn't come free clean. Stuck, like tape, resistant for half a second and then giving all at once. I looked at what had been behind it.

Wet. Veined, threaded through with something the color and give of tissue that belongs under skin, not behind a DVD case in aisle E-6. I peeled it the rest of the way and held it a beat too long before my body caught up with what my eyes had already logged, and then my hand let go on its own, the case dropping back against the shelf with a soft, moist, plastic sound. I wiped my palm on my jeans. Twice. It didn't feel like it needed a third time, but I did it anyway.

The case slid back into its slot without my hand on it. Not fast.

I looked at the case beside it, and the one beside that. Both clean. Ordinary plastic, nothing behind them but the pressboard backing of the shelf. 

Two glimmers caught the edge of my sight after that. One left, one right, gone the instant I turned my head to meet them head-on. Floaters, I thought, except floaters don't hold their position when you stop hunting for them, and these did. I let my eyes go soft instead, unfocused ahead to clear the peripherals.

Two threads. One off each shoulder, both running the same direction as the first. Up, out of true, toward a point my eyes wouldn't follow without turning my whole head.

A drop of something warm hit the crown of my head. I raised a hand to it before I'd decided to raise it. Sticky between two fingers. Thin, but with a pull to it, the specific tack of saliva that's been sitting a while and started to dry at the edges while staying wet in the middle. A second drop landed on the back of my hand, and this time I looked up before I'd finished registering the first.

A crack in the ceiling tile, hairline, running maybe eight inches before it forked. At the center of the fork, a hole the width of a coin. Not shadowed. The recessed lighting reached everywhere else in that aisle and reached nowhere inside that hole. Threads ran off its lower lip, fine as the ones on my shoulders, and the tile around it had gone the same wet, veined texture as the seam behind the DVD case.

The employee found me an hour later by the clock on the wall, though it had not been an hour to me. He didn't ask if I needed help this time. He asked, carefully, if I needed medical help. I laughed it off. Told him I was fine, that I'd just been thinking. He said whatever, in the tone people use when they've already decided you're not worth the argument, and walked off toward the front of the store.

I checked the ceiling once more before I moved on. The tile had sealed itself over, hairline crack and all, ordinary acoustic foam with nothing behind it but more acoustic foam.

—

Legos and board games sat one aisle further back. Next to the bathrooms and returns. I don't truly know why I decided to shop there. 

Three shelves along the back wall wore the tissue now. Not smeared exactly, more grown, the way mold takes the inside of a loaf. It had a texture to it up close that the DVD case hadn't let me see: fine capillary threading under a slick outer sheen, the same wet-warm quality skin has right after a shower, holding heat it shouldn't have out here in the open air of a store aisle. I put a knuckle near it without touching, close enough to feel that heat radiate off the surface, and pulled my hand back before I decided whether that had been a mistake.

I looked up. Four threads ran off me now instead of two, and the hole in the ceiling had grown past coin-sized, past fist-sized, into something the width of a dinner plate before I'd finished deciding it was worth measuring. Wet flesh ringed the opening in overlapping folds, thicker at the base, thinning where it met the drywall like scar tissue does at its outer edge. Fluid ran steady off the lower lip of it in three separate threads, not dripping so much as pouring, patient and unhurried, a tap someone had opened and simply never gone back to shut.

I closed my eyes. Tried to remember what had brought me into the store in the first place. Some errand, some specific reason a person drives to a specific building on a specific evening. I found only the tension itself where the memory should have been. The wound-tight, marathon-ready feeling of a body braced to run with nowhere assigned to run to. I pushed at the memory and got nothing back for it. I opened my eyes.

The whole aisle wore the tissue now. Shelves, boxes, the price tags still legible through a film of it, the floor tile glistening the exact way a countertop glistens right after it's been wiped down and hasn't dried yet.

I stepped backward. Tripped over nothing, caught myself on a hand that came away slick when I lifted it. Above me, no hole left to look at. A face instead. Full, resolved, familiar in a way I couldn't place and didn't try to, features settled and calm the way a photograph is calm. The employee from before, annoyed and yelling at me that I need help. Grabbed his radio and called in security.

I got to my feet running before I'd decided to run. The bathrooms as my destination. 

—

The bathroom door locked behind me with a sound too loud for how small the room was. The stall wore the tissue floor to ceiling that I only noticed once I turned from the door. Startled, I turned to unlock my exit. As with the stall, the lock and door were consumed by the organic material.

Back to the room I felt trapped, the stalls veiny matter was thicker than anywhere else I'd observed it, layered the way scar tissue layers over a wound that's been reopened more than once, veins running visibly under the slick outer surface like something with a pulse just under the skin of it. The rest of the room matched, except one corner by the urinals, bare tile, untouched, waiting.

I went to it and folded down, clutching my knees against my chest. From that angle the mirror over the sink gave a clear reflection of me, the urinals, and the ceiling at a slant. The ceiling had opened into a dozen small mouths instead of one, evenly spaced the way sprinkler heads are spaced, each one hung with a single open palm reaching down through it. Each patient, upturned, waiting. My four threads ran up into the center point where the whole arrangement met, one fleshy knot holding everything the room had grown.

The urinal sat close enough on my left that I hadn't needed to turn my head to keep it in view. In the mirror, a face rose up through the porcelain like it was surfacing through water instead of ceramic. Calm. Familiar in a way I couldn't yet place, the way a stranger's face can sit half a second too long on the edge of recognition before it either lands or doesn't. More uncanny than I'd felt before.

The eyes opened before the rest of it finished arriving. Lids parting with a slight stick, already fixed on the mirror instead of on me. Skin the color of the porcelain it was rising out of, no seam where one ended and the other began. Below the jaw, an elongated neck of dripping moist flesh like that of what covered the room. The length, long and trailing back down into the bowl like a snakes body.

It didn't blink. It didn't need to breathe to hold still that long. It came up and over the rim and dropped onto the tile with a sound too heavy for how little of it looked solid, and a hand—just one, reaching down from among the dozen ceiling mouths—closed around the back of its skull and dragged it the short distance across the floor until it sat directly in front of me. Close enough to touch, still tethered to everything above us both by threads I no longer needed to look up to focus.

—

We stayed like that. The face and I. We didn't move except in the smallest ways. A blink, a twitch, a brief flare of nostrils. I felt the tension I'd carried in from the parking lot start going soft at its edges the longer I let the two of us hold still together, the marathon-readiness draining out of my shoulders and jaw the way water drains once you stop plugging the sink. It felt, for the first time since I'd walked through the front doors of the store, like something had finally been decided on my behalf, and decided kindly.

The pounding on the door started underneath that feeling, distant at first. I couldn't have said how long it had been going before I noticed it at all. The face kept looking at me with the specific patience of something that had already secured what it wanted and was only waiting, now, for me to stop resisting fully.

The door came off its hinges and the lights went out.