I stood by the last door of the last car of the light rail to get closer to the exit of my light rail stop. I would still have to walk a little bit. The light rail was only three cars long. I thought I saw something at the end of the car but couldn’t quite get my eyes to focus before it seemed to flicker to the next train over. Darkness covered the window on the other side of the conductor’s compartment as the train decelerated. What was that smell? The sudden deceleration causes me to stumble back a few steps. I walked forward down the stairs and off the light rail and stared back at the next car down for a few seconds. Nothing else departed. The train doors closed, and it started to move on. I turned around and started walking towards the exit to the station. Twenty, thirty feet with several benches on the left and a light rail track and fence to my right, and as I turn right to head down the stairs, I feel something behind me. I stop in front of the stairs and look back from where I came. Nothing there. I look back down the stairs and catch a flicker of a shadow disappearing to the right down the street.

I go down the stairs and look down the street where it disappeared. It’s empty—just an empty street. The fence on the other side of the street has a foot of barbed wire on top. There are a few nondescript trucks parked back there. I walk down the road to where I have to cross. There’s a big building there. It’s a factory. The sign says it’s Dairy Gold. It’s a milk factory. Those trucks didn’t look like milk trucks. I stop at the intersection to let a car go by to my right. There's that smell from the train again. I push the button to get the walk sign to come on. Across the street, there is a vantablack darkness. Diagonal across the street, there is a rip in the fabric of the world. It is blacker than anything I've ever seen before—a scar across reality. I stand frozen. I can’t look directly at it. Across the street from the emptiness, there is an apartment building. It stands two or three stories high with balconies. From down the road to my right, a car is driving up.

I’ve crossed the first half of the street with the green light, unable to look at the black scaled negative image slowly weighing me down from my sternum to my perineum with a dread I hadn’t had felt since I was a child taking out the trash at a house I had just moved into. At a hardware store with my family a few aisles away. I’m shaken from my reverie as a car drives past. It’s a Suzuki samurai. As it runs the light in front of me and drives past that terrible darkness, my eyes follow it—the car rolls to a stop. The darkness is off the street corner. The small car’s windows darken. There is silence. The doors open. I’m staring at it. My feet move me towards it.

I can’t tell what’s making that noise. I stop. I feel the darkness examine me. It fills my skull from the bottom of the sockets of my eyes, and there is an exchange. I know something that I did not know before. It found something in me: a kernel of my mind that it responded to somehow and wrapped with a tissue paper of knowledge. There is something in the darkness. It leaves the car and moves towards the apartments, and my eyes try to follow it but cannot focus on what they see. There is a feeling of gravity. Of being at the top of a very tall building. There is a downdraft and a screaming. Somebody is screaming. Many people are screaming. It's the residents of the apartment.

The residents are shrieking as they fall through the very walls of their apartment down across the street into this rent in reality. This gaping maw. And as they fall through the black rip, there is a splash of blood on the sidewalk beneath the darkness. It is more than blood. It is viscera. The apartment residents are overheated water balloons filled with 100lbs of oatmeal, hitting the sidewalk as if from a freefall of two or three stories. They painted the sidewalk at 9.8 meters per a second second. I can't look at what's left of them. The smell from the light rail is layered with offal and copper. The screaming stops, and there is silence again.

If it was daylight before, then it is undoubtedly dark now. Is the sun rising on the horizon as I walk towards the empty Suzuki? That vast darkness is gone. I can feel that it hasn’t gone far, but the human remains are gone from the sidewalk too. All that remains are knitted scarves in vibrant reds, pinks, and browns approximating human insides. A laundry pile of knitted tubes and crocheted spheres. What did I just see? I get in the driver's seat of the empty car and start driving towards the light on the horizon.

I can’t think about what I saw back there. I drive up a hill, and as I get to the top, I see that there’s a milk factory on my right. As I start to go down the hill, I cross under an intersection, and as I come back up another hill, the apartment is on my right. The scattered crochet tubes are like cigarette ash blowing away like blood-soaked litter on the sidewalk in front of me to the right. I accelerate, and there’s a milk factory on my right again. I speed down a hill and under an intersection, and as I come back up the hill, the apartment complex is on my right, and that awful scene is once again in front of me again in full high definition, so I slam the gas pedal down, and I drive even faster.

I’m going up the hill, past the milk factory, and back down the under the intersection, and as I'm driving up the next hill, I'm closing my eyes. I open them as I go up the hill again past the milk factory, and then as I'm pushing under the intersection, I squeeze my eyes shut. Afraid of what I'll see when I crest the hill again. I must be going nearly 90 mph, and I open my eyes, and its intersection after intersection of the negative images of butchery. Such an awful scene was painted on the sidewalk beneath the apartment. It's street after street of viscera and despair and viscera and despair, and I slam the breaks and pull the emergency brake, and the tires lock. There is a loud squealing noise as the car skids and lands on its side and slides slowly to a stop where I lay with my head on the ground amid the broken glass, and I breathe.

I pull myself out the broken window and stand. I’m breathing heavily. I can feel the blood running down the side of my face. I put my hand to it and brought it to my mouth to taste. It’s coppery and warm, and I look at my hand, and it’s covered in black viscous oil. The car seat I was sitting in was covered in a similar black goo. I had been drawn to it and got into the car as if propelled by a force like the momentum of walking down a steep incline. I notice the dark slime on my body, and the blood has a cloyingly sweet aftertaste now.

I’m looking at the tableau, and it’s not entrails and insides and muscles and liquified fat I’m looking at; instead, I'm looking at a feast of roasted meats on silver platters and chocolate fountains and butter sculptures of the residents from the apartment. I might have thrown up if there was food in my stomach, but there was only emptiness inside me and a dark knowledge just outside my understanding, burning at the edge of my consciousness. I swallowed and walked forward.

There was another rip in reality—an inverted scene on the other side. A sky with dark nebulas, This tear was not sentient, merely the byproduct of whatever had done this. I thought that whatever I had seen earlier, whatever had done this, wasn’t precisely a rip or a tear. It was something at the center of the slash. They were standing through an incision into reality like the point of a knife tearing into a bedsheet. I had to find this thing. I had to know what it did to me. I had to stop it before it could kill again. I walked through this tear and kept my eyes open. I had to see what it had done; I had to know what I was up against. The samurai lay on its side in the intersection, broken windows, steam rising from the engine. The tear closes behind me.