When I was twelve, my parents threw me a surprise birthday party. Not many people came. A handful of family, a few friends. Nine people in total plus my parents, who gave me three different gifts. Everyone else gave one gift each. That’s 1×3 + 9×1 = 12. Twelve gifts for a twelfth birthday. How appropriate—except that I actually got thirteen gifts, with the final one waiting for me on my pillow.
I remember walking into the bedroom that evening, feeling cold because the window was open and the wind blowing in, and there it was, a small box wrapped neatly in matte black wrapping paper and a translucent plastic bow.
Already there was something sinister about it.
Everyone else had already left, so I assumed this was a fourth gift from my parents, and I sat on the bed without closing the bedroom window and excitedly tore open the box. Inside was a note saying, This is the first doubt, and a single black puzzle piece.
But before I could touch it, I heard a sudden rustling sound—turned my head to look through the window: saw nothing unusual, and when I turned back, the box was empty. Both the note and puzzle piece were gone.
I had trouble falling asleep that night, and I kept feeling a breeze on my body even though the window was closed and I was wrapped in blankets. It felt as if the wind was blowing through me…
When I mentioned the gift to my parents the next morning, they swore it hadn’t been from them. When I showed them the box, they said they’d never seen it before. It was obvious they didn’t believe that what was in the box had disappeared.
I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have believed me either. What I was telling them was humanly impossible.
I knew they loved me, but it was clear from that day on that we were living in slightly different worlds. Theirs was the world without the black-wrapped box, and mine the one with it.
Throughout the day I reached out to everyone who had been to my birthday party to ask about the mysterious gift, but no one claimed it had been from them. As far as I could tell, the thirteenth gift had come from no one.
It was maybe a week later that I first noticed a small, puzzle piece-shaped hole in the sky.
I’d gone out into the front yard on a dull overcast night. No stars, no moonlight, just darkness—in which there stood out a speck, seemingly somehow darker than the rest.
I called it a hole because that’s what it seemed like to me, but absence is ultimately the better word: a fraction of the sky from which even night itself was absent.
Not blackness but emptiness.
Devoidness.
Moreover—and I realized this the very moment I glanced briefly away, toward my parents’ house—the absence wasn’t in the sky at all but in my vision: something caught in or imprinted on my eyes, blocking out not light but reality.
It was then I must have screamed, because my parents came running outside and I recall my body shaking, being held by them, the concerned looks on their faces, being unable to speak but trying—trying to describe what it was that had happened. The way they stared at me. Like I was mad, like they didn’t know me, like I was foreign to them.
I closed my eyes: to the realization that still the absence persisted, that not even shutting my eyes was enough to stop its being.
I was sent to doctors.
I screamed with them sometimes too.
The psychologists talked endlessly about my childhood. The eye doctors forced open my eyes, flooded them with drops and made me stare through distorting lenses. The brain specialists subjected me to all kinds of scans.
Their conclusions were disappointing.
I had suffered a mental episode brought on by pattern recognition and floaters. I had a rare condition called Thygeson’s disease. My brain function was normal but I had a severe vitamin D deficiency. I was a compulsive liar and should be studied further, ideally at the university where the particular doctor who’d made that diagnosis was currently working on groundbreaking research concerning compulsive behaviours. Not to worry, my parents would be compensated. Not to worry, in time I should be fine.
Eventually I learned what to say to convince everyone that I was better now.
That made my parents happy.
But I wasn’t better—if better meant that I no longer saw the absence. Once, I stared at one of the psychologists after he’d asked me a question about my sexuality. “What are you looking at?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. “I just lost focus.” What else could I have said? There’s a puzzle-shaped void in existence that’s currently on your forehead, and just now I think I saw something moving in it?
My problem wasn’t lack of focus.
It was hyperfocus.
I couldn’t not be aware of the absence. Always and everywhere it was.
So I taught myself to live with it, to accept it despite my lack of understanding. I’m better now, I told them, and they all believed me. Those were the magic words. I’m better now. I’m better now. I’m better now.
By the time my thirteenth birthday came along, my parents acted as if they had forgotten “the episode”. I was a normal kid again. Maybe they were pretending, maybe not. All I know is that I had not forgotten—I can never forget.—and so it was, in an atmosphere of expectant dread, that I entered my bedroom that evening and stared at the small box, wrapped neatly in black matte wrapping paper and a translucent plastic bow, resting on my pillow.
Deep down, I knew it would be waiting for me.
I knew what was inside.
The note said, This is the second piece of doubt, and the black puzzle piece was of a different shape but same material as the first, and after I had looked at both, then looked away, they disappeared, and the dark absence in my vision had doubled in size.
It was now like two interlocked puzzle pieces.
That birthday night was even colder than last year’s, and the wind penetrated me more fully. Pulling the blankets over my head, I shook and wept silently, staring with eyes tightly shut into a void that was deeper than anything I’d ever known.
On my fourteenth birthday I stared at the small box for hours before finally opening it.
How I hated it! Yet how I craved to know what was inside, even though I had no doubt. A third black puzzle piece, along with the words, This is the third piece of doubt.
I felt that night as if encased in gaseous ice.
The following day I decided never to open a fourth box, and for a year I trained my will. When the day came, after blowing out all fifteen candles and eating cake among happy people who still saw the world colourful and whole, I went to my bedroom—the gift, of course, was already there—picked up the box and tossed it out the window.
I slept warmly, but in the morning the box had returned.
I tried to burn it in the fireplace. I did burn it, watching with mixed emotions as the flames turned it to ash, only for it to reappear again.
Finally I confided in a friend. I invited him to the house, showed him the box and convinced him to open it, which he did without a second thought. “It’s empty,” he said. But when I moved close to have a look: the puzzle piece was there.
And a look was all it took.
I jerked my head away, and when I saw my friend again there was a square-ish absence of four interlocked puzzle pieces on his face. Across the absence, something slithered. Momentarily, catching not the light but the nothingness, like an anti-reflection—
This is the fourth piece of doubt, my friend whispered.
“What did you say?” I demanded.
“Me? I didn’t say a fucking thing,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t get it. What was supposed to be in the box?”
I remember his exact words because I wrote them in my journal. I have that journal open on the desk beside me. The next entry is about the same friend’s disappearance. It’s still unexplained. I assume eventually they presumed him dead. I still pass his mother on the street from time to time. I keep my head down.
Not that I could look her in the eyes even if I’d wanted to. Not with so much accumulated absence.
On my sixteenth birthday, I opened the box to discover the puzzle piece and two separate messages: This is the fifth piece of doubt and Don’t share with strangers.
I never told anyone about the box again.
(Well, I’m telling you.)
By twenty-one, the puzzle pieces had interlocked into so much nothingness I started having trouble with day-to-day activities. To see something, I had to look slightly away from it. Whenever I spoke to someone face-to-face I saw as much of unthem as of them. People aren’t as forgiving of not being looked at directly as objects. I once got slapped for refusing to make eye contact, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t keep looking at the absence of her face. We were breaking up anyway. I loved her, but how could I ever truly love anyone if I would always see the void in them?
On the night of my twenty-third birthday, my body temperature dropped suddenly and I became cocooned in frozen time. My heart barely beat. I breathed faintly. All surrounding light receded in rays that glimmered as they faded—and failed, until all surrounding me was cold, unknowable darkness through which, through the absence, I witnessed the emergence of a sole serpentine tentacle, witnessed it slither out the absence into the nothingness of my receded world and, by God, felt it on me, on my face and limbs and chest, and when I attempted to scream, it repulsed itself into, and down my throat…
I’ve tried describing the experience so many times I have entire journals full of failed, laughably insufficient attempts. Some of them I’ve burned.
Nothing I write can communicate the feelings I had that night.
But know this:
Horror is but a gateway.
I have seen the tentacle many times since then.
Sometimes it is one. Sometimes there are more. Usually they pass merely across the surface of the absence like rain across the windshield of a speeding car, but every once in a while they slip through, and enter our world.
I read once about a homeless man who lived undetected in a Spanish art gallery for several weeks. He lived within the walls. One day, when the gallery was full of people, he used a knife to slash one of the paintings. Because he was in the wall, he slashed it from behind, so that from the perspective of the gallery crowd: a blade had punctured the painting, slid down and withdrew, leaving stunned silence and flaps of canvas. Some who were in the crowd later suffered from post-traumatic stress comparable to that experienced by witnesses to the most unimaginable acts of violence. At least one person committed suicide.
The homeless man was arrested and sentenced to prison. I saw an interview with him on YouTube, conducted a few days after the incident, in which, when asked why he did it, he said: “I wanted someone else—anyone else—to feel what I feel.”
He died less than a year into his prison sentence.
Sometimes when I see the tentacle emerge from the absence, I can’t take it. I want to curl up and die.
What it does to us is vile.
For the past decade, I’ve even started to feel it. I don’t mean in an abstract sense. I’m not an especially empathetic person. I mean I literally feel the tentacle: what it feels, I feel, as if I’m the one seeing and the tentacle slithering. I feel the coldness of the void become the warm moistness of the world, and I—
I can’t even admit it.
Imagine sitting in a movie theater. The lights are off. Red curtains cover the screen. You, along with everyone else in the crowd, are anticipating what’s behind them, yet with every passing moment you increasingly sense (becoming know) that what’s behind the curtains is you. More than that: there is no movie behind the curtains. There never was. The movie is before the curtains. Everything you’ve believed real has been flat and on a screen, and with every tick-tock of the horrid analogue clock the curtains inch open, and little by little you begin to realize yourself…
I am thirty-six years old today.
The absence is a neat 5×5 puzzle pieces large.
The tentacles come and go easily through. I have seen enough to suspect that however many there are, they are all part of one greater entity. But that’s mere footnote. What matters is that there will come a day—x, y or z birthdays from now—when the absence will become big enough to allow the entire entity to transit.
I fear that day like nothing else; but also I lust after it.
That day shall be the terminal neatly-wrapped matte black box. The final piece of doubt, inside of which, thawing, I will find: myself.
Even now, there are times when I still feel repulsed by what I am becoming, but when my heartbeat slows and breathing drops to the sliver of a breeze, when I experience the vileness of the tentacle, when my disintegrating humanity, bubbling with ever-diminishing guilt, flows into the great unhumanity of the abyss, I understand that to re-pulse is to bring back to life. Re-pulsion is therefore synonymous with re-animation, which is a power that belongs solely to the gods. To be repulsed by one’s self is therefore to remake one’s self by means of death and rebirth.
It is an act of divinity.
So why am I writing all of this now, after so many years of silence and self-horror and shame?
Because I am tired of living in the walls, and truly I am better now. Better than my parents. Than the psychologists, eye doctors and brain specialists. Better than all of you. For years, I thought my life had been a slow accumulation of doubt. In fact, it has been the opposite. Piece by piece, my doubts have been falling away.
When I opened my journals this morning and started writing this, I thought I was writing a story, compiling a strange personal experience into a narrative for other people to be creeped out by, but the reality is that by writing everything down, I have understood a fundamental truth about myself.
Dear god which is me!
Thank you, r/nosleep.
Thank you!
I’ve posted a few stories here over the years. This will be the final one. This has been the story of me.