I'll preface this one by saying I've never been that into horror, and even less so after taking a job that makes most scary fiction feel a little too tryhard and silly. But, I've read or tried to read enough of it to know that I hate when the demons and aliens and weirdness are waved away as "indescribable," and I'm not going to resort to that with anything I've really encountered, but putting this one into words is going to be hell.
The call itself was an interesting little story. It came to us from one of our pest control partners, because the caller had told them it was nothing but "rats" or "possums" or "something weird" at what we all just called "The Piano Place," though it was really an entire massive, high-end antique mall. It had a real name, but locals called it the Piano Place because of the big, gaudy chrome-plated sculpture of a grand piano in its parking lot. It was always a pretty big deal to the upper class around here; it was like a multicultural museum where everything happened to be for sale, but the least expensive item on its shelves might be a single vintage pack of bubblegum somehow worth $45. It had its own auction house that attracted big money from out of state, sometimes out of country, and its owners didn't even work there themselves or even technically live in town, but came down from their condo up in the mountains when they felt like hosting parties for their millionaire friends. Otherwise, all anyone really knew about them was that their employees had to raise a stink to get any sick leave or a single holiday off, and they still suckered a few into making sure the place would be open 365 days a year.
The call hadn't technically come from one of their own employees, but from some poor girl barely in her 20's who worked there on contract through an overnight security service. All alone, too, because they didn't actually need anyone to protect the goods as much as they needed both an eyewitness for the insurance claim and a security company to sue for the value of anything that ever did get stolen. She'd tried to tell both the owners and her own contractors that there was something weird going on, only to be forced to submit to a drug test, and now the only thing paying her rent was on the line because she was, by admission, usually a little high, just not high enough that it could have explained what she'd seen.
The kid was smart to call the pest guys herself and just say she'd seen animals, hoping to get some sort of professional team to catch glimpse of the real problem and back her up in some way. I have to say I'm pretty proud of the rat guys for doing exactly that, too, chewing out both businesses for dismissing her concerns about an unchecked outbreak of what they claimed to be toxic, hallucinogenic mold. The owners still balked, of course, but days later they were ratted them out to the local news that their neglect had been putting employees in danger.
Of course, this was all also concocted so we could take our time to really figure this one out.
It apparently only appeared at night, though the windows were blocked out completely by metal shutters and the building was kept blindingly bright at all hours - another of those "anti theft" measures that look good on an insurance claim - so it wasn't the level of light that brought the thing out of hiding, or out of whatever it was doing while the sun was up. And this time, when I say "the thing," I don't know if even that's an appropriate word. What we finally saw for ourselves, on our third night patrolling the place, was more like an "event" than an "object," but it definitely behaved in a way that made you want to call it a "thing." It was without a doubt an extremely Thing-Adjacent Phenomenon, which I promised I would describe as best as I could, so here goes nothing:
...Imagine yourself looking around in a dark room, maybe an attic or a basement full of old junk, lit by just the tiniest traces of moonlight through some cracks in the walls. You can make out all the shapes of the objects around you, and you know exactly what they are, but you can't see their finer details or any of their colors. Then, you turn on a bright spotlight and you slowly, slowly sweep it around the room. With me still? Within that circle of light, of course, featureless rectangles are revealed to be beautiful paintings, the dark void of the floor is a colorfully patterned rug, you can see every little crack in the old rustic furniture, almost like the light is a window into a different version of the same world.
So, now imagine a similar spotlight drifting around in a densely packed antique store, "lighting up" the details you couldn't see, except, like I said, this antique store is already kept bright as a hospital. You can already see the paintings and the rugs and the cracks, in all the detail and color you thought existed, but everything within the "spotlight" is still somehow much more detailed. Like when someone finds out only later in life that they needed glasses, right? And suddenly they can see the individual leaves of distant trees instead of just blurry, greenish blobs. Like the world around you was always in low resolution, and now suddenly it's in 4k High Definition.
Maybe that wasn't as confusing as I was selling it, but unfortunately, that's only the half of it. Lock all that in a second, the moving hyper-detail spotlight, while I try to convey the rest.
So...everything within the "spotlight" is in ultra-fine detail, yes, you can make out more cracks in the wood than you ever could before, maybe even discern the individual cells of the wood, but I have to reiterate that it's a "higher resolution" kind of effect, not a "magnification" effect, because none of the familiar details or contours look any larger or closer than they ever were. Your eyes, for some reason, can just see all the way down to the microplastic filaments and dust mite droppings.
Except...EXCEPT...and this is almost the last twist, I promise...the details are also totally alien. On top of the hyper-definition, on top of being able to see every individual fiber in the upholstery of an ottoman, you're positive those fibers shouldn't look like chains of glassy coral branches wiggling around like a nest of snakes. The matter making up the rustic wood should not consist of hairy cones that spin around like drills. An old newspaper shouldn't be a carpet of puckering, waving funnels exhaling tiny clouds of powder. All of it in bright, ugly oversaturated colors, and I said this was only "almost" the last twist, so the last twist is that it isn't just a visual effect. You can hear the sticky wetness of the wiggly coral things, and as long as you can see and hear them, you can smell something like chlorinated pool water. The hairy cone things buzz as they scrape against each other, and a smell like burnt dust fills the air. The wavy funnels make a funny little toot as they puff what actually stinks like a dog fart.
The circular area constituting this phenomenon was just about a meter across, and my comparison to a spotlight was necessary because that's precisely how it moved, too, light a patch of light projected from an unseen source as it shakily crept around. You might also be wondering what happens to the human brain when it suddenly perceives a broad new spectrum of unfamiliar "stuff" all somehow fitting comfortably into less physical space than ought to have been possible, and as it turns out, no, you are not stricken with madness like in all those goofy horror stories. You don't even get a headache. But you do apparently lose your grip on the passage of time, like your brain is slowing way, way down as it's forced to process more simultaneous information than it was ever supposed to, stopping to "read the fine print" as it were.
I thought we'd only just split up when I'd watched the thing drift across the "Victorian Wing" (did I mention the place was arranged in "wings," like a wannabe museum?) for all of what seemed to be ten or fifteen seconds, but when I turned to call the others, they'd already spent a full five minutes checking over some of the other wings.
Security girl was still on the job, too, and it's not her real name, but I'll just call her Sue from here on. Sue was pretty excited to open up about "Alice" with a new witness. That's what she'd eventually decided to call the thing, as in "Through the Looking Glass," and the name would stick with the rest of us, too. She even helped me convey what to look for to the others, since by now she was used to seeing what she referred to as "kinda not really a moving dimensional portal." I knew exactly what she meant by the "kinda not really," but it was still a pretty good approximation at the time. The "portal" part would turn out to be a little more apt of a description than any of us would have liked, I think.
Sue had learned early on how to avoid that pesky "time dilation" effect, which was as simple as keeping any kind of digital camera in front of you. Looking "glued to her phone" was another thing her bosses had given her some shit for, but now we know it was the only thing saving her life. Through the limited pixels of a cellular phone, the enhanced detail of the bubble-thing was just a muddled blur, and once she figured that out, she was able to observe its behavior patterns with significantly less fear.
She'd determined that it moved very, very slowly by default - slowly enough to have needed five minutes to cross a single large room while I gawked at it like a buffoon, for example - but that it changed course towards anyone who came within about twenty feet, which she'd observed both alone and with the pest crew, her guidance quite possibly the only thing that had saved their lives. Within about half that distance, it would suddenly contract a little, as if tensing itself, and "jump" six feet forward in the blink of an eye, taking a few seconds before it was ready to start moving again. Twice now it had made this sudden dash towards her, but she'd already figured out the phone trick by then, and could think fast enough to get out of the way.
I didn't like that she kept calling this "hunting behavior," but I couldn't deny what it sounded like. Especially not in hindsight.
About a week passed while we studied "Alice," and tried out different ways to contain it, or even really interact with it at all. We shone different kinds of lights on it, put different stuff in its path, threw stuff into it - yeah, real scientific, I know - and we did finally learn two new pieces of information: first, it shrunk down and stopped moving altogether in total darkness, as long as it was really total darkness, and second, its presence was tangible enough that if you moved an object it was "crawling on," it moved with that object, at least for a second or two before it would make one of its "jumps" to escape.
The owners had been growing impatient by day five, increasingly angry about how much money they felt they were losing every night that they had to stay closed and threatening to sue if we couldn't get that icky scary mold under control, but by then, we thought we'd come up with a pretty clever plan: all we had to do, we wagered, was wait for Alice to creep onto anything portable, then cover it with something else, trapping it in the dark.
Our first attempt came pretty close. We had someone keep just close enough to lure Alice onto a sheet of plywood before pulling a rope and dropping a second sheet directly onto the first. Plywood, by the way, apparently looks like many layers of rainbow colored metal starfish through the "looking glass," slowly rotating together like organic clockwork. The sound is like rain on a tin roof, and the smell is like sour apple with a hint of urine.
Unfortunatey, Alice jumped as soon as our trap began to fall, practically teleporting to the polished concrete floor, a slowly drifting patch of which now looked like a pit of orange lotus pods overflowing with a chunky, turquoise paste. The evasive maneuver seemed to prove at least some level of intelligence, but our next plan seemed foolproof: this time we would lure the thing onto the first sheet, shut all the lights off to "freeze" it in place and then spring the trap. Once we turned the lights back on, we'd have an Alice Sandwich to pack up and send off to the lab guys.
Well...it wasn't foolproof. We made damn sure we got the place dark enough to stop Alice in its tracks, but we'd figure out later that the second piece of wood had some holes in it anyway, and that was apparently all it took for it to escape. When we turned the lights back on, Alice was already oozing out through the top of our contraption, and we'd just begun discussing alternatives when we heard a new, unfamiliar voice practically roaring from the hall behind us.
"What the HELL are you people DOING!?"
The incredibly well dressed, elderly man was red-faced with rage, and I'm going to protect his identity by just calling him Richard. So anyway, Dick had dropped in unannounced, in the middle of the night, hoping to catch the fictitious Mildew Men cleaning crew in the act of scamming or robbing him or at least not working hard enough to his liking. When he saw us simply standing around, as far away as possible from a big square of cheap wood in the middle of an empty floor, I guess he was too angry to notice anything else out of the ordinary, because before any of us could so much as get a word out, he had already stormed past us and straight into the large, open clearing we had made around our trap.
"I didn't say you could touch ANYTHING!" he roared, clearly not grasping what a legitimate mold removal service would have had to entail anyway, jerking his head around to gape in abject horror that pre-war vanities and post-war coat racks had been so savagely moved a few feet from where they used to be.
It was actually Sue who made the first move, rushing headlong into the dread ten foot range as she implored him to stay away from our trap, where a little pool of impossibility was still steadily expanding. She grabbed him by the hand, intent on leading him to safety, but he jerked out of her grasp with a snarl of "don't FUCKING touch me," and shoved her away roughly enough that she tumbled to the concrete and couldn't seem to get herself back up. As it would later turn out, it had broken the tip of her tailbone.
We rushed in and dragged her out harm's way, but nobody was brave enough to go after Dick a second time. He had, by then, finally stepped within precisely six feet of the entity, what I'm forced to admit was its pouncing range. So Alice pounced, like any predator, and was suddenly no longer just a meter-wide circle, but almost instantly surrounded its victim like a bodybag, the guy's arms seemingly pinned to his sides by an invisible membrane of whatever Alice might have been "made" of.
Those of us curious or forgetful enough to look through human rather than telephone eyes will forever regret the knowledge of exactly what happens to a living thing in that nauseating, 400k super-reality. I'm sorry to say I'll be breaking my earlier promise, because I swore I'd try to describe everything I could in the best detail I could, but you'll have to just extrapolate from the examples I've already shared and know that this was worse. It was already disturbing enough that I could see the scales of his hairs, the flaking cells of his skin or the clots of oil in his pores, but to see so much more than that, more than what's "supposed" to be there by any stretch of reasoning, is so much more horrible in a pulsing, breathing organic body. There's already so, so much more going on in a human being than there is in some plywood or concrete, and now I know just how much might be going on that we just can't usually see.
None of us will ever forget the old man's reaction. We already knew that the ultra-definition could be seen, heard and smelled, but now we knew it could be physically felt. The sound that came out of his mouth-like area surely wasn't any sound you or I can make without a little help from Alice, but there was still no mistaking the mix of disgust, confusion and agony in that squealing, rattling moan, the kind of sound you might make if you looked down to find your body rotting, melting, writhing with maggots, twisting itself inside-out, all of which I think I'd sooner experience than to ever find out what "Dick" felt in what we would all prefer to think of as his final moments. Unfortunately, we can't even say for sure that he died that night. We don't know, becaus unlike everything else we'd ever seen pass through Alice's borders...the old bastard didn't go back to normal as the thing shrank back down and moved on. It didn't even leave him behind, and I don't mean it dissolved or annihilated him. He simply "disappeared from view," like Alice really was some kind of porthole or window into another world. He reached out frantically with what might have been his arm, clawing to no avail at a fuzzy, squirming, psychedelic landscape that seemed to catch like velcro in his equally convoluted new surface.
Soon, Dick was completely out of sight...but we could all still hear him, his inhuman keening growing softer and more distant the farther Alice moved away from him.
The sorriest part is, our very next version of the trap worked exactly as we'd hoped. Alice was successfully Sandwiched, and some other team was sent out to retrieve it for the Labs once we confirmed it was dangerous. Maybe "Dick" was better off not witnessing the fallout, though, because the place never did reopen, and his wife is in and out of court to this day. The official, public story is that both the owners and that overnight security company were suspected of human trafficking, because once the owner disappeared, it came out that they'd been covering up a series of on-site disappearances for years. Janitors, movers, plumbers, and of course a long line of other, less fortunate overnight security guards.
Sue wound up out of a job anyway, in the end, but not for long. She'd shown just the kind of observational skills - and nerves - our bosses look for. I tried to talk her out of it, but I already knew that was a losing battle. The way her face had already lit up when she'd talk about Alice, I knew she'd just discovered her true calling.
Sue hopes that Alice is "doing alright" in containment. I'm just hoping Alice was really the only one of its kind.