PERFORATION 6.02 (Patreon)

Not quite weekly, but twice in under a month's time isn't the worst thing in the world, considering four month's hiatus (I think?). So here we have it! Part two of VISCERAE's next arc! I'm not planning anything too closely just yet with this- getting back into the swing of things requires vibes as much or more than specific planning, though the big picture stuff for VISCERAE keeps getting clearer to me.

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A biome is a distinct ecosystem characterized by its environment and its inhabitants. Your gut — inside your intestines — is in fact a miniature biome, populated by trillions of microscopic organisms. These microorganisms include over a thousand species of bacteria, as well as viruses, fungi and parasites.

Your gut microbiome is unique to you. Infants inherit their first gut microbes during vaginal delivery or breastfeeding. Later, your diet and other environmental exposures introduce new microbes to your biome. Some of these exposures can also harm and diminish your gut microbiota.

-Medical definition of a gut microbiome

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NEW CONSTRUCTION SITES OVERTAKE LOCAL TOWN, FILLING THE NIGHT WITH THE SOUND OF HAMMERS!

In modern times, it’s become more and more uncommon to find places that are preserved rather than exploited. All across the nation, historical sites, communities, and homes of all kinds have become commodities to be traded away and used as marketing opportunities more than places for human connection. We’ve seen the ways that more and more corporations have bought up private property that once might have gone to families, young business owners, and youthful first-time homeowners, trading in stock rather than in the promise of a future, and here in Hollow Springs, that trend is no exception. 

Coming in right along with the modern trend, Three-I inc., yet another big-business conglomerate, has swooped into our local township with the intention of scooping up as much territory as they can get their hands on. The ironically named business pursues the mundane, borderline predictable path of buying up forested areas, local neighborhoods, and places of historical significance to the town and finding new ways to monetize them, filling them with brand new construction sites. While some may see this as an opportunity for the blue collar workers of our county, in truth, this bloated method of modernization kills major landmarks, eliminates major locations of natural preservation, and fills our township with far too much in terms of debris, damage, and bloated budgets. Who, this reporter asks, is expected to move in to all of the new houses currently under construction, all owned by privatized business interests? What will be left of our beloved Hollow Springs after the well of real estate has been dried up, scooped out, added to a spreadsheet and then forgotten? 

-The Hollow Springs Gazette, 1995, page 9, by Gene Springer

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The walls are colder than I expected. 

You’d think that would be better than them being warm, but honestly, no. It’s really not. It being warm would make it feel more alive, would make the sensation of it all sort of blend together into something that’s gross, but in a normal way. As much as that can be said at all about a weird flesh-tunnel magically growing from out of my house’s goddamn walls yet again. 

Instead, the cold makes everything feel stiffer, less vital, less real. Everything feels grosser. It’s the difference between cutting into a recently cooked steak and cutting into three-day-old meat left out of the fridge. The fat alone makes the whole thing a nightmare to interact with, a horror of slimy half-movement, of different textures and different consistencies all overlapping without the benefit of warmth to make it even palatably different than a rotting hole in the ground full of old meat.

My skill twitches and shivers at the thought. GLIMPSE BEYOND tries to reach out of that wiggly little corner of my brain that it lives in, but, for the first time, I hold it back. The vision it promises to show, the insight I could reach for if I were so inclined, gets pushed aside for now. 

It’s… harder than I expected.

Still- this shit is disgusting enough without me having to see its metaphor-equivalent, and climbing into it won’t get any easier if I’m covered in my own puke. 

I wish I’d worn a hazmat suit instead of paiama shorts, though. On the one hand, it’s easier to wipe off my skin than flannel pants, but on the other, even the illusion of protection it would offer would be nice. A lot of things would be nice. Like not being in the fucking tunnel. 

Hand after hand, I crawl forward, on my knees, through and into wherever this place takes me. Wherever it’s taken my roommate. 

Who I should know. Who I should remember. Who is a real person that deserves to be respected and cared about and who deserved to be safe in her fucking home. 

The fact that she took my headset doesn’t even fucking matter. It would, if we were just two normal people in a normal living situation that we both have to respect the boundaries of. But for all I fucking know, the headset dragged her into this, hypnotized her in her sleep, absorbed her fucking brain, and the fact that I didn’t have it already under lock and key put her in danger. 

This is my fault. My problem to fix. My responsibility. 

The corners and half-open pieces of the Glove come away wet with an unidentified slime as I crawl forward, and I shudder, and work very hard to suppress my gag reflex. 

It helps that there’s no smell.

GLIMPSE BEYOND nudges me again, and I ignore it. I’m sure there’s all sorts of meaning to it not having a smell, that there’s something soooo impactful about how and in what ways it’s alive, but I simply do not fucking care. I’ll figure it out when I’m through the goddamn tunnel. 

Breathe. Focus. Inhale, then exhale, always through the nose, because there’s no smell and because the idea of opening my mouth here is gross. Hand, knee, hand, knee. Focus on the little claws of my totem wrapped around me. Focus on the path ahead. 

Don’t think about how deep it’s going. 

And eventually, I do make it out. 

There’s a ring of tighter flesh, where the tunnel abruptly closes in on itself towards the end. It goes from “just wide enough to crawl” directly into my body being the only thing holding it wide, and there’s a much more solid ring that clenches shut at the far end.

I try not to think about what that means, contextually, and just push through it. 

The Glove goes first, cutting through the scentless, slimy flesh, and then my arm, and then my head’s made it through, and then I’m out. 

I land heavily on the floor, my pajamas saturated in slime, my skin coated in it. I furiously wipe off my face, the tightness of the end of the passage forcing me to squeeze through, and I have to get it off before I can open my eyes, before I can inhale, before I can do anything. I have to wipe it off, and it’s so slimy, and it’s so many different consistencies, and I have to-

I feel some of it stick to itself as I pull it off my face, and I take a breath, gasping for air after the panic.

In spite of the likely danger, in spite of the fear, in spite of the practicality, I just lay there for a moment. Breathing. 

I’m not claustrophobic. I’m not. 

But that was a lot. 

The floor beneath me is cool. Not cold, not like it’s been exposed, but like no one has touched it in a long time. It feels like wood, but it’s a little too rough to be a professional sort of layering- the smooth finish has been ruined by the unevenness of the boards, the way they’re ever-so-slightly too large or too small to fit together just right. 

I inhale. Exhale. Hard and heavy. 

If anything’s nearby, my presence will be pretty fucking known about by now. If anything’s nearby, maybe I can use it to find out what the fuck happened to my roommate. 

I open my eyes and look at the world in the walls. 

It’s… malformed. 

The structure of it is the same as my house. Mostly.

I’ve fallen out into a hallway, ending in a T-junction. The walls are the same- but the wallpaper is off, and wet, and yet too dry at the same time. The floor is the same hardwood, except for the aforementioned flaws in it, the ways that it’s just… less than it should be. The ceiling has those drippy-paint marks, except they’re more like baby stalactites, hanging much too low from the ceiling, making it all look ridged and alien. 

But the color of things is almost the same. A bit yellowed, maybe. It’s like…

It’s like falling into a house that isn’t mine. 

And there are cracks. 

Everywhere, there are pieces of broken plaster, or spaces between the floorboards, or broken pieces of architecture, and behind them all is…

Well. It’s not flesh. Not like the stuff in my wall. 

For one thing, it’s a mix of brown, yellow and grey. Rot colors. Dead-stuff colors. The kind of colors that aren’t necessarily a sign that something died a while ago, but a strong indication that it might be dead currently. No pale bleached bone, no black necrosis, just… unrefrigerated mess. Rife with…

Huh.

No mold. I don’t know why I’m surprised by that. 

GLIMPSE BEYOND pushes at me, and I push it aside again. The tingling at the back of my eyes gets louder, like a numbness spreading, but I have to focus. 

Something may have heard me arriving. 

I get up, my construct moving with me, realigning to have its head on my shoulder again. The Glove moves, shivering and pushing aside any leftover bits still attached to it. The kitchen knife in my waistband comes out, so that I have two weapons at hand, which makes me a lot more comfortable. 

Turning away from the orifice-tunnel I just fell out of, I start walking towards the junction at the end of the hall. 

As I do, I start tapping things. 

The knife in my non-Glove hand goes tap-tap-tap against the walls as I walk, the sound carrying and vibrating down the hallway. I don’t know if my currently unnamed roommate is alive, or, quite frankly, if she’s still real, but this feels more secure than just screaming. Either way, it might pull something other than what I want in towards me, but…

GLIMPSE BEYOND pushes at the back of my eyes.

I See.

I see a place that was made too thin. Was made too still. Not alive enough, not awake enough, not real enough. Not enough to feed on. Made to grow without the right nutrition, without the right ingredients, without the right anything. Just enough to be made to exist, but not enough to be made healthy. 

I see through the walls and through the flesh beside them, which is too wet and too dry, which isn’t made right, which is malformed. I see how thin everything is. I see the paper-thin surface of this place, see how it starts to crinkle and tear and burn away just by me looking at it the way I am. I see how dark it is outside, and how that void is leaking away, like a ship designed without being airtight, like being in space and knowing that the cold keeps seeping in and you can’t stop it. 

It’s a ship. It’s a tumor. It’s a…

Stillbirth. 

Teratoma. Half-eaten, half-formed, half-living, half-not. 

There wasn’t enough for it to grow right. 

I stare at this place, this unraveling bundle of hair and teeth and tissue, attached to a living thing, and- 

The teratoma wriggles. The wrinkles of it ripple, and one of them pulls back, and-

A milky, blind eye turns to stare at me. 

At the thing behind me. 

At the thing behind it, which is a house and is a living organism and is an extension of-

I vomit. 

It was too big. It is too big. I’m not-

The skill tingles in the back of my mind, gone from a numbness of being folded up too tight to a numbness of having done too much, too fast. It’s not strong enough to hold all of it- or I’m not. I don’t know. 

There’s a puddle of half-digested food on the floor, leaking through the cracks- and droplets of red fall to join it. 

My eyes sting.

I spit, the taste of acid in my mouth overwhelming. 

Then I keep walking. 

Tap tap tap. Knife on the wall. Glove extended, surgical tools out and ready. The thing I have made on my shoulder chittering lightly, sharp rib-tips and skull-chunks roving, keeping its eyes turned behind me and around me.

I reach the T-junction. 

Not a great start. But hey, nothing’s come to eat me yet, so not as bad as it could be. 

I get to the intersection and look close, trying to find some sort of sign of where my roommate may have gone. A scratch, a dent in the walls from an impact, anything. 

The hall to the left is the exact fucking same as the one on the right.

Tap tap tap, I say, my knife clinking against the plaster. 

I wait for a response. 

When I don’t get one, I turn right. 

The hallways go on for a while. Unsure of how big this space is, I start marking different corners after the first turn, tracking where I came from in case I get lost. And that’s unfortunately likely, because this place is a fucking maze.

Slightly yellowish walls, cracked and full of not-quite-living flesh, go on and on and on. There are no doors, no windows, no pictures on the walls or even any rooms, as far as I can tell. Just hallways, over and over and over. Always a T-junction, always offering a left and right path. 

And yes, I did, in fact, try that thing where you’re supposed to take every right turn until you make it out of a maze. Four right turns later, and without ever going up or down, I’m pretty sure that this place is spatially fucked. 

Four right turns later, and I still haven’t seen a single marking on the corners- and after backtracking, I confirm that the markings I left behind me do remain, so it’s not an erasure thing. This place isn’t… it isn’t alive enough to heal or change things. I think. That’s what my skill is telling me, I think, and GLIMPSE BEYOND hasn’t led me wrong yet. Though that pushiness was new. Then again, I haven’t ever tried to stop a vision for so long before, so maybe that was always a feature. 

I don’t know. I’ve gone through a lot of right turns. There’s only so much that adrenaline can keep you hyper-aware when faced with overwhelming boredom, and while this place remains deeply unsettling, it’s also so… 

Quiet.

Tap-tap-tap. 

I keep up the knife-tapping. I keep up the walking. 

I hope, as hard as I can, that my nameless roommate remembers the same story about mazes and following right-hand turns. Because if not… I don’t know. I haven’t seen any sign of life or chaos here so far, and that’s even with the fact that she’s (I think it was a she? I’m almost sure?) probably, statistically, right-handed. 

I can’t be here forever. It’s been an hour, I think, maybe longer, and even if I’ve marked every path I’ve taken, the danger of getting lost isn’t impossible. This place might not be alive to heal or change things on purpose (I think), it might be leaking enough of itself to still come apart. Maybe. 

Metaphysics is fucked. I have barely any idea what the fuck I’m doing. 

I need to help if I can. I can’t help if I’m dead.

One more turn. One more step forward. One more T-junction, and if I don’t find anything, I’ll go back. Maybe I can create something that can track in this place. Maybe I can call in a favor with Dani, somehow? Maybe I can-

On the corner of the next junction, on the right hand wall, there’s some wetness. A little puddle. 

The smell of ammonia.

Piss. Someone stopped, squatted, and pissed here. 

Maybe someone that’s been here so long she couldn’t hold it anymore. Maybe someone who got completely fucking lost, and who’s here because of me, and is trapped, and alone, and maybe didn’t have such a clear entry and exit into this place. 

I want to vomit again. There’s nothing in my stomach that would make that worthwhile. Just bile. 

I mark the corner, and take the turn, going deeper.