But the requests just kept coming, as did the amount of time he spent roleplaying. It started out as something before and after work, but he soon quit his job and without notice, it became an all-day activity. Like I said, it was part of the fun and I didn’t put any limits on it.

“Ah fuck Gary,” I said. “Why did you have to ask it for that? Don’t you remember what happened with the maternity ward!?”

It moved so strangely I still don’t know what its outline looked like. But what little I’d seen was enough and I started to frantically crawl backwards. I was so scared I made a mess of everything in my desperate scramble.

I have seen photos of glacial ice bisected by sudden geological change, seen the clear blue crystal standing tall like an impossible snapshot of the ocean depths but this was something else. Just a few metres away from where I stood, the wall of ice began, and a few metres further the prow of an enormous ship was clearly seen, frozen perfectly in time.

He’s not human. He’s an animal, a thing. What will he do if I make him angry? Tracy made him angry and all that was a stain.

Course, I didn’t have a damn clue just how bad it was. They’d been living up there close to twenty years when that car came rolling towards my end of the road.

It was there when I brushed my teeth, giggling in the bathtub. It was there, stealing food that fell under the table at every meal. It was there, sitting above my bed, stroking my hair with hands the size of dinner plates.

Once I sat alone in my classroom, lights switched off, and listened quietly as someone took a seat and the sound of a scribbling pencil filled the silence. By the time it finally stopped, the sun was rising, and the only thing left behind was a badly chewed pencil, the wood bloodied and rancid, like it’d been dragged out of a septic tank.

I felt as if I’d learned profound hidden knowledge, a truth about reality found in the glassy bloodshot eyes of a man violently dying. There’s something in there, you know, something that lies just beneath our own reality. I saw a glimmer of it that night, just like I had so many others before it.

The sky behind its towering structure warped and broke open like the peeling of burned film and revealed a bruised and sickening nebula of smoky malignant stars. I felt as if the ground beneath my feet could give way at any moment, as if the very stuff of reality was crumbling and breaking apart.

In a fugue state I carried on through the house, feeling detached and isolated from the bizarre things I saw: lone eyes hanging in unbroken lightbulbs, people screaming for help from behind glassy reflections, fingers probing desperately from within empty beer cans, their owners pleading to be let out.

It was the small black eye of a mollusc; a pearly obsidian orb embedded just above my lowest rib. Around the edges was a line of faint hairs that left me breathless when I touched them. There were no lids to blink, but the hairs moved eerily in the air, almost as if floating in the slow current of a river.

It was an absurd facsimile of a woman, a misshapen lump of green, blue, and purple padded foam cut haphazardly into a misshapen hour-glass figure like an amateur mannequin. For a face it had a porcelain mask shaped like the image of a geisha, except instead of a demure thin-lipped smile there was a clownish red-lipped snarl beneath lurid spherical eyes.