"Mari!" I yelled, diving backward out of my chair just as the heavy oak table was launched across the room.
The kinetic blast of displaced air hit me a fraction of a second before the solid wood smashed into the plaster wall where my head had been. I hit the floor hard, rolling through a pile of shattered ceramic plates and spilled espresso beans. The physical impact knocked the wind out of me, but the psychological pressure in the room was infinitely worse. It felt like trying to breathe underwater.
I scrambled behind the ruined espresso counter, my cheap leather shoes slipping on the wet tiles, my heart hammering a frantic, terrifying rhythm against my ribs.
The college student was standing in the dead center of the café, but he wasn't a student anymore. His eyes had rolled completely back in his head, exposing the bloodshot whites. He was radiating a blinding, golden kinetic energy that warped the air around him like a mirage over hot asphalt. His perfectionist Alter had completely taken the wheel, violently separating from his conscious mind in a desperate bid to protect the host from the agony of perceived failure.
And right now, it was violently fixated on me.
*Fascinating,* my Alter whispered in my head, his voice thrumming with a sickening, clinical excitement. *Your emotional suppression slipped, Doctor. Seeing your ex-girlfriend triggered a momentary, localized spike of profound grief. You broadcasted a frequency of loss, and the student's Ego latched onto it like a heat-seeking missile.*
"Okay, okay, thanks for the unneeded info Sherlock" I hissed through my teeth, pressing my spine hard against the wooden espresso cabinets.
I violently forced my clinical apathy back into place. It wasn't just a mental exercise; it was a grueling physical exertion. I compartmentalized the sorrow of seeing Mari. I took the agonizing realization that she was infinitely better off without me—that my absence was the catalyst for her success—and shoved it into the darkest, coldest mental lockbox I possessed. I focused on the mundane. The trivial. The soul-crushing boredom of an unpaid utility bill. I pictured the gray, water-stained ceiling of my old apartment. I went completely, fundamentally numb.
Out in the café, the blinding golden light around the student flickered. He paused, his hands lowering slightly. His head darted around the ruined room in sudden, jerky confusion. His Ego was sweeping the environment, trying to find the source of the grief it had tasted, but the signal was gone. I was a ghost again.
I let out a slow, controlled breath, preparing to crawl toward the back exit while the kid was disoriented.
But before the student could lock onto Mari, the air pressure in the café didn't just drop—it inverted.
My ears popped painfully. The oxygen in the room suddenly tasted like copper and rotting meat. A deafening, high-pitched ringing shattered every remaining intact coffee mug on the shelves, raining ceramic dust down onto my shoulders.
It wasn't the student's doing. The kid looked just as confused as I was, his golden aura pulsing erratically.
Right above the boy's head, the fabric of reality violently tore open.
*Oh, excellent,* my Alter murmured, his voice vibrating with grim fascination. *Look what his burnout has summoned. A spontaneous dimensional laceration. The sheer, obsessive friction of his Ego has torn a hole right through the cognitive threshold of this dimension.*
It was a brilliantly deduced, highly logical theory. And as I would discover later, my genius subconscious was completely, arrogantly wrong.
But right now, I didn't care about the physics. I cared about the monster.
Long, abnormally jointed fingers hooked over the edge of the jagged, oozing tear in the air. The laceration bled a thick, ink-black miasma that smelled like severe panic attacks and stagnant water.
A creepy infinitely grotesque creature pulled itself through.
It was a nightmare of negative space. It had no eyes, no discernible face—just a pulsing, fleshy mass of elongated limbs, slick with a viscous fluid, and a gaping, circular maw lined with jagged, translucent teeth. It moved with unnatural, glitchy spasms, defying standard anatomical physics as its joints popped and cracked in reverse.
It dropped onto the floor tiles with a wet, heavy thud that shook the floorboards.
It didn't care about me. It didn't care about the ruined café or the terrified barista cowering near the industrial sink. It didn't possess traditional optics or a standard olfactory system. It was a parasite of the mind.
It was drawn entirely to the massive, golden beacon of negative energy the student was projecting.
The Freak lunged. Its maw locked onto the glowing aura radiating from the boy's head. It didn't bite his physical flesh; it bit the light. It was violently siphoning the raw, toxic perfectionism right out of his skull, feeding on the agonizing friction of his fractured mind. The sound it made as it fed was a horrifying, wet slurping noise, underlaid with the high-pitched hum of draining energy.
I stayed pressed flat against the cabinets, my heart rate steady, my apathy an impenetrable lead blanket.
Within seconds, the Freak stopped feeding.
The student slumped forward, completely drained, his glowing aura permanently extinguished. He hit the floor like a sack of wet cement, unconscious. The Freak raised its blind, grotesque head, its maw snapping as it tasted the stale air of the café for a new frequency.
Behind the counter, just five feet away from me, Mari let out a muffled, terrified sob. She pressed both hands tightly over her mouth, her eyes wide with a primal, paralyzing terror.
But it was too late.
The Freak's head snapped toward the espresso machine. It smelled her terror. It smelled her desperate, overwhelming fear.
*Her cortisol levels are practically glowing in the dark,* my Alter sighed, sounding like a disappointed professor. *Her amygdala is flooding her system with adrenaline. To that creature, she looks like a five-course meal. It is going to eat her alive, Doctor.*
I stayed perfectly still. I calculated the variables with cold, brutal efficiency. I owed this woman nothing. In this universe, she didn't even know my name. Logic dictated that I wait behind this cabinet for the monster to feed, finish its meal, and crawl back into the wormhole. Survival dictated I stay entirely numb.
But my analytical brain began to run a quick inventory of my current assets in this dystopian dimension.
I had a crumpled five-dollar bill. I had a half-empty pack of cheap cigarettes. I had the dust-covered, rumpled grey suit currently clinging to my sweating back. I had no identification. I had no bank account. I had no leverage. Most importantly, I had no apartment.
I looked at Mari, cowering in the corner, her hands shaking so violently she could barely hold them against her face.
Then I looked up at the ceiling of the café. The reinforced plaster that served as the floor of my old apartment.
An opportunity.
I didn't yell. I threw a broken coffee mug to distract it.
It's ugly head whipped around buying me more time.
I simply stood up, dusted the pastry crumbs off the knees of my trousers, and walked casually toward the front counter.
The Freak didn't even twitch as I stepped right past its thrashing, spiked tail. I was projecting such an absolute, fundamental void of emotion that to its hyper-sensitive senses, I was just a piece of moving furniture.
I leaned my elbows on the polished marble of the espresso machine, looking down at Sarah. She was hyperventilating, her eyes fixed on the nightmare dragging its heavy, glitchy body over the ruined tables toward her.
"Hey," I said, my voice completely flat, cutting through her panic like a scalpel.
Mari jumped, violently startled. She looked up at me, then back at the Freak, utterly bewildered as to why the monster wasn't ripping my throat out.
"Listen to me very carefully," I said, casually checking my cheap wristwatch. "That thing feeds on emotional resonance. Specifically, your absolute, pathetic terror. In about ten seconds, it is going to climb over this counter and drink your sanity until you are a vegetative husk on the floor."
"Help me!" she choked out, her fingernails digging into the grout of the floor tiles, tears streaming down her face. "Please, God, do something!"
"I can," I replied smoothly, not breaking eye contact. "I am the only person in this room who can make you invisible to it. But my services are not free, and I am currently out-of-network."
Mari stared at me like I was a psychopath. Which, given the fact that a multidimensional tapeworm was currently salivating over her trauma, was a highly accurate clinical assessment. "What?!"
The Freak's front claws hooked over the edge of the glass pastry display case. The thick glass cracked under its immense weight. It was three feet away.
"My hourly rate is usually exorbitant," I continued, speaking with the calm, bored cadence of a man reading a software licensing agreement. "But I'm willing to barter. I need the keys to the apartment directly above this café. I want it rent-free, indefinitely. I also want unlimited access to the drip coffee, and you are never going to ask me about my personal life. Do we have a deal?"
"Are you insane?!" she screamed, shrinking back against the industrial sink as the Freak's jaw snapped blindly at the air, practically dripping black, viscous sludge onto her pristine white apron.
"Four seconds, Mari," I said. I pulled a cigarette from my breast pocket and placed it between my lips. "Rent-free. Nod if we have a legally binding verbal contract."
The Freak reared back, its maw opening impossibly wide. A shrieking sound began building deep in its throat, sounding like grinding metal and white noise.
"Yes!" Mari shrieked, squeezing her eyes shut. "Yes! Take the apartment! Just make it stop!"
"Excellent," I said.
I didn't try to fight the Freak. Fighting was for heroes, and fighting elevated the heart rate. I was a psychologist. I leaned over the counter, grabbed Sarah by the heavy canvas straps of her apron, and hauled her up so we were dead center, eye-to-eye.
"Look at me," I commanded, my voice dropping the boredom, snapping into a sharp, clinical authority that demanded obedience.
She whimpered, trembling so violently her teeth were chattering.
"I said look at me!" I barked, shaking her slightly. "You are having a textbook panic attack. Your amygdala is hijacking your prefrontal cortex. It is pumping you full of adrenaline and broadcasting your exact coordinates to that thing. But you are not going to die today, because you just hired the worst goddamn therapist in this miserable dimension."
I practically shoved my face into hers, blocking her view of the monster entirely.
"I want you to think about taxes," I demanded.
"W-what?" she stammered, completely thrown off balance. The sheer absurdity of the word caused her brain to stutter.
"Taxes, Mari. Think about the soul-crushing, bureaucratic boredom of filing your quarterly business taxes for this overpriced coffee shop. Think about the depreciation of your espresso machine. Think about the excruciating minutiae of itemized deductions. Let the absolute, mind-numbing boredom of adulthood wash over you."
It was a severe pattern interrupt. By hitting her with the most mundane, frustratingly boring concept imaginable right in the middle of a life-or-death crisis, I was violently derailing her panic loop. I was forcing her brain to shift blood flow from the emotional center back to the logical center.
Her brow furrowed. The sheer, jarring absurdity of the demand forced her prefrontal cortex to process the logic.
"Focus on the math," I whispered, my voice dropping into a hypnotic drone of pure apathy. I projected my own impenetrable cynicism directly into her eyes. "It's all just numbers. Nothing matters. We are all just meat sacks paying rent until we die."
Mari blinked. The violent trembling in her shoulders slowed. The sheer, overwhelming terror in her eyes was momentarily replaced by a deep, profound confusion.
Her cortisol levels dropped. Her emotional frequency flatlined.
Behind me, the Freak froze.
Its jaws snapped shut with a hollow *clack*. Its blind head darted left, then right. The glowing, radiant buffet of terror it had been crawling toward had simply vanished into thin air. To the Freak's senses, Sarah and I had just ceased to exist.
It let out a frustrated, clicking hiss. It turned its grotesque body away from the counter, slithered back over the unconscious student, and dragged itself back toward the jagged tear in the air. It pulled its elongated limbs through the laceration, disappearing back into the void it came from.
The Wormhole snapped shut with a sound like a thunderclap, leaving nothing but broken glass, spilled coffee, and absolute, ringing silence.
I let go of Mari's apron. She slumped against the counter, sliding down the cabinets until she hit the floor, staring blankly at the empty space where the monster had just been.
I pulled my cheap plastic lighter from my pocket, struck the flint, and lit my cigarette. I took a long, slow drag, letting the cheap nicotine flood my system.
"Now," I said, holding out my hand and looking down at her. "About those keys."