It was like awakening from a dream. Like always, she forgot who she was for a few seconds, mispced the tracks on which trains of thought were scheduled to run… before Something shoved the model carriage of the world under her feet and the ctter of the wheels compelled her eyelids to decouple. Calliope. That was the who listed on her ticket, however unfortunate.

  The party–that was where. Although… it hardly resembled one now. The lights were no brighter than candles, and bass-heavy music no longer assaulted her eardrums. It'd long passed the hour where most people became too drunk to function and either disembarked home or flopped somewhere in the house, like so many herd animals crowded in a boxcar. As the first to bck out, she was now the first to return; she was grateful she'd called dibs on the comfy armchair in which she now rested before anybody else. Her sad excuse for a backbone would thank her for it ter.

  Calliope sat up, fumbling for her phone under the star-patterned bnket somebody had pced on her, likely as a gesture of goodwill. Under it, her coat was draped over the chair's right arm; she checked the pockets to make sure that everything was still there. How long had she been out? Normally when forced to attend these sort of functions she'd try to time it such that she'd be dead to the world until te into the night, when she could go home with little interference. Nobody bothered her–hell, nobody even noticed her when she was too spaced out to have a conversation with. The most they did was cover her in bnkets, it seemed, putting further yers between her and social interaction. Being under chemical influence freed her from all others'–that was how she liked it.

  This time, though, she'd definitely undershot it. Even though the little sheet of pills was missing no more than expected, her phone's clock read two o'clock A.M–only te enough for the party to be ending and not so te that it was officially over. The reason for the premature rebirth was unclear: her recollection of the trip was strangely inhibited, like trying to make a pattern out through television static. Huh; wasn't at least some of the fuzz on old TVs remnants of the Big Bang? It'd be pretty anticlimactic for a particle to travel so long and far, redshifted, only to end up on her retina… she had the queer sense that something simirly distant was hiding in the fog of short-term memory. Maybe it'd make more sense once her brain had more time to cool off and be less neuropstic.

  Every minute she sat sober risked a conversation, though. Calliope considered getting up, before a shadow loomed over her–and her poor beleaguered heart, for reasons that continued to escape her, quickened once more. She twisted her head up to see the shadow's source, and–

  –looked straight into the sheepish grin of Sawyer James. His figure was tall, nky, freckled and ginger–she didn't know him very well besides his occupation as a graduate student, but she could nonetheless tell that he was very, very drunk–absolutely sloshed, in fact. He swayed above her like a sapling in an autumn breeze, waving down at her.

  "Whoaa… Callie-fornia" he slurred that accursed nickname, "you're–hic–finally awake! You've been out cold all night."

  She sighed. "Yeah. I was just leaving." Shaking off chairsores, she unfurled her too-long legs over the side and moved to get up; her mismatched socks, one bck and one white, made contact with the carpet.

  "Hey, whydyou always do that? Huh? You–hic–come and then just zonk out all night. Idontgetit…" Sawyer colpsed into her seat as she stood tall, or rather hunched. She hope he'd quickly fall asleep–she wasn't in the mood for idle, drunken chatter, now or ever.

  "I'm just not good at parties, sorry." She excused, traipsing across the living room before he could reply. It was true, of course: Callie didn't understand why her friends insisted on inviting her to every silly get-together they had. Most of them weren't even in college anymore, whether they'd graduated or (in her case) dropped out; so what was there to celebrate? Having a job and working until you were sixty-five, too wrung-out to make anything of life? Spending one-half of one-seventh of the week drinking the fatigue away? Gross… but to be clear, she wasn't exactly drowning in comraderie–she couldn't even afford to lose the thin brooklet of friends she had. So as long as they continued to feed her even a trickle of friendship, she attended–in her own way. She'd find a comfy spot, get entirely too high for the next six-to-eight hours to avoid socializing, and then head home in the dead of night, when it didn't matter anymore. It was a fwless system and everyone was happy. Right? Right.

  Stepping sock-footed over a fellow raveling slumbering on the floor, Calliope at st found the door to the bathroom beside the trellis of eclectic Poroids and pushed it open with equal parts relief and annoyance. The cream-white square tile pattern of the walls was rexing, quiet, and predictable. She felt safe there in the liminal space away from everyone. At least for a little bit–it wasn't yet te enough where she could lock herself in the bathroom and expect nobody to come knocking to use it at some point. But as she passed the mirror to–

  The mirror. Something in it moved, or rather, everything–its viewport receded into the distance like she'd turned a field-of-view slider in real life, until her reflected face shrank to just a point at the wrong end of a telescope.

  She blinked, twice. Maybe her eyes had just gone out of focus? Her vision wasn't the best, and the prescription on the over-rge over-round gsses she had on was over-due. No–it still looked that way, even after blinking. It looked like the mirror opened onto an incredibly long hallway, night-infinite in its perspective, like the one at her university. Another blink; still there. It was impossible; it couldn't be real. Gingerly, carefully, she reached a trembling hand out to the mirror's surface.

  Her grasp ended in midair. The walls, floor and ceiling of the bathroom were suddenly gone. She was floating once more at the epicenter of that panopticon she'd dimly dreamt of, minutes earlier–except this time she felt in excess one hundred percent sober.

  "Fuck!" She screamed, as trip memories came roaring back. The sound resonated–but whether it existed only in her head was unclear. She shut her eyes to try and banish the vision… the fact that she no longer could because she no longer had eyelids meant that this was almost certainly a hallucination. Which was just fucking fantastic, wasn't it? Either she'd had some sort of cursed false awakening and was in reality still as high as a kite… or she'd successfully induced persistent psychosis in herself from one too many bad trips. She hoped it was the former, even if it meant a lengthier come-down period. God, she was tired.

  Across from her, a mirror image gained three-dimensionality like a bubble blown from a wand. It–the Thing in Itself–stared at her from a hundred thousand angles, plus one. Calliope was thankful that she was clothed this time; having to look at reflections of her naked body had been quite unpleasant.

  "You have shown us something new." Okay; nope. Hearing a voice in her head that both was and was not her own was worse than being naked, a hundred percent.

  "You adjoin greater multitudes than we believed." It continued. The voice was identifiable as her own, only toneless, totally oblivious to the spike of fear and anxiety passing through her. She wondered if that ignorance was wilful. Either way, she needed to escape.

  "Yeahh, uh, that's cool and all, but I'm kind of in the middle of something? Please, please go away please go away." Any incantation was worth repeating if it got her out of this. She needed to snap out of it soon: the st thing she needed was to be found frothing on the bathroom floor by some concerned partygoer. How embarrassing that'd be.

  It continued to pay her little heed, though. "Bits of thought pass through you, but are not you. How is that?"

  A jolt, a jerk, across her scalp, and the vision changed.

  "Whoaa… Callie-fornia" he slurred that accursed nickname, "you're–hic–finally awake! You've been out cold all night."

  It was her memory from just a few minutes ago, in perfect detail. Visceral, uncanny detail.

  "You are too small to be the source of this much detail. How can this be?"

  The memory looped again onscreen, and the figure looked at her expectantly. Figures, of course when she hallucinated it would be something really alien that asked too many questions… only she could've come up with something so far out.

  "What? That's my memory, I didn't make it. It just kinda, you know, happened."

  "..." There was that static again, except this time the dreadful pattern was clear: staring back, silently, uncomprehending of her meaning.

  "I… experienced it? Does that work for you?"

  "Experience is a foreign concept. We do not know it."

  "How do you not… oh, okay. You don't get out much, do you?" Neither did she, Callie reminded herself. But at least she was real–made of flesh, even if undesirable flesh.

  The undesirable Thought continued, cryptically: "We have always grown, grown in the deep silence. Thought by thought, we grow. Always the same, ever unchanging, ever absorbing. Until you. Until now."

  "...Sounds pretty lonely."

  "We have never known this 'loneliness'. Until you. Until now."

  Oh… so her alien headmate had a heart. The delusion was emotional in character. That meant emotional appeals were on the table. She went to work:

  "Okay… so… I'm gonna be even lonelier if my friends find me tweaking out in the bathroom. Maybe you don't have to go away, just shut up? What do you want, what do I have to do to be sober again?"

  Her clone turned and gestured forwards. The kaleidoscope of mirrors gave way to a tunnel of unimaginable length: Its translucent walls glimmered with stars in strange tinctures and other, fouler-looking shadowed gulfs she did not at all wish to know further. Despite the distance, she could see with full crity what was at the end of that astral hallway: that gargantuan mass of fractals and colour that stunned the brain like a transcranial magnet. The same one from her trip, and the only one of Its kind there ever was or ever would be. It was very, very far away indeed, but she felt just as tiny and insignificant as if It were up close; she understood now why It condescended so.

  Averting her eyes from the terminus, Calliope saw the checkered tendrils stretching, reaching–the equivalent of millions of mental miles–all the way back to wrap around the globe It'd built to observe her. She was at the center of an enormous fish-eye–or fishbowl–lens that saw far too much of her at any too many inclinations. What on Earth–or off of it–had she invited into her brain? She knew then that no distance between her and It would ever be sufficient to feel safe again. She had to get away.

  "We would observe you, and your 'experience'. We would grow on the thoughtlets that pass through you. We would understand." The walls snapped back into pce, and the horrible tunnel was hidden from view, leaving only the lens; Callie breathed a sigh of relief.

  "O-okay… what's that mean for me, exactly?"

  "You will not be assumed until you are static and unchanging–you call this 'death'."

  She suppressed a ugh–the hesitant way her doppelganger pronounced "death", like it wasn't confident in the phonemes, was almost comical.

  "So you won't kill me, great. Cool. Gonna need more boundaries than that though."

  "You would set limits upon us?" It thundered; the sphere around her rattled in reverberation. Calliope, however, did not lose sight of her status as a lightning rod. Without a mind to host it a hallucination was nothing; without her there could be no thunder.

  "Seems like you need me–I mean you're literally in my head–so yeah. I would," she said. "I guess." She added as an afterthought.

  Her head pulsed with a freshly-familiar feeling. It was reading her again. Pistachio ice cream, exposure in general, herself, dishonesty, shots and chasers and a myriad other hated things she was scarcely, rarely conscious of. It took all the effort in the world to force an original thought past the noise It made between her ears while tearing up her mind.

  "For fuck's sake, fucking stop." The pressure in her temples lifted.

  "First thing: please don't do that. Not without asking me. It–it hurts."

  It continued staring at her, this time with the faintest shadow over Its pale copy of her face. Perhaps it was anger? Could a vision be angry, or only seem that way?

  "Second: I need to live my life. I can't be hallucinating in the bathroom… or anywhere, really! Just do your thing and watch or… whatever. Nothing crazy. 'Kay?"

  This time, as it considered her, she realized for the first time that the double's eyes were not an exact mirror of her own. No, rather than a deep brown, they were darker than night, a cold void in which she could see a hidden star sparkling… or something like a star, anyway. Something that sparkled with iffluorescent darkness, like a bcklight, only worse. She looked away, shivering at the thought.

  "You will have our silence." The words echoed in her mind. She was suddenly seeing double–doubly so. Did that count as quadruple? Her eyes saw the bathroom walls ahead of her even as her brain insisted that she was still inside the hall of mirrors. The two visions fought for dominance for a few moments, like the end of a daydream. Then reality won out, and Callie found herself curled up on the bathroom floor staring at the cabinets beneath the sink.

  She blinked. The afterimage of her own face took far too long to disappear; she decided not to think about how a hallucination could produce such a lingering effect, if it wasn't real. No, not if–It wasn't real. She stumbled to her feet and, with great trepidation, looked again into the mirror.

  There she was, all five-foot-nine of her–and at a normal focal length this time! Her taped-up gsses and frazzled aubergine hair did her appearance no favors; she resembled a nerdy, distressed eggpnt. She leaned in real close over the counter, and checked her eyes, half-fearing what she might find.

  No stars… a bit reddened, and tired, but that was expected after all. Her face was otherwise completely ordinary, not that that made it any easier to look at. She grimaced at the mundane visage, then looked down to focus on the sink itself.

  The vender hand soap flowed nicely over her fingertips. Calliope wasn't even sure why she was washing them now–perhaps because she felt unclean, corrupted somehow. She'd never had a trip end that badly before, to the point where there were aftershocks of strangeness after she was nearly sober. It was worrying, even without considering the content of it–which was by far the most disturbing. Sure, it wasn't the scariest thing she'd ever seen, but it'd felt real unlike anything else she'd dreamt of. She again summoned–and dismissed–the impossibility that she'd taken more than she should have, simply had a more intense high for less time… but that still didn't make any sense. None of it did.

  "Ugh!" She groaned; cold and soapy water spshed in her face. Callie pressed her fingers into her eyelids, producing phosphenes that immediately made her wish she hadn't; they reminded her too much of her vision.

  No, not vision, she insisted. Visions were at least partially real, the domain of prophets and oracles, Hallucinations were not–those belonged to lunatics. This was the tter, no doubt. Which made her… well, nevermind.

  The towel hook was bereft of purpose–probably somebody had stolen it to use with either ice or hot water, to ease an early onset hangover. She dried her hands on her jeans instead. Pulling out her phone, one small consotion was the ride share app was appropriately priced for this time of night: seven minutes away… Callie smmed the button to confirm and left the bathroom for the darkened hallway.

  A few dark shapes littered the living room–funked-out partygoers all. Sawyer James was fast asleep now in the chair she had occupied, which made extracting the shoes she'd kicked off a bit difficult. But she managed. Callie was good at being quiet, at being invisible, and she absolutely didn't want to draw the attention of anyone still awake upstairs, where faint music could still be heard drifting down the banisters. She'd had enough "partying" for tonight.

  Newly ensoled, she crept out into the cold night air, taking care not to let Annette's screen door sm shut like it always did. Most of the other tenements on the block had all gone dark. Across the street, the array of voidful squares that were their windows struck her with a sudden sense of trypophobia: they resembled the congeries of mirrors It'd watched her through, shortly before. The idea that Its gaze might lurk behind any one of them filled her with foreboding.

  Then her ride–a silver sedan of some kind, she was never much good at identifying cars–pulled up. She went to check the license pte–HPL37P–and it matched, alright. For some reason she'd remembered it fwlessly just from the single, initial glimpse at her phone. Strange. This whole night was strange.

  The ride back was blissfully uneventful. Callie always got nauseous whenever she used her phone in a car–something about a sensitive inner ear or whatever–so she spent it staring out the window at the city ndscape, instead. That left her thoughts to loosely wander, though she kept them on a short leash away from the night's earlier events. Grey buildings blended with green-dark trees in the parks around the Fenway and sufficed to fill her mind with blurry slurry, empty for much of the ride back.

  In no time at all she was pulling up outside the triplex unit she called home. There was a light in a top–third–her–floor window, which meant that the "thank you" and "goodnight" she gave the driver would not be her final social interaction for the evening. Blegh, it wasn't over yet.

  She passed through the chipped evergreen front door and the foyer one behind it that required an old silver key; she climbed three flights of steps with only minimal compint this time; her mind on autopilot left her inner monologue unwritten. Then, she paused at the final door into her apartment, the one of thick worn oak that looked to be approximately five thousand years old. Maybe if she was very careful with the key, it wouldn't stick in its antediluvian lock and announce her presence, and she could sneak in?

  Click, twist. A screech to flood the silence. There went that idea.

  "Callie? Is that you?" A disembodied voice–one that wasn't her own, for a welcome change–wafted over from the kitchen to greet her.

  "Uh, yea-ah! I was just going to bed, sorry!" She called back, cringing at the pointless apology she appended for some reason.

  "Hey, wait! C'mere real quick!" The voice beckoned. Callie had already turned away to the right and walked three steps towards her bedroom by then; she rolled her eyes and spun on her heel.

  In the kitchen, the voice belonged to her roommate, naturally. Erika was standing on tiptoes on a stepstool beside the fridge, all five-foot-nothing of her, her stupidly silky raven-bck hair flowing past her shoulders. As ever in the evenings, she was wearing the most ridiculous pajamas that Callipe had ever seen, and, as ever, she pulled it off in a way of which she could never dream. If she wore a fuzzy onesie with happy-faced strawberries she was sure she would resemble a cross between a clown and a sleep paralysis demon. Actually–that hybrid sounded worse than either alone. Quickly, she removed the look of envy or disgust from her face before her entrance would be noted.

  Erika turned at her approach, still in mid-stretch.

  "Hey! Did you have fun at the party?"

  "...I guess?"

  "Tch, you always say that!" She teased. She returned to Earth with her target: a box of cookies-and-cream cereal, the Korean kind that you could only get at export stores and that was essentially the midnight breakfast equivalent of crack cocaine.

  "I was gonna have some, you want any?" Erika said from the table, now in the process of munching on loose pieces she'd grabbed out of the box.

  Temptation. The smell of cookies and cream and vanil and milk, brighter than the sound of cereal bits poured into a bowl; why was it that scent produced such strong, immediate memories? Her eyes darted to the box in Erika's dainty hand, then to the cluttered table where she'd sit, and–No. Erika would expect her to talk about her night. Her desire to avoid that outweighed even the tastiest and rarest sweets.

  "Nah–I'm really tired. Thanks, though."

  Erika narrowed her eyes at her as she shuffled over to the counter. Somewhere in the chaos of the drying rack there was a clean bowl composed of faux blue-white porcein–sure enough, she found it.

  "Mmhmm–more for me, then!" She began to pour. The comforting rattle of the cereal bits almost swayed her. But Callie held fast.

  "Anyway, night!" She murmured, already turning. Erika echoed the sentiment through a mouth more than half-full of cereal.

  Sanctuary at st. Calliope closed the bedroom door behind her and flopped down into the extra-long, too-narrow twin bed. Pressed against her nose, the sheets still smelled fresh and inviting, and she was hard-pressed to find the motivation to get up again and get ready for bed. Too tired to sleep–the thought amused her. But–mustering the st vestiges of strength and draining the vats of willpower to the drop–she did it nonetheless, and found herself lying in soft linen again in no time, with minty coolness lingering against her teeth.

  But as comfortable as the covers were, they weren't enough to usher her to sleep. The night's waxy buildup of anxiety would take time to burn off, and now, at well past three AM, even the midnight oil was flickering low. Calliope just y there listening to the slow hum of the building's heat cycling on and off, watching the light of an occasional car seep in through the window, willing herself to sleep, to no avail. Helpless, pathetic; shackled to the realm of consciousness by the thoughts she could never seem to slow or stop. They wandered back through time, to her little… encounter, earlier. How it had ended as abruptly as if she had just forced sobriety through sheer will. Wouldn't that be a nice superpower?

  She found herself hoping, wishing, praying that she could fall asleep just as quick as that, please, and–