dimension that shared the same space as our own or if there was some other explanation, all I knew was that this other world was intruding on my space with greater frequency and greater intensity. Even locking myself in the bedroom did no good, because more often than not these days, the rug wasn’t the rug but was a carpet of orange grass, the walls weren’t solid white but were transparent windows on strange landscapes, the ceiling a skylight through which I could watch brown clouds float across a gold sky.
I could have withdrawn entirely into myself, pulled away from Jane, but I did not. I tried to fight these visions or manifestations or whatever they were, but I did not push Jane away from me as I probably would have done in the past. Instead, I kept her close, told her everything I saw, everything I felt, and it seemed that when I was with her, when we were together, that other world faded a little and I was more fully in Thompson.
I saw the creature on Sunday.
Until now, my glimpses into this alternate universe had been limited to landscapes, to plant life and rocks. I had seen nothing animate, nothing alive. But on Sunday morning I awoke, opened the bedroom drapes, looked outside, and saw the creature. It was staring at me from across an orange meadow. I watched it move sideways across the tall grass. It was like a spider, only it was as big as a horse, and there was in its face, visible even from this distance, a look of sly knowledge that chilled me to the bone. I saw its hairy mouth open, heard a loud sibilant whisper, and I quickly let the drapes drop, stepping back and away from them. I did not know what the creature had said and I did not want to know, but something told me that if I continued staring at it, watching it, I would be able to make out what it was saying.
I crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over my head.
Later that day, I went again to see Philipe. Jane wanted to come, but I told her she couldn’t. I said Philipe would be spooked, that he would not want her with us, and though she didn’t like that at all, she believed it. It wasn’t true — I’m sure Philipe would have loved to meet her — but for some reason I did not want her to meet Philipe, and I did not feel bad lying to her about it.
He opened the door to his apartment before I was halfway up the walk, and I was shocked by the change in him. It had been less than two weeks since I’d seen him last, but in that time he had deteriorated badly. It was nothing specific, nothing I could put my finger on. He wasn’t thinner than he had been, he hadn’t lost all his hair, he had just… faded. Whatever had set Philipe apart from everyone else, whatever had made him unique, an individual, seemed to have gone, and the person standing before me was as bland and unremarkable as a department store mannequin.
Then he spoke, called my name, and some of his old self was back. I recognized the voice, heard in it the intelligence and drive that had once drawn me to him, and I followed him into his apartment. The floor was covered with dirt and beer bottles and uprooted alien plants, and I looked at him. “You can… touch those things?” I asked.
He nodded.
I reached for a blue branch lying on his coffee table, and my hand passed through it. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.
“You’ll be there soon,” he said sadly.
I nodded. I looked around at the damage, at the destroyed plants and shrubs. I cleared my throat. “Do you still have those, uh…?” I trailed off.
He knew what I was getting at. “Not since that last time. Not since the terrorists broke up.”
“You haven’t… killed anyone?”
He smiled slightly. “Not that I’m aware of.”
There was a question that had been bugging me since that night of the sandstorm, since I’d followed him into that house, and I figured that now was the time to ask it. “You were talking to someone,” I said. “That night. Answering questions. Who were you talking to?”
“God, I thought.”
“You thought?”
“It was the same voice that had named me Philipe. I’d heard it a long time ago. In my dreams. Even before I knew I was Ignored. It told me to call myself Philipe, told me to put together the terrorists. It told me… other things, too.”
“Your hunches?”
He nodded. “I thought I saw it once, in one of those dreams, hiding in the shadows in a forest, and even though it scared me, it impressed me.” He paused, looked far away. “No, that’s not exactly true. It didn’t just impress me. It filled me with awe. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was God.”
“And now?”
“Now? Now I think it was someone —
I looked through the window at the purple forest across the street, and a chill passed through me.
His voice grew quiet. “I thought I saw it the other day. Outside.”
I didn’t want to hear what he’d seen or what he thought he’d seen, but I knew he was going to tell me anyway.
“It was hiding in the background, in the trees, and there were a lot of spider things in front of it, spider things the size of camels. But I could see its eyes, its eyebrows, its teeth. I saw hair, fur, and hooves. And it knew me. It recognized me.”
The goose bumps were all over my body. I was afraid to even look in the direction of the window.
“I used to think we were God’s chosen,” Philipe said. “I thought we were closer to God than everyone else because we were so obviously average. I believed in the Golden Mean, and I thought that mediocrity was perfection. This was what God meant man to be. Man had the potential to go farther or fall shorter, but it was this perfection of the median that would bring us into God’s graces.
“Now — ” he looked out the window. “Now I just think we’re more receptive to the vibrations, the messages, the… whatever it is that’s coming from that place.” He turned toward me. “Have you ever read a story called ‘The Great God Pan’?”
I shook my head.
“It talks about ‘lifting the veil’, about contacting a world that sounds like the one we’ve been seeing.” He walked across the room to an end table piled with library books and picked one out, handing it to me. “Here. Read it.”
I looked at the cover.
“Read it,” he said again.
I looked at him. “Now?”
“You have something better to do? It’ll only take you a half hour or so. I’ll watch TV while you read.”
“I can’t — ”
“Why did you come here today?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Why did you come here?”
“To… talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About — ”
“About what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the thing I’ve described, haven’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Then you’ve seen the spider things.”
I looked at him, nodded slowly.
“Read.”
I sat down on his couch. I didn’t know what bearing he thought a fictional horror story could have on the situation we faced, but I found out almost immediately. Indeed, the situation in the work was eerily similar to what I had experienced with the murderer, uncomfortably close to what Philipe had described. A mad scientist finds a way to breach the gap between this world and “the other world.” He sends a woman through, and she returns
