I found this letter in my attic dated October 15, 2033… It’s a joke, right?
“I want you to think about the most normal thing you can, be it an activity or a place or an object or what have you. Maybe it’s walking your dog down the streets of a suburb. Maybe you’re at the grocery store trying to decide between natural or movie theater butter for your popcorn. It’s normal. Mundane. Average. Unquestionably predictable. Ordinary.
The things we don’t even stop to think about. It often feels like we’re on autopilot in these moments or tasks. Think about the last time you drove to work; really try. You can’t really pick out a distinct memory, can you? You got in your car, put on some music or a podcast or something and just drove until you reached your destination. Sure, maybe some of you had something happen; an accident, a broken down car, etc. But those are out of the ordinary. They’re unexpected events that disrupt our routine. But they’re still normal. There is nothing odd about blowing a tire or getting rear-ended. These things happen.
It’s in these normal moments that abnormal events can occur. Subtle ones, though. It doesm’t want you to know that something strange is happening. Not yet.
You reach for your coffee — the one you just drank from — but you bump it instead. You were a few millimeters off. No big deal; you just forgot where its exact place was. You would never think it moved or had been moved. Why would you? That would be abnormal. A cup of coffee does not just move on its own.
We live on a three-dimensional plane with X, Y, and Z axises. If plotted on a graph, we would have free reign of the entire thing. It’s quite the freedom, really; it’s one we humans take for granted.
What about the beings confined to X and Y on the two-dimensional plane? The shadows in the corner of your eye, the figures that are there for a moment only to vanish. Such beings are confined to a very linear existence— even more so than our own. The miserable wretches are unable to truly interact with our world. Don’t worry, though, as they’re mostly harmless in their purgatorial existence.
Yet we share linearity. We do not have free-reign of the fourth dimension: time. We are bound on its locomotive, travelling down the track with no recourse. But if we could pull back the veneer on the universe and see behind the stars, we’d glimpse what is pounding on our metaphysical door.
If you bang on a door hard enough, you can rattle the house. You can move the frames on the wall or cause ripples in a glass of water. Bang hard enough and with enough force and you can move the furniture. But at that point, you’d notice, right? Even if the banging was silent, your chair moving with you in it would alert you that something abnormal happened. So, it bangs quietly and gently enough that any rattle is minor. It rattles our house of time, shifting things in it back or forth a few milliseconds— seconds at most.
It’s done waiting to be summoned; now it has begun breaking down the door, slowly wearing down the wood and the hinges. It will get through eventually.
Yomagn’tho.
That Which Relentlessly Waits Outside.
Only, it seems like it’s tired of waiting. The movement of the cup is one thing, but it will soon become more and more noticeable. The banging will grow louder. Time will shift violently back and forth as the rattling ripples are felt across the universe. Existence will be meaningless as time shifts back and forth. Here today and gone tomorrow.
And what can we do to stop this creature that wants to break into our reality?
Absolutely nothing.
By the time we notice something truly abnormal is happening, it’ll be far too late.
Yomagn’tho ah nigh. Ahagl ah mg hope”