Ding!
Orville could swear he heard it again, mumbling to himself as he tore through the kitchen. Not the stove, not the egg-timer, not even the microwave, regardless of how sure he’d been that was the culprit. Standing up to full height and stretching his weary back, Orville was on the edge of giving up when it hit his ears once more.
Ding!
Where the hell was that coming from? Standing in the kitchen, he could be certain it wasn’t nearby, except he wasn’t sure where else it could be coming from. The one bedroom apartment was far from spacious, and Orville didn’t own a great surplus of spare electronics. If not something in the kitchen, the likeliest suspect was his phone, which was sitting silently on the counter.
Checking his small kitchen over once more, Orville’s desperation led to a stroke of imagination. Perhaps it was his microwave after all, malfunctioning and making distorted sounds that seemed further than they were. That quickly led to the realization that Orville wasn’t entirely sure what his microwave normally sounded like. An error easily enough remedied, while also allowing him to make sure the device was working and prepare a snack.
Orville grabbed a bag of popcorn from the pantry and tossed it in, adding the time himself. He never trusted the sensors, the results were inconsistent on the best of days. The small appliance fired into life, spinning the bag inside a now illuminated chamber.
Ding!
Definitely not the microwave, he’d been standing inches away from it when the sound came this time. Orville headed back into his bedroom, wondering if it might be something in a neighboring apartment, sound seeping through the thin walls. The only problem was, his neighbors on that side had moved out at the start of the month, and Orville had yet to see anyone else take it over. People did leave things behind, though, and if it kept up he could go ask the administrator at the front office to take a look.
Lifting the edge of his mattress, Orville scanned beneath the bed, making sure no long lost bit of technology had somehow found it’s way to such an unlikely space. All that looked back at him were some unpaired socks and a long forgotten empty bag of potato chips. After getting the mattress back in place, he moved onto the dresser, quickly rifling through the drawers.
DING!
It was louder this time, yet somehow no easier to pin down. With a groan of frustration, Orville rose from the dresser and looked to the sky, as if pleading with the heavens for an answer. Staring upward gave him a fine view of the light bulbs on his ceiling fan as they began to flicker. It was more than just the bulb, he soon noticed. The face of his digital watch was doing the same, as were the lights in his bathroom. He had just enough time to suspect a power surge before everything cut out.
This was wrong. Orville had lived through many a time where electricity was lost, and this was far more than such a simple inconvenience. It wasn’t just the constant hum of appliances going silent, there was more missing. The feel of air as one’s skin moved against it, the sensation of blood moving through a body, the subtle sounds of life coming from all around. Gone.
Orville felt light-headed, staggering to the edge of his dresser and holding on as best he could. As he stood there, clutching his furniture and struggling to stay conscious, the world was ripped open.
It started along the seam of his bedroom corner, parting as though there weren’t pipes, beams, and paint holding the two walls together. The break continued up to the ceiling, before stretching onward to encompass the room’s entire far wall. Continuing to move like they were being pulled back, the barrier shifted into what should have been his neighbor’s apartment.
Instead, Orville’s eyes went wide as his brain shuddered at what awaited. The creature was beyond vast, standing in a chamber larger than any stadium Orville had ever seen. A huge, triangular mouth took up most of the head, undulating tentacles waving along the sides. Reaching up with a limb like a mix between a spider’s leg and a crab’s claw, it made motions outside the borders of Orville’s window into the mad world, working unseen machinations.
Horrifying as the creature was, what Orville truly couldn’t look away from were the walls behind it. The vast space stretch onward far past what his eyes could make out, yet it was bizarre in its uniformity. Countless boxes sealed by what looked like tinted glass, each with human shapes moving around within them.
Orville was so distracted, he didn’t notice the tentacle stretching forth from the huge mouth until it was in the room with him, not that there was anywhere to run. The appendage had appeared tiny on the creatures mouth, yet it had to flex and stretch to fit within his limited space. He braced for impact, however his body felt nothing when the pulsing purple flesh washed over him. Orville was gripped by a tremendous feeling of invasion instead, like his whole life was laid bare. Then it was over, the tentacle retreating from whence it came.
The creature finished it’s unseen motions on the side, and Orville wanted to weep in relief as the hole in reality he’d stumbled upon began to close. Walls and ceiling rejoined, no sign that there had ever been anything amiss. Seconds later, the world restarted, lights flickered back to functioning and sounds restored.
Despite his head swimming, Orville felt better at once. More alive, energized, when everything stopped even shifting his limbs had taken substantial effort. Already, his brain was hard at work, telling him that what he’d just seen must have been some sort of hallucination. Maybe the delivery driver had spiked his lunch with LSD or something, that made a lot more sense than some unfathomable monster living in the space between his walls. What would it even be doing there, and why rip open a world just to shut it like nothing happened? It made no sense, reinforcing Orville’s certainty that it wasn’t-
Bing!
His heart stopped, briefly, until he realized the difference. That was just the sound of his own microwave, alerting him that his popcorn was potentially ready. One could never be sure, they were a finicky treat, but Orville had set the timer low. He could always toss it back in for a bit if the snack needed a tad more time.