Now, at the age of twenty-five, Jason lived six-hundred miles away. He had a car, a steady job, a nice apartment, and, most importantly, no need for his mother. She had begun to dabble in occult rituals, trying to see things that don’t exist. And as her beliefs and actions became more convoluted, he stopped talking to her altogether. In the past five years, he had only spoken to her twice. Or at least that was the case until recently.

Two weeks ago, Jason received a strange call in the middle of the night. He awoke to the sound of his phone blaring from the nightstand and quickly answered, thinking it was an emergency. It was only his mother. She was babbling something about how the sky was getting smaller. It was growing ever closer, slowly strangling the earth in shadow, until eventually we would be crushed by an ever-advancing net of darkness.

Jason hung up. He had little patience for his mother’s antics and even less for nonsense. He made a mental note to call her in the morning and tried to go back to sleep. But she called again, and again, and again. Over and over, endless babble of things unseen and things unknown.

It was at that moment he realized that she had become completely unhinged. A good son may have tried to comfort her or at the very least contacted a mental health professional. But Jason did none of those things. He simply blocked her number and went back to sleep.

The next couple of days were perfectly normal. No random calls, no babble, only the blissful peace of his regular routine: breakfast, work, TV, sleep, repeat. One would think that ignoring his mother would weigh on Jason’s conscience. But it didn’t. He had simply put it out of his mind. His mother had never treated him as her responsibility, why then would he treat her as his?

On the third day, he received yet another call, this one from an unknown number. He stared at the phone for a moment and chewed his lip thoughtfully. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he answered it. His mother was on the other end. She had apparently gotten a new phone or was using someone else’s. He moved to hang up, but stopped, deciding to hear her out if only for a moment.

“Jason?” Her voice was clear. Much more lucid than the times before, without the frantic rush of words he was accustomed to.

“Yes,” he said, unsure how else to respond.

“Please don’t hang up,” she said. “I’m sorry about my previous calls. I’m better now, more conscious in a way.”

He hesitated. She seemed coherent, more so than she’d been in years. Going against his instincts, Jason decided to listen to her. “It’s okay. What happened? You seemed out of control.”

“I was,” his mother responded. “I performed a ritual, one I never should have done, and I saw something terrible. I think what I saw is still inside me somehow.”

As she spoke, Jason felt his heart begin to sink. She was just as crazy as always. “Are you okay now?” He was suddenly eager to get this call over with.

“I’m…not sure. I think so, but it feels as if there’s still something inside me, writhing, searching for a way out.”

He shook his head and sighed. “Well, let me know if that thing inside you acts up again, I guess. I have to go now. Bye.” He ended the call before she could respond.

Jason assumed that would be the end of it. He figured that his mother, in her old age, simply had a senior moment and was now back to her less than usual self. He returned to his normal life and seemed content with the way things were. That contentment lasted until three hours later when his phone rang once again.

“Jason,” the voice on the other side hissed. There was no lucidity this time, no true thought. Only the frenzied speech of one who thinks they’re privy to some cosmic secret and is desperate to communicate what they’ve seen.

Jason didn’t respond, but his mother continued, nonetheless. “I’ve seen the truth, child. The reality that lies beyond the meager shadow of our own. The invisible dark and twisted things that curl about our mundane world. The horrors that are awakening, within and without, the aspects of the broken one that hunger for us.”

“Shut. Up.” Jason enunciated each word with cold precision. The icy disdain in his voice stopped his mother’s drivel. “I am sick of your nonsense. I spent my entire life listening to your constant talk about mysterious forces and worlds unseen. We’re done.”

With that, he hung up. He waited for the phone to ring again, rage still heavy in his gut, eager for another opportunity to come roaring forth. But the phone remained silent. Eventually, Jason’s anger faded to mild irritation, then to nothing at all.

But still, a deeper emotion gnawed at him. At first, he thought it was annoyance at his mother. But, no, that didn’t seem right. The feeling stayed there throughout the evening, churning within him. Like the thing his mother claimed writhed within her, it tossed and turned inside him all evening. It wasn’t until late that night, as he was drifting off to sleep, that he realized what it was. The heavy sensation deep within him was concern for his mother.

The next day he decided to do something about her mental state. For the past few years, he had toyed with the idea of putting her in the care of a psychiatric institution. However, due to a combination of apathy and lack of funds, he never had.  However, he was considerably more stable now and figured doing so would at least keep her from calling him all the time.

Several days later, he found a good facility, Hurston Psychiatric Clinic, and provided an explanation of his mother’s erratic behavior to the professionals there. She had called him several times since then, always babbling about the things she sees, and Jason had recorded her calls. He presented them to the clinic, and they agreed that she should be taken into their care.

That was how he found himself returning home for the first time in years. It was the day his mother was to be transported to the clinic. He had caught a flight, rented a car, and was now mere moments away from a most unwelcome reunion. He arrived fifteen minutes before the people from Hurston were supposed to get there.

That was when the chaos began. Jason had only taken his first step up the driveway when he heard a shriek from the doorway.

“Stay back!” His mother stood on the other side of a screen door, little more than a silhouette, a pale imitation of the woman she had been before. He was several yards away, but Jason could see that she had become stick thin. She looked unbalanced and frail, but not in the way of a sickly person. Though shrouded by the screen, something about her form was wrong. It was as if she had been shifted internally, though not in a physical sense. As if her essence had been yanked about and now hung limp around her like rags from a mummy.

Jason shook the irrational thoughts from his head and continued forward. He wouldn’t let his mother’s absurdities prey upon him. The moment he took another step her shouts rang out again.

“Don’t come any closer!” She sounded frantic, worried even. “It’ll get you too. I can’t keep it inside me.”

Jason sighed but decided to humor her. “Can’t keep what inside of you?”

“The truth. The cruel reality that exists beyond this one. The twisted union of things formed and unformed. The undoing has begun, and they come to observe and laugh as we are unmade. The ones that watch the watchers and all who see beyond…” She trailed off as Jason grew closer at which point she began to panic. His mother no longer tried to speak and only breathed quickly and unevenly, each breath raspier and more ragged than the one before.

He realized that this was going to be more difficult than he thought. Jason held out his hands in a calming gesture. “It’s okay mom,” he said as he reached for the door handle. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

For a brief moment her gaze softened, and it appeared that clarity had overcome her. But, just as quickly as it appeared, the expression was replaced by sheer terror and panic.

“No!” She screeched as she grabbed the screen door from the inside and put all her weight into holding it closed. Jason tried unsuccessfully to jerk the door open. His mother was surprisingly strong. He sighed and stepped back, putting his hands up once again in a sign of surrender.

“Okay, I won’t come inside.”

She searched his face for a moment. Despite her incoherence, she still seemed keen in a way. She had yet to lose all of her sensibilities. Seeing that he seemed to be telling the truth, she relaxed her grip on the door, though she still held it loosely.

Jason actually was telling the truth. He wasn’t going to come into the house. However, he never said anything about the two burly men from Hurston who showed up clad in white uniforms several minutes later.

She screamed, fought, and generally resisted the whole process, but the two men were experienced with this sort of thing and made short work of getting her into the van. By the time they closed the vehicle door she had calmed down a bit and now sat pouting in silence, occasionally darting a wicked glance at Jason.

He got back into his car and followed them to the psychiatric center. It was only an hour away, and the time passed rather quickly. Jason mentally calculated what the monthly cost of his mother’s treatment would be. He sighed. It was more than he liked, but it would keep her out of his hair and hopefully help her in the process.

“She remained quiet the entire ride,” one of the men informed him as he got out of his car at Hurston. “It seems she’s calmed down for the most part.”

Jason nodded and approached where his mother sat in the back of the van. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time to go inside.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I can’t believe you would do this. You always were an ignorant child.”

Jason exploded at his mother’s words. “I’m the ignorant one? Do you actually believe that?” He shouted and gesticulated wildly. The van’s driver shot him an odd glance, but Jason was too angry to notice. “You’re the one who has always refused to use even a modicum of logic! I have suffered my whole life because of your silly beliefs and need to feel so goddamn special all the time.”

Jason grew silent after that. He was breathing heavily and staring intently at his mother as he waited for her to respond. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, choosing instead to stare at him with a complete and total lack of emotion.

Finally, she spoke. “You’ve doomed everyone here,” she said. “Even now I feel it reaching out of me, grasping for anything and everything it can get its hands on. I should have raised you better.”

Jason was prepared to respond, but the flat, icy quality of his mother’s voice left him speechless. There was no emotion in that voice, neither anger nor panic, just cold, simple acceptance, as if what she said was neither a threat nor a warning but merely a statement of fact. And with that statement hanging in the air, Jason and his mother were ushered inside where he signed paperwork and followed as she was shown to her room.

After that, Jason was assured by an employee that everything would be okay, and he was free to leave whenever he liked. Satisfied that his mother was taken care of, Jason left and drove back to her house. He had decided to stay there for the next few days until his mother settled into her new accommodations. The house looked as it always had, small and cluttered. Jason had few fond memories there, but still, there was a hint of nostalgia and with it a small amount of comfort.

Things were uneventful the next day. Jason cleaned the house a little and found that his mother had amassed an extensive collection of candles, cards, herbs, and other occult paraphernalia. It seemed every spare cent had been dedicated to growing her assortment of supposedly magic items.

Jason sighed as he rifled through the clutter. It was sad to see someone so desperate to escape their reality, always reaching for something more, always trying to be special. She seemed so intent on escaping her mundane life. He supposed many people were like that in a way, it just so happened that his mother resorted to more esoteric methods.

He decided to put all her trinkets in the attic. Finding a cluster of old boxes in a closet, he packed his mother’s things away. There was a lifetime of objects to distract her from the world around her, enough to distract her from the crying baby in the next room, or the hungry child playing outside, or the lonely teenager sobbing beneath his sheets, or the silence of an empty house.

Jason was in the middle of carefully packing a box of glass herb jars when his phone rang. He jumped at the sudden noise and nearly dropped the box. He sighed and set it down gently before answering.

“Jason Kember,” he answered, always cordial.

“Hi, Jason,” the woman on the other end replied. Her voice was pleasant but there was a hurried note in it, professionalism superseded by a deeper worry. “This is Natalie from Hurston Psychiatric Clinic. I hate to bother you, but there’s a problem with your mother.”

There was a brief pause, as if she was searching for the right words. Jason waited for her to continue.

“She seems to be having an episode. Normally we’d be able to handle it ourselves, but she’s managed to rile up the other patients. They seem to be playing off the things she says. Are you in any position to come here and help calm her down?”

Jason rubbed his temples in frustration. It hadn’t even been a full day yet, and his mother was already causing trouble. “Yes of course. I can be there in an hour.”

Fifty minutes later he screeched to a halt outside of the clinic. A young blonde woman sat at the desk as he entered.

“Are you Natalie?” He asked, doing his best to keep the frustration out of his voice. He knew it wasn’t her fault that his mother was being difficult.

Natalie nodded in response. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was in disarray.

“I’m Jason Kember. You called earlier about my mother.”

“Oh, good, you’re here.” She stood up. “Once again, I’m so sorry to bother you, but we’re having trouble keeping everyone under control.”

“It’s fine,” he lied. “I’m glad you called.”

Natalie led him to a pair of metal doors and passed a card over the scanner next to them. A loud buzz sounded, and she pushed the doors open, leading him into a corridor with rooms on either side.

They walked down the hallway in tense silence. As Jason approached his mother’s room, the hallway grew restless with noise. He began to hear patients rambling in their rooms. As he continued further, they began to shout, and in the immediate vicinity of her room, he heard them screaming and throwing themselves against the walls.

Orderlies milled about, trying to calm the patients down. Several gave him a sidelong glance as they passed, but there was nothing behind their eyes. It was as if they were looking through him. Jason didn’t know why but he shivered at that.

They arrived at the room that was the epicenter of the chaos. Surprisingly, it was silent on the other side.

“I’ll stay out here,” Natalie said as she gestured for him to enter. Jason would have liked to believe that she was just giving them privacy, but he detected what seemed to be a hint of fear in her voice. Were these people really afraid of his mother? She was unhinged and perhaps even violent, but she was still just a frail old woman.

When Jason entered the room, he expected his mother to be raving or tearing apart the furniture, perhaps even slamming her head against the wall in a fit of insanity. But she did none of those things. As he stepped over the threshold, she merely sat on her bed in the corner. She didn’t glance up at him as he entered. She didn’t move at all, just sat there staring at nothing as chaos reigned around her.

Dark circles ringed her eyes and her hair hung loosely about her face. She sat completely still as Jason approached her. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. The small woman was a terrifying presence in the room, a stone-like figure with infinite capacity for terror and surprise. Despite being much larger and stronger than his mother, Jason felt as if he was in danger. He noticed that her eyes had the same sunken, hollow look as the orderlies. The look was more than that of a tired person. It was that of someone who felt incomprehensibly small in the face of a greater terror, an impending unknown poised to tear apart the very fabric of that which is good.

Jason shook his head and tried to focus on his mother. It was as if a dense fog clouded his mind. He wondered why he had been called here. His mother was quiet. She wasn’t present and didn’t seem to be coherent in any way, but neither was she affecting the other patients. He felt a sense of irritation at the oversight of the clinic’s staff but calmed himself and thought it through. It was likely that she had only calmed down upon his arrival.

“Hey mom,” he said, taking a step toward her. She didn’t acknowledge him and only continued to sit there, dazed and unfocused. Jason took another step forward and moved to place a hand on his mother’s shoulder. Without intending to, his hand stopped inches from her skin. A sudden fear gripped him. If he touched her something terrible would happen. It was stupid. It was illogical. But that thought kept running circles in his head, twisting round and round until it felt like all of his thoughts were out of place. He stumbled back without realizing it.

“Their eyes are being opened.” She spoke at last.

“What?”

She nodded her head toward the walls of her room where shouts were audible from patients down the hall. “They scream because it hurts. It’s like having your eyes closed your entire life only to open them and find you’re staring directly into the sun. It burns. But they’ll acclimate soon enough.”

“What are you talking about?” Jason asked.

“They’ve seen the same truth I saw. It’s like a sickness. It seeps out of me and into everyone who comes close.” She glanced up and stared at Jason. “It’s all your fault. I tried to protect them.”

Jason remained silent, not knowing what to say. How do you respond to someone who is utterly convinced of something that isn’t true and lacks the mental capacity to see that?

“He reminds me of you,” she said, breaking the silence once again.

“Who?”

“The object of this horrible truth. He who has shown it to us and who propagates its horrors. You’re very much like him, The Vivisector. You’ve always scrutinized your world, picking it apart with your logic. He too picks apart the world, but not with the intention of understanding it. He does it simply because there’s something to take apart, to watch bleed out on the table and writhe in agony. He’s begun His work, and we can only pray for anesthesia.”

“I know you think what you’re saying is true, but you’re sick, mom. None of it’s real.” He wanted to continue, but his words felt hollow and thin. He felt himself toeing the line of her world as his own disbelief began to fade and be replaced by a sort of primal fear.

He went to make a final point, but no words came. Feeling exhausted, shaky, and slightly embarrassed, he left his mother’s room without realizing how careful he was to not turn his back to her.

Natalie was outside waiting for him. She seemed to have somehow grown even more haggard in the five minutes he was gone.

“How’d it go?” She asked.

“She wasn’t hysterical at all,” Jason responded.

“That’s strange. She must have calmed down as soon as you got here.”

Her speech was a little rushed and she seemed to look anywhere but at Jason. Growing suspicious, he narrowed his eyes and tried to determine if she was telling the truth. After an awkward moment of silence, he relaxed and decided not to push the issue. He was probably just being paranoid after that strange encounter with his mother. The thought of it sent chills down his spine. He tried to chide himself for fearing his own mother, but some deeper part of him whispered that perhaps his feelings were justified. Something was certainly wrong here.

“I have a strange question to ask,” Natalie said, her voice a little higher pitched than usual.

Jason waited for her to continue.

“I know this is an odd request, and it violates company policy, but do you think it would be possible for you to stay the night here? Your presence seems to have a calming effect on your mother, and it would help if we could at least give her some preliminary treatments without worrying about the other patients getting riled up.”

“Why don’t you just sedate her?”

Natalie hesitated to answer, and, in that moment, Jason realized why he had been called here. His mother hadn’t been hysterical. They were scared of her. The strange look he had been seeing on the orderlies wasn’t just exhaustion. It was fear. Even more than that, it was the despair of not even understanding why you’re afraid, haunted by some ancient survival instinct that keeps screaming for you to run.

Jason held up a hand to stop Natalie’s response. “I understand,” he said. And he did. There was something deeply wrong with his mother and it scared even him.

“Thank you,” Natalie said. There was relief in her voice. “Would you like me to show you to your room?”

He nodded and was led out of the hallway. Natalie brought him to an adjacent corridor lined with slightly larger, comfier rooms. She informed him that many of the orderlies lived in the facility, as it was in a remote location and it allowed them to help patients all hours of the day. She showed him to the empty room that was to be his.

He settled in and sat on the bed. There was little to do. He hadn’t expected to stay there and didn’t even have extra clothes. He shrugged. The clinic might have a uniform he could wear or at least a way for him to wash his current attire.

He thought about his mother and her strange behavior. More than that, he considered the behavior of the orderlies and patients. It was as if everyone had some eerie, subconscious fear response to his mother. Something primal, the way humans naturally find ancient predators like snakes or spiders revolting. He shivered at the thought of it. What about his mother could be making people react this way? It was as if she were some age-old adversary, just barely remembered by our oldest genes.

He thought he glimpsed movement out the corner of his eye and whipped around to face the door. There was nothing there save the flicker of old halogen bulbs. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Jason knew he was letting all the chaos of this place get to his head.

After his heart stopped its pounding, he laid down and tried to relax. It was getting late in the evening, and he knew he should probably sleep soon. He got up to turn the lights off and flopped back into bed. The dim flicker of emergency lights in the hallway illuminated his room through the window in his door. Despite his relatively bright surroundings, Jason drifted off into a deep sleep.

A strange banging sound woke him. It was quiet at first, but, as he laid there listening, it began to grow louder. He realized that it was coming from outside. A dark silhouette just barely peeked into view through the narrow window in the door.

He continued to lay in bed, stock-still as his heart pounded against his ribcage. Jason had a sick feeling in his gut. Despite knowing he should investigate the noise, he couldn’t bring himself to move an inch.

Only when the sound grew to a pounding that rocked the door in its fame did he muster the monumental effort it took to shed the covers and approach it. The noise sounded as if someone was slamming their body against the other side. Before he could reconsider, he flung open the door.

Someone was standing in the hallway. Their head rocked back and forth as if they were still rapping it against some object. The light was dim, but Jason could see that their hair was red. Slowly, their head bobbed less and less until it came to a complete stop. The person looked up at Jason and he gasped in horror.

It was Natalie. What he thought had been red hair was actually her blonde locks covered in blood. Her forehead was practically shredded, and he thought he could see fragments of bone gleaming bloody in the light.

“It burns,” Natalie said, staring at him with empty eyes. Her voice was haggard and void of emotion. She said it more as a statement of fact than a complaint.

Jason almost gagged at the sight but managed to choke it down and respond. “It’s okay, Natalie. We’re going to take you to a doctor and get you some help.” He moved to take her arm.

“No,” she said sounding angry. Jason stopped in his tracks. “The knowing and the seeing. It’s like a fire. It hurts so bad. But there is healing in it, a greater holiness to His truth. We must find bliss in the knowledge that He is going to tear our world apart and thus become one with him, tools in his hands.” She began to moan, a strange sing-song sound that sent chills down Jason’s spine.

He wanted to help her, but every fiber of his being screamed at him to get away. He sprinted down the hallway, terror driving him more than any conscious choice. As he ran, he passed more orderlies and patients. They all pounded their heads against the bedroom doors, moaning in a strange chorus punctuated by the crack of bone on wood.

Two more people hung from nooses in the hallway. The same terror that gripped him had driven them beyond the point of madness. He noticed as he passed that the nooses didn’t look quite right. They weren’t ropes, but black vine-like hands that sprouted from the ceiling and wrapped around their victims’ throats.

Jason let out a guttural sound of terror, something between a scream and a sob, and sped up until his legs burned beneath him. The hallway seemed to be impossibly long. No matter how fast he moved or how long he ran, the glowing exit sign at the end never seemed to get any closer. More horrors slid past him on every side, cloaking the walls and ceiling, moaning and screaming in agony or ecstasy.

He tried to think of a rational explanation. Surely there was something that made sense. A disease! That must be the cause. Some airborne pathogen carried by his mother that affects the brain. As he pondered the ramifications of such an illness, he burst through a pair of double doors and into the clinic’s lobby.

It was dark. No emergency lights shone in this room and everything was shrouded in darkness. He saw the glow of moonlight through the double doors of the entrance and lurched for it. His hands were inches from the handle when he stopped. He stood completely still for a moment, frozen by something inside him.

It seemed he stared at nothing, or perhaps he stared at everything. Maybe he stared at that which lies between nothing and everything, the dark and endless shadow of our world. He began to moan, a low and horrible sound filled with pain and dawning realization.

“So, you’ve seen it,” a voice said behind him.

He turned to see his mother sitting at the receptionist’s desk. He continued to moan, a horrible, whining sound that grated at his ears. As he looked at her, he saw a shadow rise up behind her. A thing of monstrous proportions, a great and terrible purveyor of destruction. It was a darkness that had its own gravity, it writhed and shifted as it drew at everything around it with a terrible power. The Vivisector.

“It’s a horrible truth, I know,” his mother said. Jason’s moans turned to something more like a whine, the kind of sound a child might make after being severely injured. “It’s okay my son. I’m sorry you had to see this.” There was a hint of genuine sympathy in her voice, as if her love for Jason managed to just barely peek through, spilling from somewhere beyond that terrible thing behind her.

Jason was crying now. Hot, wet tears ran down his face as he stared at his mother. His eyes burned with them and she swam in his vision. The only thing that remained in focus was the shadow. That fucking shadow.

“There’s a way out,” his mother said as she held out her arms. A rope was coiled in her hand. It looked snakelike in the dim room. “I can offer you this mercy.”

Jason nodded and he felt the blackness grip him. It suffocated him, drawing the air from his lungs and the life from his bones. Everything faded until there was nothing left but the shadow suspended in eternity.