Each rusted bar of the ladder cut into his palms as he climbed. His hands ached by the time he was at the top. His pulse was still pounding in his ears. He didn't want to face what was waiting above, but he couldn't leave it. This was his job. Taking care of whatever weird shit came out of the Rifts and threated the people living in Seattle. 

He needed a new job. 

The Dark was restless and spilling out of him in thin threads that hung off his skin like long hair. He wasn't able to pull it back in and he was trying not to think about all the implications of that. The threads slid up the ladder. The probed the darkness around him, allowing him to sense it as clearly as if he was seeing. 

He reached the top.

The hatch was closed. His hand trembled as he took hold of it and pushed it upward. Weak light spilled down onto him. The Dark rushed out of him and into the space in front of him. He waited. Listened. There was the quiet hum of a machine. No movement.

He shoved it fully open, letting the metal hatch bang against the floor of the room above. He lifted himself into the room. He pulled out both his pistols as he stood up and took in the space around him.

It was a small space. Looked like it had once been a storage space but the creature had converted it to a lair. It was warm and stank of damp mold. Shelves lined the walls. Books filled each shelf. Loose papers fluttered to the floor. Most likely whisked from the shelves when he opened the hatch. There was a desk in the corner with a lap top. It glowed with a soft blue light on its cracked screen. 

There was a mattress on the floor. Around it there was an odd collection of items. Cell phones, ID cards, jewelry and watches. The detritus of human lives sifted into piles of evidence. On the wall that the mattress was against there was a series of symbols scrawled in chalk. Equations, runes and sigils. They pulsed softly with the residue of Dark now spent. The creature appeared to be trying to study and use Dark the way that science studied gravity.

A cable snaked across the floor into a patch of darkness in the corner of the room. An old generator hummed. Beside it, in the shadows a long shape hunched over itself. 

He pointed his pistols at it. The air thickened and pulsed softly around him. A gentle pressure touching his mind. The Dark pushed back.

The shape moved. It unfolded itself from the shadows with deliberate grace. Everything about it was wrong, but there was still something beautiful about it. Long limbs and pale skin. The folds of its robe whispered around it as it rose to its full height and turned towards him. The dim glow of the computer painted a blue highlight on its face. Pale head. Slick and smooth. Writhing tentacles.

The creature's thoughts slid against his consciousness. It seemed careful now.

"Why do you come?"

He felt the words writing themselves in gentle caresses within the space behind his eyes. Each word a seductive invitation to embrace their minds. Each word left behind a residue of cold longing. 

Still pointing his pistol at it, he answered “You killed them.” His voice was a rasp. “The people from the train. You fed on them.”

The tentacles twitched.

"They were useful."

The creature tilted its head to one side and blinked slowly.

"Like you, I must feed or die."

Jared felt the bile rise in his throat and he swallowed hard. 

"But we're intelligent. You could eat all kinds of things that aren't."

"Its the intellect that I devour. The experiences and emotion. Everything that makes you human is what sustains me."

Jared fired both pistols.

The shots caught it in the chest. Grey ichor splattered against the wall. It didn't fall. Instead it turned to face him with its tentacles writhing in agitation. Jared fired again and again. Each shot hitting its mark. The air around the creature began to hum with invisible pressure. 

Pain slammed into his skull. It lanced into his mind. His vision fragmented into thin layers that flaked apart like fragile glass. He staggered backward and screamed.

"You are open. You see too much."

The creature stepped forward. Its pale hand extended and long fingers reaching out towards him. Jared could feel it entering his mind. It brushed through the folds of his memories. Moments of his life were dragged up and played out.

Training rooms. Tessa's lifeless body laying in the street. The cold alley where he first summoned the Dark,

He tried to push them back into their place, but the persistent fingers kept pulling things out and laying them bare. The Dark writhed. Chaotic and roiling it oozed off his body. The creature caressed the edge of the abyss. 

"You don't understand what you hold."

It dug its fingers in and pulled. Tearing, the maw of the abyss opened wide and screamed. 

The creature was close now. It laid a hand against Jared's face. Just the way that Tessa had before they kissed. Its tentacles creeped around his neck and chest. 

“Get out of my head,” he hissed.

"Your mind is loud."

The words cut into his thoughts. The tentacles tightened, pulling Jared closer.

The universe unfolded inside him. The ocean of Dark that ebbed within the abyss flowed through him and rushed out into the room. The wave struck the creature that was holding him. Books and papers flew from the shelves. The generator smoked and ground to a halt. The creature's psychic grip slipped away.

For the first time, Jared chose not to fight the Dark. He allowed it to fill him and pass through him into the small room. 

The world shattered into infinite reflection. Jared felt himself dissolve—skin, bone, thought—until there was nothing but the Dark, vast and tidal, rushing through him with the force of creation unbound. Space folded and unfolded in his lungs; every breath drew in galaxies and exhaled stars into ruin. He could taste the raw mathematics of existence, see the latticework of reality as veins of light threading through the black. He was inside every atom and every silence between them. The Dark was no longer a tool, no longer something he wielded—it was awareness itself, eternal and wordless, whispering the true geometry of everything. He saw the creature not as flesh but as a distortion—a wound in the cosmic weave, a scream given shape. The Dark surged toward it like a flood reclaiming lost ground, and Jared drifted in its wake, unmade and remade in the same heartbeat.

And as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Leaving him feeling whole and vital. Everything felt right and in its place. There was a purpose and he had touched it.

He raised his pistols and fired. The light twisted and bent around the creature. The outlines of its body shifting as though it were melting from reality. 

The pressure came again. A fist closing around his thoughts. His vision narrowed into a tunnel and he knew the creature was trying to crush his mind outright. He could feel the edges of himself coming undone. The Dark screamed inside him. It reflected everything that he was. Terrified and desperate.

He let it go.

The darkness poured from him in a black tide. It flooded the room, swallowing the pale light, filling every corner with living shadow. For a moment, there was nothing but that—Dark meeting mind, colliding, devouring. The creature shrieked—a noise that wasn’t sound but pure thought, a flaying of the senses.

Shapes flickered in the dark. Impossible geometries. Flashes of alien hunger. Jared caught a glimpse of the creature’s mind as their forces clashed. Vast caverns. Coldness. Emptiness. A pool of writhing worms. A network of thought. He could feel the creature trying to drown him in the alien's history.

He fired blind through the dark.

One bullet found its mark. The psychic pressure faltered. Jared surged forward, his boots skidding on the slick floor, and emptied the last of his magazine into the creature’s chest. Each shot was punctuated by a pulse of the Dark that hit like a hammer. Flesh tore. The robe shredded. The thing reeled back, clawing at him with invisible hands.

It tried to retreat—levitating upward toward the open shaft at the rear of the chamber—but Jared was faster. He snatched at the Dark swirling around him and hurled it. The makeshift spear pierced through the creature’s abdomen, pinning it momentarily against the wall. It screamed—not aloud, but through him, rattling every nerve.

Jared staggered closer. Blood—thick and gray—splattered across his coat and face. The creature’s limbs twitched. Its tentacles curled weakly toward him, almost pleading. For a moment, Jared saw not a monster but something lost. Something that had built this nest out of desperation, clawing at understanding. An exile studying its own damnation.

Then he pulled the trigger one last time.

The bullet struck the creature between its pale eyes. Its skull burst inward with a wet, dull sound. The tentacles spasmed once and then went still. The psychic hum in the air faded into nothing.

Jared stood there for a long time, chest heaving. The smell of burned ozone and blood clung to everything. The Dark settled slowly back into him, whispering faintly as it coiled into the hollow spaces of his body. 

He looked around the room. The walls were pocked with bullet holes, the shelves overturned. The computer’s screen flickered once more before dying. He could still feel the echo of its mind brushing against his—fragmented images, equations, thoughts left hanging in the air like ghosts.

He approached the desk. On it lay notebooks, all filled with cramped, alien handwriting. Diagrams of circles within circles, sketches of human faces next to dissected brains. He didn’t touch them. He knew he should take the evidence, but something about them radiated the same quiet malice that had filled the creature’s thoughts.

He holstered his weapons. The Dark hummed low in his chest.

The creature’s body sagged against the wall, its blood pooling around the baseboards, steaming faintly in the cold air. Jared turned away, limping toward the ladder, the smell of blood and gunpowder following him up into the silence of the tunnels below.