There was no time to brood on this disturbing experience beyond the opportunity provided within the duration of the encounter. He had a job to do. He had little else of interest to participate in besides his work, so he simply told himself he would address the matter later. It was not that he was, for a change, overriding his impulses - this was not something he had learned to do. It was simply that the impulse to obey his clients struck faster and harder than to inquire into any personal matter. It was also the case that, in this particular instance, there was very much an impulse not to investigate. So, as he shuffled inside his languid, unloved apartment, and set down the heavy black briefcase on the floor in front of his sofa, he merely gulped down a glass of water with a mix of prescribed medications, flung off his hat into some obscure corner, and relaxed the tension in his bones to prepare his body for the reception of another signal.

As he opened the briefcase, a faint wisp of air blew out from the dark interior and wafted around him as he plunged his hand deep within. It stank like rotting bark. This, he assumed, would be informing him of the location of his forthcoming quest. As ever, he found a small, cold USB stick, in the heart of the object’s velvety insides. Yesterday’s footage was a reward. Today’s footage will be an order. As part of his contract, he agrees every night that, whatever suggestions he receives the following day, he will complete them without hesitation. With his phone at the ready, he sat back, and braced himself.

There was only an icy, hissing static. His phone did not ring. He waited, growing increasingly anxious and impatient as the minutes oozed by. He sat alone and unsatiated, gazing into a fluctuating array of pixels that were sparkling within his frosty apartment. However, above the static he could hear the low groaning of the metal pipes. As he honed in closer on the sound, It became strange to him. There was a clanging that was almost rhythmic, as if there was something inside the pipes, crawling. No, it was not a thing. It was a force, like a harsh pummel of air, vibrating against the metal like an earthquake, that now picked up both in rhythm and intensity.

The static dissipated, leaving only a hollow blackness on the screen before him. Now he could see nothing, save for the slender rays of sickly tungsten trickling inward from his window that illuminated faint silhouettes in his room. Among these silhouettes, he thought he could see a geometric shape shift, silently. The metal clanging stopped. In its place, there was a shy, awkward creak that whispered in the blackness. He realized that his hands were fiercely scratching against the leather of his sofa. With a clenched jaw and shivering bones, he stood up, almost struggling for balance.

But as soon as he stood the television with a great roar burst into life and a kaleidoscope of colour flooded into the room. Amidst the shouting spectrum of light, he saw for a brief moment that his bathroom door was open, before his attention was drawn back to the screen. Before him meshed the dancing of reeds, the web-like structures of branches, and a great shoal of leaves washing over the image, all these great vistas of vegetation overlapping each-other and pulsating with hues of molten magentas, galvanising greens, and yowling yellows, image after image crashing on top of the other like a tidal wave of pure energy, vaporising the darkness. Through the television there echoed the blow of a mighty wind that sharpened as the many branches and leaves before him panicked and swayed and began to mutate and morph before his eyes into a giant dancing floral ocean. The television itself began to shudder as if it was rejecting the very contents that were inserted into it, like a dying patient whose body was rejecting a donated heart. The recorded wind was gaining ferociously in pitch and volume. Within it a cryptic, chiming chorus began to emerge, and instinctively he leapt for the remote and tried to quieten the primordial gale but even as the volume hit zero the roar vibrated only harder still, and the humming developed into great straining howls, the noise increasing until the metal pipes of his apartment began to clang again as if that wispy vaporial beast that was once contained within them had now been let loose into his apartment. He crouched down onto the floor in agony, crumpled, and clutching at the sofa before resorting to clamping his ears with sick, sweaty hands. He squeezed his eyes shut so as to not be blinded by the colour, but even through his eyelids seethed through and stabbed at his senses. It was an energy so immense in its anger, yet simultaneously so intoxicating in its beauty, it was as if it was something resurrected that was stricken down before its time, only now to tear its way out of the confines of death and lash out violently at the very world that had plagued it.

Yet, when he could cower no more and found the courage to open his itching eyes and uncover his bruised, tender ears, he found that the television was black once more. There was an utter silence. There was not even the hollow reverberation of sound, the great orgasmic affair left no afterglow. All he could sense in the mighty engulfing blackness was his own tingling body. The tungsten rays from the streetlamps outside had also departed. With a shivering posture he turned and scanned for the window to find his bearings, having collapsed completely to the floor, and now standing utterly untethered from anything in his hollow abode. Squinting in the darkness he could see a faint, hazy green, of some abnormally illuminate moonlight, being crisscrossed by the black beams of his window-frame. But then these lines shuddered, as if being stroked by an unseen force. He felt, on top of his already depleted temperature, an added pang of particularly sharp coldness stab through his joints and slash at his aching muscles. The window was open.

As he moved closer, the geometry of it made no sense. Instead of four rectangles of light formed by the window beams, there were only two on one vertical side, and the others were partially blotted by blackness. There seemed to be a dark curvature behind the lines obscuring the emerald moonlight. It was a figure. It was behind his window. There was someone gazing inward at him through the open glass, breathing into his apartment. Just as he stumbled backwards in horrific realization, the shape dashed away, and with immediate regret at his prior instinct he sprang forth at the window and wrenched it all the way open and glared fiercely out at the lurid midnight scenery.

The streets below him were dark and empty. The metal buildings before him were glistening as ever with neon lights that eyed the tenebrous dark like gluttonous voyeurs. Yet below, the streetlamps were only managing sudden spurts and belated blips of light before dying again. As he watched, they were resurrected with a sudden electrical gurgle, spewed out another pathetic glimpse of light, and then continued the cycle once more. It was rare to catch such a glitch in the infrastructure in this city. Even if the lights were in working order however, he had the sense that he would have found nothing on the street below him.

He turned to the trees far off in the distance, shimmering in the moonlight. They were so, so far away, perpetually fading into the horizon. All the same, the dirt-clad, prickly roots were slithering their way like a writhing phallus into the city and penetrating every concrete crevice like a ravenous rapist feasting on a forbidden prey. With fists tightening on the glacial, rusting windowsill, he glared ghoulishly into the forest. Whatever he had found in that briefcase, he sensed that it was not of his employers’ making.

Is someone else trying to contact me?

As he slammed the window shut with an abrupt haste, chills scuttled over him.

But how could someone stand outside my window?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He thought of acting upon these observations, yet the growing coldness of his room and the intensity of these sudden torments rendered him weak and weary. He had not eaten in some time. Since his wife had died, it had become increasingly difficult for him to maintain a healthy diet. Since his wife had died, his hunger had grown immensely, yet his appetite would always leave him. Gaunt, starving, and fragile to the cold, he often found himself incapacitated by his own habitation, left only with the dissected memories of what once was…

…It had been a normal day like any other within their newly acquainted routine. He had returned from work and his dinner was waiting for him. He had stumbled into the bathroom - he had gone inside since the door was open and the room was dark - and found her there, face down in a puddle of cold water. She was flaccid and bloated like a slug. She had drowned in the bath. The bath was not overflowing - the drowning would have taken serious effort. Strangely, her clothing, a green floral dress, was still clinging to her body. Even stranger still, her entire body was wet. Her complexion was a flushed, oozing purple that, as he had watched on in a sharp, demoniac paralysis of body and soul, sank into a pallid white. During the very few times that he dared to look back into that dreaded room in the weeks that had passed since, he saw the body bloat further still, almost doubling in size, and mutating into a sickly green complexion, as the body began to eat itself, salivating over its own organs with putrefying acids as the bacteria gnawed on the flesh for its own survival, with dark tendrils spreading violently over the skin where the blood vessels once were. In recent days, the green flesh turned finally to red, as the oxygen retreated for one final time from the body, and her bloated frame shriveled and shrank even from the size it once was.

Even before any emotional response, there came to him the instinct to view this as another cryptic message from his employers, as macabre as it was. Because of this, he never moved her body. He never reported the death. No eyebrows would be raised, as she was a stay-at-home wife, and they were a closely bonded and solitary couple, the introverted kind that found all the warmth that could nourish them simply between one another. She had known no one in the city and made it her intention for it to be that way. She had in fact despised urban life. She had agreed to move there solely under the pretext that the city was where the only high-paying work was, and if they were to start a family, they would need all the savings they could muster. The arrangement was that he would work tirelessly and save all he earned, while she would sculpt their humble abode into the most floral of urban dwellings as could be achieved, such that every arrival back home would be as pleasant and serene as he could wish for, even in a place such as this.

When she had died, to be surrounded by her plants was simply too much for him. He disposed of them all, thus the only greenery that surrounded him after her death was the great clots of cash that grew like mold within the corners of his, now only his, personal cuboid chasm. They had believed firmly in physical money, the ability to truly see one’s success, and the capacity to spend without trace. Money, of which he now had no purpose for, and of which he quickly, and unintentionally, perhaps out of the sheer handicap of grief, forgot its original intended purpose.

It was not a bout of madness that made him keep her body where he found it. He knew all too well how incomprehensible, uncanny, and foul such behavior was. He simply did not want to risk displeasing his clients. What if it was a message, a hint for what to do next? Of course, he could quit. But then he feared that, for whatever reason, he could not simply quit. He could alternatively make the most of the modest wealth that now flattered him, but he feared too that spending without the permission of his clients would also not be taken well - even if they could not track his purchases directly, he sensed that they would still, somehow, know. He did nothing that was not in service to his employers. His escape seemed impossible, and his rewards were meaningless.

Sometimes, he would ponder how he ever came to sign such a contract in the first place. Many others offered money. But these men had appealed to his skills, they had appealed to him, personally. It was almost as if they had begged him to work for them, with the same vigour of a conscription officer. He supposed that the appeal to common vanity was for him, like many others, simply too irresistible. But, and maybe it was vanity that made him think this way, he did not believe that was the entire cause of his peculiar attraction towards the contract when it was presented to him.

As he crept over to the bathroom door and observed once more that, despite the creaking movement he had both glimpsed and heard faintly during the violent eruption that had emerged within his apartment, the withering, decomposing frame was still exactly where it had been for the previous three months, he remembered furthermore that he could never even hope to call out for help. He could never hope to explain this. On some nights he would gaze over the sodden corpse of his beloved wife and try to piece together the puzzle, relieved only with the fact that his apartment’s ventilation filtered out the stench of rot.

On other nights, such as tonight, he would collapse onto his itching, crusty mattress and tangle himself up in sheets and weep himself to sleep like a lost babe dangling atop some abyssal depths. Among the tears his torso would convulse and his ribs would bruise and he would quickly run dry of tears. He took comfort in believing that, like a dying man with no faith left in his waking life, at least his dreams would surely be peaceful. But even within these delirious dreams, with a subconscious shame-laced scorn, as his sleeping breaths hung frosted in the bitter air, he interrogated himself…

…If you keep on wishing for her to come back, why are you so glad she hasn’t moved?

And even in his dreams she did not move. She stood solitary over the river, tangled up with slender, pale trunks of birch that blended with her bare, pale flesh. Unfettered by smog or the haze of city light, she gazed across to him with that playful grin of hers, her bronze hair lashing and lavishing some old carving in the bark which her softly glistening face now smudged against. Yet all he could feel was the river; It’s heaving, crashing, spitting, it’s pummeling through lands of men and lands unknown, churning up soil toiled and untoiled, burying deep down into the earth, rumbling and roaring, writhing like some wretch, splashing like a spastic, etching its own fierce carving into the grassy plains. It was his personal helicon; a blackened, muddied vessel which both buoyed and eroded the reflection of his shimmering visage. This stream was one of many streams, and he supposed that in this dreamland there must be such a stream for every man and his woman.

But voices said to him in weary whispers through the leaves of waning trees that this was no innocent flow of water. The blushing blossoms told him of curious things in their rhythmic sway, of a river that vomited up into the world from a deep darkened chasm, an eruption of clotted, sickly liquid regurgitated from the earth’s very core. These floating flowers said things that were often said in dream, fanciful notions that would be washed away upon waking. They whispered that in this world its core was not a solid burning sphere, but that it was merely the outer flesh of a foreign, ravenous void, gaping in it’s gluttony, where sadistic souls from a far off world hung in a web-like plasma, staring up with a single dilating eye at the hovering liquid ocean of metal that rippled far above them, and which dripped down onto their shivering bones, welding their ghostly tendrils into pipes and coils and wires and the dreaded antennae, that vibrates their signals up through the alloys of the earth, dissolving into buried clots of stained smoke and underground lakes that had been birthed from the spilling of blood. Though he could not see these ash-tinged metallic souls of malformed men, or these plagued miasmic gasses, or these poisoned wells of writhing water, he could feel the beating of a ferocious, frantic heart in some dark empty place, and in one final moment, as his eyes overpowered the dried dust of tears that sought to blind him from the waking world, and the last remaining shadows of those ghostly limbo souls morphed back into torn trench coats and broken lamps, he smelled the nostalgic odour of fresh urban pollution and tasted again flakes of steel and flakes of mud and flakes of blood, and felt the heavy beating of that rusted metal heart both in his own chest and in some void far, far below.