I

A lonely person walks through a city at night, carelessly passing through the narrow twisting alleyways. A small shimmer of moonlight reflects off of the wet slick cobblestones of the night street, only sometimes lit up by the often broken street lamps. 

The night and the walks through the mostly empty streets are a time of calm reflection, only ever interrupted by some unfortunate drunks, stumbling aimlessly through the night, others travelling through this sombre time and place only passing uneventfully, most of the time, anyway.

However the night is not only a time of drunks and lonely strangers, rarely but inevitably, stranger events happen in the times when dark and silence falls upon the streets. Things that twist the mind, reshape the reality of the witness, the complete uprooting of the comfortable normalcy the unfortunate people caught in these events so far enjoyed.

It is an interesting phenomenon, one day you may see something innocuous but odd, like colourful butterflies happily fluttering through the night streets, a visibly drunk man stumbling on his hands instead of his feet, eyes in dark corners of a dusty side street. But from the moment you witness one abnormality, you are already witnessing the unravelling of the thread of reality. Bit by bit, you enter a world which exists along the normal one, just outside of the view of the majority.

And after enough of the thread has come loose, you will see for yourself the wonders and horrors of the night streets, and join their ranks yourself.

II

As she walks through the shady alleyways, the wet cobblestones squeaking under her boots, she stays deep in thought, not really paying attention to her path through the maze of the repetitive continuous streets of the Old City, she stumbles into a dead end, into a street that shouldn’t be there.

She only realises the change once the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and an uneasy shiver runs down her spine, her core shaken for seemingly no reason. She finally picks up her gaze from the pavement slick with fresh rain, and the surreal nature of her surroundings hits her psyche.

A dead end street stretching for eternity, surrounded by impossibly tall buildings that she could see the roofs of. The smoke from the chimneys rising far above the city suffocating her. And in front of her, on the pavement, a thing that was not supposed to be.

The thing, it was the biggest rebuttal of reality, a squirming mass of limbs and eyes huddled over another unlucky soul who got caught in unreality. The thing noticed her and started slithering towards her while still towering over the corpse, it inched closer in unnatural movements, moving towards her in impossible ways. A piece of flesh shooting up towards the sky appeared behind her and she was staring face to face at the dead man ten metres away from her.

This thing could not exist. She refused its existence at a base instinctual level, it had to be erased. It had to be destroyed, pierced, cut, minced to shreds, forced to slither away to whichever hell it came from, it could not be otherwise.

And then, she was not part of reality anymore either.

Knives, sewing needles, razor blades, cleavers, swords, pins, scalpels, hairpins, fishing hooks, box cutters, spear tips, saws, pencils, nails, scissors.

They cut and pierced the thing, it squirmed in pain as she squirmed in madness and the two were locked in a life-ending dance.

And then the air was still, and she stood alone, on the pavement slick with fluid.