Peter woke up not to a noise, but to a profound sense of wrongness. He pulled back the blinds to look at Mrs. Henderson's house across the street. Mrs. Henderson was 92, and her house was a perfectly respectable, blue-painted ranch home built in 1957.
This morning, it was not.
Mrs. Henderson's house was now constructed entirely of doors.
Not doors attached to walls, but doors as walls. They were all different—a glossy red fire exit door, a white louvered closet door, a heavy, black-painted steel vault door, and dozens of others, all cobbled together at impossible angles. Every window was replaced by a door with a tiny glass pane set into its center, and the chimney was a stack of five tiny, antique liquor cabinet doors.
Peter stood there, holding his breath, waiting for the cognitive dissonance to break. He thought of the locket story, of the echoes and the blurring of loved ones. But this was different. This was not a ghost; this was physics having a nervous breakdown.
He watched the neighbor's property for ten minutes. Nothing moved. There was no sound. The mail carrier even walked right up to the front door-wall and slid a sheaf of junk mail into the large, brass mail slot of what appeared to be a French patio door. She didn't blink.
Peter knew, with absolute certainty, that he was the only one who saw the house this way. The thinning of the veil wasn't just letting the past bleed into the present; it was allowing a Bizarro reality to overwrite his perception of the present.
He grabbed his keys and raced to his car. He had to get out of the neighborhood, to a place where reality was locked down.
As he drove, the strangeness escalated. The traffic light at the corner didn't cycle red, yellow, and green. Instead, the lights were replaced with three pulsing, organic shapes: a red, beating heart, a yellow, watchful eye, and a green, grasping hand. Yet, the cars obeyed the lights perfectly, stopping when the eye watched them, and moving when the green hand waved them forward.
Peter gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. He needed to talk to someone, anyone, who knew him, who could confirm his existence. He drove to his sister Chloe's apartment complex.
The building looked normal, a four-story brick structure. But the entryway was not.
The lobby had been replaced by a dense, suffocatingly dark forest of antique clocks. Floor-to-ceiling grandfather clocks, small desk clocks, and large, pendulum wall clocks were packed together so tightly that their constant ticking and gonging created an unbearable, deafening roar. Chloe’s apartment was on the third floor, but the stairway was gone. In its place was a rickety, unvarnished wooden ladder that disappeared into the tangle of clock gears above.
Chloe’s face appeared in a small, circular porthole cut into the wooden face of a tall cuckoo clock near the ladder’s base. She looked worried.
"Peter! Thank God. Are you seeing this?" she shouted over the cacophony of chimes.
Peter felt a surge of desperate relief. "Yes! The doors! The clocks! What is happening?"
"It's the week," Chloe yelled back. "It's the night before. Everything's trying to make sense of itself, but it can't. Look at the ladder."
Peter looked. The rungs of the ladder were dissolving as he watched, being replaced by tiny, glowing, perfectly written poems about fear and abandonment. The ascent was being written out of existence.
"How do you get out?" he asked.
Chloe pointed a shaking finger at a massive clock face whose hands were spinning wildly, defying physics. "See the time? When the time finally catches up—when the clock finds the correct moment—the real door will open. But you can't stay here, Peter. It's too much."
Suddenly, the largest clock—a monstrosity of carved oak—stopped ticking. The clock face turned black, and a voice boomed out, a voice that sounded like a thousand voices whispering at once:
"You are late. The world is adjusting to the new occupant. Please step into the nearest designated entryway."
The voice was not malicious, just bureaucratic, and it terrified Peter more than any ghost. He realized the new occupant was the Bizarro reality itself.
He turned and fled, speeding away from the clock forest. He knew he had one final place of refuge: his childhood home, now occupied by his elderly mother. She was the most grounded person he knew.
When he arrived, the house was normal. Perfectly normal. He ran up the steps and hammered on the front door.
His mother, dressed in her robe, opened the door immediately. She was smiling, calm, utterly normal.
"Peter, dear, what is it? You look like you've seen a..."
She trailed off, her eyes dropping past his shoulder. Her smile stiffened.
Peter followed her gaze. His car, parked at the curb, was no longer a four-door sedan. It was a perfectly rendered, dark grey coffin on four thick, rubber tires. The headlights were candles. The license plate read: GONE.
"Oh, Peter," his mother whispered, her face crumbling into sudden, profound grief. "That's not your car. That's his car."
"Whose car?" Peter asked, his throat dry.
His mother looked back at him, and her eyes were now full of the same profound, deep, resigned sadness that Maria had seen in the locket photo of the woman who was almost her.
"The man who brought me flowers every Tuesday," his mother said. "The one who lives here now."
And then, Peter’s mother reached up and, with a quick, practiced movement, unzipped her face.
The skin peeled away like a loose costume, revealing a terrifying absence beneath: a swirling, grey void, like the static on a dead monitor. The voice that came from the void was metallic and echoing, just like the Chronal Echo Device:
"The reality is finished. It's midnight. Tonight is Halloween. Enjoy the show."
Peter screamed, stumbling backward, leaving his childhood home and his mother's smiling, empty costume on the porch. The veil was gone. All that was left was the strange, terrible night.
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