Rain lashed against the warped windowpane of Inger's Copenhagen apartment. Not the clean, familiar rain she remembered, but a viscous, grey drizzle that left oily streaks where it landed.
It had been raining like this for weeks, ever since the 'Breach', as the news channels had optimistically called it initially. Optimism had curdled into terror long ago.
The discovery wasn't made in some hidden lab; it was broadcast live. Project Chimera, a multinational effort, had punched a hole through perceived reality. They promised new worlds, limitless resources.
They showed images – swirling colours, impossible geometry, fleeting glimpses of things that defied terrestrial biology. Applause echoed through viewing galleries worldwide.
Then the echoes started bleeding back through.
Inger traced a pattern on the condensation coating the glass. Below, the streetlights cast distorted haloes, their glow swallowed by the oppressive gloom that daylight barely dented anymore.
Cars didn't move down there. People rarely did. When they did, they scurried, heads down, never looking too closely at the shadows, which sometimes seemed deeper, more solid than they ought to be.
Her phone rang, startling her. The sound was jarring in the quiet apartment, louder than seemed possible. She checked the caller ID. Mikkel. Her brother.
"Inger? Are you okay?" His voice was strained, tight with anxiety.
"As okay as anyone is," she replied, trying to keep her tone level. "Still raining?"
"Like spoiled milk," he said. "Listen, I heard something. From a friend who used to work security at the Chimera facility before… before it went dark."
Inger's stomach tightened. Information was scarce, dangerous currency now. Official channels offered only platitudes or static. "What did you hear?"
"They didn't just open a door, Inger. They knocked down a wall. Between rooms that were never meant to connect. And the things on the other side… they noticed."
A floorboard creaked in the hallway outside her apartment door. Inger froze, hand gripping the phone tighter.
It was probably just the old building settling, or maybe Mrs. Hansen next door, though she hadn't heard anything from the elderly woman in days.
"Mikkel, I…"
"They're not just seeing things anymore," he interrupted, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "People are reporting… changes. Physical stuff. Odd growths. Skin behaving strangely. And the disappearances…"
The creaking came again, closer this time. A faint scratching sound accompanied it. Like fingernails on wood. Old, dry fingernails.
"I have to go," Inger whispered urgently.
"Wait, Inger, be careful! Don't go outside unless you absolutely must. And lock everything. Everything."
"I know. Talk soon." She ended the call, her heart pounding against her ribs.
The scratching stopped. Silence pressed in, heavy and expectant.
She crept towards the peephole, her bare feet silent on the worn floorboards. The hallway beyond was dim, lit only by the emergency lighting that flickered erratically. Nothing seemed out of place. Just the familiar peeling paint and the scuffed linoleum.
Then, a shadow detached itself from the corner near Mrs. Hansen's door. It wasn't cast by anything. It was the thing.
Tall, impossibly thin, like stretched ink, it unfolded itself, limbs moving at unnatural angles. It didn't have a face, just a suggestion of one, a darker patch in the shifting blackness.
Inger stumbled back, stifling a scream. Her breath hitched. It hadn't seen her. Or perhaps it didn't need to see.
She scrambled to reinforce the door, jamming a chair under the knob, her hands shaking. The metal felt unnaturally cold.
The scratching started again, right on her door this time. Slow, deliberate scrapes that sent shivers down her spine.
Tap. Scrape. Tap.
Inger retreated further into her small apartment, her eyes darting towards the windows. The oily rain continued its relentless descent. The world outside was dissolving, and something else was leaking in.
Days bled into a perpetual twilight. The power grid became unreliable, plunging the city into deeper darkness for hours at a time. Water pressure dropped.
The internet was a ghost, flickering with fragmented messages and corrupted data packets before vanishing completely. Radio broadcasts became loops of emergency instructions interspersed with long stretches of static that sometimes seemed to whisper.
Inger rationed her dwindling supplies. Canned fish, crackers, bottled water. The tap water had developed a faint, unpleasant sweetness she couldn't ignore.
She hadn't heard from Mikkel since their last call. Attempts to reach him met only dead air.
The things outside became bolder. She saw them more frequently from her window – not just the tall, thin shadows, but other shapes.
Crawling masses that flowed like liquid tar, things with too many limbs skittering across rooftops, geometries that twisted the eye and mind.
They seemed drawn to sounds, to light, but also, disconcertingly, to stillness. Sometimes she felt unseen eyes watching her through the walls.
One evening, during a power outage, she lit her last candle. The small flame cast huge, dancing shadows that turned familiar objects into monstrous shapes.
The scratching returned to her door, more insistent now. Then, a low thudding began. Something was hitting the door, methodically, patiently.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Fear coiled in her gut, cold and sharp. She backed away from the door, grabbing the heavy iron skillet from the stove – her only weapon. The wood around the doorframe began to splinter inwards.
Suddenly, the thudding stopped. The scratching ceased. An unnerving silence fell, broken only by the sound of her own ragged breathing and the endless, greasy rain.
She waited, skillet held high, muscles trembling with tension. Minutes stretched into an eternity.
Then, a soft, almost gentle voice spoke from the other side of the door. It sounded distorted, layered, like several voices speaking at once, yet eerily coherent.
"We know you're in there, Inger Rasmussen."
Her blood ran cold. How did it know her name?
"The wall is thin now," the layered voice continued, calm and conversational. "Thinner every moment. We can feel you. Your warmth. Your fear. It's… appealing."
Inger didn't answer. She couldn't. Her throat was too tight.
"We didn't ask for this intersection. Your kind breached the partition. A foolish, loud intrusion." A sound like wet cloth tearing came from the hallway. "But mistakes create opportunities."
Splinters showered inwards as a dark, pointed shape punched through the wood near the lock. It wriggled slightly before retracting.
"There's nowhere left for you to hide, Inger. Your world is… accommodating us now. Making room."
Inger's eyes darted around the small apartment. The kitchen window led to a fire escape, rusted and precarious, dropping four stories to a narrow, rubbish-filled alley. It was a desperate chance, maybe no chance at all.
But staying here was certain death.
Another blow struck the door, harder this time. The wood groaned, cracking visibly.
"You broke the boundaries," the voice hissed, losing its calm edge, taking on a sharper, hungrier tone. "Now you become part of the new arrangement."
She had to move. Now.
Keeping her eyes fixed on the splintering door, Inger slowly backed towards the kitchen. The skillet felt impossibly heavy. The floorboards creaked under her weight, betraying her movement.
A loud crack echoed through the apartment as the door lock gave way. The door swung inwards with a screech of tortured metal.
Darkness flooded the entrance – the tall, thin shadow-thing stood there, seeming to drink the candlelight. Behind it, other shapes writhed indistinctly in the deeper gloom of the hallway.
Inger didn't wait. She spun around and lunged for the kitchen window. Her fingers fumbled with the rusty latch, forcing it upwards with frantic strength. The window screeched open onto the rain-slicked fire escape.
Cold, oily rain hit her face as she scrambled out. The metal rungs were slippery, treacherous. Below, the alley was a pit of blackness, broken only by the glint of wet refuse.
She heard a skittering sound from inside her apartment, the unmistakable noise of something unnatural moving quickly across the floor.
She started down the ladder, forcing herself not to look back, not to look down. Each rung was an agony of rusted metal and slickness. Her hands were raw, her muscles screaming.
Halfway down, a section of the fire escape groaned ominously under her weight. Metal fatigue, accelerated by whatever corrosive element was in the new rain. She froze, clinging tightly.
A noise from above. The shadow-thing was squeezing itself through her kitchen window, elongating and flattening impossibly. It flowed onto the fire escape platform, its featureless head turning towards her.
Panic seized her. She practically threw herself down the remaining rungs, losing her grip several times, scraping skin and bone against the corroded metal.
She landed heavily in the alley, collapsing into a heap amidst sodden cardboard boxes and unseen filth. The impact knocked the wind out of her. Pain flared in her ankle.
She looked up. The shadow-thing was descending the ladder with terrifying speed, its movements jerky and wrong. It flowed down the metal like sentient oil.
Inger pushed herself up, ignoring the shooting pain in her ankle. She limped deeper into the alley, towards the faint promise of the street beyond.
The alley walls seemed to press in, slick with grime and the ever-present rain. Strange, fungal growths pulsed faintly in the deeper shadows.
She could hear it behind her, a soft, slithering sound that scraped against the concrete. Getting closer.
She burst out onto the street. It was deserted. Streetlights flickered, casting unreliable pools of light. Buildings loomed like empty husks.
The rain fell harder, plastering her hair to her face, soaking her thin clothes.
Where could she go? Mikkel's apartment was across the city. Impossible to reach on foot, especially with her injured ankle and with… them hunting.
She remembered the old metro tunnels. Long abandoned, sealed off years ago. But Mikkel, always fascinated by urban exploration, had told her about a hidden access point near Nyhavn, concealed behind a dilapidated service panel.
If the tunnels were still relatively untouched by the dimensional bleed… it was a sliver of hope.
Hobbling, leaning against buildings for support, she forced herself towards the waterfront. The city was terrifyingly quiet, yet the silence felt pregnant, watchful.
Shapes moved in her peripheral vision. Whispers seemed to carry on the damp wind, forming half-heard words that snagged at her sanity.
She saw other people, occasionally. Huddled figures darting between doorways, their faces pale and drawn. No one made eye contact. No one offered help. Survival was a solitary pursuit now.
Once, she saw a discarded pile of clothes on the sidewalk, looking disturbingly like someone had simply… evaporated out of them.
Reaching the Nyhavn canal area felt like wading through dread. The colourful building facades looked sickly and faded in the perpetual gloom. The water in the canal was black and still, reflecting the distorted sky like a dead eye.
She found the service panel Mikkel had described, hidden behind overgrown weeds near an old mooring post.
It was rusted shut. Panic threatened to overwhelm her. She searched frantically nearby, finding a loose piece of rebar half-buried in the mud.
Using it as a lever, ignoring the grating protest of the metal and the pain in her hands, she managed to pry the panel open with a groan.
Behind it was darkness. A flight of crumbling concrete steps led down into blackness that smelled of damp earth, decay, and something else… something metallic and vaguely organic. The tunnel entrance.
She hesitated for only a moment. The sound of something heavy dragging itself along the cobblestones nearby spurred her on.
Taking a deep breath, she slipped through the opening and started down the steps, pulling the heavy panel partially closed behind her, hoping it looked undisturbed.
The darkness below was absolute. She fumbled for the small wind-up flashlight she always kept in her pocket. Its weak beam cut a pathetic swathe through the oppressive black.
The air was cold, damp, and thick with the smell of decay. Water dripped steadily from the unseen ceiling, echoing in the confined space.
She moved cautiously along the abandoned tunnel, her flashlight beam dancing over graffiti-covered walls, piles of debris, and the skeletal remains of long-forgotten refuse. The silence down here was different – older, deeper. But it didn't feel empty.
After walking for what felt like hours, her ankle throbbing with every step, she noticed something ahead. A faint luminescence.
It wasn't the flickering emergency lights she'd expected might still function down here. This was different. A soft, pulsing glow, emanating from a side passage she hadn't noticed on Mikkel's old maps.
Curiosity, or perhaps a desperate need for any change from the oppressive darkness, drew her towards it. The glow intensified as she approached, shifting through colours – pale blues, sickly greens, violets that hurt the eyes. The metallic, organic smell grew stronger.
The side passage opened into a larger cavern, clearly not part of the original metro construction. The walls weren't concrete or brick; they seemed to be made of a translucent, membrane-like substance, pulsing faintly with the shifting light. Veins of darker material snaked through it.
And in the center of the cavern… was the source of the light. A structure, if it could be called that.
It looked like a colossal, deformed heart, easily ten meters tall, made of the same translucent, veined material as the walls. It beat slowly, ponderously, each contraction sending ripples of coloured light through the cavern.
Strange, gelatinous tendrils snaked out from its base, burrowing into the tunnel floor, the walls, the ceiling.
Inger stared, horrified and mesmerized. Was this one of them? Or something they had built? Or something that was growing because of them?
As she watched, a section of the pulsating membrane near the base of the 'heart' thinned, becoming almost transparent. She could see something inside. Shapes. Human shapes.
She moved closer, flashlight beam trembling. The figures inside were suspended in the gelatinous interior, pale and indistinct.
She recognized one. The worn jacket, the familiar haircut…
"Mikkel?" she breathed, the name barely a whisper.
It was her brother. His eyes were closed, his face serene, almost peaceful. Along with him were dozens of others, men, women, even children, all floating lifelessly within the grotesque, beating organ.
Their bodies were subtly changed – skin too pale, limbs slightly elongated, features blurred.
They weren't dead. They were… processing. Being absorbed. Fueling this monstrous growth that was steadily replacing the familiar reality of the tunnels.
This was where the missing people went. This was the 'new arrangement'.
Tears streamed down Inger's face, mixing with the grime and rain. Grief and horror washed over her in a suffocating wave. She wanted to scream, to attack the monstrous heart, to pull Mikkel free.
But she knew it was useless. He was gone, assimilated into the encroaching dimension.
A subtle shift in the pulsing light drew her attention. On the far side of the heart-structure, another section of the membrane thinned. She saw another figure floating within.
A woman, around her age, with her own short, dark hair, her own familiar face contorted in a silent scream.
It was her. Another Inger.
Her mind struggled to comprehend. Was it a reflection? An illusion? No, it felt sickeningly real. Another version of herself, already captured, already being consumed.
Then came the understanding, cold and devastating. The Breach hadn't just connected two dimensions. It had shattered the boundaries between infinite variations, bleeding them together chaotically.
The 'things' weren't just invaders from one place; they were the dislocated inhabitants and raw potentiality of countless realities, drawn towards the energy of the rupture, consuming and integrating whatever they encountered.
And she wasn't just seeing another version of herself. The barriers were so thin now, consciousness itself was starting to overlap. She could almost feel the other Inger's terror, her despair, the clammy embrace of the membrane beginning to dissolve her identity.
The monstrous heart pulsed. The light shifted. Inger felt a pull, a dreadful resonance with the figure trapped inside. A sense of merging, of her own thoughts becoming tangled with the silent screams of her counterpart.
She backed away, stumbling, her flashlight falling from numb fingers and extinguishing itself against the damp floor. The cavern plunged into near darkness, lit only by the horrific, biological glow of the heart.
She had to get away. Escape the tunnel, escape the city. But where? The entire world was becoming this. There was no 'away' left.
The pull intensified. It wasn't just a mental link anymore; it felt physical, like unseen hands tugging at her soul, drawing her towards the heart, towards the waiting, screaming reflection of herself.
Her identity felt porous, fraying at the edges. Memories flickered – not just her own, but fragments belonging to the other Inger, glimpses of a life subtly different, yet ending in the same horrifying consumption.
She fought against it, digging her heels into the slimy floor, tears of terror and loss streaming down her face. She thought of Mikkel, already lost. She thought of the life she had, the simple routines, the rainy Copenhagen streets before they turned monstrous. All dissolving.
The merging accelerated. She felt her consciousness splitting, doubling, then collapsing inwards. The other Inger's terror became her terror. Her own despair echoed in the other's silent scream.
She was both outside, watching, and inside, being consumed.
With a final, wrenching effort born of sheer instinct, she ripped her focus away from the heart, away from the other her. She turned and fled back into the absolute darkness of the main tunnel, ignoring the pain in her ankle, propelled by a terror beyond comprehension.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs gave out, collapsing onto the cold, debris-strewn floor. She lay there, gasping, sobbing, the pulsating glow of the heart cavern receding behind her, but the psychic echo remained.
She wasn't whole anymore.
Part of her consciousness was still back there, trapped in the membrane, feeling the slow dissolution, the integration into the alien structure. She could feel the other Inger's fading awareness, the chilling peace that began to supplant the terror as individuality dissolved.
Inger pushed herself up. She had escaped the cavern, but she hadn't escaped the connection. She was fractured, carrying a ghost within her, a dying echo of herself from another ruined timeline.
She eventually found her way back to the surface, emerging into the perpetual, greasy twilight hours later. The city seemed even worse. More fungal growths clung to buildings, pulsing faintly. The air hummed with a low, discordant thrum.
The few people she saw moved with a disturbing, jerky gait, their eyes vacant. Assimilation wasn't just happening in hidden places like the heart cavern; it was happening slowly, insidiously, everywhere.
Inger found a relatively intact, abandoned shop to shelter in. She sat on the floor, huddled in the corner, feeling the other Inger's presence within her like a phantom limb.
It wasn't actively hostile, just… there. A constant reminder of her fate, of a fate. A slow, passive drain on her own sense of self.
Days turned into an indistinguishable grey blur. The rain never stopped. The connection to the other Inger didn't fade; sometimes, it felt stronger, pulling her focus, showing her fragmented sensory impressions from within the heart – the warmth, the coloured light, the dissolving peace.
It was becoming harder to distinguish her own thoughts from the fading echoes.
She knew she wouldn't survive. Not like this. The world was ending, and she was already half-gone, tethered to a dying self in the belly of the monster that was devouring reality.
One grey morning, the pull became overwhelming. The sense of peace radiating from the other Inger, the lure of cessation, of an end to fear and struggle, was intoxicating.
She could just… let go. Allow the merge to complete. Become one with the echo, and through it, with the heart. Cease.
But as she felt her own consciousness begin to fray, to willingly dissolve into the phantom limb, a different thought surfaced, cold and sharp. Resistance.
Not for survival – survival was meaningless now. But for defiance.
She wouldn't give the encroaching horror the satisfaction of a peaceful surrender. She wouldn't become just another placid face in the heart's collection.
With trembling hands, she found a large shard of broken glass amidst the shop's debris. The edges were jagged, sharp.
She looked at her reflection in the dusty, cracked surface. Her face was thin, pale, haunted. But her eyes… her eyes held a spark. Not of hope, but of bleak resolve.
She could still feel the other Inger, a whisper at the edge of her mind, beckoning her towards oblivion.
"No," Inger whispered, her voice hoarse. "Not like that."
She pressed the sharp edge of the glass shard against her own temple, where the psychic connection felt strongest, where the other self's presence pulsed.
She closed her eyes, not against the pain to come, but against the seductive peace offered by the heart.
She wouldn't be absorbed. She wouldn't merge. She would sever the connection herself. The only way left.
Her final action wasn't one of escape, but of utter, brutal self-determination against a reality that sought only to consume.
The rain fell, washing the world away, as Inger Rasmussen made her unique, terrible choice in the twilight of Copenhagen.