The team of oxen stood impassively, as if they couldn’t perceive the vast jagged tear in the sky that now stretched across the horizon and was still expanding at an alarming rate. He turned to his young wife, sitting beside him on the board. She had said nothing since the rip first appeared and he was beginning to doubt the report of his senses. He didn’t know if he should be reassured by that or not. If she could not see what he was seeing, then he had gone mad… but if she could, then the world had.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“Do you see that?” he asked.

“Do you mean the sky torn open?” she said. “Yes, I see it. How could I not?”

“And what do you make of it?”

“Well,” his wife said, eyeing the undulating tentacles that had begun to slip in and out of the rift, “it seems to me that when you dragged me out of the city you said you wanted wide open spaces. I don’t think space can get much more open than that.”

It seemed the other side was having problems, too. He’d watched as their nerve and manpower dwindled, and the massed charges had given way to smaller and smaller groups. They didn’t charge, they peeked their heads cautiously over the embankment or rose with distressing casualness into his line of sight. He’d just kept plugging away with his rifle, though, and now it seemed like the enemy couldn’t muster more than one man at a time.

Every once in a while there were two or even three, sometimes with fresh recruits who didn’t even have a uniform. This had taken Jerry by surprise the first time it happened, but not long enough to stay his hand. It had been a long war, after all. Terror can have a monotony all its own, and Jerry welcomed the break. That had almost got him killed once or twice, he was sure. Once the bastards had sent a man over the top with a white flag of truce. Jerry hadn’t lowered his rifle. There was only one of him. Relief was coming, he knew, but until it got there he was alone. They wouldn’t be surrendering to him.

Maybe they wanted his surrender? Not likely. He’d seen the eagerness in the bastard’s face, the elation when he got close. He was way too happy for a man in a war zone.

Probably gone right round the bend, Jerry had thought. Probably hiding a pistol or a grenade. He just can’t wait to blow me away and he doesn’t care what happens to him.

Also, there was something disconcertingly familiar about his face. After he’d been at it for so long, the faces of the enemy had sort of blurred out. He didn’t see them as individuals any more. You couldn’t, or you’d go round the bend yourself. But this one had got in close and something about his face had almost stopped Jerry cold. He knew he couldn’t let anything slow him down or he’d be stopped for good, so Jerry had blown him away, and the bastards hadn’t tried that again.

But they hadn’t given up. Like a drippy faucet, the enemy came over the top reliably but irregularly. Sometimes it was almost continuous, sometimes there’d be a maddening delay when it seemed like they’d finally stopped right up until the moment a head popped up again.

There was one now. Jerry hardly needed to take aim. He’d become a machine; mechanized warfare, incarnate in a man. He squeezed the trigger. There was a report. The man fell back. This had become Jerry’s life, since the rest of the machine gun crew had gone crazy. One by one they’d given up and ran right across no man’s land, right over the embankment and into the arms of the enemy.

Shell shock. It had to be. They’d all had some close calls with artillery bursts, especially that last one just after they’d fed the last belt through.

Jerry had watched in horror as each of his mates scrambled out of the hole. He’d waited for the inevitable, for the shots to ring out and shatter their skulls or the machine guns to tear them pieces. They had never come. The enemy wasn’t going to waste the ammo. Instead the bastards had taken them alive and then sent them back after Jerry.

Their poor broken brains had been so receptive to the enemy’s lies that they’d believe anything, and spout it back out.

The war’s over. The fighting’s over. You can put down your gun and join us. You have to see it, Jerry… on the other side of the trench. It’s beautiful, Jerry. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Jerry knew if he let the stress get to him, he’d be next, but he also knew that relief was coming, reinforcements were coming. He couldn’t last forever, but he just had to hold out five more minutes. He couldn’t lose his nerve. He couldn’t let anything slow him down. He had to keep fighting.

And so he’d done the only thing for his comrades he could do: he’d put them out of their misery. Eventually the bastards stopped sending them, and now it was down to just one man. Not one man, Jerry thought to himself. Can’t kill the same man more than once. One man at a time.

It was coming up near midnight in the foxhole. Jerry spared a glance down at the last cigarette, but only a glance.

“You mean the side effects?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I mean when you find out what’s really been crawling all over your skin this whole time.”

“Henry?” his wife said from right behind him. Close enough to touch him. He thought she was going to. He expected to feel her hand on his arm like he usually did, but he didn’t. She was scared, he thought. She was right to be.

“Henry,” she said again, from a foot or two farther back, “they’ve plowed the roads again. We should really go out to the store while we can. We’ve used up all the canned soup, and there’s no milk or bread…”

“We can’t go out there,” Henry said, not taking his eyes off the snow, alert for any signs of movement.

“Henry, it’ll be fine. The truck has four wheel drive.”

“You think you’d make it to the truck?” he asked.

“It would be easier if you’d shovel the walk again, but the important thing is…”

“The important thing is that we’re in here and they’re out there,” he said.

“What’s out there?” she asked.

“Sharks,” Henry said.

“Sharks? Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, just as another triangular fin slid out from beneath the whiteness and glided smoothly across the lawn.

“Look, look!” Henry said, pointing. He turned to see if his wife was seeing it, but she had turned to walk away. When he turned back to the window, the thing had submerged itself again.

“Henry, you’re getting cabin fever,” his wife said. “We all are, I suppose. I’m going to get the kids bundled up.”

“You can’t take the kids out there!”

“They need to get out, even just to the grocery store,” she said. “You do, too.”

“We have supplies left,” Henry said. “We can last until the snowmelts.”

“Supplies? We have fifty pounds of dry cat food you laid in when you were so afraid of that virus,” she said. “We’re not eating that, not when the stores are open and the roads are clear.”

“Honey, please listen to me,” he said, though he recongized the tone in her voice. She wouldn’t be persuaded or reasoned with.

“We’re going in fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes to figure out how he could save his family from what was waiting outside… or to decide if he’d have to settle for saving the children, somehow, if their mother wouldn’t be stopped.

It was a grim choice, but a man had to do what it took to protect his family.

I fear it has started again. Despite all of my precautions, despite the traps and the presence of my faithful cats, it has begun. The protestations of my friend the captain as to impossibility of the testimony of my senses notwithstanding, the facts are irrefutable. The sound in the walls, the mad frenzied scrabbling beneath the surface of the solid-seeming limestone, is only the prelude, the first herald of my nightly torment.

They tell me that I am distracted, that my mind plays tricks on me. This they say to my face. Behind my back, I am sure that they call me mad. I would swear to the Holy Virgin that I am as sane as I was when first I moved to my ancestral home, insofar as I am able to recognize insanity when I see it. What follows each night as once-still curtains sway in sudden draughts and ancient tapestries writhe with the multitude of scurrying, skittering, chittering bodies boiling out of the walls behind them is nothing less than the very distilled essence of madness itself.

Am I mad? I, who have faced this terrible sight thrice thus far? I who alone have stood as mute witness to this secret horror of rhythmic rodentia? No doubt my nerves have suffered somewhat from the ongoing ordeal, but I defy any of my supposed friends or my innumerable enemies to remain as calm, as steady, as resolutely sane as I am when they see the hamsters come out to dance.

Da da di da di do do…

“Janet?” I said.

“There’s something on your mind, isn’t there, Brian?” she replied. She put her hand on the side of my face, her fingers idly playing with a few strands of my hair. “It’s been weighing on you for some time. Why don’t you just say it?”

“Alright, Janet,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I’m under a lot of strain right now, with work and your family and mine and all, and there’s just a lot of pressure for me to look good, to impress, and… I worry sometimes that I might be losing it.”

Her hand stopped moving. She smiled and took a few steps back. Her hand remained where it was on my cheek, detaching neatly from the wrist. The stump bled shiny black beetles that immediately buried themselves deep in the shag carpeting. With her other hand, she reached up and ripped the skin away from her face, revealing a gaping black hole of nothingness behind it… nothingness that contained a horribly fanged maw and two flickering flames for eyes.

“But, Brian,” she said in a voice old and dead, “how can you lose what you never had in the first place?”

“Er, I was actually talking about my hair,” I said.

“What? Oh,” she said, smoothing her face back in place. She ruffled my thinning hair with her one hand while rejoining her wrist-stump to the other. “You look fine, dear. You look respectable. Dignified. My father was bald as an egg when he was your age, you know. Speaking of… we should finish getting ready. They’ll be here soon.”

I nodded, and we didn’t say another word about it. It was just one of those things. Privately, though, I found the whole thing very worrying… especially as my therapist had responded much the same way a few days before.