The bus hums with that low, hard mechanical sound old buses eventually learn to make—part resignation, part stubborn forward motion. Johannesburg streams past in the late-afternoon gold, pretending so hard to be civilized it loops right back into surrealism.
Corporate hedges trimmed into geometric obedience. Driveways guarded by electric fences and optimism. The city wearing good behaviour like a cheap suit and hoping no one notices the blood under the cuffs.
Aster stares out the window and tries to pretend along with it.
Maybe if he looks long enough, he can crawl back into the illusion. Let the glass and chrome blur together until the world resumes its usual shape. Become, if only briefly, a person-shaped object who doesn’t believe monsters are stitched into the seams of reality.
For a few minutes, it almost works.
Maybe he overreacted. Maybe this is all just the hangover from too many existential shocks stacked too close together. Sleep deprivation. Stress. Mild psychosis. A touch of post-traumatic whatever. He can alphabetize the diagnosis later.
For now, he has sunlight, motion, and the vague reassurance that the bus driver probably exists.
That’s enough reality for one afternoon.
Then he sees him.
The breath catches in Aster’s throat before he even understands why.
Not a man.
Or not enough of one for his mind to stop screaming.
It stands on the pavement as the bus slows at an intersection, shaped roughly like a person in the same way a scarecrow is shaped roughly like a person if you squint. Tall in that unsettling way buildings are when you’re too close to feel safe. A duffel coat hangs from its frame like it’s trying to disguise the fact that it isn’t entirely sure what a body is meant to look like. The shoulders are too narrow. The arms too long.
Its face is shadowed, but something about it catches in Aster’s chest.
The air around it seems… wrong. Bent. Perspective itself warping slightly to make room.
People pass by, and each one twitches. Eyes narrowing. Spines stiffening. They veer around it with the unconscious precision of prey avoiding a predator it can’t consciously see.
Aster’s pulse surges up into his throat and starts sprinting laps around his skull.
There’s no reason for it. No logic. But something in him—something deeper than fear, older than thought—responds. Like a buried reflex suddenly waking up.
The figure tilts its head.
Sniffs.
Once.
Twice.
Slow, deliberate inhalations, as if scenting something on the wind.
Recognition hits Aster with all the grace of a car crash.
Something moves beneath his ribs.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
A squirming pressure under his sternum, shifting in his chest like something that had been content to pretend it was dead until now.
He folds forward, one hand gripping the seat in front of him hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Dread crawls up from beneath his breastbone, slick and invasive, pressing outward like it wants to be seen.
His pulse hammers.
The world begins to warp.
At first only at the edges, like wet paint dragged by careless fingers. Colours deepen. Shadows pulse. The bus roof feels lower. The aisle stretches impossibly long. And outside, the figure’s shadow starts to bleed, multi-coloured mist unspooling from its feet in translucent tendrils. Light bends through it like oil on water.
Aster can’t look away.
Not a man, his brain screams, before quickly adding, but let’s not be rude about it.
The thing stops sniffing.
Its head snaps toward him.
Their eyes meet.
Aster doesn’t see eyes.
He sees a signal flare somewhere in the architecture of the universe.
And then it screams.
The sound isn’t sound so much as rupture. A siren tearing through reality, peeling the world open like overripe fruit. Buildings flicker. The street warps. The sky tears at the seams as mist floods in through the cracks like water through a breached hull.
And in the space between one blink and the next, Aster sees it for what it is.
Not a man.
Its skin splits back. Flesh tears open into machinery. Its jaw unfolds, metal blooming out from bone, light bursting from where eyes should be. It’s a bloodhound assembled from scavenged nightmares—steam and circuitry, flesh and steel, lungs screaming like factory sirens.
Its call echoes through the collapsing street.
Other sirens answer.
From the horizon. From side roads. From every direction.
Close.
Too close.
Aster feels it then—more hooks sinking into him, latching somewhere deep in the marrow, dragging.
“What the fuck,” he whispers, voice trembling somewhere between awe and outright pants-shitting terror.
The creature lunges as the bus lurches forward, claws scraping along the side as it changes gear and belches exhaust. Then it’s left behind in the wake of the engine, shrinking into the fractured distance.
Aster doesn’t look back.
Denial requires concentration.
Even as the bus moves on, the world stays broken. Geometry opens and closes at the edge of his vision like a half-shuttered eye. He presses his palms over his face and waits for impact—for talons, teeth, the usual hallucinated horrors.
Ten seconds pass.
Then twenty.
Nothing pounces.
Nothing tears through the roof.
Slowly, he opens his eyes.
The bus interior has changed.
Or, more accurately, reality has given up on subtlety.
The metal shell has dissolved into something living. The walls ripple with textures not meant to exist—grotesque vines curling like drowned fingers, coral-like fans pulsing gently as though breathing, flowers the size of serving platters opening in colours so saturated they feel illegal. Deep crimsons bleeding into ultraviolets his eyes have no business understanding.
Every colour throb with the insistence of fever.
The passengers are enclosed in soft golden shells, each person cocooned inside a translucent field that refracts the surrounding madness into muted light.
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Aster looks down.
He’s wrapped in one too.
Golden filaments shimmer over his chest, webbing around him like a warm, luminous cocoon.
“Oh good,” he mutters. “Premium Delusion.”
He stares.
This hadn’t happened in the convenience store. Whatever’s covering him now hadn’t protected him from the things latching onto him there. But now the city beneath the city—the swamp, the creatures, the impossible second skin of reality—lies open around him, and for the first time it isn’t instantly devouring his mind.
He corrects himself immediately.
Not reality. Hallucination.
Probably some delayed neurological backlash from years of stress, malnutrition, and occasionally buying meat from places with a suspiciously flexible relationship to refrigeration.
Temporary.
That’s the word to hold onto.
Temporary.
He leans back against the warped seat and lets his eyes move.
Across the aisle, a woman scrolls absently on her phone, completely unaware that barnacles have taken up residence on the screen. Tiny calcified growths cling to the glass, feeding her subconscious with messages no human wrote.
Validation. Envy. Outrage.
The words flicker across the barnacle shells in a pulse too quick to be language and too deliberate to be random. She smiles faintly at an ad as the things flash Consume, the screen glowing with a shimmer from some second layer of reality.
At the back of the bus, a man mutters to himself while something like a beehive embeds halfway into the field surrounding him. The bees inside don’t buzz. They whisper. Dozens of overlapping voices, each carrying its own worry, memory, irritation, or half-finished thought, drowning each other out in a constant nervous drone.
Aster catches himself thinking that maybe this is literal schizophrenia made manifest—a biological echo of inner chaos externalized for him to see.
Then he snorts softly to himself.
No. That would imply some kind of structure. Some coherence. And if there’s one thing his life has never offered, it’s a well-organized psychotic break.
His gaze snags on a young woman a few seats ahead, staring with painful intensity at another passenger’s wedding ring.
An emerald serpent slithers down from the bus ceiling and drapes itself over her shoulder.
It leans close and whispers into her ear.
A green mist begins to leak from the edge of her golden field, curling upward in slow poisonous ribbons. A moth the size of a bird darts through an open window, apparently drawn by the mist.
It gets too close.
The snake strikes.
It swallows the thing in one elegant snap.
Aster flinches despite himself.
The panic still scratches at the back of his skull, reminding him that none of this is supposed to be possible. He’s tripped before—mushrooms mostly, and once a truly regrettable work shift conducted while the walls applauded him politely.
But this? This isn’t the usual cosmic joke. Keeping composure while emerald snakes whisper secrets that make people bleed green Mist isn’t remotely in the same category as handling a bad trip. That’s like comparing ice cream to hand grenades. And none of his past chemical misadventures have ever felt this solid, this cruelly, vividly real.
Especially not when he doesn’t even feel the slightest bit intoxicated. Could this really be a hallucination?
Aster dismisses the thought almost immediately. “Yeah. Definitely should’ve gone to more therapy.”
He refuses to finish the thought.
The alternative is psychosis, and he is not emotionally or financially prepared for psychosis.
So instead, he lets his gaze drift out the bus window and watches the city unfold in layered absurdity: mist curling over rooftops, impossible flora bursting from concrete, creatures flickering in and out of visibility beneath the golden cocoon of ordinary life.
Beautiful.
Hideous.
And somehow functioning.
Then the bus reaches the next stop.
The bus stops and opens its doors, letting passengers exit and new ones enter.
Unfortunately, they aren’t the only things to get on.
Tentacles crawl up from the fractured street—wet sinew and translucent cartilage slick with mucus in colours nature had the good sense to avoid. They gather themselves into a shape somewhere between Cthulhu and that mouth-tentacle thing from Final Fantasy named after a cigarette brand, then spill onto the bus.
Aster stares.
The thing oozes over seats and passengers alike, searching for purchase on every available surface. Wherever it brushes the golden fields, the barriers flare with bioelectric resistance, burning the tentacles in halos of protective light.
The creature giggles.
Actually giggles.
A wet, obscene little sound.
As it writhes, it leaves behind sticky orange-yellow foam. Some of the fields repel it outright. Others don’t. Where the foam clings, it starts to seep inward, and the air around the affected passengers changes.
The affected bubbles begin bleeding a sickly, acidic haze that tastes of anxiety, swirling like distorted clouds around them, twisting in stutters, jerks, and micro-panic loops. As the mist blooms, different tendrils on the creature open like flowers, fan-like mouths hungrily filtering the released mist from the air.
Feeding.
“Oh, fuck this.”
As the writhing mass draws closer, the bus thankfully lurches to its next stop before it can reach Aster. He pushes himself upright. “Yeah, that’s enough public transport for one lifetime.”
He’d rather ride this out somewhere that didn’t feel like being trapped in an enclosed space with them.
The doors open.
He steps out into the street and immediately regrets the continued existence of the outside world.
The world outside is no longer just indifferent—it’s alive, hostile, and unnecessarily slimy for some reason.
The same storm of coloured insanity covers the sky again, and the city seems to have turned into a swamp of nightmares and pure lunacy.
The first step onto the pavement feels like walking across the tongue of some stone-skinned leviathan. The ground ripples—faintly, but enough.
He doesn’t jump back; he doesn’t yelp. His brain quietly folds the moment into a growing file labelled Nope and tapes it shut with what’s left of his self-respect.
The golden field still clings to him, faintly shimmering like static trapped in glass, and that—more than anything—keeps him from cracking clean open.
He doesn’t care if it’s just his mind’s attempt at a security blanket.
Monkey brain says gold field means safe.
Monkey brain is currently carrying the team.
He rubs at his chest.
The hook tugs again—deep, mechanical, hungry.
This doesn’t feel like ordinary panic. It feels colder. More focused. Less like fear and more like something actively tugging the line, trying to find him.
He thinks of that creature made of meat and steel again, shivering as he wonders why this hook and that creature feel so inexplicably connected.
“Yeah, it could always get worse,” he mutters. “Better to think of this as MK Ultra: South Africa Edition and just wait for it to end.”
Then he forces himself to look up.
The city has peeled itself like an orange, revealing its raw, primordial guts.
The ordinary streets still exist underneath—brick, glass, traffic lights, grime—but over everything lies a second ecosystem: moss throbbing in colours that make his brain itch, luminous roots feeding from the skeletons of buildings, spectral fungus blooming in window frames, entire forests growing out of concrete facades.
Something like a tentacle slips back into a storm drain when he glance at it.
A shop window has sprouted coral fans in gradients of lavender, chartreuse, and molten orange. The glass reflects his face—and something behind him that isn’t his reflection.
He looks away before it can wave.
Best not to stare at anything too long.
Staring implies acknowledgment.
Acknowledgment implies thought.
Thought is currently a luxury.
He walks carefully, heels pressing into the living pavement, and the city whispers around him in damp curious murmurs. A shimmering puddle mutters of regrets and tiny betrayals. He gives it a wide berth on principle.
A patch of pavement ahead has bloomed into a garden of grotesque delights. Flowers with petals like bat wings droop beside bulbous mouths dripping fluorescent nectar. Snails the size of pigeons crawl over vine-thick stems, leaving behind glittering trails that hum faintly. A moth the size of a cat swoops low over his shoulder, its wings trailing static that tastes briefly, horribly, of complacency.
At the crossing, a red light holds him in place.
A few people stand outside a pub nearby—office workers turned weekend philosophers, shirtsleeves rolled, cigarettes in hand, talking too loudly to disguise the fact that none of them particularly like each other.
Aster’s attention catches on the man at the centre of the group.
Not the man, exactly.
But the mist around him.
It hangs in the air thick and perfumed, the psychic equivalent of being cornered by someone explaining cryptocurrency to a waitress. The man laughs too hard at his own joke, head tilted back like a solar panel trying to absorb admiration.
Aster is about to look away when the mist suddenly contracts, sucked inward toward the man’s spine.
And then he sees it.
A pale, glistening thing clings to the man’s back. Leech-like. Viscous. Pulsing with a slow deliberate rhythm.
The man keeps laughing. No one else even tries.
The parasite swells, as if inhaling the excess self-satisfaction bleeding off its host, then exhales a dark green-blue mist in a thick oily wave. It rolls over the rest of the group, brushing against their fields and sticking there like second-hand cologne with delusions of grandeur.
The others sag almost imperceptibly.
Aster watches as a bright copper vapour begins to leach from them, pulled free and fed back into the thing with every pulse.
He reaches out before his brain can veto the motion, fingertips brushing the drifting edge of the gold vapour. Warm. Electric. Real. Thin ribbons of what he can only describe as pure joy siphon from those in range.
He can almost follow the mechanism.
The parasite feeds on one man’s smugness, refines it into some sort of emotional solvent, then uses it to dissolve happiness out of everyone nearby and siphon the result back into itself.
A neat little ecosystem of weaponized arrogance.
Aster stares.
It makes perfect sense.
That, more than anything, is what finally alarms him.
He blinks, hard.
He’s standing in the street, staring at an imaginary leech that he now imagines runs on weaponized arrogance and psychic osmosis.
The group has noticed him—waving his hands through empty air, slack-jawed, staring at something they can’t see. They do their best impression of ignoring him.
The guy with the leech doesn’t bother with tact. He glares straight at Aster, irritation plain.
“Oh shit—uh, the stock market,” Aster mutters, spinning around and walking as fast as he can without breaking into an outright sprint, hoping he doesn’t look too crazy, but certain that he does.
Why the fuck is he trying to make sense of his own insanity? Is he stupid? He’s in the throes of a schizophrenic break—or some spore-induced fungal infection actively producing LSD directly on his neurons. He’s not sure yet, but he can’t afford to be labelled crazy on top of being cursed unlucky. He needs to wait for this hallucination to stop, and being out in public is starting to feel like a terrible idea.
And that thought brings him right back to the house.
The key. The empty rooms. The note on the fridge.
Did he really break into it?
Yes.
Is that still somehow the most sensible option available to him?
Also yes.
If he goes back, he can at least wait this episode out in private. Better to spend a day hiding in an empty mansion than get dragged to a psychiatric ward because he got caught debating astral parasites with a traffic light.
He looks around for a road sign not currently buried under psychedelic foliage.
Richman Street.
Shit.
He’s nearly twenty blocks from Heart Lane, and the last of his coins died nobly on the bus.
He’ll have to walk.
Not that far on a normal day.
This, unfortunately, is no longer a normal day.