Chapter 29: The Devil's Hour

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” 

— Carl Gustav Jung

The numbers glowed hot like red-pulsing lava: 3:33—the time he'd always brushed off as supernatural BS. Now they throbbed like a universal red flag. The second wave slammed him with brutal clarity, tossing him from bed; worsening nausea felt like his stomach turning inside out; a sharp blast of lethal cold; and finally, the hit—unendurable heat. His clothes became a hot fish net against his skin as he frantically tore them off while trying to get into the kitchen, reality splintering around him. The delayed drug-alcohol mix was taking hold of his bodily movement, blurring his vision, and making audio sounds impossible to comprehend.

The kitchen morphed before his eyes, walls breathing and stretching into infinite corridors. His desperate thought, "I need water!" echoed through dimensions as he stumbled forward, only half his body following—the rest seemed to melt into another realm. The 6-pack bottle of spring water he'd bought that day at Lidl's became his singular focus, a lifeline in the chaos. But the kitchen kept receding; it dissolved into a labyrinth of impossible angles, each corner defying physics. The hum of the refrigerator transformed into a choir of discordant voices, singing in languages that never existed.

Entities emerged from the shadows—first as whispers, then as forms that shouldn't exist.  A flash of clarity cut through the chaos. He remembered Alan Watts's words from yesterday's lecture: “Ground yourself when things get intense.” His fingers found the grout lines between tiles, tracing their straight paths, but the respite was brief.

A creature with iridescent scales slithered through the air, its multitude of eyes blinking in synchronized judgment, observing every struggle Alex felt. The walls pulsed with veins of light, each matching Alex's racing heartbeat. While his skin rippled like water, each pore opening and closing in waves of sensation.

"Help!" The word formed in his mind but emerged as a cascade of bubbles in the air with no sound. His tongue felt like liquid mercury, his teeth humming with electrical current. The floor beneath him began to ripple like dark water, threatening to pull him under.  Time fractured and reality started switching like TV channels with a remote. In one eternal moment, he was still crawling across the kitchen tiles, their surface breathing beneath his palms. In the next, he was suspended in a void where memories took physical form—each regret and fear manifesting as shadowy tentacles that reached for him with hungry purpose. 

The water bottles became his focal point—he'd always been the prepared one, the planner, the one who kept emergency supplies. Now those same bottles mocked him with their multiplying forms. When he finally grasped one, it felt alive in his hands, pulsing like a heart. The liquid inside glowed with an inner light whispering promises of salvation. The first sip felt like a phantom taste assaulting him—burning plastic, flowers, sweet and rotten egg, all mixing together through dimensions he couldn't grasp any longer.  More faces began emerging from the walls—distorted versions of people he knew. Anatig’s features melted and reformed, her eyes becoming black holes that threatened to devour him. His own reflection appeared in every surface, but wrong—aging decades in seconds, decomposing, reborn, dying again in an endless cycle.

The air grew thick with voices:You don't belong here. You never belonged anywhere. Watch as we unmake you.!!!

Each whisper carried the gravity of truth, each accusation striking like physical blows. The room temperature oscillated wildly—arctic cold that crystallized his breath, then infernal heat that made his skin feel like wax melting from his bones. Creatures continued emerging from the expanding corridors—beings made of geometric patterns that hurt to look at, shadows that moved against the light, things with too many limbs and eyes that knew too much. They didn't speak, but their presence screamed volumes about his insignificance in the cosmic horror of existence. His consciousness split into multiple streams—one part of him aware he was having a bad trip, another convinced he had died and this was his eternal punishment, and yet another believing he had finally seen through the veil of reality to the truth that had always lurked beneath.  The kitchen tap transformed into a mouth full of chrome teeth, vomiting not water but memories—every mistake, regret and moment of shame pouring out in a torrent he couldn't escape. His body felt both infinitely heavy and impossibly light, as if he were simultaneously sinking through the floor and floating toward a ceiling that kept receding into darkness.

Suddenly his skin started dissolving into stardust. He remembered his first panic attack at age eleven, after waking up from being knocked out by his stepfather. This was worse. So much worse. The stardust of his flesh began to form constellations of dimensions, each one telling stories of his life failures like a puzzled canvas in front of him.  Through it all, the clock's red digits remained constant: 3:33. Time had become a loop, a prison, a joke the universe was playing at his expense. And somewhere in the chaos, a small voice mocked him with this promise, “This is only the beginning.”

Reality shattered completely. The kitchen's familiar contours twisted into a Möbius strip of horror, where up became down and inside became outside. Alex began to feel transparent, part of all existence, and all was a part of him.  He could see his veins pulsing beneath, carrying not blood, but streams of cosmic light that aligned in hypnotizing streams.  The creatures multiplied, evolving with each blink. What started as shadows became crystalline entities singing in frequencies that made his teeth vibrate. Their forms shifted between states of matter—liquid to gas to something entirely foreign to physics. One particularly massive being, composed of fractals and eyes, reached toward him with appendages made of pure mathematics.

We've always been here, Alex, they seemed to communicate directly into his brain. Watching. Waiting. You've finally taken enough to see us.  His consciousness fragmented further, each piece experiencing a different version of reality:

●       In one, he was dissolving into pure energy.

●       In another, he was being reconstructed by alien geometries.

●       In a third, he was watching himself from every possible angle simultaneously.

The floor beneath him became a living membrane, breathing with ancient wisdom. Each exhale released spores of memory into the air—moments from his past playing out like a holographic theater. He saw himself as a child, as an old man, as someone who had never been born, all simultaneously.

The water bottles had transformed into portals, each one leading to a different dimension of terror. Grabbing another bottle, the liquid inside spoke to him in voices that sounded like his own but stretched across octaves no human throat could produce:

Why do you run, Alex?What are you running from?Who are you when no one's watching?

The walls began weeping a substance that looked like mercury but moved with purpose.  I love you, but I can't fix you," Anatig's voice suddenly echoed through the dimensions of his mind.  He'd promised her stability, security, promised her change. Now here he was, proving her right about everything. It was all just a promise he wasn’t able to keep. The creatures emerging from shadows wore her expressions—concern morphing to disappointment, love degrading to pity, hope crumbling to resignation. He was being born and simultaneously dying. The ceiling had become a vast neural network, synapses firing in patterns that spelled out truths too profound for his human mind to comprehend.  Time wasn't just broken—it had become recursive. Each moment contained infinite moments within it. The clock still read 3:33, but now the numbers had depth, leading down into abyssal corridors of meaning. Alex could feel himself being pulled into these numerical tunnels, each digit a gateway to another layer of consciousness.  His body no longer felt like his own. His hands had become maps of every decision he'd ever made, his fingers branching into alternate timelines. His heartbeat echoed through dimensions, felt like slowing down, each pulse creating ripples in the fabric of reality that returned as waves of pure sensation.  The air itself became conscious, thick with the anguish of accumulated thoughts. Breathing felt like inhaling liquid wisdom, each breath filling him with knowledge that burned through his synapses like holy fire. Colors had tastes, sounds had textures and fear had a geometry all its own.

Through this kaleidoscopic of a nightmare, a deeper truth began to emerge—something fundamental about existence itself, about his place in the cosmic dance of creation and destruction. But each time he got close to grasping it, reality would shift again, sending him spiraling into new dimensions of understanding and terror.

The kaleidoscope of horrors suddenly collapsed—not gradually, but like a vacuum imploding. Every color, sound and every twisted creature vanished into a single point of nothingness. The silence hit like a physical force.

White.

Dead quiet

Absolute white void

A room stripped of everything—texture, shadow, dimension. No up, no down. No walls, yet somehow enclosed. The air itself seemed dead, not just quiet, but devoid of the possibility of sound. Alex's heartbeat, his breathing—all muted, as if sound itself was an offense here.  His body felt both weightless and simultaneously crushed by infinite pressure.

The whiteness smothered against his eyeballs like drying cotton, at the same time stretched endlessly in all directions. Physical existence and time ceased to have meaning. Then...

The floor—or what he perceived as the floor—cracked.

A hairline fracture of absolute darkness split the white void, spreading like black lightning. Before IT spoke, he saw what terrified him most: not the cosmic horror, not the death of his ego, but the simple truth reflected in every dimensional fractur. He wasn't running from reality—he was running from himself.

We’ve always been here… In every bag you’ve dealt with, every car you've transported, lies you’ve sold, and truths you've failed to face.

The crack widened, revealing not darkness, but an absence so complete it hurt to look at. The void pulled at him, not physically, but at the atomic level, as if every particle of his being was being called home.

He fell.

Or perhaps the universe fell around him.

The descent wasn't fast or slow—such concepts had no meaning here. He experienced every possible velocity simultaneously, his consciousness stretching like taffy across dimensions.  Then IT spoke again.  The voice wasn't heard—it existed. It resonated not through air but through the fundamental forces holding reality together. Each word felt like universes being torn apart:

“Insignificant speckle of nothingness.” Alex felt a taste of iron in his mouth as the words were spoken.  "You dare?" the voice continued in an angered tone."This is not your time."The sentence twisted through him like barbed wire twisted when caught.

"Go back!"

Out of nowhere, a fragmented vision flashed — a blonde girl (Nova) smiling, Remigijus counting money, the all-knowing gaze of the Zen teacher said:

“Only when you let go of who you think you are, can you become who you truly are.A command that crushed what remained of dimensionality.

The voice started peeling layers from his soul, revealing a boy clutching a backpack at Charles de Gaulle, a man handing cash to Ray, and a corpse staring at a Zen flower garden. 

“This is your truth,” it penetrated his soul.  “Now wear it.’”

It spoke with the authority of eons, each word a judgment from something so vast and terrible that human language had no framework to contain it, but it could be felt with every atom of the self.  The creatures', faces and empty, ravenous promises dissolved into the vast nothingness.  Alex felt his consciousness snap back into his body with the force of a cosmic rubber band. The reality rushing back in like a tsunami of sensation, felt electrifying.

He found himself on his living room floor naked, every muscle rigid, throat raw from screaming sounds he couldn't remember making. The moment he picked up his phone for a second, it seemed the clock still read 3:33. The next moment it is 9:33. Six hours of horror have not finished yet.

The return to reality slammed again into Alex like a freight train of sensations. Knocking him down, his body convulsed, muscles spasming as reality reasserted itself. Sweat-soaked and trembling, he lay on the living room floor naked, covered in ground dust like he was mopping the floor with his body. The room spun lazily, aftershocks of the void still rippling through his consciousness.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

The murmuring shadows in the corners and behind the bed began to move. Not like before—no creatures now—but worse: they seemed to hide watching eyes. Police eyes. Gang eyes. Family eyes. Everyone was watching.  Alex's heart thundered against his chest bone as paranoia flooded his system. The windows—I had to check the windows. He scrambled up, legs barely working, he stumbled to the living room aluminum blinds. Peering through a crack, the pre-dawn street looked too quiet. Suspiciously quiet.

They're coming for you.They know everything.They're already here.

The voices and ideas weren't his, yet he felt compelled to internalize them nonetheless.  It seemed like every car that drove by was an unmarked police car. One SWAT team was hidden in every shade. A gang member was on their way to collect with every rustle.

Under the windows, from the living room to the kitchen. Struggling against the walls running upstairs and somehow back, somewhere, a helicopter was keeping an eye on everything.  He caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, but instead of his reflection, he saw tactical gear and red dots twirling across his chest.

“Oh my god, where were my fucking clothes?” he yelled. 

He found jeans under the coffee table, a ripped shirt hanging on a kitchen doorknob. His movements were jerky and mechanical, like a puppet with half its strings cut. The fabric felt wrong against his skin - too rough, constraining and too much like evidence.  The BMW keys glinted on the counter—a flare of escape. He grabbed them, the metal burning cold against his palm. The house keys... where were the house keys?

Fuck the house keys.

No time.!

He burst out the front door like a startled animal, expecting gunfire, expecting hands grabbing him, expecting the void to reclaim him. The pre-dawn air hit his lungs like ice water. The BMW sat there, a German-engineered chariot of salvation.  Three attempts to get the key in the lock. Two more to get it in the ignition. The engine roared to life—too loud, much too loud. Everyone would hear. Everyone would know. The car lurched forward as he stomped the gas, tires howling against pavement. Rubber burned, smoke billowed in the rearview, and the engine screamed as automatic gears ripped through, pushing 90, 100, faster.

The streets were a blur of paranoid calculations. His brain processed every detail at lightning speed: the flash of brake lights ahead meant roadblock; every intersection held potential ambush, and shadows between buildings screamed trap; the distant wail of a siren confirmed pursuit. Each turn could lead to salvation or capture. His hands shook on the steering wheel as dawn began painting the sky in sickly orange hues. The radio stayed off—they could track you through radio signals; everyone knew that.  A primal force drove Alex through the pre-dawn darkness to his old house. The morning mist parted like a curtain, revealing the place that once was Alex called home. Pure instinct, a father's knowing that thundered in his blood, guided his hands controlling the steering wheel.

The familiar house court stretched before him. Anatig's garden emerged from the fog—tomato vines still climbing their stakes, flower beds where her laughter once danced, while Vilhelm played around. The garden seemed to be anticipating the impending doom by holding its breath of desolation.  His first struck the doorbell. Again. Again. No answer. Each pulse echoed his racing heartbeat; time felt like it was slipping through his fingers like sand. He had to see them. Had to speak to his son. Had to speak the words burning in his throat before—no answer.  His legs gave way beneath him, knees hitting the familiar concrete of the porch.

The red door—the same door he’d painted years ago—kissed cool against his forehead as he slumped against it.  His palm spread flat against its surface, as if he could reach through the wood itself, through time, through the barrier between then and now. He stayed there, breathing in the lingering scent of home, his body curved against the door like a question mark seeking its answer.

Suddenly, footsteps stirred inside…drawing closer.

NEXT WEEK! Chapter 30 : The Price of Trust 

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