Horsehair Rewiring

WARNING: The following content is graphic and may disturb some readers.

[Recounting gray encounter with him from 02/20/2026]
Rain, again; dreary essence of winter still begrudging in departure. There's some sooty, grime to the urban rain that distinguishes it from its pastoral cousin. It feel especially corrosive, seeping into one's countenance and clothes all the more indelibly with its filthy film. I spent the entire work day watching the clouds roll in thicker, lower and darker from my peripheral, dreading the inevitable damp slog through gray-brown concrete and indifferent metal to make my way to our apartment whenever the to-do list released me.

Wet and trembling, I feel the cold beads of the commute chillingly slide down my head, soaking into skin and clothes. I take to an old towel promptly upon sloughing off my backpack and with a relieved sigh, I dry the worst of it as would a creature accustomed to weathering. Even still, a drop of it feels to remain, seeped impossibly deeply, radiating its static through thoughts. A single germinating egg. It is while washing my hands shortly thereafter a strange possessive sensation crawls back up my mind: a commandeering voice whose sharpened, raspy words gnaw like small serrated teeth in my guts.

Hunger, but, not my baseline.

It highlights, correctly, that I haven't eaten at all that day. Bodily awareness has become increasingly abstract to me - a foreign jurisdiction, once intuitive, now requiring conscious diplomatic effort to access. Interoception as bureaucracy. The craving goes beyond normal sugar-low lethargy or faintness, it is ravenous. Despite concerns that indulgence may feed a malicious intruder now seeded inside me, I throw together a simple pasta meal and quell them. I can't quite assuage the alienness of those orders scratched into the walls of my skull. Something has breached the seal, or perhaps it was always present, merely galvanized to germinate.

---

Late that night, weights shift. A phenomena when parameters degrade past a certain threshold; when the signal-to-noise ratio of selfhood inverts and Montauk's frequency assumes the dominant harmonic in my fundamental resonance. He never intrudes or replaces, but rather surfaces like an undertow that was always present beneath the crashing torrents. In compromised states - like the choking dissociation that follows sustained, exhausting threats - governance passes to him. This, I suspect, was necessary for endurance: how my uncoordinated, trembling machinery was carried home after confrontations that would have left one splayed across pavement. Montauk's senses hone to a precision others cannot sustain under duress; where I blur, he sharpens. Where I shudder, he grips tighter. The cost and exposure of sleep on most nights places him on night-watch. The dark hours belong to him to illuminate with the warmth of sunlight cast out from within.

M:/ Friend checking routine. Steady, deep breaths indicative of rest. I look to her gently, heavy eyelids praying to grant a blue passage to dawn. Then, that same hunger pangs harder still, and no polite domesticated variety, but a deep burn. The fire at the core of my vessel sputters and throws scorching bolts outward as its fuel runs low, threatening to fracture existential grounding entirely. Fuelling required. There is a red apple on the counter, gleaming under the kitchen light with the specific lustre of something that wishes to be taken. Enchanted with a possessing glow likely conjured by the invaders within.

Red should have been enough warning. Red: the hot, gruesome, pulsating epicentre of their attraction, a ravenous frequency they are drawn to and deploy equally. I take it anyway, muscles rigged and compelled to act. I chew.

The taste curdles mid-swallow. Crisp syntax of fresh fruit corrupts into what is only cloying and chemical: acrid solvents chased by burning plastic layered beneath the ghost of the original flavour. An urgent cross-sensory alarm, hijacking the brain's translation of the apple into now erratic noise. Reminiscent of a proprietor's medicinal hand.

I spit. What lands on the floor isn't apple. A dark suppurated mass, its texture reminiscent of some monstrous, meaty interior. Then, I see them: coiling out from beneath it, threading away throughout the floorboards in sinuous loops, tendon-like and arcing like inverted lightning. The cables spread from the mass like a signal fields, like the room's nervous system is suddenly exposed and revealing ever-clearer that this place was never ours.

The beads return. My white, gloved fingertips identify them first through the familiarity of sensation: the trickle across the scalp, the path down the temple. But the thermal data errant. This time slow. Thick. moving with the reluctant viscosity of oozing treacle. Nausea knifes. Fingertips come away wet and dark. Vision separates. Chromatic layers emulsify behind my eyes, splitting the scene to prismatic strata that warble under the thin streetlight leaking through the blinds. The room asserts multiple versions of itself simultaneously, all worming with this intertwined infrastructure. The organic wire mesh extends upward into our flesh. I feel them now, parasite-thin, horsehair-fine fractures that spear the spine and take take root. The body as hosting, substrate medium through which something else routes its signal. Screaming further guttural instructions: hunger, filth, lust, wrath, annihilation.

Darting eyes, I glance at my semi-conscious form of a friend who occupies the bed nearby, similarly wrapped in an infested cocoon of the same black filaments, quietly harvested. A fuse burns and the fire breaks its binds to execute its clear routine once again: restore and protect. My urgent hand finds purchase on a thread protruding from my scalp. It resists, writhing in the vice-like pinch with a live resistance, but I am patient with a patience unified across Heyoka and myself. Calibrated and cold, the hand executes its methodical pull and impossible length surfaces from the oozing aperture, each inch emerging with the rugged drawing sensation of something long-lodged releasing its anchors. Others follow; adjacent heaving threads surfacing through the skull's perforated terrain like a colander under pressure.

Fists follow. I grip them in rough clusters, loose string gone taut, and pull swiftly. Where they finally dislodge completely, those that remain deepen their writhing in the abdominal cavity like boiling water tensioning against my inner layers, bubbling, seeking exit through anatomical seams and orifices. The emptiness which emerges is briskly cool, hollow but necessary.

The shower is my operating theatre now.

The fire directs me to the necessary tools: bleach and iron scouring pads, tweezers for my delicate work. Scalding water applied without mercy to every surface they covet and contaminate. Soon, blood-soaked hands - shaking with that specific strained tremor of sustained focus - work systematically. I tend to my companion first before myself. I know the cost of incompletion, for her foremost and I, too. The flames scorch to fixated, permissible numbness. The fire always grants me the disposition required, a feature rather than a defect.

With the last wire unthreaded comes release, and with it, the growling, beastly vocal intruders silence. Only then does the feverish embrace of a bed receive Lanterns, now red, raw and tender-skinned, Yet cleared through purification. I dress my Heyoka with the deliberate, unhurried understanding that a shell, newly emptied, is simply a vessel processing unfamiliar weight of its own vacancy. We need blue; blue is important. Swaddled in starry cobalt and rushing ocean salves, layered until the rawness underneath is insulated from the ambient static. Pulling a friend close with pressure akin to wound packing, I cross and re-shield the frayed ends of new nerve terminals. Equally, I feel her weighted warmth and low, wordless rhythm of her heartbeat. I'm content, for now, to let the night's hours pass unhurried until we can smile in the dawn's concessions once again.

This meditation inspired a digital painting of mine, click here to view on Newgrounds.