No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.

  - H.P. Lovecraft, Through the Gates of the Silver Key

  ﹡﹡﹡

  Calliope Mondegrene was so fantastically, impossibly high that she might as well have shuffled off the mortal coil absolutely for areas unknown, to explore cosmic spheres that the waking mind had never dreamt of–for how could it? Standard-issue consciousness was blind and numb to such things, beyond the wall of sleep where dream daemons dwelt in every redoubt of the mind.

  The bold, insistent tones of the long-forgotten party still made impact on her optic nerve and eardrum, but to no effect–her mind was cast fully adrift in the vacuum of psychedelic space, and no further input was required or requested. Her real body was slumped back in the armchair somewhere in euphoria–God bless it–while the little packet of essence she called a self pinged listlessly through a kaleidoscope that put anything supposedly real to shame. She might have been drooling, even–tracing a silver route of saliva floating behind her in the astral murk, as she lurched onward on her drunkard's walk. Maybe that would be helpful to find her way back, because no trip sted forever: it had to end, even if the destination ended up just off from where she began, the way the Earth and sun and stars never made the same syzygy for a second time.

  In simpler words: she would come down eventually and probably be a little worse for it. But right now, that was no matter–Calliope didn't and couldn't care about such things so long as she got to enjoy herself. She bumped off one half-formed concept after another on her journey to everywhere and nowhere.

  Until something far past the threshold of strange happened: she was no longer nowhere; she was no longer alone. All around her, that background of cosmic eigengrau that she never bothered to take notice of before… It was staring back at her, with a million, trillion compounded eyes.

  Thought froze, even as the beating of her heart rose to fever pitch. Callie'd been through bad trips before, of course–usually some nightmare or other from her past would straddle her brain and buck her about like a ragdoll for a while, leaving her with a little more trauma than before. It was unpleasant, but manageable–usually avoidable too with the proper protocol… which she hadn't followed. Somewhere in that vapid assembge of neurons she strung together a thought: that she was stupid to have used without someone to trip-sit for her, again. It would've been helpful when something exactly like this happened: when things started to go very awry, when she longed for the comfort of another person to guide her through the worst of it, when she wished for the decrystallization of her ego. But there was nothing she could do. She was far too high to move her body, and all the commotion of the party meant that nobody would be coming to check on her. Calliope mentally prepared herself for a bad time.

  But This was no ordinary nightmare, no dark thought conjured from the inkling depths of her imagination; This was a tidal force from well Outside. Where a moment ago she'd swam through a stream of consciousness in a dreamlike trance there was now only the ocean of that Presence, all-encompassing and bcker than shadow. It felt alien, un-thinkable, not of her own mind; It fixed upon her tiny thoughtform like it was a tardigrade in a microwave, and the outskirts of her head began to broil.

  "Um, God?" She voiced, nervously. The walls were closing in around her skull; the pressure hurt like nothing else. Calliope wasn't really religious–despite her upbringing's attempts to make her so–but she always wondered if getting high elevated her even an inch closer to the divine, if any existed. She figured it couldn't hurt to ask the Presence to divulge Its nature–unless of course she were unlucky and the divine leaned towards antiquity in temperament. If It harbored the misanthropism of an ancient and forgotten God, she was well and truly fucked.

  The answer was noncommittal and nonverbal. As It rushed in and swelled to every corner of her brain she realized she'd been mistaken: now, It was all-encompassing. In, in, in…It filled every crevice in her mind the way the ocean fills a fractal coastline, and she'd confused bathing in brine to drowning in it–the salt of It rubbed against her grey matter everywhere it touched. Even her hyponatremic ass wasn't built for such salinity.

  Back on Earth, her beating heart was nearing a tempo that would be lethal in just a few minutes; the expression of terror on her face went unseen under the dim house lights. Nobody was coming to save her.

  Earth. That was where she was from. Cal-li-o-pe. Right? Moments of her life fshed in her mind's eye like the world's shittiest flip book: trying and failing to ride a bike when she was eight years old. The school spelling bee–lost on the word "isosceles". That time her voice broke at chorus, and she'd been so embarrassed and ashamed and quit and hated it so much that she'd wished to die for the umpteenth time. Then: every other time she'd wished for such an ending, all at once. The release of destrudo threatened to consume her; the torrent of emotions that came with the memories was suffocating. It hurt to be rifled through like that… hurt worse than the time she'd broken her arm skating, worse than when she hurt herself, on purpose, gouging gring gashes into her groin. The memories of the pain stacked atop one another–like ur-pungent scallion pancakes–were far worse in gestalt than the sum of each individual experience.

  "Stop," she begged. The voice in her own head sounded small and feeble. Small, like prey–like it had to hide from the predator much rger than itself that intruded into its domain. Blotches of pink, blue, yellow exploded in her vision as It hunted her down. The Presence was inside her, in her very soul, picking and probing at the whole of her for some unknowable purpose–or maybe It was simpler than that and only wished to devour her. She hoped It'd be quick about it.

  Then the deluge of memories stopped as soon as it had started. Her hope rose; had the plea somehow reached her captor?

  A pause, and a great shifting in every direction. Preparations.

  WHY

  The word may as well have been branded into her senses. It hurt to look at and to hear and, rather than reverberating, it stayed there fixed and demanding, an ichorous wound bled in iridescent ink. It smelled of clove and sulfur; it left the taste of metal in her mouth; it rang discordantly like a thousand timbrels. The image of the frog she'd refused to dissect in ninth grade figured prominently, its legs twitching in undead galvanism as if to taunt her: & WHY NOT seemed to be the subtext there. Calliope prayed she would come down soon, that she had maybe taken less than normal and the trip would be over, but she knew it was only that–a prayer, a pointless thing in a pce like this. There was no pleasant God to hear it in the confines of her altered mind.

  WHY

  It said again, twisting into her like thumbscrews. At every angle now there was a great tesseltion of mirrors, reflecting and observing her. Every facet turned her way incised into her skin, into the very core of her being, despite the separation. Calliope hated to be observed, to be seen; now it was unavoidable. There was nowhere to look without seeing her naked and pathetic body repriflected to infinity. Horrible; it was beyond horrible.

  "Be-because it hurts, damnit!" She cried out. She might as well have shouted at a tidal wave or a colpsing star; whatever frightful concept gripping the reins of her trip seemed unlikely to listen to reason.

  But It might have. There was a drawing back, a pouring and draining, as the entity wrapped around every wrinkle of her brain withdrew. Calliope exhaled what felt like her inaugural breath. The pressure cmped over her skull released just in time–she was barely a heartbeat away from bodily death, even if she couldn't know it.

  The Thing coiled back in all directions. Back It slithered, back through the edges of the mirrored walls that remained focused on her. She could actually see as It went: grotesque tendrils of alternating sable bck and charnel white that prickled unceasingly, like a colony of chiaroscuro centipedes. In a moment more, they disappeared through the cracks, leaving only a million images of herself to be seen in Its lens, which rotated about in a stochastic pattern as if to resolve every molecule of her one by one.

  Then her reflections moved of their own accord. A million mouths opened to speak; the resulting voice again drowned out all thought. A million eyes fixed on her own; there was nowhere she could avoid eye contact.

  "WHAT ARE YOU" It said in a thousand different tones.

  Okay… so It could form sentences even, not just words, this manifestation of a bad trip. Maybe… maybe she could calm herself down by conversing in turn? Humanize the thing–that was the strategy.

  Calliope was unsure which mirrored face she should address. Perhaps they were all the same and it–like all else–didn't matter; in the end, she chose one at random.

  "I'm… I'm a person. Hi. Are you like… I dunno, my subconscious or something?"

  It did not reply in words, no. Instead, It showed her–she would forever wish that It had not. Mirrors became windows; windows became bottomless pits yawning open onto things so alien they may and must not be described. She could see the whole terrible breadth of It, the way one might see a globe and imagine the shape of the Earth… but she couldn't grasp it, no more than she could hold the pnet in her fingers or infinity within her brain. Every single little facet opened onto something so, so, very, very rge; the sight of all of them at once frayed the edges of her fragile mind. It was like nothing she'd ever conceived, or could conceive, or could ever desire to conceive. The sum total of her being was a bsted heath against the fractal fruit of Its potential. Such gross complexity should never be–and yet It was. And yet It was far too much. Her heart rate skyrocketed again, and she felt a terrible foreboding; glimpsing the endless expanse for too long would surely kill her.

  "I… I don't understand," she whimpered. At once the panorama coalesced. A reprieve… now there was just the single image in her head: a single ant atop a circuit board. Millions of miles of silicon wafer y about in a byrinth, incomprehensible to its antennae. She knew in her bones that it represented her. Jesus, Mary and all the rest: what the hell kind of ced drug had she taken?

  "YOU ARE SO VERY SMALL" Her own voice spoke to her. The mirrors instantly returned. Calliope tried to still her reeling head while the walls resumed their intermittent spinning.

  "Y-yeah, or, or maybe you're just big. What the fuck is this?" She tried to stay calm, but fear betrayed her. Even between her own two ears she heard her voice waver. Panic and paranoia now reigned absolute.

  "You are so very small, but you are new." The voice came from behind now. She spun round, only to come face to face with… herself. Or a thing that looked like her, anyway. It was like one reflection had left the mirror and gained mass; the doppelganger floated some feet ahead.

  She gulped before addressing it: "Can you just, like, go away? I'm not having a great time, and I'd really like to not be high right now."

  "You are a facet unknown to us. You are fragile: a speck, scarcely there. To move away would destroy you in our wake."

  "Gee, thanks… Wait, 'us'? Ohh, don't tell me–I'm finally fucking losing it, aren't I?" This was it: she'd finally damaged her brain with drugs beyond a threshold of madness with no hope of return. That really put a damper on things.

  "You are but a droplet; we are an ocean. At a distance, your multitudes become a single point; ours persist, so 'We' are many. This is the basis of your thought, no?"

  Calliope only half-understood the double's meaning. Even for a god It seemed arrogant. Perhaps her ego escaped the cage in which she kept it down, repressed… and was at present holding court with her.

  "That's… kinda rude, right? I'm just one person, so–not really a fair comparison."

  The double gave her only a bnk stare. It went limp, like its puppeteer left the stage abruptly to deliberate something. It took almost an entire minute–from her perspective, who knew how long that was in realtime when taking everything into account–to return and pick up the strings.

  "Expin." It sounded terse, upset; she wondered if it was possible to be at odds with your own subconscious. She had a better chance at that than anyone.

  "Er, you know–I'm just one person, I'm sure if you added up all of humanity or whatever maybe that'd be enough. An ocean, or something."

  The response just puzzled her reflection further.

  "There are more? We do not see them. It is only you."

  Calliope almost snorted. It said that with the confidence of someone insisting that the Earth was ft, with no hesitation despite being so incredibly wrong.

  "Well… I guess you wouldn't, huh? I'm really fucking high right now, and you're probably a hallucination–never had a self-aware one before though, congrats–so of course you wouldn't really know about the real world."

  Another expressionless stare. Her confidence rose; she was actually doing it! If she could just outtalk this figment of her imagination until she was lucid again, maybe she would be okay.

  "We have seen the totality of you. You are nearly nothing; you are alone. Communication has been needless courtesy."

  The sembnce of dialogue had caused her to overstep, to speak out of turn. Now she was truly fucked: tar-moiréd strands began oozing back through the edges of the mirrored walls. They reached towards her, needle-sharp and hungry–shit, she had to think of something! Anything, she could say–

  "Yeah, well, not my fault if you've never heard of reality. Just get it over with." She mentally kicked herself. Her defiant side won out at the worst possible time.

  But the tendrils stopped nevertheless. Her double flickered without any change in expression–come to think of it, its face had remained the same throughout the entire exchange.

  "Show us." And It sounded like a child then–like a kid asking to see the pte of cookies that Santa had allegedly eaten. The curiosity was palpable enough to cause a pause, which meant the turns had tabled; she'd achieved mastery over the trip demon! In spite of her situation, Callie couldn't help but feel a little smug at that.

  "Sure, I'd fucking love to–except as I literally said, I'm wayyy too high right now to be lucid. And you're not even real so, you're just gonna disappear when I'm sober anyway. Sorry!"

  Her half-apology rang out into a second, longer pause. There was a faint, almost imperceptible murmuring all around, like countless voices conferring on… something.

  "You are a tiny network. Many links are dark which may be brightened. Many links are bright which may be darkened. That pattern will be altered. You will show us?"

  It wasn't quite a statement or a question, but somewhere in-between–a prophecy, perhaps. She stared at the figure, at all the figures–the calliope of Calliopes–reflected around her. The meaning of the cryptic words penetrated her understanding: It was offering her a deal. Wake up, be lucid, walk the world a little…but bring It back with her to sobriety. Yeah, right.

  That was nonsense, wasn't it? The only sting psychological consequence she'd ever experienced from tripping was maybe an extra nightmare here or there. Nobody'd ever split their personality by getting too high, or anything like that, that was absurd…so there was no danger? Somehow that felt wrong; in her heart she knew that the thing wearing her face was definitely not part of her. That It was dangerous, beyond her understanding. Maybe beyond human understanding. This would be no ordinary trip, and she wouldn't return alone or unchanged.

  In the end, a mixture of curiosity and weariness got the better of her. Calliope didn't even have to fully voice her agreement; It began before she was even aware she'd made a decision at all. Darkness gripped her once more from everywhere at once–the cmmy sensation in her skull was destined to become familiar. It was feeling around in her brain again, searching through every crack, doing who-knows-what. But no memories fshed before her eyes this time. This work was much more subtle.

  It flushed the foreign neurotransmitters from her system one by one; no doubt her poor liver would be working overtime for hours afterward. Fantastically, impossibly, she felt her sound and sight returning to the world of the living. She was coming down.

  And that

  was how,

  one high night at a party,

  Calliope Mondegrene began the ending of all things.

  gremnoire