Fleeting Faces

It fit no earthly name.

The apparition Emily saw that day could not be described. It was something – just something. She couldn't capture it with the English language.

The English language... that fastidiously constructed edifice that tries and succeeds to contain all the vastness of life in its steely walls... failed to contain this being.

Was it even a “being”? No. The thing even evaded the basic categories of “life” and “lifeless” that have existed since the beginning of time. To try and assign “living”, or “dead”, or “inanimate” to it was as if to try and assign gender to a rock. The thing was wholly incompatible with such notions. It was neither living, nor dead, nor inanimate – it just existed.

Exist, it did. It wasn't a figment of her imagination. It stood out crisply against the backdrop of wall, not muddled with its surroundings – determinedly present.

And it was horrifying. But not horrifying because it eluded language, not because it was different from everything of Emily's world. Horrifying because its exterior was pockmarked with a peculiar black-and-white pattern. A pattern that repeated like a Julia fractal. A Julia fractal that spiraled to infinity.

The thing was bone-white. Gaping, black holes filled its center, which broke into repeating fragments as if it were some phantasmal projection of a kaleidoscope. It was a mosaic of nearly identical bits and pieces – each piece distorted a bit differently than the next, folding in on itself in horrifically beautiful symmetry.

The gaping holes – with their disorienting, echoing repetition – could swallow up the sanity of any observer.

But there wasn't time to get lost in its pattern. In a second, the thing had vanished – and Emily was staring down the blankness of the wall.

She shook the image out of her head. It was surely just a trick of the eye, a bit of random neural firing. She opened the front door and continued on her way.

It was dusk. The road before her was a motley of shifting blue shadows, its procession broken occasionally by the orange glow of street-lamps hovering above. The ground was shiny – wet – slathered in some sort of sweat or grease that had no origin. The wind shook the layers of palm-leaves around her. The meticulously-kept lawns of the cookie-cutter neighborhood lay silent, as if they were nothing more than decorations. It was dusk.

Ch-chink. The keys rustled in Emily's pocket, as if mocking her decision to walk to the library rather than drive. The street was relatively quiet, save for the last-minute cries of birds and steeping whine of crickets. Every so often, a car would roll past her on the neighborhood road, its headlights jeeringly bright in the dim blue of dusk. Ch-chink.

It was a haven. The library lay ahead, its softly-lit presence contrasting against the falling dark. It would afford her security with its plain walls, dry books, and stench of aging parchment. It would surely keep her safe from whatever churned about in her peripheral vision. It was a haven.

Emily entered, and headed toward the science books in back. She plucked a Feynman book off the shelves and began to read.

Swoosh. The sound of a passer-by made her reflexively glance around. With panic, she realized an odd attribute of her surroundings...

She was surrounded by lines.

Vertical spines, horizontal shelves, parallel aisles. The whole library was constructed from lines. The books that crammed the shelves were vertical stripes. The shelves were horizontal, straight planes. The aisles were parallel, rectangular solids. All lines. Peering through the gaps in the shelves, Emily only saw more lines of books; and through those gaps, still more – receding all the way into infinity.

The library was made of identical layers of spines, shelves, aisles – laid one upon the other, like pages in a book. Spines, shelves, aisles... leading to shelves, aisles, spines... leading to aisles, spines, shelves.

Dizzied by repetition, Emily abruptly sat down. The Feynman book fell from her hands. It bounced away from her, fluttering its pages.

And, horrifically – the sound echoed.

It reverberated across the bookshelves, oscillated between the vertical spines. It propagated through the entire library in identical auditory fragments. As the sound hit physical objects, it shattered into a million bits identical to itself, which shattered into more, and more...

It was clear. This was the world Emily was condemned to. A world of ever-repeating fragments, a world of self-similar patterns.

Emily had thought that the apparition resembled none of her world.

No; it resembled her entire world.