A Wednesday evening some time ago, our man Dango is but seven years old. Thin black creatures are stalking around the house. Dango finds out that no-one else can see them the hard way:

“Mum! There they are! LOOK!”

“Nothing’s there, dear. It’s just your imagination.”

Dango became convinced that his thoughts could manifest physically, and tried to perform a full frontal lobotomy on himself with a pen knife in order to stop himself from thinking. It didn’t work, but everyone thought that he was ‘kind of weird’ afterwards. Lobotomy was still a hip new thing in that time and was touted as curing all insanities of the mind. Dango’s father, an old fashioned man, disagreed.

“Total rubbish… they’d be better off as opium addicts. They’re like the walking dead.”

Dango, at age seven, had an extremely active imagination, and figured that figurative death was a far better fate than being pursued by the endless monsters he was capable of dreaming up. Luckily, he did not know the correct surgical procedure for self-lobotomisation, and succeeded only in jabbing himself in the eye, which hurt ‘like a bitch’. His parents were shocked that he knew such language, and blamed it on the school he was attending. They moved him to a boarding school far away, so that they didn’t have to deal with it.

The thin creatures, unfortunately, were not something that Dango dreamed up. They are still there – they are everywhere, as a matter of fact – if you know how to look. If you tilt your head in the right way at the right time. Some are tiny. Others are nine feet tall. They are evil and weird. They may be part of a vast organization that secretly controls the universe, they may simply be a type of undiscovered animal and a perfectly natural phenomenon. They could be both. A fourth explanation? Also possible. Only Dango knows, and he won’t tell you because you won’t ask, and you won’t ask because you don’t think to question anything but your own sanity when you accidently tilt your head in the right way, at the right time, and catch a glimpse of the slim limbs that move like breaking glass and the face that is almost as surprised to see you as you are to see it. Dread. Waking up from a dream, the nameless, shapeless terror that haunted you is still there, only now it is more real than ever. The television is showing the back of the chair you are sitting in now, with someone in it. You move slightly, and the person sitting in your chair on the television does the same. You turn around, slowly. There is a man with a camera behind you. His eyes are massive, his pupils huge. The television turns to static, and as he stares at you, he begins to open his mouth and smile.

You blink. It is gone. You are sane. Dango’s lips are sealed.