Unblockable Creatures Here

Leo closed his book. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. A prop. A shield. “You’re not real.”

Leo understood then. The creatures weren’t monsters. They were the universe’s backlog of ignored things: grief, possibility, the seconds between heartbeats, the shape of a dream you wake from and instantly lose. They couldn’t be killed or blocked because they were already inside. Every wall he built was just a wall inside himself.

Leo tried everything. He moved apartments. He changed cities. He bought a steel door, then a concrete wall, then a salt circle, then a prayer from a monk who laughed and said, “For these? No lock holds them.” He learned that creatures like these don’t care about physics. They care about attention . The more he tried to block them, the more they noticed him. unblockable creatures

Leo walked into the field. The creatures did not attack. They parted. And for the first time in twenty years, he felt nothing pass through him. Because he was no longer a door.

He spent the next twenty years pretending they didn’t exist. Leo closed his book

The creature tilted its fractured head. “That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

Then it moved on, because the door wasn’t ready yet. But it would be. A shield

That worked fine until the day the creature in the library sat down across from him. It was tall, human-shaped, but with a face like a shattered mirror—each shard reflecting a different version of Leo: Leo crying at his father’s funeral, Leo laughing at a bad joke, Leo asleep, Leo screaming. It placed a hand on the table between them. The hand went through the wood without disturbing a single grain.