I rarely got mail. Always tried to avoid it, if possible. So, most times, it was just bills. Until one day, I got a strange, unmarked matte-black envelope. No name. No return address. Just blank, tactile weight. Like a statement-sized monolith. My fingerprints disturbed its surface upon inspection and quickly faded.

Inside, a single Polaroid captured the hallway of my apartment. The exposure was grainy, like an artifact from decades gone by. Yet a dense, inky black mass occupied the upper right side of the frame. It was an amorphous, light-consuming void, floating approximately halfway down the hallway, anchored to the top edge of the wall against the ceiling.

By morning, a dark, oily stain bled into the wallpaper exactly where the mass had hovered. The sharp, stinging scent of sulfur rose from the drywall, like a struck match refusing to go out.

A second envelope appeared 2 or 3 days later. This one depicted the bedroom, taken from a high, impossible angle. I didn't know anyone tall enough to take this photo and no load-bearing furniture stood in that part of the room. The shape had evolved. Along its fraying edges, dozens of tiny, wet pinpricks of light reflected back. Uncanny lidless eyes gazed from the darkness. It hovered directly over me while I slept.

Within hours, the ceiling above the bed began to change. A thick, obsidian residue seeped through the plaster, and the air grew heavy with that same distinctly foul scent sinking into the pillows and sheets.

I called my sister, landlord and best friend in an effort to corroborate my reality. Nobody could see the stains or sense any odor. They all said this was probably just a prank and dismissively reassured me about the photos. Technology in the wrong hands often lead to tawdry and aimless criminal mischief. But why me? Why my apartment? Who was this?

A frantic attempt at reclamation followed. Armed with caustic cleaners and stiff brushes, the effort was angry and desperate. Both black, glistening stains seemed to resist at first, but finally faded under persistent chemical onslaughts. For one hour, my apartment smelled only of bleach and Lysol. I had to open several windows and run fans in almost every room. The sulfurous stench receded and the walls were cleaner than when I moved in. I'd never cleaned a ceiling before in my life.

Relief lasted only a few days.

The third photo, about a week from the first, showed the living room in its current state: clean, except for just above my couch. The manifestation was no longer a simple shadow. It had developed complex, multi-jointed appendages. In the shot, the mass draped towards the head rest, its spindly extensions uncoiling downward, tips hovering a hair’s breadth from the top edge.

Then, in all three spaces, the stains had returned. Each approximately the same shape as the apparitions pictured. Unholy pheremonal residue bled back through the fibers thicker than before. The repugnant stench returned, this time somehow more advanced, now accompanied by a faint yet deep hum echoing from behind the drywall.

With a double-gloved hand, I tried tracing the dampest part of the stain, pressing careful every few centimeters. As adhesive dissolved, wallpaper began to roll back and peel, plaster soaked and growing increasingly soft. I grabbed surgical masks from the bathroom and an aluminum baseball bat from under the bed before slugging repeatedly through odorous sludgy pulp, revealing a deep, silent darkness. It was a cosmic stillness that did not belong in any home. A quiet space pulling at the very edges of time.

The drones grew stronger from soft vibrations that shook the floorboards to defiant psychoacoustics engulfing other senses. Whatever this was, atmosphere and human perception bent to its whim. Shadows reached impossible depth. The absence of light were eventually writhing tentacled masses reaching out and guiding me towards patient oblivion. The transition was almost complete. True infinite nothingness became baseline and new hyper-sensory connections emerged. Time and space no longer mattered. I was something else somewhere else, among beings I couldn't previously recognize or interpret.

The last thing visible before light disappeared entirely was the final Polaroid fluttering to the floor. It showed the room completely empty, the walls pristine, and a single, heavy envelope waiting on the rug.