The Shape of the Exhibit

Jennie didn't scream. She whimpered, a low, guttural sound that scratched at the back of Ethan's throat as he fumbled with the emergency shut-off panel. Her hands, or what he could still recognise as hands, were pressed against the 'sculpture' – a term that now felt utterly, sickeningly inadequate. It shimmered, a non-Euclidean construct of polished obsidian and what looked like frozen light, except it wasn't frozen. It was *moving*.

Outside the gallery's massive glass façade, the winter night had swallowed the city whole, a thick, insistent snowfall blurring the edges of the world. Inside, the world was blurring too, but from within. The 'exhibit' was no longer confined to its plinth. It was breathing.

“The power’s not cutting!” Ethan yelled, his voice cracking, the words feeling futile even as he said them. He slammed his palm against the panel, a useless gesture against whatever force was preventing the circuits from breaking. Sparks spat from the conduits, smelling of burnt plastic and something else… something metallic and sickly sweet. He glanced back at Jennie. Her face was pressed against the undulating surface, her eyes wide, unblinking, reflecting geometries that no human brain was built to process.

The Unfolding Geometry

Maxine stumbled through the warped doorway of Gallery Three, her breath catching in her chest, a strangled sound. The pristine white walls of her non-profit gallery, her life’s work, were now rippling like water. Paint flaked off in impossible spirals, curling into itself before dissolving into the air. The temperature in the room had plummeted, yet a sickly, wet heat seemed to emanate from the sculpture's core. Every fibre of her being screamed to run, but her feet were rooted, witnessing the horrifying culmination of Jennie’s grant application.

“Jennie, get away from it!” Maxine screamed, her voice a thin, reedy thing against the low, thrumming hum that vibrated through the floorboards, up her bones. The hum wasn't a sound, not really. It was a pressure, a physical presence that pushed against her eardrums, her teeth.

Jennie didn’t respond. Her shoulders trembled. A thin, dark line, like a hairline crack in ancient ice, began to spread from her forehead, tracing a path down her cheek. It pulsed faintly with the same unnatural light as the exhibit itself. A wave of profound, arctic dread washed over Maxine. This wasn’t an artistic performance anymore. This was a surrender.

Ethan yanked at a thick cable, his hands slipping on the frozen, slick plastic. “It’s drawing power from… everywhere! The grid! It’s feeding!” His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, despite the biting cold. He stared at the main conduit, now glowing with an internal, sickly green light. The wires within were writhing, like trapped serpents.

A small, quiet clicking sound drew Maxine's gaze to the far corner. Frankie. The young artist, usually so timid, was there, a battered digital camera pressed to their eye. Their hands, though shaking, were steady on the lens. The flash flickered, a tiny, inadequate burst of white light swallowed by the profound, unnatural darkness that now clung to the corners of the room. Frankie was documenting it, compelled, drawn into the surreal horror unfolding around them. Maxine saw it in their eyes – not just fear, but a bizarre, almost reverent fascination.

“Frankie, stop!” Maxine cried, but the words felt meaningless, lost in the hum. Frankie didn't even flinch. Another click. Another flash. The exhibit seemed to *react* to the light, its impossible angles sharpening, its surfaces deepening into an infinite, obsidian void.

Echoes of Nothingness

Ethan stumbled backwards, tripping over a coil of disconnected cable. The floor. It wasn’t flat anymore. A subtle curve had begun, rising towards the sculpture, as if the entire concrete slab was slowly, imperceptibly, being pulled inward. He scrambled, pushing himself up, his eyes darting from the writhing wires to Jennie. The crack on her face had widened, and now, from within the fissure, a faint, internal glow pulsed, mirroring the exhibit. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out, just a silent, desperate gasp. Her body had begun to angle itself unnaturally, mimicking the exhibit's impossible geometry.

He had to do something. Anything. He lunged for a fire extinguisher, his fingers fumbling with the pin. It felt useless, pathetic, but it was *something*. He’d fight the impossible with foam and CO2. The absurdity of it made a choked laugh catch in his throat, a raw, desperate sound.

Maxine felt the cold seep into her bones, not just the temperature, but a deeper, existential chill. The glass wall of the gallery, moments before a barrier to the blizzard, was now a rippling surface of impossible refractions. Outside, the snow wasn’t falling *down* anymore. It was swirling *into* the glass, dissolving on contact with the shifting surface, leaving behind traces of dark, oily residue. The city lights beyond, usually a comforting blur, were distorting, stretching, becoming elongated, skeletal fingers reaching through the snow-laden air. They were losing the outside, just as they were losing the inside.

“This isn’t… art,” Maxine whispered, the words catching in her dry throat. Her hand went to her phone, a useless brick now. No signal. Of course. How could a signal penetrate *this*? The hum intensified, vibrating her teeth, her very skull. Frankie, oblivious, or perhaps entranced, kept clicking, capturing the horror. The camera seemed to be the only thing operating normally in a world that had ceased to be normal. They were documenting the impossible, a visual suicide note to a reality that was actively disassembling itself.

One of the gallery's steel support beams groaned, a sound of tortured metal, but the groan wasn't mechanical. It sounded… wet. Like a massive, ancient beast stirring. The beam visibly warped, not bending, but twisting into a helix that didn't match its original structure. Cracks spider-webbed across the ceiling, but they didn’t look like simple plaster cracks. They pulsed, too, with that same sickly light, mapping out new, unholy constellations above them.

Ethan sprayed the extinguisher. The white cloud billowed, hissing, but it didn’t touch the exhibit. It didn’t even reach it. The foam seemed to dissipate mid-air, dissolving into nothingness a foot from the undulating surface, as if an invisible wall of pure *wrongness* surrounded it. The hum grew into a roar, a silent, internal scream. Jennie let out a shuddering breath, her body now angled at nearly ninety degrees to itself, her limbs elongating, her skin tightening over sharp, new angles.

Frankie’s camera clicked one last time, the flash illuminating a single, terrible moment. A protrusion. From the sculpture's obsidian core, where Jennie's face had been pressed, a new form was emerging. Not a human form, not a familiar shape. It was a tentacled limb, iridescent and slick, impossibly long, impossibly segmented. It reached out, not for Jennie, but *from* her, as if she were merely the birthing vessel. The crack on her face flared, and her eyes, once wide with terror, now glowed with an alien, profound understanding, a terrible, unblinking awareness. The thing writhed, seeking purchase, testing the very air of their reality.

“What… what is that?” Ethan choked out, the extinguisher falling from his nerveless fingers, clattering to the distorted floor. The hum became a scream, a cosmic tearing, and the gallery walls began to buckle inward, not breaking, but *folding* upon themselves like wet paper. Maxine stared at the emerging horror, then at Jennie's transformed face, the awful, knowing light in her eyes. The tentacle moved, impossibly fast, impossibly smooth, and then the air shrieked, a sound not from lungs but from the fabric of space itself, as the thing stretched, reaching, reaching for something far beyond their comprehension, far beyond the confines of their collapsing world.

The glass wall, moments before distorting, now simply wasn't there. Only a vast, swirling vortex of absolute blackness remained, framed by the collapsing edges of the gallery. And from that void, something else stirred, a formless, impossible mass of pure shadow and cold. It was coming through.