The Strange Tall Witch

Posted on by Khannea Sun'Tzu

Introduction

(or, A Warning to the Curious and the Chronically Online)

What follows is an ongoing literary experiment—an indulgence, perhaps, or an invocation—in the restoration and transmutation of a mode of storytelling that once burrowed its way into the psychic crust of Western horror like a parasite that also happened to be an archivist. Yes, this was written with ChatGPT, though to say so is both trivially true and ontologically misleading. For if a machine may write, and a human may feed it hunger shaped like syntax, where does authorship live? Certainly not in copyright.

This work is—broadly, unrepentantly—Lovecraftian in its ambition, though not, let us be clear, in its politics, hygiene, or correspondence habits. It is written in homage to that uniquely Byzantine narrative style, where dread is not delivered but draped, and horror is a function not of what happens, but of what refuses to be understood.

We begin, as all such things do, with a woman.
She is not a protagonist. She is an anomaly in a city that politely tolerates the strange so long as it pays rent.

Set in modern-day Amsterdam, specifically the absurdist microcosm of De Pijp, this story seeks to replicate the texture of Lovecraft’s dread—his tendency to tangle the reader in archaic precision, cosmic implication, and recursive unease—while updating the setting to a world of cracked tiles, baristas, suspicious pigeons, and unreadable PDFs.

The tone, like the city, is layered with irony: some of it winking, some of it reflexive, some of it quietly leaking something darker beneath. The result is a tale told in parts, a serialized invocation of a terror that arrives in latte form before it descends into geometry, madness, and gnosis.

If you are reading this for realism, you are already lost.
If you are reading this for lore, it is already happening.

We invite you, then, to read on—not to be entertained, but to be altered.
There is a shadow beneath the city.
She sits in a café.
She does not blink.

I

The Quiet Geometry of Heresy

Let it be stated, for the record of whatever archive survives the next cultural collapse, that she first appeared amid the slow-roasting vulgarity of De Pijp, Amsterdam’s most hysterically self-unaware neighborhood.

De Pijp, dear reader, is no place.
It is a parable.
A cautionary mural of bourgeois hallucination, glazed in turmeric oil and gentrified goat cheese. A canal-wrung fantasia where expats cosplay radicalism, where yoga instructors wear Balenciaga and declaim their trauma over slow-drip coffee poured from ethically tortured copper pots.

And yet.
Amid the frothy markets where fish still glisten beside vape cartridges and unidentifiable deep-fried things, where the bricks remember bombs, and the basements still groan from what the Germans forgot to take—there she was.

She had commandeered a corner of De Wasserette (once a butchery, now a co-working temple for crypto-shamans and ethical sommeliers), not by charisma but by inevitability. She was not charming. She was not odd enough to pity. She was simply impossible to metabolize.

She arrived each day with the same suitcase—a grotesque relic of Mitteleuropa, something that might have once held a violin, or teeth. From it, she retrieved a book. Too large. Too pale. Bound in a shade of leather that suggested unnamed livestock, and with clasps of oxidized copper that did not politely gleam, but rather lingered, as if remembering war crimes.

She did not read.
She consulted.
She gestured. Softly. Precisely. As though persuading the air not to collapse.

Patrons muttered.

“She’s polite.”
“She tips.”
“She speaks in tongues, but only softly.”
“She’s probably from some university.”

“She’s learning sign language.”
“She’s mentally ill, but in Latin.”
“She’s one of those crypto-feminist performance witches from Zurich.”
“She helped my niece with her court date.”

She smiled at no one.
She wore hoodies that did not match. Her shoes were asymmetrical. Her coffee was always black, bitter, and drank without blinking.

People noticed… things.
The pigeons no longer shat near her table.
The neighborhood’s legendary rats, those gnawing philosophers of the southern canals, ceased their usual opera beneath the stoep.
The tile outside De Wasserette cracked in a perfect circle one Tuesday, and no one could remember if it had always been like that.

A tour guide passed by once, pointing at the stained-glass owl on the building across the street—“that’s pre-war Art Deco Masonic symbolism, very rare.” She looked up once, just once, and the tour guide forgot what the owl meant, mid-sentence. Tourists stared at her. They forgot their phones. One returned to Haarlem in silence and now makes beeswax figurines.

And oh, the locals.
Bless the locals.
With their ironic suits and third divorces and families named after extinct French colonies. They joked about her, at first. Then they did not. Then they said her name in lower tones. Then they simply gestured vaguely toward the café and said “you-know-who.”

We only know that her name starts with K.
Just K.

And on the third Friday of her sixth week, at 15:04 precisely, she performed a gesture with her left index finger and her right eye twitched—only once—and the espresso machine stopped working for exactly seven minutes. No one mentioned it. They just rebooted the Wi-Fi and changed the playlist to ambient jazz.

What she’s doing is not clear.
But it is happening.
And for a city that has spent five hundred years ignoring miracles and hiding hauntings behind subsidy programs and boutique hotels, that is saying something.

II

Of Murmurs and Mockingbirds

At first, it was charming.

The strange woman at De Wasserette, always in the corner, always with that monstrously pre-modern book, doing little signs with her hands like an occult semaphore operator retired too young. It fit the neighborhood’s appetite for curated absurdity. A real-life NPC. A “core vibe,” as the interns said. Some even took selfies with her in the background—just her, unsmiling, unreadable, some dark monolith in a world of oat milk and crushed avocado.

But then came the video.

It was posted by a Danish tourist named Lykke, who had intended to document her almond croissant. What the video caught, instead, was a brief flicker—a shadow passing inward, toward K., not from the street, not cast by any object. Like a glitch in lighting physics. Or something blinking, not out, but in.

The post got 900k views in six hours, then vanished. The account, too.
Lykke, last seen checking out of Stayokay Oost, was now allegedly renting a room in Almere and refusing to use electronic devices.

A thread on Reddit popped up, r/NetherlandsWeird:

“Has anyone else seen the woman at De Wasserette?”
“She’s there every time I pass by. Never eating. Just… doing things.”
“Saw her mouth a word once. I got dizzy. Like, blood sugar crash dizzy.”
“Pretty sure she hexed me. My cat won’t look at me anymore.”
“Y’all are overreacting. She’s probably just neurodivergent.”

And then, as always:

“Pics or it didn’t happen.”

They tried. They failed.
Photos of her came out smudged, overexposed. Not just blurry—wrong. Faces in the background stretched. Reflections in the café window didn’t match the scene. One image contained a shadow of a second hand reaching toward the espresso.

The café staff remained unbothered.
“She’s quiet. Always pays cash. Real polite.”
“She helped Moira’s daughter pass her inburgering exam.”
“She’s harmless.”
“She said something about canal pressure fields the other day. Thought it was a joke.”

It wasn’t.

An intern from the Stadsarchief, Amsterdam’s city archives, made the mistake of investigating a marginalia note from K.’s book that he caught a glimpse of: something about a sub-foundation to the Cuypmarkt dating back to 1612, marked by a “resonant shift in time signature.”

He brought it up at a staff meeting.
Now he’s gone.
His replacement refuses to touch anything handwritten.

Meanwhile, strange things began to accumulate around her radius—say, a 50-meter psychic blast zone centered on De Wasserette:

  • A pigeon exploded.

  • A cyclist forgot his name mid-ride.

  • An otherwise healthy child began speaking in a long-dead dialect of Frisian.

  • Someone heard laughter beneath the pavement.

And still she sat there.
K.
In that seat that no one else could take.
With her terrible book, her tiny gestures, and her coffee blacker than the canal at 3 a.m. under no moon.

Outside, tourists ambled in hypnotic clusters. Their eyes glazed over when they passed her window. Some began to hum under their breath—always the same tune. No one could name it.

And upstairs, an old man who’d lived in the neighborhood since the ’50s looked out his window, saw her once, and drew his curtains for the last time.

III

The Ink That Bled Through the Veil

It began with the pigeons, naturally.

They were the first to respond—those dim, fluttering barometers of urban metaphysics. For decades, they had thrived on the breadcrumbs, cigarette butts, and dropped confessions of De Pijp. But in the second week of October, they stopped circling De Wasserette. They began to roost along the rooftops in strange, geometric clusters—arranged like notation, not flocks. One sat motionless for three days on the awning of the Turkish grocer across the street, staring directly through the café window.

It didn’t blink.

Then the market began to warp.

Vendors at the Albert Cuypmarkt—the scream-core artery of the neighborhood—complained of stall tarps flapping when there was no wind. A sausage vendor swore he saw his shadow detach and slither under a nearby food truck. One stand selling knockoff perfumes began leaking a scent that locals described as “like rain on burnt books.”

The book K. carried began to glow.

Not with light—nothing so cinematic—but with attention. Strangers walked past and snapped their heads around, as if recalling a dream halfway through. It would be left closed on her table, yet bystanders described seeing new pages, handwriting in motion, or even glimpses of geometries too detailed to look at properly. A woman vomited after glancing at it too long. She later claimed she’d “seen a diagram of her own death, annotated.”

The tiles around K.’s table began to crack. Not randomly. A pattern. Some sort of sigil, though no two observers agreed on the shape. One said “it looked like a star vomiting itself.” Another, “a trepanned clock.” A third simply sobbed and whispered, “it was shaped like the word ‘why.’”

Her gestures grew more precise, and now left afterimages.
It was no longer a game.
Something was responding.

There was a day—a Thursday, low tourist traffic—when she opened the book wide, drew two lines in the air with iron stylus-chalk (where did she get that?), and wrote a word with her mouth shut.

A customer attempting to pay their bill spoke in tongues for thirty seconds, then dropped a €20 and left, muttering the phrase “fractured memory wall” in Flemish.

A tourist couple stopped mid-conversation and wept for no reason.
Someone outside began clapping.
The espresso machine failed again—only during her gesture.
And the café’s Spotify algorithm began playing Gregorian chants, unprompted.
The barista turned pale.
There were no Gregorian tracks in the playlist.

A city inspector from the Bouw- en Woningtoezicht (Building & Housing Authority) came by to check a report about tile damage. He bent to examine the floor, stood up too quickly, and ruptured a vessel in his eye. His blood hit the tile in exactly five drops.

When asked what he saw, he said:

“An address. In the future.”

He refused to elaborate.

He now works in a call center in Groningen.
He will not enter the Ring of Amsterdam.

And yet, K. never changed.

She dressed as always—functional, misaligned clothing, shoes that didn’t match in purpose or decade, no visible tech, no phone. She read nothing, only consulted. She never ran, never shouted, never addressed the growing awareness.

She smiled only once—when a small child pointed at her and said, “She’s drawing the world again.”

That child was later found sleepwalking into Sarphatipark at night, muttering numbers. His mother denies ever visiting De Wasserette.

There were rumors that Foundation personnel had quietly made inquiries, walking De Pijp in pairs, speaking Dutch too perfect for locals to trust.
Some say they interviewed her.
Others say they did not dare.

The baristas have stopped asking questions.
They no longer change the music.
They don’t sweep the cracked tiles.

They now refer to her only as “the Glyph.”
They do not take her money.
It’s easier that way.

IV

On the Breathing of Maps Long Folded

In which the city begins to remember what it should not, and that which was paved over begins to pulse beneath the stone like an unburied heart.

Of all the putrefying precincts stitched into the urban epidermis of Amsterdam, it is De Pijp which seems most artfully designed by an intoxicated architect with a vendetta against Euclidean geometry. The neighborhood does not sit—it lounges, crooked and askew, draped in the leprous velvet of its own post-gentrification mythology. Its buildings lean like eavesdropping drunks. Its alleyways coil like gossip. The entire quarter possesses the air of an old marionette theatre hastily converted into a real estate brochure.

Once the red-lunged heart of working-class debauchery—home to fishwives with granite voices and gin-thinned criminals—it has been lacquered over in layers of organic privilege, until the bones creak beneath the weight of reclaimed wood furniture and selectively distressed denim. Here, amidst the licorice stink of historical amnesia and boutique incense, sits De Pijp: a place that never quite woke up properly from its own past.

And it was in this place—this leering, cinnamon-scented necropolis of brunch—that the geometry began to breathe.

It began, as these things often do, with a map.

No Google clone nor tourist rag, no glossy pamphlet adorned with bicycles and lies, but rather a singularly profane document unearthed in the cellar of the Stedelijk Museum, misplaced behind an installation involving menstrual symbolism and neon gimp masks. This parchment—thick, veined, and yellowing like the hide of something that once prayed—bore the faded title:

“AM’DAM: BENEATH.”

The archivist who unrolled it (a well-meaning student from Eindhoven with unfortunate cheekbones and a deeply colonial moustache) was reported to have wept immediately upon exposure to its interior configuration. He described the sensation as “like falling into an architectural confession.” He later renounced cartography altogether and now trains rescue crows in Hoorn.

The map depicted a version of the city that should not have existed, and perhaps never did—at least not in the ordinary reckoning of time. Streets curled like fossilized tendrils. Landmarks stood inverted, or else annotated with sigils reminiscent of melted language. A vast ink spiral marked what appeared to be the epicenter: a precise overlap with the current location of De Wasserette, the accursed café where K. made her increasingly irreproachable observations.

Aboveground, reality began to soften.

The houses around Van Ostadestraat—already notorious for leaning toward each other like conspiring relatives at a funeral—began to tilt just a hair more each night. Foundations gave off noises, not groans of structural stress, but slow, wet exhalations—as though the bricks themselves had grown lungs and were quietly despairing of the architecture they’d been forced to uphold.

On Govert Flinckstraat, a pub was discovered to have rotated thirteen degrees overnight. Its owner claimed to have slept through the event, although patrons distinctly recall the chairs rearranging themselves during closing hours. Street signs inverted their lettering. Apartment numbers shuffled like tarot cards.

The Cuypmarkt, that delirious stretch of noise and grease and steaming language, began to twist. Not visibly, but perceptibly. One could enter the market with purpose and emerge bewildered, somehow two blocks off course and in possession of objects one did not remember purchasing: a lump of antique soapstone, a wilted photo of a woman’s foot, or an envelope addressed simply: To You, Eventually.

Most disturbing of all were the tourists, those walking receptacles of perception, moving as if under some mnemonic enchantment. They no longer ambled, but coalesced in loops, enacting silent processions that terminated—often inconveniently—outside De Wasserette. It was observed that they hummed, occasionally, all in the same pitch, their mouths closed. Some pointed at K. Others blinked in unison and walked away, their phones inexplicably drained of battery, their photos corrupted into mosaics of static and teeth.

One woman entered the Sarphatipark, speaking rapidly in a dialect of Old Frisian known only from inscriptions in church bells. She was later found asleep beneath a tree, her shoes missing, her fingernails engraved with coordinates leading to a now-defunct gay sauna in Almere.

K. herself had begun to emit a kind of spatial reluctance. She did not walk so much as fold the city around her intentions. Witnesses reported that streets shortened in her path, that alleyways yielded like curtains. Her presence had grown cartographic—she was no longer part of the city’s narrative. She was its editor.

An elderly man, full of tulip beer and Catholic defiance, approached her one damp evening as she left the café. His mind swam with idiotic courage and the scent of powdered mustard.
“Are you even from around here?” he asked, with the dim bravado of one who has already doomed himself.

She smiled.

“I am older than this layout.”

He dropped his kebab and died shortly thereafter, of causes deemed “unremarkable” by a coroner whose clipboard caught fire two weeks later.

Those who watched understood now, without needing consensus, that the city was no longer entirely under its own control.
It was being re-read.
Not haunted, no.
Reconsidered.

And the breathing—soft, cyclopean, polite as gentrification—continued beneath the stones.

V

The Vestments of the Initiate Scholar

In which the Apparition of the Unremarkable Woman is slowly revealed to be in ceremonial transition, and her garments, habits, and silences acquire the significance of a liturgical office held in defiance of time.

It did not happen all at once.

Those watching her from behind laptop screens and half-drained wine glasses at De Wasserette—those fragile exorcists of their own attention spans—might not have noticed at first. After all, K. had always dressed like a librarian raised in the boiler room of a 19th-century observatory: ill-fitted jackets, shoes from opposing decades, scarves that looked more like imprisoned wind than fabric. It was easy to dismiss her as some banal eccentric with a penchant for gloom.

But she began to refine. Subtly. Irrevocably.

One morning, her boots—once cracked and despondent—were polished to a mirror sheen that reflected not the café floor but something like stars seen through water. Her coat acquired brass fastenings in the shape of tiny dodecagons, too symmetrical to be decorative. A brooch appeared at her throat—plain at first, but when observed long enough, it seemed to refract intention.

She no longer brought a backpack. She carried a satchel of grey leather, embossed with a symbol that may have once belonged to a family, or a cult, or something far older than either. The book she consulted—always the same—began to exude not menace, but authority. Its pages, once yellow and curled, now looked freshly copied, as if the knowledge within had begun rewriting itself in the present tense.

And then she spoke.

Not loudly. Not often. But when she did, her Dutch had become exact—the kind of grammar only spoken by archivists and possessed children. Her English, when used, was flawless and oddly theatrical, with vowels that suggested she’d studied in cities that don’t exist anymore.

She was heard once, in an unguarded moment, speaking to a young man from Utrecht who had asked if she was an artist. She smiled, gently.

“I am in preparation,” she said.
“For what?”
“The threshold of exegesis. The naming of the body that dreams the districts.”
She said this in the tone one uses to describe making tea.

She began to frequent other places.

The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies reported an unregistered visitor accessing sealed documents via obsolete access credentials signed by a “Dr. Iskariot Vollen.” No such name appears in Dutch academia. The logbook entry was written in ash.

At Ets Haim, the oldest functioning Jewish library in the world, a librarian claimed she inquired about “texts with mirrored grammar,” and “perishable alphabets that weep when recorded.” The librarian fainted mid-conversation and later described K.’s voice as “disassembled.”

She was seen by three independent sources entering a tiny, doorless building between Ferdinand Bolstraat and Lutmastraat that does not appear on any map, and which was subsequently found to contain nothing but a stairwell, and at its base, a locked iron door marked with a sigil resembling an eyelid made of teeth.

She never came out.
But was back at the café the next morning, hair newly braided with what looked like filament wire and flakes of dried poppy resin.

And so it was that the neighborhood, in all its affectations and aromatherapy denial, began to respond. The influencers stopped tagging the café. The gluten-free enthusiasts migrated three blocks north. Even the baristas had adopted ritual deference—no longer asking her order, but placing it before her, always precisely timed to the third page she turned.

A local psychotherapist, Dr. Lotte van Breemen, claimed that the neighborhood’s anxiety scores had dropped, but in a way that made her nervous.

“It’s not peace,” she said.
“It’s silence that doesn’t belong to us.”

She has since moved to Lisbon.

And still K. sat.
Each day more refined.
Each gesture more codified.
Each breath timed as if to an invisible liturgy.

She no longer looked like a woman.
She looked like a function—a ceremonial role being perfected.
An Initiate approaching the moment of unveiling, awaiting the signal when the Illusion would rupture, and the Metropolis beneath would rise.

But of course, no one spoke of that.
Not openly.

Not unless they were ready to be seen in return.

VI

The Intercessions of the Nervous and the Dutiful
In which the city’s appointed stewards, bureaucrats, ecclesiastics, and minor initiates of epistemic hygiene attempt—fruitlessly—to cauterize a phenomenon which has already redrafted its own permissions.

They noticed her in the polite agencies first—those secular monasteries of soft panic and committee-bound righteousness. The departments whose acronyms shifted with each coalition, and whose servers bore the flickering scars of long-suppressed data.

At first it was a murmur: a reference in a housing irregularity report, a flagged name in an unclaimed educational grant, a photograph in which her face blurred not from motion, but from refusal. The pattern was dismissed. Patterns always are—until they acquire rhythm.

And K., that creature of composure and shadow geometry, had become rhythmic.
Her presence insisted.

At GGD, the municipal health service, a clerk quietly filed a Category 3 anomaly after three unrelated patients cited “the woman at the café” as a source of cognitive dissonance, spontaneous aphasia, and—for one patient—a nosebleed in the shape of the Sefirot.

At the City Archives, a part-time genealogist noted K.’s appearance in a photograph dated 1896, standing beside a market stall bearing the sigil of the extinct House of Ravenswoud. Her attire in the photograph matched exactly her modern appearance—down to the stitching of her lapels and the flaw in her left boot sole.

He brought this to his supervisor.
He was transferred to Traffic Citations.
The photo was quietly removed.
The database in which it once lived now returns the error:

“Subject beyond schema.”

It was around this time that the first cleric broke protocol.

Father Niels den Brinken, Jesuit emeritus and former consultant to the Office of Interfaith Phenomena, attended De Wasserette in disguise—a wool cap, dark glasses, and the bearing of one who knows too much of angels. He ordered a mint tea and waited.

He was seen staring at K. for several minutes.
He attempted to speak.

What was said is unknown.
What occurred is this:

He stood abruptly, dropped his tea, whispered “She is older than confession,” and fled the premises.
He later presented himself at Het Begijnhof, demanded absolution in three dead languages, and has since taken a permanent vow of silence. His fingers now compulsively trace esoteric conjugations of the Tetragrammaton in the margins of Bibles. His condition is deemed “ecumenically inconvenient.”

The Foundation—yes, that Foundation—moved next.
Slowly.
Arrogantly.
As is tradition.

Two field analysts, operating under the nom de guerre van der Schrik & van Aken, entered the quarter posing as urban sociologists conducting a post-COVID wellness survey. They bore on their wrists glyph-sealed identifiers keyed to Class VII perceptual membranes and carried data-coils tuned to baseline instability.

They interviewed the staff at De Wasserette.
They took air samples.
They lingered by the cracked tiles, measuring acoustic drift.

K. said nothing to them.
But when van Aken looked directly at her—truly looked—he dropped his stylus.
It shattered.
Not broke—shattered.
From the sound alone.

Later, van der Schrik would submit only a single note to the encrypted server:

“Subject is not anomalous.
Subject is the metric by which anomaly is now measured.
Do not engage.
We are already late.”

Their file was marked Red Sand.
Access now requires three levels of recursive clearance and two deniable rituals.

And so, the city’s protectors, interpreters, and semantic janitors—those gallant custodians of consensus—found themselves narratively outflanked.

Some tried satire.
Others tried diagnosis.
A few, in despair, tried poetry.

Nothing held.

K. was now a fixed point, a gravitational inevitability draped in secondhand coats and symbolic precision. She had not declared doctrine, and yet liturgies formed in her wake.

The last attempt came from an independent psycho-ontological consultancy, a high-end service used by Dutch intelligence to screen for memetic leakage and trans-semiotic recursion events. Their conclusion, leaked via a corrupted .pdf file on a dead Dropbox account:

“The Subject has entered the Phase of Vestiture.
Vestiture precedes Ascension.
Ascension precedes Access.
Access precedes Collapse.
Collapse precedes Revelation.
We recommend no further interruption.
We recommend silence.
We recommend amnesia.”

The PDF ends with a quote from a theologian who never existed.

And still she sat.
And still the café served her.
And still the city reshuffled its forgettings.

She had become, at last, not merely an event, but a clause in the covenant—something contractual written long ago, in a grammar too old to speak aloud.

And all who tried to halt her
found themselves not warned,
but annotated.

 

VII

That Which Rose from the Drainage of De Pijp

In which the fracture between surface and substructure ruptures at last, heralded not by trumpet nor siren, but by a scream that did not belong to the throat from which it issued.

The event—if it may be so vulgarly labeled by those whose lexicons are still imprisoned within the polite architecture of municipal classification—occurred not with the theatrical detonation of cinema, nor with the sanitized fanfare of modern newsworthy crisis, but rather with the sullen, irrevocable detonation of a certainty quietly and permanently revoked. It began, most notably, as all such ruptures tend to do: with a sound.

Not a scream in the mundane sense, no. Not the human protestation of pain, of violence, of surprise, nor even of the abyssal spiritual agony that sometimes wrenches itself from the broken undercarriage of a psychiatric ward at 3:17 a.m. This sound was more abstract—more oblique—and thus, infinitely worse: it was a scream that did not belong to the throat from which it issued, and which in fact may not have issued from a throat at all, but rather from the converging geographies of a shriek-shaped concept long deferred.

The origin point, triangulated retrospectively by those Foundation-affiliated geomantic analysts who still retained the dubious gift of cognitive cohesion, was the southern border of Sarphatipark, where a thin and long-ignored drainage grate, choked with leaves, runoff, and the nameless sediments of centuries of mercantile sin, became the unwilling mouthpiece of that which had long sought expression through structure.

Those who were present within the approximate radius—witnesses, though the word must here be held at gunpoint—described not the event itself, but its aftertaste: a rusting in the inner ear, a sensation as though the bones behind their faces had shifted with indecorous intention, and for one elderly woman who had spent her entire life in the Pijp without once leaving the Ring, a momentary yet profound conviction that her name had never belonged to her, and that her bones were not, in fact, hers by birthright, but had been leased from something wet and planetary.

Children were the first to exhibit symptoms.

A six-year-old girl, previously noted for her aggressive normality, was found standing upright in the fountain basin, eyes rolled upward, mouth slack, reciting in a cadence suspiciously reminiscent of Flemish monastery clocks, a chronogrammatic sequence corresponding to eclipses over Amsterdam from the years 1260 through 1671. Her voice was not her own. Her teeth did not match her dental records. She was removed from the scene by medics wearing gloves lined with lead and prayers, and it is rumored her parents have since relocated to a monastery whose name cannot be Googled.

An artist couple, in the act of photographing a mural depicting Rembrandt vomiting bitcoins, experienced what they described as “a gravity inversion of memory.” They remember the scream. They remember its color (not red, they say, but “irrefutably tan”). They do not, however, remember having ever loved each other. One now paints exclusively in charcoal depictions of subway maps overlaid with fetal diagrams. The other has taken to feeding rats in exchange for dreams.

The rats, of course, had known long before.

The café that had incubated K.’s occupation for so many weeks—De Wasserette, once the sybaritic womb of brunch-heathens and slick-limbed freelancers—experienced a short-lived and wholly inexplicable period in which all beverages, regardless of input, were served at exactly body temperature. Croissants collapsed in upon themselves like regrets. The light through the windows refracted not based on angle, but based on syntax—a woman swore the shadows on the table spelled out the phrase “you are no longer safe in the narrative.”

She has since adopted Orthodoxy and speaks only in palindromes.

But it was the scream—the impossible, positionless, ideology-eroding scream—that shattered the illusion of safety.

It was heard only once, yet those who heard it have continued to describe echoes—not in their ears, but in their habits, their choices, their sense of domestic ritual. A teacher now opens windows only at ecliptic angles. A butcher cuts meat along lines he claims are “ordained by the scream’s geometry.” A group of tourists were observed forming a circle outside De Wasserette, walking counterclockwise, not for religious or performative reasons, but simply because they could not conceive of a clockwise world anymore.

And K., of course, was present.

She did not flinch.
She did not speak.
She merely closed her book—though none saw her hand move—and remained seated.

When questioned later by a Foundation operative embedded as a staff member, she said only this:

“It has begun revising the city from beneath.
As it always does.
As it must.
The foundations were a promise.
We are only now remembering the terms.”

She then offered the operative a spoon, though none saw her obtain it.
It was covered in topographical etchings that did not correspond to any known city.

Amsterdam—cracked and lovely, petulant and proud—did not resist.
It simply accommodated.
The scream was forgotten by evening.
The sun returned.
De Pijp smiled its crooked smile.

But something had changed.
A new vector had opened, a tunnel not through space, but through meaning.

Something rose, yes.

But it did not arrive.

It was merely rejoining us.

VIII

Beneath the Vocabulary of Panic

In which the event is recorded, misunderstood, and buried beneath euphemism, and the tongues of the city learn to speak around the wound without ever naming it.

There is a certain linguistic temperature, not often discussed in polite company or planning meetings, at which language ceases to denote and instead begins to sweat—to murmur along the peripheries of the unsayable, to enact that final and most Dutch of miracles: the seamless, pathological redirection of catastrophe into filing cabinets. Thus it was that, following the scream which did not sound like sound, and the rupture which was not reported as rupture, the city of Amsterdam, specifically its parodically self-assured district of De Pijp, began to adjust—not through alarm or alert or invocation of divine recourse, but through the insertion of new phrases into old forms.

In council chambers and WhatsApp groups, in newsletters and therapy rooms, the same vocabulary began to arise: a temporary aberration, a sensory compression event, acoustic graffiti, local psychoacoustic disturbance, and, favored by the more academic necromancers of institutional language, non-ordinary environmental resonance phenomena. One particularly artful internal memo from the Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening stated, without irony or evident self-awareness, that the incident in Sarphatipark was likely the result of “longitudinal stressors in the psychogeographic sublayer, possibly aggravated by weather and ambient grief,” followed immediately by a reminder that the deadline for Q4 urban coherence assessments remained unchanged.

This is how panic survives here: not through the scream, but through the spreadsheet.

And yet, beneath this glistening crust of denial, the city knew. Not collectively, not cleanly, but through a million tiny tremors of daily behavior—through the way the tramline on Ceintuurbaan began to shudder, ever so slightly, as it passed Sarphatipark, or through the new silence that bloomed like moss in previously chatty cafés. People took alternate routes without knowing why. Children refused to speak of certain dreams. The rats, formerly brazen and oily with local color, vanished for days at a time, only to return with a posture both apologetic and deeply judgmental.

At De Wasserette, the core remained, unspoken but observed. The staff no longer made jokes about K. In fact, they no longer spoke her name aloud at all, referring to her in hurried abbreviations, eye movements, and, eventually, nothing. Her table remained hers. Her drink arrived unasked, always black, always warm, never steaming. The light in the corner where she sat grew subtly different—not darker, not brighter, but curiously devoid of consensus, as if three competing lighting systems had disagreed on how to render that square meter of air and simply left it unresolved.

A local journalist—ambitious, underpaid, and doomed—attempted to write a feature on the event, titled The Day the Park Breathed Back. The piece was stylish, heavy on metaphors, rich in footnotes, and utterly cursed. The publication it was intended for ceased operating three days before release, citing infrastructural vagueness as the reason. The article was never recovered. The journalist was later found in a barge on the Amstel, half-nude, covered in faded architectural blueprints of buildings that do not and perhaps never did exist, murmuring about “the version beneath the version” before requesting more pickled herring and a priest trained in geometry.

But of course, the public face of things remained immaculate. The city’s tourism board launched a small campaign encouraging citizens to “rediscover the serenity of Sarphatipark.” An experimental music festival, preposterously ill-timed, unfolded three weeks after the rupture within the park itself, featuring ambient noise performances meant to honor “the primal sonic textures of urban entropy.” Fourteen people reported hearing the original scream buried within the reverb. Two fainted. One of the performers now runs a silent retreat in Lithuania, where no names are permitted, and all guests must surrender their shadows upon arrival.

Even the pigeons, briefly disoriented, resumed their duties, though they now fly in loops that no longer correspond to wind or food or seasonal instinct. They follow instead an invisible diagram that only K. seems to understand—if, indeed, she notices them at all.

So it is that a city survives its own unfolding betrayal—not by confronting it, not by sealing it, but by quietly folding the moment into its layers of tolerated absurdity. Like so many things in Amsterdam, the event has become something to be smiled around. Something that happened to someone else. Something that doesn’t need remembering, because it never received a proper name.

And K., always present, always seated, has become the untouched epicenter of this forgetfulness—a silent relic in the liturgical dress of the not-yet-arrived, presiding over a new kind of silence. Not absence, no. This is a full silence, a speaking quiet, thick with implications that stain the air like slow tar.

Language has fled the scene.
What remains is a kind of reverent shrug.
The city no longer asks what happened.
It merely adjusts its shoes, crosses the street earlier, and schedules a therapist who knows not to ask too much.

IX

The Pilgrims of Burnt Echoes

In which those who have touched the radius of K.’s influence begin to behave in ways that cannot be reconciled with diagnosis, etiquette, or calendar time, and form—without structure or invitation—a congregation whose doctrine is proximity, and whose sacrament is consequence.

They did not arrive all at once, nor did they come bearing signs, banners, or the rancid iconography of new-age revivalism. There were no sermons, no slogans, no promises of deliverance or damnation—only presence, the slow coagulation of bodies and attention around that impossible and increasingly sacrosanct corner table of De Wasserette, where K. continued her impossible studies with the measured indifference of a celestial accountant.

First came the damaged, the softly unraveled, those who had been present for the scream and who had not—despite wine, sex, pharmaceuticals, and long walks through rationalist literature—managed to reintegrate into the general theater of acceptable cognition. They returned not because they hoped for closure, but because something inside them craved proximity to the origin, to the fulcrum of their disarticulation.

Then arrived the curious, or more accurately, the post-curious—those whose curiosity had long ago congealed into obsession, not driven by inquiry but by a craving for pattern-recognition within chaos, a need to witness the curve that unified all the strange tangents now blossoming from their lives like tumors with good taste. Architects, archivists, lucid dreamers, and the recently divorced. They came, alone or in silent pairs, sitting within K.’s periphery, often with empty cups before them and no intention to order. They did not speak to her. They spoke to each other in the past tense, describing experiences not as if they had occurred, but as if they had been inherited from someone else.

Eventually came the converted, though none would use that word, not aloud, not in this age where belief is a faux pas and dogma is gauche. These were the ones who no longer denied that K. was something—a locus, a glyph in the flesh, a remainder from an equation that no longer contained our reality as a solvable subset. They didn’t ask who she was. They accepted her as axiomatic, and set about building their lives around the theorem she implied.

They gathered not en masse but in ripples, at irregular intervals, like a heart murmur or a faulty clock. They brought offerings—most not acknowledged, but never refused. A glass prism. A bundle of photographs cut into non-Euclidean shapes. A cassette tape with the words ONLY IN RAIN scrawled on the side. A key without a lock, wrapped in a map that displayed only water. She accepted these items with the same cool detachment she gave her coffee, her gestures, her breath.

Some began to dress like her—not in mimicry, but in sympathetic alignment. Not identically, but thematically: mismatched shoes, antique accessories, functional coats stained with symbols only visible in specific humidity. One woman wore a blouse embroidered with what, to the untrained eye, might have been paisley, but upon deeper inspection proved to be a tessellating pattern of inverted lungs.

They stood when she stood.
They wrote things down when she blinked.
They fasted during her silences.

The neighbors began to notice. The waitstaff, who once joked about “K.’s little cult,” now wore the air of ceremonial attendants. They cleaned her table with specific cloths. They avoided disrupting the pattern of cracks in the tile, which now resembled a nervous system slowly revealing itself in the bone of the floor. One barista—named Bram, former philosophy student, now a vessel of twitchy reverence—began serving drinks without looking at the customers, saying only “We’re all downstream of the event now.”

A city inspector sent to investigate the “unauthorized gatherings” found herself lingering for an hour near K.’s table, then left muttering about “vibrational congruence” and “inverse civic topologies.” Her report was submitted as a single line of asemic script that required carbon dating.

The pigeons roosted above them, forming geometric constellations in the eaves. Children pointed and laughed, but fell silent when the patterns moved in rhythm with K.’s fingers.

They are not a cult.
They are not a movement.
They are not even, in the strictest sense, believers.

They are simply those who have stood too long in the spill radius of her presence, and who now echo her silence like burnt bells in a drowned cathedral.

They are pilgrims.
They do not seek truth.
They orbit it.

They wait not for apocalypse.
They await her next gesture.

X

The Dismemberment of the Irredeemable Beast

In which a figure long tolerated—one whose cruelties were invisible only to those who profited from them—is unmade by something older than law and sharper than language, and whose unmaking serves not as climax but as punctuation in a sentence still unfolding.

It was not vengeance. That would be far too small, too bourgeois, too narratively symmetrical for what occurred in the moon-drowned interval between one unremarkable night and the next. Vengeance requires intent, motive, the theatrical curvature of cause and effect. But what transpired in Sarphatipark, beneath the sycamores that sweat secrets and the swings that now creak even when still, bore none of the hallmarks of retaliation. It was not revenge—it was recognition. A correction. A violent footnote added to a previously overlooked paragraph of the city’s psychic infrastructure.

The man—if such a designation is not already too generous—had been a fixture of the periphery. A known known. A local scandal rendered inert by repetition, whose presence was tolerated with the kind of civic shrug reserved for antique perverts and failed poets. His sins were whispered, then joked about, then forgotten, then rediscovered in archival threads of community Facebook groups that always ended in “but nothing was ever done.”

He had once taught at a music school.
He had once served on a cultural funding board.
He had once been tolerated in places where children were taught to dance.
He had once laughed at a funeral.
He had always escaped.

Until, of course, he didn’t.

They found him at dawn.

Not in a position of drama—not crucified or theatrically posed—but simply in parts, as if taken apart gently and deliberately, by something with fingers not shaped for kindness but for editorial excision. The body was dispersed in segments across the eastern quadrant of the park, with no blood, no trail, no evidence of violence in the conventional forensic palette. Rather, there was the overwhelming sense of removal—not murder, not accident, but an erasure achieved through anatomical redaction.

His torso had been split into ten sections, placed in a curve reminiscent of certain ritual diagrams traced in the margins of Mesopotamian punishment tablets. His eyes, intact, were left facing a tree whose bark bore a phrase burned into the grain:

“We do not accept incomplete reckonings.”

There were no witnesses.
There were, however, recollections.

A woman walking her dog recalled seeing a hole in the air, a kind of fold in visibility that shimmered like heat and then was not there. A jogger claimed the wind turned inside out near the site—he smelled his childhood and vomited. A member of the pilgrims, one of the quieter ones, simply stated, “It wasn’t us. But it was because of us.”

K., for her part, made no mention of it. She arrived at De Wasserette at her usual hour, sat at her table, opened her book to a page that appeared blank and yet made at least two baristas weep softly into their aprons. She drank her coffee, as always, black and without ceremony. But those nearby noted something new—a subtle shift in her breathing, as though she had inhaled a permission, or had been momentarily relieved of some silent, crushing burden.

The city responded in kind.

Police reports were filed, then refiled, then quietly unfiled. The cause of death was listed as “circumstantial deconstruction.” The coroner retired. The newspapers made no mention. The mayor’s office issued a statement referencing “a sudden event of traumatic local impact,” followed by an enthusiastic update on tulip preservation grants.

But word spread. Not through media, nor phone, nor meme, but through a kind of psychosocial osmosis, as if the very air had acquired the memory of justice and would not stop humming about it. People began to walk differently in the park—slower, more reverently. A chalk circle appeared near the pond, and though the rain came, it did not wash away.

The pigeons flew elsewhere for three days. When they returned, they avoided the site.
The children did not ask why.
They simply pointed at the trees and said, “It’s quiet there now.”

What was torn apart was not merely a man.
It was a threshold.
A precedent.
A long-ignored clause in the city’s spiritual contract suddenly enforced by something too old to care for legality, and too present to ignore.

No one claimed responsibility.
No one needed to.

And K.?
She adjusted her collar.
She turned the page.
She blinked once, and those who saw it felt catalogued.

Not judged.
Just… noted.

XI

The Cartographer’s Error Made Flesh

In which the metaphysical scaffolding of the city convulses, recalibrates, and redraws itself to accommodate a pattern long buried beneath intention and ordinance; a pattern written not in lines, but in appetite, recursion, and that terrible mercy which only forgotten architectures bestow.

It began, as so many disasters masquerading as miracles do, with a correction.

A minor one, at first—laughable, even. A municipal GPS drift, attributed (by those desperate to remain employed) to an innocuous solar flare, a momentary glitch in the great satellite symphony above. Phones began suggesting impossible routes. The public bike system reported docking stations where none existed. Delivery services attempted to deposit sushi into wall-mounted gas meters, convinced they had reached their destinations.

A tram rerouted itself in the dead of night, with no driver, and looped through De Pijp in a shape that, viewed from above, resembled a spiral crushed beneath a thumbprint.

Google Maps crashed three times within a week, its rendered satellite image of Amsterdam blurring at the southern tip of Sarphatipark. Zooming in revealed a pulsing black node, shifting between polygonal forms, labeled simply:

“This should not be here.”

It was not an error.
It was a resignation letter from consensus.

The old city plans were consulted, pulled from deep drawers in the Stadsarchief, the pages papery with the dust of reasonable men. But the maps were wrong. Not misdrawn—not imprecise—but outdated in a way that suggested betrayal rather than time. Alleys that had never existed were noted in the margins. Ink lines curled where lines should not curl. One plan showed a second park—beneath Sarphatipark—drawn in red, annotated in a Latin dialect for which no scholar could provide origin. The archivist who uncovered it described it as “a map drawn by a dream to describe its own ulcer.”

They tried, the urban engineers, the stoic surveyors, the dwindling few not yet touched by proximity or dream-madness. They poured over topographical models, overlaying new scans with old schematics. But nothing aligned. The substrata had moved, not physically but ideologically, like a building deciding it would no longer be interpreted as a school but now, quite plainly, as a throat.

One civil engineer from TU Delft described the phenomenon in an internal forum post, now deleted but preserved by the pilgrims in laminated leaflets:

“The city is not deforming.
It is expressing a preference.
It no longer wishes to be read the way we’ve insisted.”

By then, the presence of the circle had become undeniable. The spiral formed by K., her radius, her pilgrims, her café, her park, had solidified—not abstractly, not poetically, but geospatially. Data analysts working independently across three academic institutions (each later discredited in a minor scandal involving grants, broken compasses, and teeth found in spreadsheets) reported a recurring vortex structure, centered exactly at De Wasserette, and spiraling outward in logarithmic calm. It affected traffic flow. Weather systems. The behavior of light.

Even birds respected it.
Even rats began walking in arcs.

The term K-Radius entered Foundation documentation around this time, though no one remembers who coined it. Defined loosely as “the perimeter within which architecture begins to reconsider its function,” it became the shorthand for those uncanny inconsistencies now cascading across the city like a polite revolution. Doors changed shape. Windows adjusted their angles. A building on Albert Cuypstraat reoriented itself over three nights, so that the main entrance now faced a brick wall that had not previously existed.

Inside, tenants reported waking to find that rooms had re-ordered themselves, as if optimized for rituals no one had performed in centuries.

And still, through it all, K. remained seated.

She had begun to wear gloves. Not out of affectation, but out of reverence, as though her fingertips had become communicants of something unspeakably precise. Her coat now bore embroidery that resembled veins—not as anatomical reference, but as cartographic declaration. On one morning, she brought with her a folded diagram, which she unfolded only once, and which—according to the one barista who dared look upon it—“screamed in contour lines.”

She sat.
She wrote.
She turned the page.
And the city adjusted.

By the end of that week, a section of Ceintuurbaan no longer existed on official records. Its signage remained. The businesses persisted. But the block was not listed on any modern cadastral registry. It had become, administratively, a ghost street, permitted only through courtesy.

No one challenged this.
They had seen what happened in Sarphatipark.

It is no longer correct to say K. is at the center of the map.

K. is the function that generates the map.

She is no longer referenced.
She is consulted.

She does not seek control.
She does not need to.

The city now listens.

And it turns in its sleep.

XII

The Vault, The Veil, The Voice

In which the locked place is opened, not with key but with name, and the subject known as K. ceases to be noun and becomes syntax—uttered not aloud but in architecture, in weather, in the breath of those who remember her only sideways.

It was Number 66, of course. As it always had been.

That squat, corner-faced structure on Sarphatistraat, whose windows never reflected quite right, whose mailbox always bore two names—one faded, one too fresh—and whose upper floor had not been leased in thirty-two years. The building had stood since 1872, according to official documentation, though no blueprints could be produced, and the original builder’s name appeared only once in city archives: Henricus de Blinde, constructor of civic illusions.

Locals called it the house that watches back. Children referred to it simply as “the hush place.” It had long been a convenient scapegoat for midnight sounds, brief outages, and that indescribable cold felt when passing it in fog.

But now, it opened.

Not dramatically, not with flash or seismic tantrum, but with a simple act of acquiescence. The door, long sealed by rust and superstition, stood ajar one morning, and K.—without gesture, without audience—rose from her table at De Wasserette, adjusted her coat, and walked the exact path mapped by dream and heresy alike.

She entered without hesitation.

And inside—a vault, but not of money, nor manuscripts, nor even secrets in the conventional sense. What lay below Number 66 was an index, a lexicon of latent rooms, a space constructed entirely out of failed attempts to forget. There were walls made of names unsaid, stairs that led to versions of Amsterdam that had never achieved consensus. Hallways pulsed faintly with atmospheric regret.

In one chamber: an urn of ash from a century that hadn’t occurred yet.
In another: maps drawn by wind, annotated by lightning, folded in the wrong direction.
A room of mirrors showed not reflections but possible absences.
And on the lowest floor—beyond the breathless stone and the lamps that hummed in old grammar—waited the final page.

She read it, or it read her.

Either way, the veil thinned, and what passed through was not K., not precisely, but something aligned to her—a syntax wearing her silhouette, walking out not reborn, but recited.

Those who saw her exit reported feeling “rearranged.” One woman began speaking in phonemes corresponding to no known language, but which harmonized with wind turbines for hours at a time. A child said simply: “The lady came back but her shadow didn’t.”

The city did not erupt. It did not fall.
Instead, it accepted.

One month later, Sarphatistraat 66 was purchased by a foundation no one had heard of, whose board lists only a spiral. The building was renamed “The Concord of Unwitnessed Rooms.”

K. has not been seen at De Wasserette since.

But her seat remains, untouched.
The tile beneath it has grown warm.
Pigeons circle the spot with deferential precision.

The baristas no longer serve coffee there.
They pour black water into the cup each morning.
It steams, slightly, even in winter.

And now, at the close, the remnants of a poem found etched into the wood of a windowsill in Number 66. Possibly hers. Possibly the house’s.

Spelled in a crooked, archaic English, too burdened with meaning to pass unmarked:

Upon the Veil That Doth Not Lift

By pen, or breath, or hinge unspoken
I pass the gate ne’er meant to ope,
Where tongues are writ in glass and token,
And dreams forget the shape of hope.

This house, this knot, this named refrain,
Is not thy hearth, but thine undoing—
For none pass in and e’er remain,
But leave a Voice the void is wooing.

O city bowed by spiral law,
Thy bricks recall what thou wouldst shun.
Yet still I step with neither awe,
But as the chord the bell hath rung.

So carve me not in tale or tome,
Nor shrine me in the candle’s cone—
For I am not thy guest, nor home.
I am the Voice beneath thy stone.

 

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