The Perilous and Most Honorable Society of Those Who Have Seen the Thing

The invitation arrived in Declan's mailbox between a Spectrum bill and a coupon for forty percent off at Bed Bath & Beyond, which should have been his first clue that something weird was happening, because Bed Bath & Beyond had been dead for two years and yet here was a coupon, pristine, urgent, offering savings on bath towels that no longer existed in any accessible retail dimension.

The invitation itself was printed on paper so thick it felt like holding a slice of expensive cheese. The text was embossed in gold:

You Have Been Observed.

You Have Been Chosen.

Tuesday. 8 PM.

The Denny's on Lombard.

Ask for the Pancake Situation.

Declan Toomey was thirty-four years old. He worked at a dog grooming salon called "Paws and Reflect," which he had not named and for which he apologized internally every time he answered the phone. He had a studio apartment, a cat named Susan, and a Hinge profile that described him as "ambitious" in a way that technically wasn't lying if you considered "finishing a whole pizza" an ambition.

He was not, historically, the sort of person who got chosen for things. His grandmother—who had opinions about everything and shared them, loudly, at family gatherings, while pointing with whatever utensil she happened to be holding—had once told him he had "the energy of a man who would be picked last for the softball team but would bring very good snacks." She'd meant it as a compliment. Probably.

The Denny's on Lombard looked exactly like every Denny's everywhere, which is to say it looked like someone had taken the concept of "3 AM regret" and rendered it in vinyl booths and laminated menus. Declan stood in the entrance for a long moment, holding his mysterious invitation, feeling profoundly stupid.

The hostess was maybe nineteen, with the thousand-yard stare of someone who'd seen things. Hash brown things. Grand Slam things.

"I'm, uh," Declan started, then lowered his voice to what he hoped was a conspiratorial whisper. "I'm here about the Pancake Situation?"

The hostess's expression didn't change. "Booth seven. They're expecting you."

Booth seven contained three people who looked exactly like the kind of people you'd find in a Denny's booth at eight o'clock on a Tuesday, which is to say: normal people, slightly tired, reviewing the menu even though everyone knows you don't need to review a Denny's menu because you already know what you're getting and it's going to disappoint you in exactly the way you expected.

There was a woman in her sixties with gray hair pulled into a severe bun, wearing a cardigan that had clearly seen some shit. Next to her sat a young man with the nervous energy of someone who'd had four espressos and then discovered a fifth. Across from them was an older gentleman in a three-piece suit who looked like he'd wandered in from a BBC period drama and was now very confused about the mozzarella sticks.

"Declan Toomey?" The woman in the cardigan gestured to the empty seat. "Please. Sit. We have much to discuss and limited time before the dinner rush brings in the high school lacrosse team, and I will not conduct sacred business while teenage boys throw sugar packets at each other."

Declan sat.

"I'm Eleanor," the woman said. "This is Timothy—" the nervous young man waved frantically— "and Sir Harold Pembrook-Ashton the Third, but we just call him Hal because honestly, life's too short."

"Quite," said Hal, who had discovered the children's menu and was studying the word search with intense focus.

"You're probably wondering why you're here," Eleanor continued.

"I mean, a little bit, yeah."

"You've seen the Thing."

Declan waited for elaboration. None came. Timothy was now vibrating slightly, either from caffeine or cosmic significance.

"I've seen... a thing?" Declan tried.

"The Thing." Eleanor leaned forward. "Three weeks ago. Thursday. You were walking home from work—"

"How do you know where I work?"

"—and you passed the alley behind the Filipino bakery on Clement Street, and you saw something. Something that didn't fit. Something that made you stop and think, 'huh, that's weird,' and then you kept walking because you had leftover Chinese food in your fridge and it wasn't going to eat itself, but you've thought about it since. Haven't you? In quiet moments. When you're trying to sleep. You've thought: what the fuck was that."

Declan had, in fact, thought exactly this. He'd seen—well, he didn't know what he'd seen. A shimmer. A fold in the air. Something that looked like reality had a crease in it, like when you try to put a screen protector on your phone and there's an air bubble you can never quite smooth out, except the air bubble was six feet tall and vaguely humanoid and looking at him.

"The Society has existed for three hundred years," Eleanor said. "We are the keepers of the knowledge. The witnesses. The ones who have seen the Thing—or Things, there appear to be several—and lived to not really talk about it because honestly who would believe us."

"What... is the Thing?"

"Excellent question. We have no idea."

The waitress appeared. She had the dead-eyed efficiency of someone who'd worked food service long enough to become immune to all human drama. "What can I get you?"

"The Moons Over My Hammy, please," said Eleanor. "And a side of existential dread. I'm joking, that comes free with the meal."

"Coffee," said Timothy, though his hands were already shaking so badly that this seemed medically inadvisable.

"I shall have," Hal announced, "the Lumberjack Slam, with the eggs scrambled, and also I would like to understand why Americans have done this to breakfast. It's eight o'clock in the evening and I'm about to consume four thousand calories. This country is a miracle and a sin."

"I'll just have water," said Declan, because he was still processing.

The waitress left. Eleanor folded her hands.

"The Society's purpose is simple," she said. "We watch. We wait. We bear witness. And every third Tuesday, we meet at this Denny's to discuss what we've witnessed, which historically has been nothing, because the Thing—or Things—only appear about once every eighteen months, but we like the routine and also Hal has become emotionally dependent on the Lumberjack Slam."

"It's true," Hal admitted. "I dream about it. The sausages. They haunt me."

"So I'm invited to join a secret society," Declan said slowly, "that meets at Denny's, doesn't know what it's watching for, and has no actual purpose beyond... witnessing?"

"When you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous," Timothy said, speaking for the first time. His voice was surprisingly deep for someone who looked like he was held together primarily by anxiety and caffeine. "But consider: you've spent your whole life feeling like something was slightly off. Like there was a frequency you could almost hear. Like the world had a secret and everyone else had agreed not to notice."

Declan considered this. His grandmother would have said he was "away with the fairies," which in her lexicon meant everything from "daydreaming" to "probably cursed" depending on her mood and how much Jameson she'd had.

"And also," Timothy added, "we have a group chat. It's mostly memes, but sometimes Eleanor posts photos of her grandchildren and we're all legally obligated to say they're cute even though one of them looks like a small Victorian ghost who's seen a murder."

"He has an old soul," Eleanor said defensively.

"He has the soul of a haunted doll, Eleanor. We've discussed this."

The food came. Declan watched Hal attack the Lumberjack Slam with the dedication of a man who had found his calling, and found that calling was breakfast meats in inadvisable quantities.

"So what now?" Declan asked. "I join? There's a blood oath? Secret handshake?"

"God, no." Eleanor looked horrified. "We're not savages. You sign a form—there's liability issues, you understand—and you get added to the group chat. Meetings are every third Tuesday. Attendance isn't mandatory but if you don't come, you have to bring donuts next time. We're very firm about the donuts."

"What kind of donuts?"

"Whatever kind you want. We're a society of witnesses, not monsters."

Declan looked around the booth. At Eleanor with her cardigan and her matter-of-fact delivery of impossible things. At Timothy, who was now drinking his fifth coffee and seemed to be achieving some kind of transcendence. At Hal, who had paused his consumption of the Lumberjack Slam to dab his mouth delicately with a napkin, because apparently table manners persisted even in the face of breakfast anarchy.

"The Thing I saw," Declan said. "The shimmer. The fold. What was it doing?"

"We don't know," Eleanor said. "We've been watching for three hundred years and we still don't know. Maybe they're observing us. Maybe they're maintaining something. Maybe they're just passing through and we're like... highway rest stops. Convenient but not the destination." She shrugged. "The point isn't knowing. The point is noticing. Most people go their whole lives and they don't see it. You did. That makes you one of us."

"That's it? That's the whole thing? I saw a weird shimmer and now I'm in a secret society that eats breakfast food at inappropriate hours?"

"Welcome to the Perilous and Most Honorable Society of Those Who Have Seen the Thing," Eleanor said, raising her coffee cup. "We've been waiting for you. We didn't know we were waiting for you, specifically, but now that you're here, we're glad. The Society is small. New members are rare. And also Timothy needs someone else to share meme duty because frankly his meme game has been lacking lately."

"It has not—"

"You posted a Minion meme last week, Timothy. A Minion meme. In the year of our Lord 2026. We nearly had to revoke your membership."

"It was ironic!"

"The Minion did not know it was ironic, Timothy! The Minion was sincere!"

Declan started laughing. He couldn't help it. Here he was, in a Denny's booth, watching an elderly woman in a cardigan argue about meme quality with a man who appeared to be forty percent espresso, while a British aristocrat quietly finished his breakfast meats and a secret society inducted him into its mysteries, which apparently consisted of: watching, waiting, and showing up to Denny's with donuts when you missed a meeting.

"Okay," he shrugged. "I'm in."

Eleanor smiled. It was the smile of someone who had seen strange things and found comfort not in understanding them but in having people to not understand them with.

"Excellent. Timothy, add him to the group chat. And Declan?"

"Yeah?"

"Welcome to the rest of your life. It's exactly like your regular life, except now you know the world is weirder than you thought and you have to pretend it's not. But at least you have us." She paused. "And the Moons Over My Hammy really is quite good. You should try it next time."

Outside the Denny's windows, the city went on doing city things. People walked dogs. Cars idled at red lights. And somewhere, maybe, a shimmer moved through an alley, a fold in reality checking its watch, late for an appointment with a universe that had no idea it was being observed right back.

Declan ordered a milkshake. It seemed like the right way to celebrate. His grandmother would have approved. She always said the Toomeys had a gift for finding themselves in situations that made no sense and then making themselves comfortable anyway. "It's why we survived the Famine," she'd say, "and also why your uncle Seamus got banned from that casino in Reno. Adaptability. It's in the blood."

EPILOGUE:

The group chat, Declan would discover, was indeed mostly memes. But once every few months, someone would post a blurry photo of something that didn't quite make sense—a shadow that bent wrong, a door that led somewhere else, a moment where reality seemed to stutter—and everyone would respond with the sacred words of the Society:

Huh. That's weird.

And somehow, that was enough. To notice. To witness. To share the weirdness with people who understood that the world was stranger than it pretended to be, and that the appropriate response to cosmic mystery was not fear or worship but showing up on a Tuesday night, ordering too much food, and saying to the universe: yeah, we see you. You're weird. We're weird too. Let's all just be weird together.

Susan the cat had no opinion on any of this, but she did appreciate that Declan seemed happier lately, and also that he sometimes came home smelling like bacon.