As any hunter knows, the key to a successful hunt is to go undetected by one’s prey. The hunter may hunt actively, following and stalking his prey, or he may hunt passively, hidden away in a blind or behind natural debris, silent and unmoving for long enough of a duration so that his appearance will go unnoticed by any incautious creature unfortunate enough to cross his path. The hunter can stay for any length of time, given the proper provisions, and over long enough of an interval, the prey will cease to have any general, let alone collective, knowledge of him—or, perhaps, any hunter or predator of his kind at all. 

This is precisely the case with humanity. We go about immersed in the tedium of our lives, operating with at least the tacit understanding that nothing Terrible lies in wait for us. That we are not at all times hunted. For what sort of creature would (or could) do so? We have for millennia been the drivers of extinction and exist, except in extreme exceptions which prove the rule, at the very top of the food chain. Should we like, we hunt. We are not the hunted.

And yet, there is absolutely something Terrible beyond ordinary comprehension hiding just beyond, behind the veil and underneath the veneer of reality, peering through the cracks and eyeing our every coming and going. Whatever it is—and God only knows if it is even a physical threat, a predator which would consume our flesh—it is so old that, as with our prey, any general or collective knowledge of this Awful thing was lost many thousands (or millions) of years ago. 

The hunter is also aware of the phenomenon of being “seen but unseen.” This is when, after having been hidden from sight for sufficient time as to go undetected, the occasional animal will look him directly in the eye. Usually this is for only a moment, but the animal, the prey, has detected something. It merely lacks the understanding to piece together the greater picture in which he, the prey, is that which is stalked, and that the creature which stalks him lies in wait just before him. 

There are some humans who have this ability of sorts, who experience the “seeing but not seeing” of the Horrible thing, the Ultrapredator, hiding and biding its time. Naturally, these individuals have difficulty putting into words such uncanny an experience as this, but there are a few descriptions which seem to reappear: A sudden feeling that the world will end, often in a sort of “total collapse”; The sensation of being “watched” by one’s reflection; The appearance of sudden panic, involving the reversal of gravity (“falling into the sky”) or the disappearance of the moon; and finally, the most common and pronounced is that of the distinct, unshakeable, and continual feeling of "someone" sitting, standing, or walking directly behind the individual, and that this "someone" also stands over his bedside while he sleeps.