THE CREATURE
You’ll want to hear this, I think. Certainly you’ll gain more than I will from me telling it. I would take this to my grave—gladly—but for you, I’ll tell it. You’ve rescued me, after all. And maybe… maybe I need to tell it for myself as well.
You see, I’ve always had an imagination.
Growing up, I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it good? Was it bad? Adults always took turns praising me and cursing me for it, so I could never say. The make-believe worlds in which I spent my time were so vivid to me that I’d sometimes confuse them for real life. Even into adolescence—when I first really learned how to tell stories and make these worlds real for others—I would wake up gasping for air from a dream so crisp it seemed even more tangible than the bed and covers around me. I would remind myself that it wasn’t real, calm down, and go back to sleep.
By the time I was in my teens, I thought I’d put that all behind me. I could tell the difference between something I’d created and something I hadn’t. Still, I was always creating in my head: characters, fantastic events, and so on. But now these creations worked for me and found their way into my stories instead of confusing and terrifying me.
It wasn’t until I saw the creature for the first time that anything served to shatter that illusion. The illusion that we can know anything for certain. The illusion that the scanty knowledge we wring from our imperfect perceptions will answer the deeper questions of reality.
The creature. Yes. I saw it staring at me from my bedroom doorway, and my first thought was—of course—that it couldn’t be real. There was nothing believable or logical in the sight of that massive hulk of malformed flesh hunched there. There was nothing familiar in those long, dirty, yellowing claws honed to a razor’s edge. There was nothing human in those emotionless, bloodshot eyes…
Okay, I thought. Time to wake up.
But as the interminable seconds ticked by, and my horror mounted, an inevitability gripped me: The creature there was as real as I was, whatever that meant.
Somehow, my mouth moved and my voice was heard, sounding to me to be coming from another plane of existence millions of miles distant. I said, “Who are you?”
I remember, even as the terror in me threatened my sanity, how strange it was that my voice was level and cool. Still trying to process the grotesque thing in front of me, my brain had left most of my body on auto-pilot. I wasn’t even sweating.
The creature didn’t respond, but there was something about its posture that seemed familiar to me. And then, just before it transformed, I knew: this creature was standing at my door, head tilted to one side, exactly the way my mother had for years when she would come to check on me.
What? The Creature? Well, it’s no surprise to you, I’m sure, that he was an alien, he’d come from another world, but the thought didn’t occur to me then. Where I’m from, no such encounter had ever been widely known. Anyway, it would have made no difference to me then to know it was an alien and not a monster. There’s no difference, really, when we are talking about the Yanders.
You’ve never heard of them? That doesn’t mean you’re safe. Remember, we had never heard of them either. Your people are as much at risk as mine were. In fact, all the more reason to listen, and listen close.
As I said, the creature changed. And instead of something grotesque, it became something that should have been comforting. My mother was there, brows knit in concern, looking the way she always had.
As I screamed, the world wavered before me. My father came, trying to calm me, to help me. But he couldn’t. There was no way to know if it was really him.
I never told them what I saw. Instead, I withdrew into myself. I became an bystander to the world, never certain, never sure. From that day forward I marked what was happening around me, but I didn’t connect myself to it. I made up my mind to trust no one, and observe everything.
And—believe me—there was much to observe.
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from Short Stories
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