They are something completely alien from us, something I could never comprehend.
Model 1 whispers again.
“Goodbye, my love.”
Then, holding Model 1 between them, Seth and Derek, with speed and dexterity unimaginable for a human, turn and dart out of the room.
10
Feeling the blood flowing from my chest soak the mattress beneath me, I lie still, unable to move.
Through the bedroom window, I glimpse the trio going up the street in the night. Their six collective legs move in perfect synchronization. I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but the moment they walk beneath a streetlamp, the light fails and their three backs are covered in darkness.
It is the last thing I see.
Scars
I
The boy was dragged into the cave.
The reason was unknown. Nor did he know the people who were dragging him away. In truth, the boy didn’t know who he himself was. He had been roaming the fields when he was grabbed by men he didn’t know and dragged into a cave in the mountains.
Once deep inside, the boy was tied up. The men made sure that the chains wrapped around his limbs would render him completely immobile before finally retreating.
In the dark, he cried and shouted for a while, but no one came to his aid.
When his cries had wound down, the boy heard a rustling sound behind him.
“It” was coming toward him.
The boy survived on raw meat and greens.
He slept curled up where he was tied. He also excreted there.
Occasionally, the boy was dragged outside the cave by the chains that bound him. This happened once every few days. Or it could’ve been once every few weeks. No sunlight reached the interior of the cave.
Whenever he was dragged outside the cave, the light was so bright that it hurt him. When he was raised by the chains into the air, the boy would cry out in pain and fear. He would be dragged off somewhere and thrown into a body of icy water that glittered and undulated. The boy did not know how to swim, but his tied-up hands and legs prevented him from swimming anyway. Shouting and flailing, he would begin to sink in defeat when suddenly, something would yank the chain again and he would be flung into the air, dragged through forest and mountain trails, and tossed into the cave once more. Inside the cave, where the boy had air to breath and steady ground beneath him, the boy felt a kind of relief.
Flashing sunlight or suffocating darkness, the blinding sky or the damp and moldy air of the cave, water as cold as ice or sticky humidity and feces—there was nothing in between for the boy and no foretelling of what would happen when.
It came to the boy once a month, pierced his bones, and sucked at his marrow.
It was impossible for the boy to see the passage of day or night, and therefore he wouldn’t know if a month had passed or a year. Though he could not calculate how much time was going by, the visit of It was the single thing that was regular and predictable in his life.
The boy didn’t know what It was; he didn’t even know what It looked like. It seemed to writhe in the darkness. It was large, strong, scary … and brought great suffering.
It would insert a sharp, hard thing into the boy’s vertebrae and suck. Starting near his backside above his pelvis and working its way up, vertebrae by vertebrae, toward the boy’s neck.
The order of how it happened was always the same. The small, white dot of the cave entrance would be covered by a sudden, black mass. A rustling, a squelch. Damp, musty, stiff feathers would press down on the boy’s wrists and ankles. Then a sharp, hard, and indescribably terrifying and painful object punctured his vertebrae.
After It left, the boy wouldn’t be able to move for a while out of pain and fear. When he’d finally make an effort to get up, the feeling that his backbone was shattering would make him cry out.
There was no intended meaning or direction to the boy’s screams. The boy had no family he knew of. He didn’t know who his mother or father was, did not remember where he had come from or where he had been wandering, and what faint traces of memory he had were scattered into the depths of oblivion.
Despite this, the boy prayed that someone, whoever that may be as long as it was someone, came to rescue him from this cave. That they would take him wherever it may be as long as it wasn’t here, to a place where this pain and darkness did not exist, he prayed with all his drained, wasted heart.
Of course, no one came to his rescue. Since no one knew the boy existed, no one realized that the boy had disappeared.
II
Alone in the cave, the boy tested how far he could move from the stake that held his chains to the ground. To the rhythm of his clanging chains, as he walked he mumbled in a low voice and hummed something resembling a song. This wasn’t from some emotion like joy, it was merely his futile attempt to somehow fill the repugnant space that was this empty darkness and the hours of dread.