The effluvium of piscine decay was the last scent I expected to encounter as I sat in my favorite coffee shop some five blocks off Salem’s antique waterfront. Initially, it presented as little more than a tickle at the back of my throat – a whiff of something I couldn’t quite identify, but which upset me nonetheless. I became distracted from my crossword without even realizing I’d lost my concentration. But the odor built in both intensity and pungency, until it reached a point at which I could identify it for what it was. It was then that I looked up and saw the thing in the doorway.
An apparition stood motionless there, some thing against which my mind rebelled. A ripple of horripulation rolled across my skin as I stared. Its form blurred and faded even as I attempted to think about describing it. It was as if the thing knew someone discerned its presence, and wanted to deny definition. The very idea, that it might be aware of my awareness, sent a further shiver down my back. But my mind, however confounded, slowly formed an impression, confirming eventually every horror I so dimly perceived.
The thing, incomprehensible as it was, glistened moistly, and a bit of Coleridge thrust into my mind, a line from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “And slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy seas.” This aberration had but recently arrived from some benthic place beyond man’s casual reach. I retained the impression, no matter how the thing blurred, of thick, multi-jointed legs covered in a sort of chitinous black exoskeleton. Greasy tentacles extruded profusely from a head too horribly anthropomorphic for such a piscine assemblage. They waved about and quested as if scenting the air for prey — I could see nothing else that behaved as a sense organ, no eyes nor nose. Those movements were agitated, and growing more so, as the thing stepped over the threshold. The scent of abyssal corruption intensified grossly as it entered, and I gagged. I thought for a moment that I saw man-like arms with short tentacles instead of fingers, and the torso seemed that of a man, but grossly enlarged and with rows of gills down its flanks. An enormous, shark-like tail dragged on the ground behind it.
I was further stunned to realize then that no one else in the shop was reacting to this monster, even as it bumped a table, slopping coffee onto a businessman’s papers. And I became aware that I was frozen, as if in perceiving this thing I had by automatic reciprocation focused its attention sufficiently to enforce some kind of mesmerization. I barely found strength to draw breath, expending all my energy in praying the thing would not further acknowledge my notice.
Throughout the shop, some few customers read newspapers, and the slime-dripping behemoth focused on those patrons. Its tentacles strained all in different directions for a short time, but seemed somehow to reach an agreement, and the thing stopped directly behind a man in a three-piece suit. It slowly leaned over his head, as if its joints were unaccustomed to moving in that manner, and its cranial tentacles engulfed the man’s skull.
The gorge rose in my throat as I heard wet, sucking, drooling sounds emanate from the creature.
The man became quite evidently less human as the malignancy sucked away at his head like some kind of hideous lollipop. His visage first hardened, then faded. It seemed that his skin tones were being washed away, and his hair thinned and drooped as I watched. The skin contracted on his hands and sagged from his throat. He began breathing through his mouth, and his teeth thus exposed were blackened and worn, his gums receded and mottled. All of this gave the impression of one greatly aged, but this was not a man being aged. His movements, when he picked up his mug and sipped, unconsciously moving the tentacles obstructing his mouth, were certain and firm.
My throat burned with acid. And still no one noticed the atrocity occurring under the demon’s tentacles, nor my own face which must have been etched into a rictus of the utmost repugnance.
The obscenity ceased slurping, finally, and stretched itself high above the now beslimed man. Ropes of mucous strung between the man’s head and the thing’s horrid tentacles, which now waved through air as if in ecstasy. The man stood also, brushing pollution from his eyes, and picked up his briefcase. His suit was dark with moisture at the shoulders and down his back, and no one noticed.
I vomited a little then, a moiety of acid choking into my mouth and burning my throat and tongue.
That horrific affront to nature then faced me directly, its eyeless gaze gripping my head as surely as its tentacles had gripped the skull of the man departing the shop. It asked me questions I felt compelled to refuse, which I could not otherwise comprehend. I knew only that I wanted to kill this abomination. I saw myself take a weapon, a sharpened stake, anything, and pierce it over and over. I felt it mocking me, laughing at what it saw in my mind.
It then let me feel a little of what it had sucked from the man’s head — a little glowing ball of compassion and humanity, which it was digesting into shit and hate and despair. The demon let me feel what it was eventually going to excrete, which had once been part of a man’s soul.
There was no longer any holding back. My stomach clenched, and I vomited. This, people finally noticed. Even the slime-coated businessman turned back as he passed through the doorway of the shop. Some folk came towards me, to see if they could help, but more simply turned back to their newspapers. I shuddered and heaved anew as the monster, with every apparent symptom of delight, trailed its tentacles over the heads and backs of those moving to help me. It continued mocking me even as it heaved its bulk toward the door, people unconsciously stepping around the invisible horror as they moved.
I remained frozen one final moment as the fiend lingered under the doorway, then it vanished into the rain. I fell from my chair, curled into a ball in my own ejecta, and wept at what I had seen.
#
Hours later, I stood in the light drizzle of a cool September afternoon and tried to hold on to my sanity. I had never been a religious man, but I now blamed God with every fiber of my being for the atrocity I had witnessed. There was no way an obscenity that awful could exist without something equally wonderful existing in balance. The Second Law of Thermodynamics guaranteed that. So if I had indeed seen that awful vision – and I knew that I had – then I knew also that God had to exist. And if He did, then that…thing was His fault, and I hated Him for it. Even if God hadn’t taken an active hand in that horrific obscenity’s creation, He felt its existence. He had to know what it was doing to His children, and He wasn’t coming to our aid. That realization stirred such righteous indignation in me.
I found that the anger somewhat alleviated the awfulness of the experience. The image of that foul, rank, obscene creature sucking the goodness out of a human being remained beyond tolerance – I knew I would carry the imprint of the episode with me to the grave and beyond. But the anger helped to ameliorate some of the sharpness of the event, drew my focus away from the horror and settled the acid roiling in my stomach.
I wandered, no doubt raving like a lunatic as my mind struggled to digest the experience, until I found myself standing once again in the dirty little square onto which the coffeehouse fronted. Returning to the locus of the perversion further sharpened my outrage, and I felt an irresistible compulsion to act. I could not simply accept that there existed on this Earth atrocities such as that creature and let them go their way while I went mine. Simply acknowledging that course as a possibility brought the gorge to my throat again. The idea that I might just walk away and leave humanity to its fate at the suckers of that reeking predator struck me as every bit as horrible and disgusting as the act I had already witnessed. But no action occurred to me that seemed even remotely possible, and I shook with the effort of containing my frustration on top of the horror.
I had been so engrossed in these thoughts that I didn’t notice the old man arrive behind me. I had no idea how long he had been standing there, holding an umbrella over me as I glared at the coffeehouse. There hadn’t been room in my mind for beings other than myself and that pollution of space and a hateful God. I was taken completely by surprise when he spoke.
“You are right to hate God for the shibboleth, you know. We all do, too. But you are wrong to believe that you can do nothing to combat the monster.”
His voice was mild and calm, and simply hearing him speak those few words allowed me to take my first deep breath in hours. I looked up at his sorrowful face for a long, almost serene while. Pale blue eyes and a large, pore-covered nose dominated a face otherwise covered equally in wrinkles and a three-day stubble. His clothes were worn, but clean, and his posture was strong and erect. I took another deep breath and straightened as I looked at him; I felt comforted.
And then my understanding caught up with his words.
“What do you mean?” My voice was an acid-etched croak.
He smiled sadly as he spoke. “I will not tell you the whole story; for, like God, it is thousands of years in the making, very long in the telling. These things, and yes there are more than the one you have seen, these things are not of this Earth. The place they come from is very far, and very near. That is a paradox. In any thing where one sees two opposite facts at the same time, one sees the hand of God.”
I wanted clarification of his statements – so freighted with existential implication – but my attention was wrenched away. A man shuffled up to the door of the coffeehouse. He appeared to be soaked to the bone, but something about the way he moved made me believe that he was not merely hunched against the weather. I looked more closely and saw something above his head. Horrified anticipation shook my frame.
“Yes,” said the old man. “There is something there that you need to see.”
I didn’t want to go. A premonition told me that I really did not want to more accurately perceive what appeared above the man’s head. My stomach began once more to churn.
“I have to, don’t I?”
“Yes.”
His voice remained as mild and as calm as before, and once again upon hearing it, I took a deep breath and felt that I might be able to cope after all. I cautiously approached the front of the shop and peered through the window.
The interior remained dimly lit, but I instantly identified the man who had so recently entered. And I just as quickly comprehended the object above his head.
A pale appendage thrust upward through the man’s lank brown hair. To all appearances, it was a grotesque, elongated finger, pale gray, with arthritically inflamed joints. It waved slowly, lazily, above the man’s head, and no one in the shop seemed to notice it. I knew then that this appendage related directly to the atrocity I had earlier witnessed, and I felt my stomach drop. Tears spiked my eyes.
“That…thing…did something to him, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” the old man said. Again, I had not heard him move behind me.
“It’s revolting,” I said. I wanted to storm into the shop and rip the finger from the man’s head.
“But if you do, the host will die.”
I was somehow unsurprised that the old man had so evidently read my mind. But once again my conception caught up with his words: ‘host’ loomed over me.
“It’s an embryo.”
“Yes.”
My understanding, seemingly separated from my mind, continued to deliver one blow after another. “And if I remove it by force, he will die.”
“Yes.”
“And if the organism comes to term?”
“He dies.”
“And the…larva?”
“Eventually becomes another like that which you have already seen. A different shape perhaps. A different function, maybe. So you see.”
My mind churned.
“There is nothing that can be done surgically or chemically, is there? Because no one else sees them?”
“That is so.”
“Then why can I see these things?” I looked back up the old man.
“Ah,” he sighed. “That is indeed a very good question.”
He looked into my eyes, and their depth shocked me. One hears of people with eyes like wells, all manner of metaphors for depth. I had never experienced anything like it and always chalked such descriptions up to hyperbole. But the old man’s eyes truly were tunnels through time and experience; they were hypnotic. He quickly looked away.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Today is a very big day for you. I am sorry for that.” His voice was so freighted with compassion that I almost felt my heart would break. “Today you have found that the world is nothing like what you thought it was. Today you have been shown that evil is very much more real than you thought; it is more than simply an agency of human selfishness. Today you have discovered that there are choices, more difficult than you ever imagined you could possibly have to make. But you will choose – you must. By virtue of seeing what you have seen, you show that you are chosen. And that means that you will make these decisions, that you have the ability to do so.” His voice carried a dreadful, compassionate finality.
Again, my understanding caught up with what seemed the most salient implications of the old man’s speech. “What decisions?” I feared I already knew the answer.
“You do know,” the old man said.
I wanted to hesitate, to receive confirmation of my suspicions, but found I could not. “I must either rip out the thing before it…hatches. And kill the host. Or wait for the larva to kill the host, hatch, and then kill it.”
The man inside reached the front of the line and ordered. He seemed outwardly not at all unlike many of the other patrons I could see. He moved a little more slowly, perhaps, as if he were dreadfully tired. I could see just how gray his skin was, how sunken his cheeks. But I could also see the finger waving out of the top of his head. To everyone else in the shop, he was just another tired businessman at the end of a wet, cold day. Not to me. I shuddered. Then resolve poured from my mind into my muscles.
“Those things have to die,” I said.
“Yes.” The old man’s voice was harder than it had been, as hard as mine. I felt the echo of some ancient antagonism in it.
But. “I cannot kill another human, no matter how ill.”
The old man sighed again. “I know. And your task is therefore made much more difficult. For you must then follow these people.”
I jerked. ‘People,’ plural. Multiple. I was amazed at what my battered mind managed still to register as important.
“Yes, there are many, now. You must follow each until the parasite is matured. And once it erupts, you must destroy it.”
“How?” My imagination failed in the face of the revelations of the moment.
“You already know,” the old man said.
An image of myself beating at the awful corpse of the instigating monstrosity with a length of rebar flashed across my mind.
“Yes,” the old man said. “They are physical in this realm, and subject to simple physical violence.”
I felt warmth and determination flooding me. “Good.”
The old man said, “However much, and righteously, you may hate Him, I will still say, ‘Go with God.’”
“What?” I looked up, but the old man was gone, and just at the edge of hearing I detected the sound of vast wings beating the air.
#
I followed the shibboleth’s victim home in the soaking rain. Some sort of resolution hovered just beneath my comprehension, and I felt a compulsion to keep the poor creature within my sight. He lived in one of the garish new condos that had seemingly erupted from the ground next to the T station in the last year. I followed him more closely than I would otherwise have deemed safe, but he never noticed me. As I stood in the rain, peering through his window, a sickening realization crept over me. I had no idea what the gestational period of the creature’s awful progeny might be. I had no way to judge how long I would have to wait before the man’s body died and the parasite emerged. I felt further, terrible revelations waiting in the depths of my mind, ready to spring out at my understanding. I almost hated myself for not confronting them now. But I already felt as if I were drowning, weighted down beneath a sea of experience.
It felt gruesome, to find myself simply waiting for a man to die so that I might more easily take the thing in his head. But were waiting and watching more inhuman than acting swiftly and early, and ripping the unearthly growth from his skull? I shook my head and massaged my temples. I had never enjoyed debates about euthanasia and quality of life; I was too ambivalent about my own feelings toward physical disability. I could too easily understand both sides of the argument. On the one hand, I knew what a joy life was; I knew how much happiness might be wrung from even the most wretched circumstances. A paraplegic could still appreciate a sunrise or a fine meal. But I also knew the joy of full, athletic movement and felt a crushing terror of being separated from that experience. The despair of never again being able to move, of requiring another person to do for me all the most basic activities of daily life, of being a mind imprisoned in a husk of dead yet living flesh…. That was to me a vision of hell.
A fresh revelation crept into my mind: the victims were no longer human.
I had seen the shibboleth suck from them the very thing that made them alive. They were now indeed husks, fleshy transports for the growing things implanted into their half-mindless skulls. They weren’t alive; they were at best half alive, and half in hell. I could at least release them to find their way wherever they were due after death, assuming a person with half their soul digested by a transdimensional monster could be released to any kind of afterlife. I shook my head. There was no time to doubt. Resolution sprang fully formed into the forefront of my mind. It compelled me to act.
I looked around for a weapon, and my gaze immediately found something. I took it as a sign, a totem of the rightness of what I contemplated. A three-foot length of rebar lay on the ground. It was the same sort of steel I’d seen myself using against the shibboleth when my mind first revolted against its control.
Normally, I was something of a planner – not quite unable to start without developing a process, but definitely more comfortable, more confident. But these were not normal times. I didn’t care to think anymore. I knocked on the front door of the victim’s unit, waiting what seemed an eternity.
Eventually, the door opened a few inches, and a tired voice said, “Yeah?”
I kept my hands behind my back, the bar gripped evenly. I said, “Sir, are you there?” I hardly recognized my own voice.
“Yeah? What do you want?”
The words came out as a single string of sound, like a recording played back too fast, almost incoherent. I then saw the tip of a moist gray finger seemingly peer around the edge of the door, and something clicked in my mind. I shoved the door open roughly, knocking the host backward into the hallway. He stumbled and fell onto his backside. I strode forward, slamming the door loudly behind me. I snarled through painfully clenched teeth.
The man looked up at me from where he sat on the floor, and the thing in his head waved as lazily as ever. He said, “What?” in a dull, tired, colorless voice.
I growled, and my mind filled with animal hate. I took one final step forward and grasped the pupating appendage as tightly as I could and yanked with all my strength. Something cracked deep within the victim’s head and the embryonic horror slid out. The man grunted softly and collapsed backwards, his head bouncing off the linoleum of the entrance hallway. The soft-shelled, segmented thing in my hand whipped wildly, making a soft, breathy, keening noise. I wondered, feared that it was calling for help, but decided I didn’t care. I slammed it as hard as I could to the floor and started to beat it with the rebar. The rough, sharp end of the steel as often missed the grotesque, bloody thing as hit, and I gouged chunks out of the linoleum even as I slung chips of slime-slicked shell onto the walls. The larval horror stopped moving after the first strike; I nearly cut it in half. But I wasn’t done. A red mist rose up in my brain. I wanted to destroy this monster, this aberration. I wanted to rub out every trace of its existence.
I don’t know how long I battered at the thing, but I had gouged the floor deeply by the time I finally returned to myself. Someone was yelling on the other side of the door, demanding to know what was going on.
I looked around, and it was as if I had wakened from a dream. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew what I had done. I had broken into a man’s home and caused his death, and then done my level best to destroy the evidence of what had killed him. Flight was my only option. I ran to a window, flung it open and fled into the soggy New England night.
#
Time passed in a blur, a welter of broken images.
A husband and father of four children shuffled through a caricature of life without his family noting any change in his behavior. A child of only nine years fell to the spawning in an alley, and then I felled the writhing octopoid next to his pathetic little corpse. A coworker cost me my job, after I screamed at her for assisting an elderly woman with gills peaking through her blue-toned hair.
On and on.
I realized one day that three weeks had passed. And I had experienced as much as I could handle. Asleep, I saw only tentacles and blood. Awake, I saw nothing that stuck in my consciousness. Everything was gray, diffuse – whether as an effect of the constant rain or the life draining slowly from me as I butchered embryonic demons, I did not know. I knew only that I was wasting away like one of the sad hosts I sought to free, that I must eventually lose the battle I fought, struggling to hold the borders of human existence against this benthic invader. And then revelation struck at me again: the only way to end the nightmare was to destroy the monster that had started it. Rather than attack the pawns, I must assault the general.
I think I may have gone slightly mad, then. But I knew that I could destroy it; the first vision proved that to me. I finally had a plan.
I tracked a host for three days, watching as the embryo within matured almost to the point of eruption. When the host finally wandered into an alley, I knew the mewling monstrosity would soon pull itself free. And when it did, I was there. I lunged in and grasped it by the legs, swiftly gathering its seven slime-coated limbs into one hand-hold.
Then I tortured it.
I used my steel to press at its joints. I scraped at what seemed most like sensory organs. I swung it bodily at the walls of the alley.
When I first grabbed the squirming thing, it pushed at my mind in the same way that its more awful parent had. But it didn’t have the same power. As I tortured it, it starting keening, screaming thinly into the air, just as I had heard others do before it. Finally, however, the quality of that sound changed, became somehow internal. It projected directly into my mind. It was a mental sound that sawed at my consciousness in the same way that a fire engine’s siren ripped at the eardrums of a person standing too long too near. Every one of these creatures made a sound similar to this as I butchered them in the homes of their hosts. I reasoned that they would not have the capacity to make such a sound if it would not actually call for aid. I reasoned correctly.
I did not have to long endure the unpleasantness of the thing’s distress call. After a few minutes, a pressure like that of the initial encounter grew in my mind. The source of these fetal abominations approached, heralded by the stench of putrefaction.
As soon as I saw the shibboleth, its tentacles questing around the corner of the building at the mouth of the alley, I tensed. I knew it would assault my mind. I did not know how I would react, but I knew, at the very truest depths of my being, that I must face this thing, and that I had the power to destroy it no matter what it did. So determined, I jammed the length of my steel through the flabby body of the thing in my hand. It shrieked, spasmed, and died.
The shibboleth lunged around the corner, its cranio-facial tentacles straining toward me. It was just as before – I could not focus directly on the grotesque thing. Revulsion threatened to overwhelm my self-control even as hatred reinforced me and shielded me from what must have been a mental violation of the worst kind. It raged at me, and I smiled. Some massive, almost physical presence battered at my mind even as the abyssal creature advanced heavily on me. It wanted to blast me from my own body. I had received that power – I had affected it that much.
I allowed it to wobble closer, remained still as if ensnared and entranced, while resolution simmered in my heart. And finally, as its tentacles groped within a step – within inches – of engulfing my head, I unleashed my hatred. I lashed out with the rebar, a great, backhanded uppercut that slashed a pair of tentacles off the thing’s head.
It shrieked, both aloud and in my mind. Its tentacle-fingered hands quested for me, and I nearly tripped over the corpse of the last host as I danced out of its reach. Another stroke from my weapon removed one of those appendages in a splash of gray, mucousy blood. The shibboleth shrank back. For all its bulk, for all its incredible mental power, it seemed never to have encountered physical resistance. It had no tolerance for physical pain. Its grasp on my mind fell away completely. I stepped closer and slashed with my crude weapon, gashing the bulk of its foul, scaly body. The odor of rotting fish grew infinitely stronger, and I retched. Its bulk trapped it in the alley; it could not escape me. I bared my teeth and dared feel a sense of triumph.
It then began keening as its progeny had, only much, much louder.
I had not given proper heed to the probability of there being more than one of these things within the old town. Desperation took me, and I slashed at it, over and over, my arm moving like part of a machine. But the fiend kept squealing; it kept interposing its arms between the bulk of its body and the blows raining down on it, until both arms were broken and slashed to ribbons, drooping and dripping pustulence down its flanks.
I saw shuffling figures at the mouth of the alley behind the demon, and my heart sank. The aid it called turned out to be worse than others of its kind. If forced to fend off incubators as well as the mental assaults of the creature, I would be overwhelmed. I would be caught; there would be too much evidence. Or worse, so much worse, I would be implanted.
I was compelled to make an insane gamble. I raised the bar over my head in a two-handed grip and stepped in close. The shibboleth raised its shredded arms to me like tentacles, and wrapped them around my torso, drawing me in close to its body. I was instantly covered in slime and pustulence and putrefaction. The benthic miscegenation screamed again, but in a different tone – it radiated triumph.
I would end that feeling forever.
I brought the bar down upon its head like a spike, driving the metal as hard as I could into its skull. It screamed one last time and released me, even as its tentacles traced trails of acid across my face. I wrenched the bar free and stabbed again; the iron erupted from the other side of the grotesque skull in a gout of gray ooze. The shibboleth dropped to the floor of the alley and curled up on itself.
I stood over it, gasping. Righteousness filled me with warmth, for the first time in weeks. The length of rebar in my hands glistened in the dimness, oozing with the pustulence that served the thing as blood. The hateful creature still squealed, but its tone did not pierce me. All of the pathetic husks who had encroached upon the battle now lay prone on the ground like stringless marionettes. The appendages poking from their skulls still strained toward me, but weakly, their usually languid motions becoming merely feeble.
I knew that all of those poor people were dead, truly dead, and prayed that the embryos within were too young to survive, that I wouldn’t have to rip them all from the heads of their erstwhile hosts to dispatch them. I looked down at the corpus at my feet. Its tentacles and flippers scrabbled feebly at the cobbles. Revulsion filled my brain and my stomach with acid. It was time to finish this.
It took a long time, using only that piece of rebar, but I eventually removed the abomination’s head. As I stood there, holding it by a few flaccid tentacles, the thought occurred to me that I had not yet seen any sign of the authorities, in spite of there being a number of bodies within plain view of the mouth of the alley. It seemed to me that a kind of madness then released its grip on my mind. It was past time for me to go. I took the head with me.
#
Derby Wharf extended a quarter mile into Salem’s harbor, and at its end squatted the whitewashed cube of a brick lighthouse. A short lightning rod jutted from the top of that edifice, and I fixed the head on it, at the boundary between human land and the awful sea. I felt certain that there were others of this kind of creature, and I wanted them to know what would happen to them if they came here again. Once I climbed down from the lighthouse, I took a moment and looked around. The late evening streetlights battled against the weather, yellow globes that created an orange glow in the distance. It was cold standing out there in the rain with the wind coming off the ocean; but that wind carried a clean, salty crispness, and the rain slowly washed the fishy filth from my clothes and my face. It almost felt like a rebirth.
Then I started to shiver violently, uncontrollably, and I fell to my knees at the end of the wharf as images of the victims sleeted through my brain. Legs, and claws, and spines and fins, writhed in a mass of pale gray flesh that seemed to expand to fill the whole of my field of vision, blotting out the harbor before me. Those shadowy visions had been creeping around the edge of my consciousness for days; now they leapt out and filled my mind. I was not reborn. I was betrayed.
I do not know how long I lay at the end of the pier, but I became aware that the rain had stopped at some point. I looked up and saw the moon illuminating a ragged hole in the clouds directly above me.
A voice said, “I thought this might be more comfortable.” The old man walked slowly closer, and as he stepped into the circle of moonlight the pure, cold glow reflected off a pair of ghostly wings folded hugely behind his back. “You’ve done well. The shibboleth and all its progeny are denied.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Thank you.” My previous sense of righteousness returned and warmed me.
“No,” the angel said, for I knew it had to be an angel. “I thank you. I say again, you’ve done well.”
But pale claws and glistening tentacles began again to wave at the edges of my perception. “Please; you’ve got to help me!” Warmth and surety fled me, and I once more shivered uncontrollably.
“I cannot. Not directly. But you should know this: you humans are more than strong enough to survive this sorrow, your great work.”
I could not hear any of the expected compassion in the angel’s voice – only a sort of clinical assessment. Fear grew in me and the eyeless bulk of the shibboleth stalked me in my mind.
“I can’t.” My breath left me. “Please.”
The angel turned and started to walk away, toward the end of the wharf.
“You can’t just leave me like this. Not after what I’ve seen. Not after what I’ve done.” I was shouting. I felt tentacles reaching through my mind, scar tissue tightened across my face and hands. “You’ve got to release me!” There were too many of them.
The angel kept walking, its shoulders bent beneath its great wings.
I saw again a high school student with a segmented leg waving from her empty eye socket.
“You’ve got to kill me, God damn you!” I screamed.
“Your god may not thank you for what you have done, but mine will.” Its voice was flat, distant. It didn’t look back.
I couldn’t…. I was losing….
It stepped from the pier and descended to the level of the water. Its wings returned to invisibility as it left the circle of moonlight, but at the edge of that circle I saw a flash in which was illuminated their entire span, some hundred feet of glowing white feathers stretching far out over the water. And in that flash, the thing I had taken for an angel looked more avian than human, more alien than holy – harder, harsher, crueler, and vast.
I had but a moment to register the scope of the betrayal.
And then the shadows took me.
