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I had read once, in some fevered margin of an Ottoman manuscript, that the mind when faced with what it cannot parse will reach backward into memory to cobble together an image from scraps — a child's nightmare here, a carcass seen on the roadside there.
This is why we think we see shapes in clouds.
This is why the dying swear angels wear the faces of their mothers.
And so the thing that answered my call came to me stitched from horrors I thought I had survived.
It was tall — no, that is wrong, it was long, as if its existence could not be measured in our single, upright dimension. Its "limbs" — if such grotesqueries could be insulted by that human word — were jointed in ways that suggested both gait and flight, but were not bound to either. And the skin… the skin was neither flesh nor hide, but the damp shimmer of something hauled from the bottom of a saltless sea, its surface flowing in slow eddies like oil on black water.
Its head — again, I betray myself in naming it — was a mask, or perhaps my mind's only shield against what writhed beneath. Carved bone and flensed ivory fused into a predator's grimace, lips peeled back in a smile too wide to fit in this world. But the teeth were wrong; they were not teeth, not even close — they were script, each fang a sigil, each molar a fragment of a word, all arranged in a language I could almost hear.
It was not looking at me.
It was looking into me.
I felt the gaze as a pressure behind the eyes, pushing inward until the memory of my first kiss, my first excavation, my first scream — all uncoiled in reverse, collapsing back into nothing. I thought I heard my father's voice calling from another room, but when I turned my head toward the sound, I saw only the warped crucifix at the far wall, its Christ bent unnaturally forward, as if whispering to me.
The sound in my ears swelled, not in volume but in presence. Each frequency was a finger against my skull. A second step. A third. I tried to count them, but the numbers slipped, repeated, skipped ahead, folded backward. Somewhere around the thirteenth or the first, the weight of its nearness made my vision stagger.
I wanted to look away — to deny the full shape my mind was assembling — but some vile compulsion demanded I witness. Perhaps that was part of the infection. Not merely to see it, but to desire to see it, as if each stolen thought made more room for it inside me.
The air between us convulsed, like heat rising from asphalt, and for a heartbeat I thought I saw the form beneath the mask. My sight did not blur; my mind blurred, folding away from comprehension. There was color without color, angles without edges, a wet sound of something turning inside out but never finishing the motion.
I clamped my eyes shut.
It didn't help.
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