Suppression

4 - I See Monsters

George just made it across the zebra-crossing before he fell to his knees and retched again. This time his stomach was almost empty. His muscles heaved painfully but there was nothing there to move. As before the all-consuming pain in his skull left him unable to think about the many people milling past him. This time no-one asked him if he needed assistance.

He heaved again, depositing a splat of dribble on the pavement. Soon after the nausea and headache subsided together, dropping away blissfully quickly. He knew they would be back so he climbed back onto his feet and set off again towards the town centre.

The large, silver disk still hovered silently above the buildings. It was hard to gauge its altitude with any degree of accuracy but he estimated it was only a couple of thousand feet up. If that was the case, then the vessel had to be at least two hundred feet across. For a moment, it faded from view and the pain in his head disappeared completely. He soon discovered that turning his head to one side allowed him to see the disk in his peripheral vision. Looking at it square on caused it to immediately fade from view.

Feeling better than he had for months, he pressed on through the busy streets, using the disk like a guiding star. He kept glancing at passers-by, looking for any indication that others had seen it too, but everyone seemed blissfully unaware.

It did not take him long to arrive at a point he felt was directly beneath it. He still could not see it directly but it definitely seemed to be parked directly above the broad, pedestrian area in the centre of town. He stood still, staring right up at it, trying hard to see it again. George could not understand how a hallucination could remain visible in his peripheral vision yet disappear completely when he looked right at it.

There seemed to be one way to find out if it was really there. He pulled his smart phone from his pocket, unlocked it into camera mode and pointed the lens up at the disk. Tapping the shutter button, he took several photos then, without bothering to bring his phone back down he scrolled through the photos. As he feared there was nothing but grey sky and a few darker clouds showing in the pictures.

He looked around again at the people passing him. Still no indication that they could see anything either. He conceded that what he was seeing had to be some kind of hallucination, until he caught his smart phone's screen in his peripheral vision. The disk was back. Right in the centre of the shot was the perfect circle of silver, but the split second that he looked directly at it, it vanished.

After trying several viewing angles, he found that the image on his phone was reacting precisely like the disk in the sky. Now he did not know if that confirmed it was a real object or a genuine hallucination. Both possibilities seemed highly unlikely, and more than a little scary. He wondered what would happen if he looked at both at the same time. Catching the object in the sky in his peripheral vision again, he moved the phone so that it was directly in front of his gaze.

For a moment, he could see the real object and had a clear view of the same object on the screen. Then the disk vanished from the image on the screen. He did not know what was going on but he was definitely causing some sort of reaction. For a moment he subconsciously glanced at the real object and was surprised to find it did not vanish. Now he could see it properly. He aimed his phone's camera again and used the zoom function to get a closer look.

His phone was now showing just empty sky, even when he looked away from it. He was about to take some zoomed in snaps when a fizzing sensation began at the back of his head. It felt like aggressive pins and needles and rapidly spread to cover his whole head. Fearing the pain would return, George headed for one of the many wooden benches which were dotted along the pedestrianised street.

Before he got there, he felt like his brain was disintegrating. Colours changed, shifting in a rainbow. His sense of balance became fuzzy and the shape of the world around him began to change. Distance to objects lost all meaning as did all the sounds he could hear. Everything seemed to become just a cacophony of unidentified noises.

Feeling badly disoriented, he slumped onto the very end of the bench, landing two whole feet away from where he expected. The world began to twist and rotate. He held on to the bench and attempted to restore his equilibrium.

Closing his eyes just made it worse, so instead he looked around at the dozens of people going about their everyday business. That was when he realised that every single person he could see had turned their heads and were staring directly at him.

He scanned every person he could see, but everyone was still walking around as usual, just staring unblinkingly at him while they did so. The effect would have been unnerving had it not been for the vigorous fizzing sensation in his skull. The nausea returned with a vengeance. Around him the world bent and distorted. He wanted to leave, but standing up was quite impossible. It was more likely that he would fall off the bench.

In the middle distance up ahead he noticed a large man, easily a head taller than the other members of the public, striding purposely towards him, apparently ignoring the people around him, and leaving them to get out of his way. As the man moved he seemed to get taller. His tanned skin darkened and his head seemed to be ever so slowly expanding. His face looked angry, but it seemed that no-one around him was consciously aware of his presence.

George continued to hold on to the bench. He did not know why he seemed to be hallucinating, but he wanted, more than anything, for it to stop. The large man was getting quite close now and George suddenly got the urge to run. He tried to get to his feet but it felt like the floor was flexing freely beneath his feet. He perched unsteadily on the front edge of the bench but could move no further.

The large man was not just growing taller but way also steadily morphing into a different shape; wider, bulkier and nearly aubergine in colour. Legs lengthened with every stride and his hips appeared to slid up the sides of his torso. His already too long arms folded back out of sight in the most unnatural way as George's brain tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The man's legs straightened then folded forwards, inverting his knee joints. His gait now was more akin to a T-rex than a human being.

George tried again to stand up but his own limbs felt numbed and distant. The large man, or whatever it now was, stopped a couple of paces away. George tried to speak but nothing came out. The creature before him stretched up to a height of at least nine feet, half of that long knobbly legs. What appeared to be the head sat on the lumpy shoulders with no neck in between. It was horrific to behold, but the smell was worse. It smelled like something that had died weeks earlier.

For a second, he saw scrawny arms deform their way out of the sides of the creature's head as it loomed over him. He had the sensation of a buzzing, whirring noise for a moment as one of those scrawny arms, considerably larger than his own, reached out towards him. Its powerful fingers, two pairs of two, clamped around his head. There was a moment of excruciating pain in his neck and then his head was torn from his body.