CODE ELDRITCH

Chapter IX

The Encounter

You know how fish are supposed to be either in water or on a plate?

Yeah, that's what I thought as well.

My first personal encounter with something altogether alien was very different from what I imagined when The Official gave me his far-fetched spiel on what is and isn't a grievous threat to humanity. When I was introduced to the Foetid Carapace, that was a bit like watching something cinematic unfold on a TV screen. Horrifying, gross, but altogether not too believable.

When a hole opened up in the ceiling of that tight little space I was in — revealing terrible vistas of buildings curling in on themselves in vast and convoluted systems of cylinders and impossibly bent surfaces that made me feel not just small but insignificant — and a tattooed man dropped out, I have to admit the reality of the situation finally impressed itself upon me.

There is something about the small that gives it a stronger gut punch-kind of potential than the huge. Sure, FC-01 and The Tree were awful things, but sometimes it's difficult to see the forest for all the trees.

The man flopped onto the floor, forgoing all attempts at nimbly protecting his head and just... kind of crashing into the floor. Water splashed from where his scalp split open, not blood. The telltale smell of the sea filled my nostrils.

He nevertheless stood, where an ordinary person would have shook violently in death throes, stretched his neck while brackish water ran down his neck in filthy currents.

"Uh," I said. There is something about the unbelievable that takes the edge out of the frightening. In that moment I knew nothing about the place he had come from, or of the innumerable alien things that crawled about the inside of his skull. He was just a tattooed man who had fallen out of my ceiling and was leaking water from his wounds. "Can I help you?"

Even now, what possessed me to offer that hideously deformed thing a hand in that moment I couldn't tell you. But out my hand went, and that ink-blotted, water-leaking mess of a person extended his hand in return. I can only blame my incredulity, and maybe my lack of experience.

I noticed just too late that there was something else in the room with us. Or rather, something else in the room in him. In his outstretched arm, palm facing upward, I saw the pulsating movements of what looked like eels... under his skin.

I didn't wince, like I would today, or scream and pull my hand back like I should have. There was no fear, revulsion or even morbid curiosity. I just froze.

Then, from the slack skin that hung below his eyes, I caught a glimpse of the grotesque, fleshy apparatus that kept him standing. I'm not sure if this is a conclusion I've reached afterward and retroactively justified to myself or if it struck me right then and there, but I understood suddenly that this man wasn't alive at all.

You might chuckle now, wondering how possibly I could have thought anything else after he cracked his head violently open on the floor, but there is a threshold for how much bullshit a person is willing to accept in a short span of time, and I had was long past mine.

The slithering, eyeless eel-thing that wiggled free from loose facial skin bared rows and rows of teeth, circling deeper and deeper into a misshaped, bloodcurdling throat.

I stepped back now, quiet. The man hadn't scared me, but the eel-thing (you can find it filed under RM-00 Ravenous Multitude for reference) unnerved me on many levels. I estimated six steps to the door, but the thing stood between me and my only exit, so I took another step back.

Just when things could not get any more stereotypically horror movie, the lights in the room flickered out and left us in darkness.

When they flickered back, the eel-maneuvered man had closed the distance between us. There had been no sound of footsteps, no dripping water against steel floor, no echo against bulkheads. The lights were out for no more than a fraction of a second while the thing moved, those bulging, useless eyes no doubt staring blindly in the darkness.