CHAPTER 10

It had been my plan to grab my coat from my apartment and then go out for a meal at the Old Toll House Tavern, where Zac, and Joshua Rokop would be sitting, as they did almost every night, telling each other crazy stories until the early hours, but my intention vanished when I walked into my room.

There was a tension in the air which I could not explain. Was someone hiding in the room? Perhaps Wasser? I pulled the curtains aside, opened the closet, glanced into the other room: no one.

The strong box had not been moved from where I had left it.

Was the door locked? I took a few steps back towards it, then stopped again. Why this sudden fear?

I was seized by the insane idea that I should quickly climb up onto the table and take a chair with me to hit whatever was crawling around on the floor.

“But there’s no one here,” I said to myself out loud. It made no difference. The air I was breathing had turned thin and sharp.

My eyes searched every corner: nothing.

Everywhere I looked, nothing but familiar things: a chest, the lamp, the picture, the wall clock, faithful old friends all of them, and lifeless. I hoped they would change their shape as I looked at them, allowing me to assume some optical delusion had been the cause of this fear that was paralyzing me.

No, that was not it, either. They stood there, rigid, remaining true to their shapes. Much too rigid, given the murkiness of the light in the room, for it to be natural. They are under the same spell as me, I told myself. They don’t dare make even the slightest movement. And all the time the same awful lurking presence filled the air, like the constant sound of a running toilet. All my senses were ready to pounce, but there was nothing to pounce at. I stood in a corner and counted my heartbeats.

I started saying words out loud, any words that came into my head: ‘duck,’ ‘bunny,’ ‘worm,’ ‘mole,’ and repeated them mechanically until they suddenly stood before me, naked, stripped of sense, fearful sounds from a distant, barbaric past, and I had to scour my brain to rediscover their meaning: D u c k?  W o r m?

I slowly realized there was a strange being standing before me holding out his hand. It was a grey, broad-shouldered creature, about the size of a sturdily built human. Where the head should have been I could see nothing but a sphere of pale mist. The apparition gave off a dismal odor of sandalwood and damp slate.

In the darkness the phantom was outlined in a spectral haze. The only perceptible movement was a slight contraction of the silhouette, which then dilated again, as if the whole of its body were pulsating with deep, slow breaths. Instead of feet, it was standing on bony stumps, from which the grey, bloodless flesh was pushed up for a few inches in bulging rolls.
Immobile, it held out its hand towards me. In it were little seeds the size of beans with red with black spots round the edges.

What on earth was I supposed to do?

It must already have been late, for I could no longer distinguish the walls of my room. From the apartment next door came the sound of steps. I could hear someone moving wardrobes, pulling out drawers and letting them crash to the floor; I thought I recognized Wasser’s rasping bass cursing and swearing. I ignored the sounds. They meant as little to me as the rustling of a mouse.

I closed my eyes. Long lines of human faces passed me in endless procession, rigid death masks with the eyelids firmly closed. It was my own kin, my own ancestors. Each carried the same genetic variance as me, though for many, the gene was recessive and other strengths came to the forefront.

They rose from their graves, presenting individual features, with hair brushed smooth and parted, curled or cut short, with full-bottomed wigs or pigtails fastened with a ring; down the centuries they came, their features growing more and more familiar until they merged into one last face: the face of me. I was the goal. The perfected creation.

Then the darkness dissolved the room into an infinite empty space, the center of which was myself in my bed with the grey shadow still in front of me, its arm outstretched. And when I opened my eyes, I could see strange beings standing around us in two circles, intersecting so that they formed a figure eight.

Those in the one circle were dressed in robes of shimmering blue, the others reddish black. They were people of an alien culture, grey and unnaturally slight in stature, their faces hidden behind shining cloths.

From the quivering of my heart I could tell that the moment of decision had come. My fingers itched to take the seeds; at that I saw a tremor go through the figures in the reddish circle.

Should I reject the seeds? The trembling passed to those in the bluish circle.  Whichever I did, accept or reject the seeds, the action seemed to cause concern with one of the circles of beings.

I raised my arm, still with no idea what I should do, and, surprising even myself, punched the outstretched hand of the phantom so hard that the seeds flew into the air and rolled away across the floor.

I lost consciousness and felt I was plunging down through bottomless depths; then I found my feet firmly on the ground.

The grey apparition had disappeared. Likewise the figures from the reddish circle. The bluish figures on the other hand had gathered around me. On their torsos they bore an inscription in golden hieroglyphs and seemed to take an oath. They raised their hands, each holding between index finger and thumb, one of the red seeds I had knocked out of the headless phantom’s hand.

Then one alien left the circle and stood before me, pointed to the writing on his chest and asked me whether I could read it. And when, almost incoherent in my exhaustion, I replied that I could not, he stretched out the palm of his hand and pressed it against my chest, and the shining characters appeared there. I still could not read them and even worse, to me they were upside down.

A hand pressed my eyes and I fell asleep.