• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Did I offer you a choice?” He pushed his tangled claw into my chest, ripping me open, unbleeding. I tried to yell, but nothing came out.

The blue thread went taut and vibrated, then shimmered and crawled over me, spreading over my limbs and up to my head. The thread passed over my eyes and blinded me a moment, then faded. The shape of it vanished, seeming to sink into me, knitting me closed again around its adamantine knot within my ribs.

The mist-world blazed and faded like fog under sun. The shape and color of the Grey changed, roaring with a tangle of light, fountains and smudges of illumination, glowing forms of vibrant color and force, lines as straight and hot as highways in the desert, as twisted as tornadoes, wild as wind.

The studio, formed of soft mist, was limned in gleaming threads around us, and the top of Queen Anne Hill spread away beyond it, through inconsequential walls, glimmering with phantom fires and falling into an ink-dark stain of cold nothingness—the Sound. In the distance, the black beast howled in rage and I felt it gather itself and rush toward us, all teeth and claws and unquenchable hatred.

The Grey was alive inside me and I felt it vibrating, coiling, binding into me like a malevolent vine growing from the living seed Wygan had planted. I could feel the pulse of it. I shrieked despair.

Wygan laughed. “Yes! You will grow to the part I need you to play. But we’d best go now, before the hungry one ruins the party.”

He let go, his touch withdrawing with the same sensation as cactus spines drawn from my skin. The Grey lapped over me like a wet sheet and slid away, leaving a single, indissoluble thread that vanished between my breasts.

I was on my knees by the studio door. My clothing and face dripped. I fought nausea, gagged and swallowed bile, gasped to catch my breath again. I staggered to my feet.

“You doin’ all right?” Wygan asked. He was still in his chair.

I gulped. “Alive.”

He giggled, and the sound rubbed against my nerves like ground glass. “More or less. But you should be able to keep yourself that way now, until I need you. Now you see it as it really is, and you can use that. You’ll need to learn the part, though, or something may hurt you.”

I turned and stared at him, shivering in shock. He looked back and smiled a little, sending a breaker of cold over me. The light in the booth turned blue, though the bulb on the stand was amber.

“I . . . know all I can stand to.”

“For now. You can let yourself out, I think.”

He turned his back to me, tugging on his headphones and crouching over the console. Will Robinson pursued Dr. Smith through bars of Pink Floyd, casting a blue shadow from the video monitor in the shape of a giant reptile, which grinned at me.

I bolted out the door and stumbled, tripping, desperate for distance, toward the door.

“Don’t forget me,” he called out, a shadow voice gliding on a nonexistent breeze. I heard him laughing behind me all the way.

I staggered out to the Rover and leaned against it, bowing my neck to press my face against the cold solidity of the old truck’s side. I shivered and gulped mouthfuls of ordinary Seattle air to stop myself howling out loud. There was an ache in my chest where Wygan had touched me, black pain equaled by the tearing horror rampaging through my mind. I hated myself for this trembling weakness, and more so for what had happened. I crawled into the backseat and curled into a sickened ball as my thoughts screamed and raged:

What are you? Raped, ripped, re-formed. What are you, now? Ignorant fool. These are vampires; a monstrous redesign of humans, psychotic by our standard, alien, divorced from humanity. What drives them is not what drives you. It never will be. Never again. They are not human. They are not humans! And neither are you. Not anymore. Insect. Half monster. What are you, now?

I lost track of time, hysterical, quivering in a crumpled wad of misery, despair, and self-disgust. After a while,