Timeline: Present
Point of View: Side Character
Location: Earth (Park Manor trailer court)
Jaquelin York (not Jacky for short, she was certain to tell you) was Irving’s neighbor, and she didn’t really pay attention to the ruckus outside all too often. She complained when she needed to complain (when things out there just got a little out of hand), but she accepted where she lived. Trailer parks were cheap living, and cheap living attracted a certain kind of folk. Most people were good people just trying to make it by, some were good people that actually kept up their mobile home rather nicely (even keeping the yards weed-free and maintaining their front porch to keep out the rot). But some of the others… boy, some of the others just weren’t any good.
She’d lived in many trailer parks over her 67 young years of living, and Park Manor was one of the better ones she’d lived in (which is why she’d chosen to live there for the better part of 19 years). She was sandwiched between good people that maintained their home well, such as she did (Jerry and Rebecca Fleckenstein, such good people), and Irving, who she thought was an odd, greasy little man who mostly kept to himself. She’d had to call lot management on him only twice because of his unmowed lawn, but that was the worst of it. She figured she was pretty lucky to have neighbors such as these, all things considered.
In fact, the only bad neighbor that was close (three houses down and to the left, around the bend) was a rather barbaric man named Erick Donahue, his wife (at least, only when he was home) Tessa and their horde of devil-born children. She’d had several broken windows and a keyed car that she blamed on those wandering children without leashes, and the drunkard Erick was sure to keep the neighborhood awake on the weekends with his rambling, screaming, and breaking things. So far as she knew, at least, he wasn’t beating his wife or children. But boy did she have suspicions.
So when Jaquelin (not Jacky) heard a certain kind of ruckus going on next door at Irving’s house at 10:57pm at night, she found herself somewhat surprised. She wasn’t surprised enough to go knock on doors, but her ears perked up. She turned the volume down a couple clicks on the Wheel of Fortune re-run to listen. It sounded like the man was genuinely freaking out. She knew him to drink often, but he’d drink and go to bed, that was all. She didn’t think him a man for doing drugs. Not like that drug-infested mother of his had been at least, thank heavens.
At 11:15pm, with the noise still ongoing, she stood and walked over to a nearby window. She cracked open the curtain a sliver and stared out across the narrow lawn. His curtains were drawn, but she could see light flashing from his living room. She could hear the man yell at something, and then there was crashing, as if he were stumbling around in there. It seemed very likely he was either very drunk or very high. She was becoming more keen on dialing the police, but hadn’t yet committed. She moved a chair up close to the window so she could continue to watch comfortably.
At 11:21pm everything had gone silent, and Jaquelin (not Jacky) was considering going to bed. She stood from her chair to at least migrate back into the living room when the loudest crash of the night took place. She dropped back into her chair, eyes glued to the window. She couldn’t see anything at all. The only lights from over there were the flashing ones coming from Irving’s living room. Her eyes were wide as she watched, but she could see nothing.
Then the ground began to rumble. It was like an earthquake (she’d never experience one, but one could imagine), but the rumbling was inconsistent. The quakes pulsed, the whole house shaking with each one.
Jaquelin got closer to her window, looking out and around as best she could. She looked up into the sky. Still she saw nothing, only blackness. The pulses were declining, getting smaller, moving away. She tried to guess at their source, but could think of nothing at all. It didn’t seem possible that Irving was able to make such ground-shaking movements or sounds on his own.
She fled to the doorway of her home and wrapped a sweater around herself and stepped into a pair of plush slippers. She gripped the handle of the door separating herself from the outside, then paused. What am I doing? She asked herself. I should be calling the police, not doing this myself.
Even so, despite her fear, she was out the door, the cool night air assailing her senses almost immediately. She wrapped her sweater tighter around herself, her arms tight about her stomach in an embrace. She took a step, then crossed her porch, her thighs brushing against what some would consider an excessive number of potted plants.
I’m curious is all, she told herself as she walked. If there were identifiable voices or sounds, then surely she would have called the police to deal with the matter. But she was a curious person, and she could not adequately categorize the things she’d heard and felt next door.
Her slippered feet touched the grass, the blades of grass cool and wet against her ankles as she walked, noticing the transition as she stepped over her well-maintained line into Irving’s slightly taller and weedier turf. One foot caught in the dirt and she lost her slipper, toes digging into the wet grass. She cursed goodness and then slipped her foot back into the slipper quickly, overly eager to walk around the rectangular home and peer into what awaited her from the other side.
She turned the bend and stared at the other side of Irving’s trailer.
It wasn’t clear at first exactly what she was looking at until the moonlight hit its moisture just right. Before her, spread out against the wall of his own home, was Irving turned inside out. Her father cleaned deer many years ago when she was still a child, and she would sometimes catch glimpses of those carcasses hanging gutted from the garage rafters. The image was striking, and similar to the present, aside from the guts dripping down, the intestines and remaining organs slapping onto each other in a heap at the ground in wet squelches. At the top, she noticed a gaping hole in his head where the left eye had once been.
Jaquelin wasn’t sure what sounds she was making, if they were screams or gags, but the night’s silence had become ringing in her ears. She began dry heaving onto the concrete below until bile finally came forth. It pooled on the ground, soundless and staining her furry pink slippers.
Then she passed out there on the concrete before she could do anything to address Irving’s situation.
----------------------------------------
On the other side of Irving’s house, inside his own home, was Preston Carpenter, up late playing Fortnight even though his parents had told him to go to bed. They’d hurried him to his room several hours earlier, then scurried out the door to go do what adults do some nights with friends.
Preston wasn’t new to being home alone. He was home alone often, and because of this had grown accustomed to gaming late into the night. He didn’t have many friends in real life, but he had many online, and he played with some of them now. Not all of them were kids his age (some were old enough to be friends with his parents) but Preston didn’t care. Some would say that age was just a number, and never was that more true than on the internet when all one had in which to judge another person was their voice and their on-screen avatar.
“Razor, where did you get that sweet outfit,” Preston said into the mic as the on-screen characters danced before the battle began. “Dude, nice, I should get that pack. That’s sick.”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
As the game was about to begin, Preston sensed that something wasn’t quite right. The house felt as if it were shaking. He hadn’t noticed it before, as focused as he was on his game. The world around him and time itself had a habit of disappearing while he played. He wasn’t old enough yet to recognize any problem with that. Someday maybe he would have made the choice to flip from one addiction to another, because that was human nature, but he’d never get that chance.
The rumbling continued, like massive footsteps just outside the house.
“Guys I gotta go, be right back. Yeah, yeah, just watch my back until I get back. Fuck off, I wasn’t the one that decided to go refill snacks while we were one of the last three teams on the map. Yeah I still remember that, you fucking…”
He trailed off as he felt and this time heard the rumbling outside. He dropped the headset without saying another word. His heart raced. He wasn’t really sure what he should do. He suddenly wished his parents were home so they could tell him what to do. He was a cocky kid, liked to go his own way, but like most people (especially kids) he didn’t like to make decisions when shit got scary.
He approached the curtained window behind and to the right of the television. He slowly lifted the cloth to expose the glass and stared out into the dark. Even with the lights off inside the house he was unable to see much out there in the pitch black.
Then he saw the figure moving. It was a slight shifting of shadows much too large to be anything natural.
He let the curtains fall closed, feeling a little uneasy.
He tried to reason with his fear. Irving was out there in his lawn. Who cares? Maybe he was taking care of himself out in public in the middle of the night, just spicing things up a little bit. Preston had done it before, after all. Many times. It was better outside sometimes.
But what about the shaking? And those shadows were much too big to be...
He felt deeply unsafe in his own home. He moved toward the bedrooms, peeking into the doors one by one without turning on the lights to ensure that he was truly alone in the house. He returned back to the living room, the vibrations continuing, those dull thudding sounds that shook the house. They were louder now. Closer. Near the other side of the house, maybe the front door.
He ran to the door to make sure it was locked. It was. Then he moved the curtains aside to watch out there.
He saw the culprit, the tall shadowy figure out there. As it stepped by the front door, the automated lights turned on and bathed the creature with light. It towered about the single story mobile home, its hundreds of glowing eyeballs brightening immediately as the light fell upon them, like the eyes of animals at night. Some of those eyes fixated on Preston while the others remained forward-facing.
Then, before Preston could comprehend its happening, the creature turned toward his house. The act of its mobility was fluid, those many eyes and the structures connected to those eyes all shifting until their pupils landed on Preston.
Preston shut his door and turned off the lights.
----------------------------------------
Jaquelin awoke to the sound of a boy’s screams, and she lifted her aching body up from the ground. As she shifted her weight, her chest cried out in pain, and she fell back to the concrete and placed an arm up at her chest. It wasn’t a stroke, she didn’t think, because she’d already had one of those once before. This was something else, perhaps a cracked rib. She stood more slowly the second time around.
Again her eyes landed on what remained of Irving, and she felt bile return to her throat. She turned away.
She had to call the police. She checked the pockets of her pants and sweater for her phone, but all four of them came up empty. She had a bad habit of not carrying the device around with her. She wasn’t of the current generation, and didn’t think of it as a necessity. However, in that moment, she wished she’d taken it out the door with her. She shuffled back toward her mobile home trying to remember where she’d last seen that damned thing, and when the last time she’d charged it had been.
The young boy screamed again, accompanied by the sounds of metal being stripped away from wherever it was designed to remain. It was a loud tearing, grating sound, like tin siding being ripped away from the side of the house during the all-to-common wind storms around the area in late summer.
In her haste, Jaquelin spun her heel, nearly risking a sprained ankle.
Jaquelin wasn’t a brave woman, and in that moment, in her terror, she wasn’t thinking about helping that screaming boy. Neither was she overly concerned about her own well-being (the beast inside that house had another target, after all, and hadn’t yet seen her as far as she knew). She was instead trying to search the database of her own mind to remember who lived in that damn house. Was it the Hill’s? The Kitchell’s? No, no, the Kitchell’s were across the street, and the Hill’s were several houses away on the other side of her own house. Who in the hell had the young boy on the other side of the Barker home?
The boy yelled again, but this time the sound was much different. It was more of a squealing, as if the life were being extracted from the poor boy’s body, and then there was silence. A light bulb went off in Jaquelin’s mind. The Carpenters! Yes, that was it. Oh, that poor boy.
----------------------------------------
The creature had seen Preston as soon as the lights had turned on. However, that doesn’t fully capture the multitude of swift processes that took place within the complex creature’s hive mind.
The first process was that of seeing. The closest Earth equivalent to how the creature sees would be that of a common house fly. While a fly has only two eyes, those eyes are made of up thousands of lenses called ommatidia. These lenses curve around to form a globe, one on each side of its head. They each capture their own individual image of the world, and then these images coalesce into a collage of images for which the fly sees the world. However, the fly itself is a simple creature with a simple brain, and this is where the similarities between the fly and the creature end.
In that moment when the Preston’s lights flickered on, seven of it’s eyes on that side of its body had detected the movement that was the light turning on. Those eyes each were connected to seven brains from within the hive system that interpreted what that light could mean. Then those eyes saw Preston, which the brains only knew as a being similar to that of the Irving creature. Those brains immediately sent signals across to the other 677 brains within the system connected to their eyes, alerting them of the movement and the second creature. Of those 677 eyes, 39 of them were stolen parts (including Irving’s) of which the creature considered lesser beings. Those 39 eyes didn’t have their own brains, as they weren’t part of the hive, but they were still functional, tied into the hive as an additional tool to send additional signals to the greater mind, assisting them in sending data that pinpointed depth, color, and movement to a precision beyond even that of an eagle.
All this to say that, in milliseconds, the action of seeing became moving.
Before Preston had stepped away from his window, all 716 eyes had rotated to the source of that movement and had all equally detected the being. In milliseconds more, all brains aligned that the being they’d seen was similar in stature to that of the first mysterious being they’d assimilated into the system, and was equally worth studying to further understand more about this new place.
The creature(s), now aligned on their mission, moved 240 of its eyes on the left side that had been configured to form a foot, taking a first step, and 253 on its right (an in-exact division because some of the eyes were of different sizes than the rest, and the brains had already determined the optimal count and mass for balance), while the remaining eyes remained in what could be considered a body. In three seconds the creature was at the door forming appendages that it could slam against the thin door to gain access.
Once it did, it chased the loud creature inside through a series of narrow passages and blockades until the small creature ran out of room to escape, trapped by the very building it had attempted to escape into.
Once pinned, it freed the creature of its head with a deft tug upward. As it’s life blood, warm and rich with a deep vibrant color that reminded the creature of its own home, it popped one of the seeing orbs from its head and assembled it into its system.
With these two new human eyes, it was capturing images of the world from orbs that were used to seeing it, and it’s brains were using that information to understand more about where it was.
Then it proceeded to spread the body out as it had Irving, tearing it’s exterior and stretching it across the barrier of its home as its beautiful color flowed out. When the body was stretched, the creature placed its body in the center, its one good orb still resting in its head. Curiously, this body didn’t create the signal the last one had. This body was a dead ruin of bone and fluid.
Even so, the creature hoped the rest of the hive would be able to find the first signal it had left, and it would continue to search for more portals that it could open for travel between worlds.
----------------------------------------
Back inside her home now, Jaquelin laid underneath her covers with her phone, frantically dialing the police.