AND THEN I SAW HIM...

I am sitting on my front porch, smoking a Spirit and enjoying the cool Fall night. It is my kind of weather: dry, invigorating, breezy. The boughs of the oak trees sway with the zephyrs. The moon has made its uncensored appearence earlier in the week, and so now the street is lit only by the street lamps down a dozen houses. They cast all in a slightly unsettling yellow hue. I inhale and expell a dual plume of gray-white cigarette smoke.

I am not but my mood is tense. And I know not why. And but then I see him.

Twelve-and-a-half feet tall? Shorn oblong skull, reflective almost in its lack of color. He (it?) walks (shambles?) in an almost floating gait. From the distance at which I sit, I can't tell if it walks or flies. But it does it so slowly. I should be screeching like a banshee and running to the protection of my hounds. (Oliver is a sumabitch when he gets riled up. And Louie? Well, Louie's got 60 pounds of pressure loaded in his jaws. Lest ye forget.) But I don't. I stay.

And so I sit on my porch, calmly smoking my cigarette and watch as the being approaches. Closer now, I can see that he/it possesses a featureless face. Flat as a shovel, it is, and the "eyes" are crudely-punched black holes. Its nose is a suggestion. Its "mouth" is a dark-ochre slash. It stands almost thirteen feet tall. That is difficult to convey, through print, just how abnormal--and disconcerting--its height is. Consider this: Imagine a man the height of an 18-wheeler walking into your local drug store and buying a pair of sunglasses. Surreal doesn't even begin to explain how I am feeling. It's like watching a tree play golf.

Its arms hang to its shins and I note that at the end of each of its six-fingered hands, four-inch nails (talons?) scrape methodically at the night sky. I can't see its feet. They are--for some reason--obscured, a blur. A tooth loosens in my mouth and I absently spit it out. It bounces off the concrete bottom step and comes to rest on the walkway. The being is two houses down, now, and still I am uneffected. Just curious, truth be told.

The wind intensifies and, through the sighing of the branches, I begin to hear snatches of conversation: "...the oven was off i know the oven was off i know..." and "why did you do this to me?" and "...you to look in the got damned book, it's in the got damned book, you..." and "...lights are brighter than i had thought they would be so bright so brig--"

The being is one house down; and the wind intensifies further. Well.... The sound of the wind intensifies--is a train hurtling down my block?--but there is no overt manifestation of meteorological phenomena. The branches sway just as they had and the newly-fallen leaves spin as they had. The sound, the amplification, is in me. In my head. Between my ears. Behind my eyes. How does one run from Internal? To where does one flee?

I sit. And I wait as the being shambles down the street, not twenty feet from me, directly in front of my house. As it passes me, I smell sulphur and I see cotton-plumps spinning 'round its knees. Its feet are still blurred to me--it ends at the knees and morphs to the concrete of the road. Yet it moves. And as it moves, as it passes before me, it turns its head in my direction, it stares straight at me. Into me.

I am calmly paralyzed on my front stoop. I wouldn't be able to move if I wanted to. Its eyes...nothing and everything. My heart seizes and my breath stops. I am horrified and terrified by what I see in its dusty eyes, yet I am loathe to pull away. Courage or cowardice have nothing to do with it. I cannot pull away. I see Ages in its eyes. I see corrosion and erosion in its eyes. I see the passage of time in its eyes. I see myself naked in a tub, face-down, in its eyes. And I try to close mine, but they will not close. I see...I see. The being speaks not a word to me. It fixes its haunted eyes to mine, and then it slowly turns its massive head back to the straightline.

I finish my smoke and I go to bed.