Spawn of Man by Terry Farricker Page B

motored by relays. The cable, swaying steadily like an elongated metal-scaled snake, looped and curled on itself, until it disappeared into the vestiges of the wall.
    ‘Robert, it is rude to stare.’
    Robert’s head fell back to its original position. Something dripped from the thing’s “neck,” where it was still composed of organic material, and the face spiraled on its trunk, high into the air, then glided back down to face Robert again. Robert considered running, but his fear rubbed out the picture of him successfully negotiating the maze of corridors to escape. In its place was sketched an image of him maybe achieving twenty feet before the thing caught and entwined him like a giant cobra. He could feel the breath leaving his body, as his mind elaborated the scene.
    ‘What… are… you?’ Robert said, struggling to form the words.
    ‘Don’t you mean, who am I, Robert? Or, who are we? For I am more than one. My physical sum is two but my consciousness expands to nurture many. Do you know your Bible, Robert? Call me legion, for we are many!’
    From the haze of the aperture that the abomination issued from, came another sound, a humming, buzzing sound, like wings being beaten at incredible speeds. The droning belonged to a different being and it now hovered two feet to the right of Robert. It was some form of wasp, but horrifically mutated, so that it had an insidious little human face, full of loathing and hatred.
    The wasp-thing was fully twelve inches long, with gaudy yellow and red coloring, and it licked its lips with a black tongue, displaying a set of sharp, needled teeth. Its long, bulbous abdomen lifted as it held its body vertical, and Robert felt the dread anticipation of a strike and he lifted his arms to protect himself.
    There was a wet, flicking sound, like a whip dipped in oil and cracked in the silence of a graveyard, and the wasp-thing was plucked from the air by a tongue. The tongue managed to unfurl from the face-entity and ensnare the wasp in a second. The tongue was grotesquely constructed from flesh and blood, but it was barbed with wicked spines. The spines were so thick and protracted that they could never retract down the throat of any predators born in the natural world. The wasp-thing’s back was snapped and the spikes impaled its body, as it vanished into the face entity’s mouth. Robert convulsed and felt a watery solution of bile and vomit fill his mouth.
    ‘I apologize, Robert, it’s so hard to retain one’s humanity sometimes, I’m afraid,’ and the face’s eyes widened in their smooth sockets to focus on Robert with a gaze that was both pestiferous and sympathetic at the same time.
    ‘I am the essence of Daniel Douglas that was. His thoughts, his dreams, his memories and his hopes. I am also the fruit of his death. The thing that was born from his death. Do you understand, Robert Douglas?’
    Robert pushed his head back against the wall, but the face followed and continued to speak. ‘Allow me to teach you something about humanity, Robert Douglas.’
    Robert turned his head sideways so that he looked into the corridor and replied, ‘ You are going to teach me about humanity?’
    ‘Ha, yes, I take your point,’ said the face and the slit that served as its mouth smiled without humor. ‘However, do not make the error of interpreting my intentions through my outward form. You cannot appreciate the… circumstances that have prevailed upon me and brought me into being.’
    Robert still presented the thing with his profile and from the furthest point in the corridor he had recently walked down, he thought he now saw a light, a beam like that of a torch, playing erratically in the gloom. But the hovering face was oblivious to this development and continued to speak, its voice sonorous with a slight synthetic edge passing through it. ‘Robert Douglas. There is great change on the horizon, a change that you must embrace because you are focal to it.’
    Robert turned to