it.
Previously it had stood watch up there along with a pair of damaged companion sentinels behind the derelict hotel’s balustraded patio wall; then it had reappeared at a location half-way down the terraces, perhaps placed there—or so I had conjectured—by some midnight romeo, to act as a roof over his bower or love nest. And now…
…But, how had it made its way here? To this spot directly across the dark canyon of the road, behind the rim of the great retaining wall, where only its cowl and upper half were visible from my balcony? Perhaps a freakish gust of wind had carried it aloft, tumbling it down the terraces and landing it right-side-up, trapped against the hillside’s retaining wall.
Well yes, perhaps. And perhaps not.
But there it was, for all the world like the top half of an eerily human figure—indeed of a cowled nun!—looking down on me. And as a car crested the hill and its headlights shone however briefly on that oddly religious shape behind the high wall, so the darkness under the cowl flashed alive in a pair of triangular flares, which were at once extinguished as the beam swept on.
These things I remember, and also laughing to myself in the stupid way that drunks do, as I stumbled in through the balcony doors to collapse upon my bed…
I felt it coming. But don’t ask me how; I just knew. Perhaps it was this affinity of mine for weirdness, this magnetism working in my mind, my being. I had felt it, it had felt me. I had seen it, it had seen me. I definitely had not wanted to know it, and that could be why I had failed to recognize it: a natural reluctance to engage yet again with the Great and Terrible Unknown. And it very definitely did not want its existence revealed!
Of necessity a secretive creature, it had become, unfortunately for me, practised in the erasure of any suspect knowledge of its being. And quite simply—as an adept of this indelicate art—it now intended to erase me!
I felt it coming, its flexible mantle fully open, parachuting on the night air. But immobilized, my mind dulled by drink, I refused to believe; I denied it. It could not be…it was a nightmare…the Demon Drink had filled my mind with monsters. Ah! But what then of the thin people of old London town? Or the clown on stilts as I believed I had once seen him or it? Or had they too been impure and not so simple fantasies of the flowing bowl, mere figments of fermentation, tremens of delirium?
Yet now I could even smell it: a not-quite-taint, a waft of mushroomy fungus spores, a hybrid thing’s clammy innards, contracting to engulf and smother me…
My God! I felt it on my face like a slither of wet leather! And knowing that it was real, I came awake screaming !
It was there in room number seven with me, inside the wide-open balcony doors, leaning over my bed. Its membraneous canopy was closing over my head, shutting off my air, holding me down. I lashed out with both arms, groped beyond the perimeter of the thing’s web. My left hand found and grasped the bedside lamp; I automatically thumbed the switch and dragged the softly glowing lamp inside the living canopy with me.
I was stone-cold sober in a moment, as this alien—what, intelligence?—was illumined from within. And seeing it like that, literally from within, I remembered comparing the structure of more orthodox, man-made parasols to the physical form of the octopus. Oh, yes! And now…well it wasn’t only the more orthodox ones!
For there beneath its mantle—where, thank God, there was no huge parrot beak but, instead, surrounding a pulsating slit-like mouth, a ring of eight short, worm-like tongues, spatulate at their tips for the delivery of whatever food sustained it—I saw that indeed the thing had tentacular limbs, all eight of them connected by webbing and lined with grasping suckers.
As for the mantle stretched between these limbs: while it was flexible and had the consistency of a bat’s wing, allowing my lamp to shine
Previously it had stood watch up there along with a pair of damaged companion sentinels behind the derelict hotel’s balustraded patio wall; then it had reappeared at a location half-way down the terraces, perhaps placed there—or so I had conjectured—by some midnight romeo, to act as a roof over his bower or love nest. And now…
…But, how had it made its way here? To this spot directly across the dark canyon of the road, behind the rim of the great retaining wall, where only its cowl and upper half were visible from my balcony? Perhaps a freakish gust of wind had carried it aloft, tumbling it down the terraces and landing it right-side-up, trapped against the hillside’s retaining wall.
Well yes, perhaps. And perhaps not.
But there it was, for all the world like the top half of an eerily human figure—indeed of a cowled nun!—looking down on me. And as a car crested the hill and its headlights shone however briefly on that oddly religious shape behind the high wall, so the darkness under the cowl flashed alive in a pair of triangular flares, which were at once extinguished as the beam swept on.
These things I remember, and also laughing to myself in the stupid way that drunks do, as I stumbled in through the balcony doors to collapse upon my bed…
I felt it coming. But don’t ask me how; I just knew. Perhaps it was this affinity of mine for weirdness, this magnetism working in my mind, my being. I had felt it, it had felt me. I had seen it, it had seen me. I definitely had not wanted to know it, and that could be why I had failed to recognize it: a natural reluctance to engage yet again with the Great and Terrible Unknown. And it very definitely did not want its existence revealed!
Of necessity a secretive creature, it had become, unfortunately for me, practised in the erasure of any suspect knowledge of its being. And quite simply—as an adept of this indelicate art—it now intended to erase me!
I felt it coming, its flexible mantle fully open, parachuting on the night air. But immobilized, my mind dulled by drink, I refused to believe; I denied it. It could not be…it was a nightmare…the Demon Drink had filled my mind with monsters. Ah! But what then of the thin people of old London town? Or the clown on stilts as I believed I had once seen him or it? Or had they too been impure and not so simple fantasies of the flowing bowl, mere figments of fermentation, tremens of delirium?
Yet now I could even smell it: a not-quite-taint, a waft of mushroomy fungus spores, a hybrid thing’s clammy innards, contracting to engulf and smother me…
My God! I felt it on my face like a slither of wet leather! And knowing that it was real, I came awake screaming !
It was there in room number seven with me, inside the wide-open balcony doors, leaning over my bed. Its membraneous canopy was closing over my head, shutting off my air, holding me down. I lashed out with both arms, groped beyond the perimeter of the thing’s web. My left hand found and grasped the bedside lamp; I automatically thumbed the switch and dragged the softly glowing lamp inside the living canopy with me.
I was stone-cold sober in a moment, as this alien—what, intelligence?—was illumined from within. And seeing it like that, literally from within, I remembered comparing the structure of more orthodox, man-made parasols to the physical form of the octopus. Oh, yes! And now…well it wasn’t only the more orthodox ones!
For there beneath its mantle—where, thank God, there was no huge parrot beak but, instead, surrounding a pulsating slit-like mouth, a ring of eight short, worm-like tongues, spatulate at their tips for the delivery of whatever food sustained it—I saw that indeed the thing had tentacular limbs, all eight of them connected by webbing and lined with grasping suckers.
As for the mantle stretched between these limbs: while it was flexible and had the consistency of a bat’s wing, allowing my lamp to shine
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