I used to think I could be happy anywhere. I wanted to see the world, and imagined I could make a life for myself wherever you plunked me down. Now I chalk that up to a youthful lack of taste. The same one which makes small children prefer pieces of breaded, processed chicken in the shape of dinosaurs over filet mignon.

There’s a connection between my body and the land where I was born. Yes, that’s a real thing. I didn’t believe it either until I moved out here. As I grow older, I crave familiarity more than novelty. Familiar sights and sounds. Familiar flora and fauna. The very scent of the air.

I have nobody to blame but myself. I made a classic young man’s error, getting on a plane for somebody I wasn’t married to. “Yet”, I told myself. Had my future with her all planned out, down to the color of the curtains...only to be dumped over the phone while unpacking.

I just wanted to go home after that. I wanted the comfort of those familiar sights, sounds and smells. Instead, because I spent my last dime transplanting my life from Oregon to Florida, I found myself stranded in an utterly alien environment.

I don’t belong here. Certainly not my body, but my heart least of all. Come to think of it, my true “happy place” was never a place, but a person. Was. Now I’m a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by incomprehensible beasts I have no ability nor desire to understand.

The first thing that struck me when I left the airport was the faint smell of burning tires, mixed with what I would soon learn is a scent typical of swampland. An obese woman dressed up as Uncle Sam occupied a booth set up outside, handing out free baby turtles to “police, firefighters or military in uniform.” I still don’t know what that was about.

The smell inside the cab was the same as outside but intensified by heat. A dense musk I was reluctant to immerse myself in, except that I knew nothing of local public transit options and couldn’t afford to bring my car.

On the drive from the airport to the apartment complex, I spied gators sunbathing right on the front lawns of houses adjacent to a large pond. Just right out in the open. And here I always thought the point of creating civilization was to get away from large predators.

A news report on the cab’s radio described a recent altercation between a shirtless man and police. Evidently he lit his beard on fire, declared that he could turn his entire body to steel and fire lightning from his eyes at will, then challenged bystanders to face him on the field of honor.

There’s a running joke that every time a news report begins with “A Florida man…” followed by a list of depraved crimes against nature and decency, they’re really all about the same guy. Some sort of demented superhero named “Florida Man”.

It was followed by a report on a string of missing persons cases. I didn’t know it then, but pretty soon I’d regard that as an improvement. If the rate of disappearances picks up, pretty soon this could be a dramatically nicer place to live.

This state is, at the very least, never boring. Maybe it’s something in the air, or the water. Maybe it’s the frequent hurricanes. Frequent by my standards anyway. But more likely it’s just the abundance of meth.

I was mugged on my third night, though mugged might not be the right word. The poor slob was too out of his mind to actually take my wallet. He wore a vomit stained undershirt and something resembling a kilt fashioned from a garbage bag around his lower body.

I couldn’t understand a word that came out of his nearly toothless mouth. I don’t know for certain if he was tweaking, he may simply have been homeless. Every native I’ve run into since I got here speaks English, but degenerated by varying degrees.

It’s not just a Southern drawl. Not much of that here. Nor is it a self consistent local dialect. It’s a mushy, corrupted patchwork, ever-changing to suit the mood of the speaker. I’m not just trying to be difficult, there have been times when I sincerely had to nod and smile because I couldn’t understand the fellow speaking to me.

I have known plenty of brilliant Southerners. This isn’t about North and South. I recall struggling to describe the nature of that cultural divide to an exchange student once, realizing in the process how petty and artificial it is.

The only actual, literal rocket scientist I personally know speaks with a Southern accent so thick, he ought to wear a tablet around his neck to display subtitles. So whatever’s wrong with Florida has nothing to do with the larger Southern US, which has produced a respectable number of accomplished thinkers. It’s specifically a Florida thing.

When you’re little, everyone you trust tells you to follow your heart. What awful advice that turned out to be! I followed my heart all the way from a lush, temperate wonderland of natural beauty to a putrid swampy hellscape prowled by roving bands of mutants. Fuck you, heart.

That’s not to say I haven’t met some interesting people here, albeit nearly all of them from out of state. I don’t have a large enough sample size to say this with any confidence, but it does seem like Florida is a popular place to pass through when you’re young, figuring yourself out and deciding what to do with your life.

Passing through Florida, and through my life. Each of them like a momentary sip of water, just barely sustaining me as I languish in this human desert. The cab ran over another of the increasingly common potholes.

I would later learn that the city concentrates maintenance funding on the areas immediately surrounding the theme parks which bring in all those lucrative tourist dollars. They visit the parks, maybe they visit the beaches, then they’re gone. No sense in fixing up what they’ll never see.

Consequently everything outside of the oasis of city spending surrounding those theme parks looks like a borderline post apocalyptic banana republic. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. As with any state there are nice and not so nice parts of Florida, I’ll be generous and assume I happened to move to one of the latter.

The landscape consists of dodgy, cobbled together strip malls and various small businesses of questionable legality. All of them operating out of dirty single story hovels which change hands frequently. Payday loans, pawn shops, cash for gold, and churches.

Oh, the endless variety of churches! One on every street corner, as plentiful as coffee shops back home. Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Scientologists, Eckankar, even a few snake handlers. The more gonzo, sensationalist and fringe, the better.

Like Vegas without the casinos. Everything’s instant, value priced, while-u-wait. Culture without nuance, depth or patience, with a population to match. If you’re familiar with the website “People of Wal Mart”, imagine that, but everywhere you look any time you step outside.

Partly due to the cultural disconnect and partly due to the lingering shock of being dumped, I began floating through life high above everything, nowhere touching the Earth. It no longer had anything I wanted. Nothing with which to entice me to re-engage.

The sting of the breakup, though it felt as if it would last forever at the time, eventually petered out. The habit of disconnection I picked up in the process did not die with it, but persisted as a permanent new feature of my personality...one which quickly proved its worth as a pain avoidance mechanism.

Nobody could hurt me if I never sincerely invested myself in them. What an ingenious trick! Nothing prevented me from going through the motions. From saying all the same kinds of things I would’ve, if I allowed myself to return the love so generously invested in me by a string of women more emotionally adventurous than I.

This way I could have companionship, gratification and the various other benefits of a relationship, but with none of the danger. It never lasted longer than a few months though. They always picked up on what I was doing when, sometimes just experimentally, they tried to hurt me a little bit.

A test of some sort. Going to dinner with an old boyfriend, sloppy makeouts with some rando at a party or something of that nature. I was supposed to get angry. To yell, to cry, even to slap them depending on their tastes. Anything but an indifferent shrug.

If only they weren’t so curious, things might’ve lasted longer. But they had to know. They couldn’t just accept outward appearances as reality. They had to scrape at the skin, recoiling in horror when the wound refused to bleed. When only cold, dull metal shone back at them through the opening.

I know I’m the one who was in the wrong. To lead them on like that, letting them entrust their hearts to an emotional cripple. I should be guilty. But then, guilt is a feeling. I’m just about out of those by now.

It’s the same way anywhere there’s loads of people. Malls, airports, theme parks, bars. I imagine a sort of invisible force field just slightly larger than I am. A full body condom. To separate me from these people, however frequently I must immerse myself in them.

A Christian roommate back in college had his own term for it: Being in the world, but not of the world. A stopped clock is still correct twice a day. This particular world is one I have to be “in” for the time being, I decided...but I will never be “of” it.

There’s no avoiding interaction, not forever. Don’t think I haven’t tried. I don’t even leave my apartment lately, performing online jobs for a service called Mechanical Turk. Basically human assisted search results.

I did it on the side at first, but once you’ve stuck with it for long enough and are highly rated, you can make serious money at it. Enough for rent and utilities anyway, plus a little extra for the occasional pizza or energy drinks that food stamps won’t cover.

So I stagnated. Then I stagnated more. Days, weeks, months went by with no human contact save for text on my monitor. The only times I’d go out would be for booze or coffee. Or to hike. With practice, over time I whittled down the number of words I needed to say to the bartender (in order to communicate what I wanted) to the absolute minimum.

She didn’t notice what I was doing at first. When she did, she started giving me the stink eye every time I ordered. Not that I care. I don’t know her. I don’t fucking know any of these people. This may as well be a foreign country.

Back home, I loved to hike. You really can’t get away with being an indoor person in the Pacific Northwest. There’s an embarrassment of gorgeous wilderness just minutes from any city. Not so much here. Just endless flat expanses of asphalt or swampland, punctuated by big budget tourist attractions and gimmicky, low budget Americana.

I chose this apartment complex in large part because it’s directly adjacent to a much nicer, more upscale complex. They’ve got their own beautifully landscaped bicycle path, the closest thing to a wooded trail for miles.

Naturally, they’ve put up a rustic wooden fence as a “suggestion” that those of us who don’t pay for the path’s upkeep should stay out. Of course I just step right over that shit. I don’t know these people. I don’t care what they think of me, or owe them anything.

It’s one of the rare bright spots in my life since moving here. Nothing like a proper hiking trail but it makes for pleasant Sunday walks. The landscaping is a little overdone and artificial, like everything else in this state...natives included.

Even so, simply being out in the sun, more or less surrounded by trees, flowers and grass is a sorely needed respite. The only interruption is the occasional overly disciplined cyclist, wearing full body neon spandex and a teardrop helmet, rocketing past to one side.

One of ’em stopped once to lecture me for making use of the path. He could tell from my clothing where I must live. I just stood there, expressionless, until he tired himself out and left. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Except for incidents like that, I could be both outside and alone for the entire day once a week. I needed the exercise too. My hermitic lifestyle had begun to take a toll on my body. The regular diet of rice, beans and pasta plus the occasional pizza delivery also wasn’t doing me any favors.

Despite the weekly exposure I’d grown distressingly pale. All muscle definition vanished and with each passing day I felt myself growing weaker. Every Sunday, when I emerged from the apartment for a walk, the sun hurt my eyes a little more.

Deterioration. Progressively worse, resembling the transformation already underway within me. A gradual withering which I could imagine no plausible way to reverse. To hell with it, I decided. It’s not as if I’m terribly attached to life at this point.

It was during one of these Sunday walks, specifically a stopover in an undeveloped field of grass, that I found it. The field is one of the few places I can reach from the path that’s purely natural, neither landscaped nor built upon.

I didn’t think much of the object jabbing me in the back initially. I simply meant to lay down and look up at the sky, maybe listen to some music. But something sharp pressed into me as I reclined. Rolling over and retrieving the offending object, I stared.

Can’t say why I didn’t notice the smell sooner. Once close enough to my face, it made me gag. Something like the cracked, partly decomposed claw of a crab. Not any species I’ve ever seen. Too large for one thing, and black as night.

Here and there, coarse, pointy bristles protruded from it. Like the ones which cover tarantulas, seen up close. Coconut crabs? Out here? Not that I knew of. Lobsters? Not this far inland. As repulsive as it was, it made for a welcome curiosity. A disruption of my usual, increasingly mind numbing routine.

I contemplated bringing it back to the apartment, but decided against it because of the smell. Instead I took a picture with my phone, then laid elsewhere in the field until the sun began to set. I’ve become accustomed to the heat since moving here, but it’s downright pleasant in the evening.

Except in the Summer, and even then only for a scant few days, back home it was never warm enough that I could take walks after dark without a jacket. Strolling along beneath the stars, the now comfortably tepid air tickling my bare arms made me resolve to schedule some more evening walks in the following weeks.

Now and again I passed through great teeming clouds of gnats or some other tiny winged insect. I knew these small, localized swarms assembled in the evening for breeding purposes and felt mildly disgusted by that as I picked them out of my hair.

Then again, they inconvenienced me relatively little compared to what it must be like from their perspective. Imagine some gigantic, incomprehensible beast plowing into you while you’re just trying to get laid. A brief moment of disgust for me. But for many of those flies, a brutal and unexpected end to their already short lives.

They’re the lucky ones. I’ve got to go on living here. I took a shower when I got home to wash the remaining gnats out of my hair, as otherwise I could feel a few stragglers writhing against my scalp, fighting to free themselves. Down the drain with ’em.

I ordered a pizza online afterwards, still dripping, towel wrapped around my waist. I didn’t even bother getting dressed in time for the delivery. Just opened the door, took the pizza and handed him the cash. “Oh. I uh, I didn’t mean to…sorry!”

I didn’t so much as make eye contact. “Well, have a great evening and enjoy your pizza!” Token friendliness, and thinly veiled pleading for a generous tip. I shut the door in his face. I order pizza once a month at most. The rate of turnover is such that it’ll be someone else next time anyway, guaranteed.

Strangers in the night, just how I like it. The pizza was decent for what I paid, though some strange process happens as it cools down. It’s never anywhere close to as good reheated as it is freshly baked.

The same thing happens to any fast food I’ve tried. Addictively tasty when fresh and hot, but it slowly congeals as it cools, saturated fats solidifying until achieving a rubbery texture. It doesn’t stop me from eating it though. My insides are no less cold, no less limp.

I played computer games on one monitor while ‘turking’ on the other until the sun came up. All told I made nearly fifty dollars. Something about sleep deprivation really puts me in “the zone”. The energy drinks probably have something to do with it.

I enter this hazy, almost dreamlike mindset where the work flies by. I’m no less proficient in MOBAs when I get like this either. My skills improve, if anything. Time loses all meaning. My bloodshot eyes track the action with no conscious effort on my part, my every movement automated.

During one of these semi-lucid marathon gaming sessions, in the wee hours of the morning, I first glimpsed one. A whole, living specimen that must’ve followed the scent I picked up from touching that claw. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye mind you, and because I knew I was inebriated, I didn’t take it seriously.

Hallucination comes with the territory. It was hardly the first time I spotted blotchy, moving silhouettes in my peripheral vision. Mildly concerning the first time, but I don’t scare easily. I have a solid grasp on what’s real. On what’s even possible, versus the mind playing tricks on itself.

That infuriates some people. Usually ones with some frivolous worldview built on a mixture of sloppy thinking and outright fraud. I could be less abrasive if I were to qualify my statements as if they were just my opinions, but they’re not. Anyway, do they deserve that level of consideration? It’s their own fault for being suckered into such obvious hokum.

This fortified materialistic mindset insulates me against fear of the dark. In most cases I’m likely to be the scariest thing hiding in the dark anyway. I can’t pinpoint when I turned into what I am now, but any crazed vagrant, thief or meth head concealed by cover of night has more to fear from me than the inverse.

That’s just realistic threats, too. Ghosts, demons and the like never enter into my consideration. To reach the center in my brain responsible for fear, such ideas would first have to pass through the center responsible for separating the plausible from the implausible. They never do.

I simply know better. It’s a bleak, boring world out there. No sasquatches, no devils, no ghosts or chupacabras. Humans are the only monsters on this planet, myself included. The longer you live around them, the more of their attributes you absorb until one day you look in the mirror and see one of ’em staring back at you.

That reminds me, I should start smoking. Whatever it takes so that I die before the transformation completes. Death is my destination, as certainly as someone with a gun to his temple. I’ve just chosen to take a more circuitous, scenic route.

To that end, when I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache, I headed straight for the bar. Sheila was surprised to see me, I think. I don’t look at her face much. I’m also not actually sure that’s her name. Sharla? Shauna?

“Shit, you’re a mess.” No argument from me, I left the apartment without showering. My hair must’ve been a riot to look at, stiff oily tufts sticking out all over. When I said nothing, she sighed and asked me what I wanted.

“Whisky, neat.” She frowned. “This ain’t fuckin Star Trek. I’m not that machine. Whatever it was, you know. Tea, earl grey, hot. Can’t you say hello first? Maybe ask how I’m doing?” I smiled. Shirley’s not usually funny. Shanna?

“I just want my drink.” I paid upfront. A tab would’ve been too much of a commitment for my liking. The beginnings of roots I had no intention of putting down in a place like this. I already felt hungover and would undoubtedly regret this later in the day.

Morning drinking is one of those cliche signs that you’ve lost control of your life. I’ve got no life to lose control of, so I ought to be alright. My eyes wandered, then came to rest on the dingy little strip club across the street.

I think it used to be a Blockbusters. They repainted but didn’t bother to change the architecture, just blacked out the windows. The sign was missing some letters, and had been for the past year. The giant pair of neon outlined cartoon tits above that communicates their value proposition clearly enough. Most of their regulars probably can’t read anyway.

A pair of surly, shirtless men with huge beer bellies were duking it out in the strip club’s parking lot. Really going at it, smashing each other’s ugly, drunken faces with their fists, a trash can lid, and at one point the hood of a parked car. I looked away, having seen that sort of thing so many times around here that it wasn’t even worth paying attention to.

I’m not an eavesdropper by nature. I could care less what anybody around me is talking about, but it’s occasionally ridiculous or outrageous enough that my ears perk up. This is how I’ve learned everything I know about how their minds work, which is more than I ever wanted to.

For one thing, there exists no semblance of critical thought in their understanding of the world. Their method for determining what’s true basically boils down to what they’ve heard other people say. The more people say the same thing, the more credible it is in their estimation.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard them breathlessly discussing obvious internet hoaxes as though they were real. Confusing satire for news, or the contents of tabloids and chain letters as if they were the products of reputable journalism.

This is how they accumulate a sort of “folk wisdom”. What “everybody knows is true”. A mishmash of politically motivated rumors, investment scams or other get rich quick nonsense, and the sort of hollow Earth, Jewish conspiracy, ancient aliens bullshit of the sort commonly discussed on Coast to Coast AM and Infowars.

Whether they believe it boils down to how cool they think it would be if true, and the degree to which it reinforces their entrenched political views...which are themselves dictated in large part by fear, selfishness and stupidity.

According to the average conversation I overhear while drinking, Obama was born in Kenya, the government puts fluoride in our water and chemtrails in the sky to dumb us down (as if these people need any help with that) anybody who’s not some sort of evangelical Christian is out to get everybody that is, and these various menaces are all somehow in cahoots with each other.

Rolling up everybody you dislike into a single vague, sinister entity as if Jews have any truck with Muslims, or atheists with either is surely simpler than forming separate opinions of each group. Which is easier still than getting to know individuals, though I suppose I’m not one to talk as I avoid that like the plague.

Topping off their list of bogeymen, there’s the feminists, the gays, the blacks, the ACLU, the government and basically any other barrier to achieving their idea of utopia; a country under the exclusive control of people who look, sound, think, dress, fuck, and smell like they do.

That’s a wonderful joke to me, because if you ask one of these creatures to list the qualities they imagine all blacks possess that they find so disagreeable, what you’ll get from them is a spot on description of themselves.

They’re disgusting, aren’t they? It can’t just be me. There are days when I wonder if I’ve judged them too harshly. This usually happens when I haven’t run into one for a while. That little shred of guilt vanishes the moment I next hear one of them speak.

“Oh ya, dem fings is real. I seen ’em” says the plump woman with the ratty blonde hair seated near me. Whoever she’s speaking to is just outside my field of vision, but I don’t care enough to turn my head. I continue listening anyway, and discover she’s talking about ghosts.

“Dey had experts on dat show, I done watched it t’other night on da Histry channel.” Oh yes, of course. The History channel. Also known as the Hitler, ghosts and aliens channel. Gotta give the people what they want, integrity be damned.

“Expert” has a very particular meaning for these people. “Scientist” is a dirty word. It has political connotations for them. It’s those damnable “government scientists” who tell them that climate change exists, that the Biblical account of human origins probably isn’t accurate, that vaccines are a necessary precaution against pathogens, that fluoride is harmless in sufficiently small amounts, etcetera.

Just a bunch of dour, humorless spoilsports in their view, whose input on any matter of emotional importance is never welcome. “Experts” are another story. That’s any white or Asian man in nice clothes who argues in favor of their own ill formed opinions, with a command of the English language far enough in advance of their own that he sounds intelligent and credible, but not so much that he comes off as snooty.

These buffoons regularly appear in so-called documentaries about the existence of mermaids, the alien origins of Bigfoot and so on with “Expert” under their names at the bottom of the screen. It’s these “experts” the locals are referring to when they use the ambiguous “they”.

As in “Did you hear that they proved the existence of Atlantis?” or “They found evidence dragons really existed back in the middle ages”. Which it turns out was the poor fellow’s interpretation of The Last Dragon, an openly fictitious mockumentary which speculates about how the anatomy of dragons might work if they existed. If.

Doesn’t matter. He saw it, it sounded serious and authoritative, so in his mind he’s got a rock solid basis for making such a claim. There’s no use arguing. He’s got that vague but convincing memory to latch onto.

Even if you take out your phone and show him the exact program he’s talking about to demonstrate for him that it was never meant to be taken as fact, he’d shrug and say something like “close enough”. As if it was a reasonable mistake anybody could’ve made, and you’re the asshole for taking it seriously enough to settle the matter.

It’s maddening and never, ever worth the hassle. When you wrestle with a pig, you both get filthy, but the pig enjoys it. I learned that the hard way when I took a night class on programming.

A well built fellow in a pink polo shirt with a popped collar was impressing the anorexic blonde with the disproportionately huge bust seated next to him by explaining that time is the fourth dimension.

Not realizing the tar baby I was about to become entangled with, I muttered that time isn’t objectively the fourth dimension (since it isn’t as though they have numbers carved into them) and that there exist spatial dimensions in excess of the three familiar to us as well, one of which could be accurately called the fourth.

He “corrected” me, citing a Michio Kaku television special he watched the night before. Didn’t matter that we could both be right. That duration can indeed be added to length, width and height as one of the metrics used to describe a solid at the same time that spatial dimensions exist in excess of the three familiar to human experience.

What mattered is that he saw something on TV which sounded credible, so he felt certain that the irritating nerd contradicting his recollection of it couldn’t possibly know better. I drew a tesseract for him. To his credit he recognized it. Most people recognize a tesseract even if they don’t know the term for it.

“This is a four dimensional cube, or at least a flat drawing of one. Yet the fourth dimension expressed here isn’t temporal, but spatial. What’s being visualized isn’t the duration of the cube, but an additional degree of extrusion.

A line is an extrusion of a point, a square is an extrusion of a line, and a cube is an extrusion of a square. When you extrude a cube, you get a tesseract. That has nothing to do with time and everything to do with space.”

He scoffed but didn’t explain why. “Whatever nerd. Just go look up what I was watching, then come back and tell me that. You think you know everything.” Of course I don’t, but this particular topic was one I happened to know something about.

His posturing further impressed the tits on a stick whose narrow white ass he’d been blowing smoke up before I made the mistake of involving myself. “Ooohhh, you’re so smaaart. You should come to my place and help me study tonight.”

Maybe I really am the fool. He was presumably balls deep in her a few hours later, while I pulled another all-nighter playing MOBAs and narrowing search results for random internet retards. If you judge a method by the results it produces, impressive sounding horseshit outperforms factual accuracy every time.

The women I did occasionally capture the interest of seemed mainly attracted to the novelty of dating somebody who could string together a coherent sentence without straining himself. I’ve got opposable thumbs, an even number of toes and all my original teeth, apparently rare and enticing qualities around these parts.

A few tugged at my heart. Tempted me to engage, to become entangled. Really sweet, bright, worthwhile girls who had the misfortune of meeting me. Of being fooled by the human shaped outer shell, mistakenly imagining there was still anything of substance left inside.

Even then, they could tell what I was turning into. I don’t blame them for leaving. If I had any scruples I would’ve warned them off myself when we met, but I didn’t. Nothing that I once liked about myself remains. It all burnt to the ground the day I received that phone call while unpacking.

When my blood alcohol level rose to the point where I could no longer silently endure the braying and bleating of barnyard animals carrying on behind me, I stumbled out through the double doors in a blinkered stupor. Is the sun always this painfully bright?

The debilitating level of intoxication made the heat and humidity surprisingly bearable. I was soon drenched with sweat but only noticed when my hand became too slippery to hold onto the bottle. Wait, I paid for the whole bottle? Shit, I’d better finish it then.

Drank too much? Drink more, that’ll fix it. Booze logic at work. I can’t say exactly how I got there, but after a long unintelligible smear of blurry scenery, I realized I was back in the field. I really ought to wear a GPS collar when I drink, so that after I sober up I can have Google Maps show me the route I took. Something like those Billy focused Family Circus comics with the dotted line all the fuck over the yard.

I concluded it was an ideal place to pass out, and was in the process of laying down when I spotted the unmarked van pulling into the parking lot at the far side of the field. I pressed down as flat as I could, but continued watching with rapt interest.

Someone must own this field after all. I worried about how they might react to finding me here, drunk and disheveled. Not for long though. Curiosity quickly supplanted fear as I watched a quartet of men in black suits, white rubber gloves and sunglasses emerge from the vehicle.

Even if I were sober, they were far enough away that I couldn’t make out what they were doing in any real detail. Whiskey goggles only added to the difficulty. What is that, I thought. What the fuck is it?

Some kind of carrion. A dead animal, about the size of a man. Too many legs though! Too many for a bear, or a deer, or anything I know about. Jet black all over. Long spindly legs dragging behind as they heaved it into a body bag, zipped it up, then loaded it into the back of the van.

Fuck me. I studied the label on the bottle but could find nothing to blame for what I’d just seen. When I looked up, one of the agents seemed to stare directly at me. I froze. He turned a few degrees. Then a few more, surveying the field for any witnesses.

Despite my drunken incompetence, just by laying flat in the tall grass, I managed to evade notice. Once fully satisfied that there were no witnesses, all four men piled into the van and drove off. Why during broad daylight? Even in such a state, that seemed odd to me.

Unless they didn’t want to risk anybody finding whatever the fuck it was that they bagged up and made off with. Didn’t want to leave it rotting out here even a second longer than necessary, heading out to retrieve it the moment somebody called it in.

Cops? No, no. FBI? Maybe. Spooks of some kind. I don’t know enough about the agencies which handle hush hush, cloak and dagger type shit to venture a guess at who employs those men. Just that they weren’t the sort of fellows I should introduce myself to.

I remained there for a time, watching for any further activity. Then I abruptly vomited, getting some on my shirt. I stood up swearing at myself, every other word slurred to the point of unintelligibility. Then it struck me.

They did it. They finally fucking did it. I’m one of the local creatures now. God damnit. Maybe this is how it happens? Maybe nobody’s actually native to this fetid swamp, the prehistoric peninsula that time forgot. Maybe they come here and begin changing. By the time they realize what’s happening, it’s too far along.

Fuck me. Fuck this place. Garbage, all of it. But I could no longer exclude myself from the mess around me. Now I’m just another figure in the background, fitting in at last when I hoped I never would. Death, take me now.

I tripped in a gopher hole and stumbled, falling to my hands and knees. When my senses returned, it took a while to fully process what was in front of me. I never really bothered to explore the whole field before this, just wandered a short ways in and laid down to watch the clouds roll by.

But now, close to dead center of the field, I found myself peering down what appeared to be a borehole of some kind. A sinkhole, maybe? Is this what they look like? Didn’t sound right. This looked excavated, not naturally formed.

It was about five feet in diameter and so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. It just faded into inscrutable blackness after about fifty feet. If I didn’t stumble on that gopher hole, I’d probably have fallen into the much larger opening instead.

What is this? Something related to construction? That must be it. A freshly dug well, possibly. Or the early stages of a geothermal heating and cooling setup for whatever building would soon be erected here. With atypically good timing, my stomach chose this point to once again empty itself.

The remains of my liquid breakfast spiraled down into the darkness, scattering along the way into so many soupy droplets. I dry heaved a couple times, confirming that was the last of it. I then repeatedly called out into the abyss. I don’t remember exactly why. Just to listen for the echo I think.

There’s a lot I don’t remember about that day. How I wound up at the field for example. I just know that I got home somehow, because that’s where I woke up, head pounding like Michael J. Fox working a jackhammer.

The sun had already gone down. Not recently either; when I stepped outside to gauge the temperature it was chilly enough that I decided against walking it off. My cat wove between my ankles as though deliberately trying to topple me.

It’s a stretch to call Goblin “my cat”. Just a stray who tolerates me because I feed and shelter her. A scraggly little creature that I welcomed into my life because she’s cleaner and better mannered than most of the people I’ve run into since my arrival.

I spent so much time developing an immunity to human attachment that I neglected to do the same for animals. I’m helpless but to dote on this grumpy, stubborn little critter. I’m sure I’d love her less if she could speak. Makes me wonder if the locals might be rendered equally charming by a sudden outbreak of mutism.

Goblin leapt onto my lap the moment I sat down at my computer, aggressively burrowing into my jacket. She gets clingy at night. Probably less to do with affection than the fact that my body emits a good deal of heat.

What was that, I thought. What exactly was it? A jumble of half remembered sights and sounds trickled back into my mind, bit by bit, as I struggled to sort out how much of it really happened. Most of all, I felt captivated by fleeting memories of the hole.

What’s down there, I wonder. Down that hole, deep in the Earth. What could be down there? What’s down in the hole? Gotta get my thoughts under control. Clicking the time in the lower right of the screen brought up the calendar. Thursday already?

Hardly the first time my sleep cycle became inverted. Takes forever to fix it, too. I’ve read you need to stay awake until evening, resisting the urge to crash before then. I never manage. Instead, I stay awake further and further into the wee hours of the morning, falling asleep later and later in the day until I come full circle.

It’s hell on my body, and increasingly my mind as well. When a series of soft knocks came at the door, I initially ignored them under the assumption I was hallucinating. Who would visit me? I stumbled to the door and opened it just a crack.

Camille, my next door neighbor. She brought me cornbread and grits the night after I finished moving in. I ate it all, but other than that we’ve had no contact since, save for occasional glances when we both retrieve our mail at the same time.

“I don’t mean to bother you, it’s just...I never see you leave your apartment anymore. Is something wrong?” I searched for answers to that question which wouldn’t fill many volumes. “No” I grunted. She didn’t buy it, probably smelling the whisky on my breath.

“If something’s happening in your life...if you’re hurting and don’t have anybody to talk to about it, you could come see me any time you want. I don’t know anything about you, so I can’t promise I’ll know how to help, but I’m a good listener.”

I just wanted her gone. “I go for walks sometimes. Don’t worry about me.” I began to shut the door, but she wedged her foot in there. “Somebody left a thing on your door.” She carefully handed me a post-it note through the narrow opening.

Sure enough. Looked to be from the landlord, too. “...Thanks.” With that, I pushed her foot out of the opening with my own, then shut the door the rest of the way. The note expressed similar concerns about “antisocial behavior”.

Asocial rather than antisocial, surely? What is there to complain about? In most ways, I’m a model tenant. I don’t blast music at odd hours, I don’t host parties, I don’t do much of anything. If not for the light coming out of my windows at night, one could be forgiven for assuming this apartment is vacant.

The note ended with something or other about an upcoming “community party” in the “clubhouse”, the same large structure which houses the office where I signed all the necessary paperwork to move in. What “community” exactly? I just live here.

I crumpled it up and threw it in the bin on my way to the kitchen. The moment I flicked the light switch, a single cockroach fled beneath the fridge. I grimaced. Not much to speak of in the fridge except the pizza I ordered the other day.

Another cockroach crept behind the microwave the moment I spotted it. In all likelihood there were hundreds hiding in various shadowed crevices of the apartment, only emerging to scavenge while I’m sleeping.

Revolting little creatures. Slick, glossy black carapace. Slender, bristly legs upon which it skitters about while its antennae wave to and fro, tasting the air. Closely related to the praying mantis but altogether less elegant, though my opinion hardly matters as the damned things are impossible to get rid of.

I heated up a slice of pizza, scarfed it down, then chased it with an energy drink. I knew by now it’d take several hours before I felt regular, so I drew a hot bath and turned the bathroom lights off. Taking a steaming hot bath in the dark is my go-to hangover remedy.

I don’t know if it actually expedites the process, but even the meager light from the apartment’s fixtures hurt my eyes in this state. What a relief when I at last slid my weak, pale body into the steaming tub. At once I felt the tension in my limbs begin to dissolve. Works every time, though lately it seems like it’s growing less potent.

Goblin pushed her head against the door until it swung open just far enough for her to enter. The gap in the door cast a long, narrow strip of light across the floor and up the wall. I grumbled but didn’t want to leave the warmth of the bath to close it.

Besides, I knew she’d just want to be on the other side of it a minute later. She rubbed up against the door frame, yowling intermittently. “Singing the song of her people” I call it. Even with the door open, she couldn’t decide which side of it she wanted to be on.

Just then, something passed by outside the door. I didn’t get a good look, only what I could see of it through the narrow opening. A bizarre, tangled, impossible silhouette...My second sighting, though I didn’t yet realize it.

Terror gripped my heart. Burglars? A wild animal? Camille? None matched whatever I glimpsed a moment earlier. So I stepped out of the bath, wrapped a towel around my waist and warily emerged to investigate.

The front door hung open. Muddy tracks stained the carpet, shaped nothing like the sole of any shoe I’ve seen. I did a quick inventory of my belongings but found nothing missing. Only then did I notice the cat was gone.

Must’ve been a vagrant who broke in meaning to rob the place, too fucked up on meth or whatever else to actually carry it out. Or maybe he spotted me in the tub and booked it, having wrongly assumed the apartment was empty on his way in.

No sense going out looking for the cat. In all likelihood she hauled ass out the door when the burglar broke in, and would be too spooked to show herself for a day or two. I considered calling the cops, but didn’t want the hassle or prolonged interaction.

I considered notifying the landlord, but he’d just call the cops himself and I’d wind up having to go through all that tedium anyway. Instead I set a dish of food just outside in case Goblin came back while I was sleeping, propped a chair against the door from the inside, then climbed into bed.

Sleep didn’t come easily. I had to get up twice to puke into the toilet, after which I started having hot and cold flashes. Absolute misery. Must be coming down with something. For an hour or so I just couldn’t get warm no matter what I did.

Then for the next hour, I overheated even after stripping down and throwing off the covers. Nothing in the medicine cabinet looked appropriate for my symptoms. Nothing to be done except try to get as much sleep as possible, and hope I felt better come morning.

But when I next awoke it was not to a clear head, nor to the rising sun. Instead I awoke to the feeling of some heavy, ungainly creature perched on my back, pinning me down. My heart pounded, but before I could cry out or fight it, something pierced the back of my neck.

Whatever it injected made me go limp. I was still fully conscious but paralyzed as a second horrid monstrosity, obscured by the darkened room, loaded me onto the first creature’s back. I could feel it struggle somewhat to bear me along. Perhaps it normally targets smaller prey.

Even if I could move, I wouldn’t have been able to free myself. I was bound to its sleek, segmented carapace with some sort of sticky fiber. My mind raced feverishly, trying to work out what the fuck it was, where it came from and where it could be taking me.

A nameless fear silently gestated within my chest...one I dare not believe in until we reached the field. The moon loomed large overhead as the chittering, crawling beast beneath me made its way to the center of the field. Then down into the great, gaping hole.

Blood rushed to my head as we descended into the Earth. A starry patch of night sky, framed by the mouth of the hole, was the last thing I saw before I blacked out. Indeterminable hours passed while shadowy forms swirled about my subconscious.

I next awoke on the agonizingly cold, rough stone floor of a cavern. The ceiling was also roughly hewn grey stone, stalactites descending from it here and there. The first thing I did was check my body for injury.

I hurt all over, but that was mostly down to sleeping in an odd position on such an unforgivingly hard surface. My pale, clammy skin was marked all over with numerous cuts, scrapes and bruises...but nothing serious.

No broken bones, no sprains even. It surprised me to wind up at the bottom of a hole in such good condition until I remembered how I got there. I scrambled to my feet, whirling this way and that, searching the darkness around me for any sign of the creatures.

I found none in my immediate vicinity. But I did find five more naked, frightened looking hostages. Prisoners? I couldn’t yet say anything with certainty about the reason for our abduction. Only one made eye contact. A few stared silently into the distance, knees to their chests, slowly rocking.

Others lay curled up in the fetal position with their eyes closed, murmuring softly to themselves. All of them were situated around the edge of a natural pit in the floor, perhaps fifteen feet across, filled nearly to the brim with oily black syrup.

Directly above the pool, faint rays of morning sunshine radiated from a hole in the ceiling. The one I was brought here through, no doubt in my mind. The light was just enough to dimly illuminate the pool and a modest area around it.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth chattered too, as did those of the fellow nearest me. “Wh-what is this?” I stammered. “Where are we?” He just kept staring at me, arms wrapped around his knees as he violently shivered.

I searched in vain for some sort of weapon. Something sharp, or something that would make for a serviceable club. Nothing to be had but other people. Frightened, naked masses of humanity, huddled together beneath the only source of light as moths might circle a flame.

My next thought was where my phone wound up. Would it even work this far underground? As I ventured further and further from the light’s edge in search of it, I realized nobody would come looking for me.

Nobody. I’d set up my life just about perfectly in order to wind up missing without anybody who lives in the same complex even realizing it. My family back home would be the first to know I’d gone missing. Camille, if not for them. Then the landlord would take notice when I don’t pay rent.

My stomach sank as I entertained, for the first time, the notion that I might be down here long enough for that to occur. So cold! I returned to the meager patch of damp grey cavern floor around the pool which the sunlight illuminated.

It was some small comfort to feel sunshine on my skin. Small then. I didn’t yet know, you see. Probe as I might into the darkness I could find no walls to this cavern and thus, no tunnels through which I might return to the surface.

I grew more and more frantic until the fellow I’d first made eye contact with seized me by the wrist. “Settle down. We tried that already. Don’t you think we tried? That was the first thing.” The blackness encroached so snugly against the edges of the light, with a nearly palpable presence.

“What is any of this?” I begged. “Where the fuck are we?” He motioned for me to sit down. “At the bottom of the hole, of course. They brought you down here like the rest of us. Although probably you were on your way down here anyhow.”

He handed me something resembling beef jerky. I accepted, though under the circumstances I had no intention of eating it, and asked what he meant by “on my way”. He reclined with suspicious calmness, slipping his legs into the bubbling black sludge.

“You were unloved, weren’t you. But that’s no crime in itself! Countless tiny little beetles, spiders and worms go through life unloved simply because nobody notices them. But you also didn’t love anybody yourself, am I right?”

He actually waited for me to say something, so I told him none of this babble got us any closer to the surface and that we should be collaborating to find a way out of this damp, horrible pit. “Probably not for lack of love thrown your way if I had to guess” he added.

I took him by the shoulders. “What the fuck are you talking about? We need to get out of here! If we climb on one another’s backs we might be able to-” He stopped me there. “Nope, that’s why there’s five of us. We can’t even reach the cavern ceiling with just five. That’s why they don’t bring more at once.”

Tears began to flow, though I was so numb I didn’t realize it until some wound up in my mouth. “They? What the fuck are you talking about? You, me and the others? Who is “they”? You’re crazy. We need to get out of here!”

I tried without avail to rouse the others. Catatonic for the most part, or violent when touched. Nobody else would speak to me or even so much as look at me. It seemed like my only option, if I meant to make it out of here, was to cooperate with a madman.

“Listen. Maybe you’re right about me. Is that what you want to hear? Alright, nobody liked me. I didn’t ask them to. I’m not asking you to like me now. I don’t fucking want to run for mayor, I just want to get out of this pit I woke up in. I just want to get out.”

He wore an expression I’ve seen so rarely before that I can’t place it. Smiling, but mournful, as if I said something tragically stupid that I don’t yet realize the larger meaning of. “You could’ve made some effort you know. Cautious, friendly feelers were extended in your direction. Only to be stepped on.”

No, fuck this. I shoved him away and resumed patrolling the edge of the light. “It isn’t any use. There’s nothing but darkness in every direction, forever. It has you now, all over and done with the moment you crossed the threshold. The sooner you accept that, the better.”

I shouted obscenities at him. As if that would make him wrong. As if it would suddenly reveal some hidden passage to the surface that I somehow missed until then. Of course it didn’t, only more blackness.

Worse still, once I ventured far enough from the sunlit pool, I nearly lost sight of it. That’s when I first realized that the ever-present darkness down here isn’t simply darkness. There’s substance to it, like a thick fog. I couldn’t see but twenty or so feet ahead of me in any direction!

Fear led me straight back to the sunlit pool over and over. There was simply nowhere else to go but into darkness. Into the unknown. Right then I desperately wanted comfort, and the only comfort available was the faint warmth of sunlight on my skin. How I came to cherish it.

The light isn’t always your friend, though. I didn’t realize it was preventing my eyes from properly adjusting until, on one of my longer ventures into the darkness, I first spotted one. Well, the fourth time really, if you want to pick at nits.

Something like a gargantuan earwig, easily seven feet long. Or cockroach? It had anatomical features of both, as well as immense compound eyes. I gasped and took a few steps backward. It shifted subtly as though uncertain what I’d do next, but not afraid of me.

It was hideous and altogether alien. I mean, it looks like many other common insects I was no doubt surrounded with daily back on the surface, I just don’t normally see them so close up. At this scale, they make a lot of the same sounds any other animal makes. At least the ones related to breathing.

It grunted, issuing a billowy cloud of stench from its huge, bristly mouth parts. Now more fascinated than fearful, I studied the beast more closely. Only for two more just like it to approach on either side.

When I didn’t retreat on my own, the three of them began advancing on me. Shepherding me, slowly but surely, back into the light. Once I complied, they withdrew into the shadowy fog. Skitter, skitter, inch by inch, until I could no longer discern even their silhouettes. They melted right into it, as if they’re simply solid forms which the darkness takes on whenever necessary.

I didn’t stray for a long time after that. They’d be looking for me now. If I meant to escape, it would have to be the way I came. As I sat there by the pool, deep in thought, I noticed the poor demented fellow from earlier rubbing black slime on his arm.

“What is that stuff?” He turned very slowly to meet my gaze, smiling softly. Just once it’d be nice to see him frown, given the circumstances. “Nothing” he responded. “Does wonders for cuts and scrapes though. Not much point, but I like to stay pretty in between.”

In between? Between what? I brushed it off as so much nonsense. But as I watched, everywhere he covered a wound in the black slime, he then wiped it away to reveal unblemished pale skin. That much, I could not chalk up to his mental condition.

Is it really possible? I assumed the black slime was just runoff or something. Maybe the pit was used for dumping toxic waste at one point. I leaned in to study the gently bubbling surface of the noxious brew more closely. Within it, countless tiny wriggling creatures swam to and fro.

Tadpoles? Not quite. I picked one out of the goo and examined it. Once wiped clean, I discovered it was bone white and resembled a spermatozoa. “Oh don’t manhandle those” the other fellow babbled. “They’re what makes it all work. If they catch you hurting one…”

I didn’t need to be told twice, depositing the writhing, slithery little thing back into the putrid soup it came from. The light by this point was noticeably dimmer. The sun must be setting topside. Opposite me, the rest all huddled together.

“Do you want in on this or don’t you?” I asked what they were doing. “What you’d be doing if you were smart. You think it’s cold now, wait till the sun’s down. All we’ve got for warmth in this deep, black pit is each other. Last chance.”

I declined, opting instead to curl up on the hard, damp, cold cavern floor. I didn’t know these people and had my doubts about their sanity. Even in a place like this, I wasn’t about to let a bunch of naked strangers spoon me.

There was just no getting comfortable. I couldn’t stop shivering, and no patch of cavern floor was any better or worse than any of the others I tried. However I curled up, it did nothing to warm my body, as I had no blanket or anything else to cover myself with.

I lay there for a time, propped up against the base of a fractured stalagmite. Fresh tears retread the paths laid down my face by those before them. This can’t be the rest of my life, can it? There has to be a way out of here.

Somehow I actually managed to fall asleep like that. The others were by that time already sound asleep in their great, fleshy pile. I began to wonder if I might’ve made the wrong choice by turning them down earlier.

It didn’t make much difference when the bugs came for us. Just that most of the food was neatly piled up for them, that’s all. I only realized what was happening because they tore into the others first. But before I could get up and run, two of the bugs pinned me.

What follows remains the most excruciating pain of my life. I felt nerves and muscle tearing as they pulled my leg out of it’s socket, then ripped it free from my body. Blood gushed out of the ragged stump as two more fought over the freshly severed leg.

I couldn’t form words. Not that they could understand it if I begged them to stop eating me alive. It’s something that almost every living creature experiences, but which humans are uniquely safe from thanks to modern civilization. Except for certain unusual situations of course.

It turns out one of those situations is being devoured by giant insects as you scream until hoarse, blood bubbling up in your throat. My arm was the next to go. The still unbearable pain from before muted it somewhat, but I still threw up in shock when they ripped my arm off.

The sickening crack of splintering bone followed. Then eager slurping sounds as they separated the parts of the limb they wished to eat from the parts they didn’t, mandibles furiously moving about almost too quickly to see.

Soon their heads were absolutely caked with my blood. It dripped from every bristle, collected beneath their massive bulbous eyes, then pooled under them on the cavern floor below. I felt myself losing consciousness just as the creatures, apparently finished feasting on me, dumped my remains into the pit of black stuff.

This is it, I thought. Of all the possible ways to die...but at least it’s over. I readily sucked the foul, soupy fluid into my lungs. Drowning is an unexpectedly painful way to die, but after what just happened it felt downright merciful.

Then I woke up. Still immersed, disoriented but somehow with all of my limbs restored. I swam desperately for the surface, and upon reaching it, gasped for air. Once I made it to the edge and pulled myself out, I sputtered in disbelief.

When you wake up after something like that, it’s either very good or very bad. In this place I could hardly imagine it meant anything good. I hurriedly examined the parts of my own body I’m able to see for any sign of injury. Nothing!

I spit out as much of the black goo as I could, then put two fingers down my throat. The rest of it came up shortly after that. The fellow from the other day laughed at me, still smug when I turned to glare at him. “What the fuck was that!?” I shouted. “...You know, don’t you.”

He urged me to keep my voice down, explaining that loud noises agitate the creatures. “Easy fella. It was jarring the first time it happened to me, too.” So it really happened? I demanded to know how I could be not just alive, but physically intact after those things gorged on my flesh.

“I told you how the slime works, didn’t I?” He gestured to my hand as I wiped more of the sticky black shit off my body with it. “They come after the sun goes down. They feast. The black pool revives us, regenerates us...so they can come and feast again the following night.”

I thought I already understood what my life would be, even if I didn’t want to accept it. But as he spoke, the rest of the grisly ‘big picture’ slowly unfolded before me. It can’t be. Can it? The evidence of my senses told me so, but my mind stubbornly rejected the unbearable implications.

They’re farming us. Has to be. Not exactly, but something close. There’s no need to breed us with one another, not when they’ve got this black pool to dump us into when they’re done feasting. We’ll just come out good as new, every time....almost, anyway.

I’ll never really get used to being eaten alive night after night, but after the first couple times I grew accustomed enough that I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. It became part of the rhythm by which I marked the passage of days.

As I carved another notch into the base of the broken stalagmite I was using as a calendar, my hand itched. But when I scratched at the itchy spot, the feeling only intensified, so I took a closer look. I found the beginnings of a fingernail sprouting from just beneath one of my knuckles.

I balked. But sure enough, that’s what it was. I had enough to worry about already, so I ignored it for the time being. On my way back to the sunlit pool, I tripped over something which I discovered, upon bringing it into the light with me, was my own bloody femur.

I gagged and dropped it in fright. It became real for me then. Completely, unreservedly. I’d just held my own remains, there was no longer room for doubt. That’s when I at last accepted that I was down here for the long haul, not just until some miraculous escape opportunity presented itself.

That’s a terrible habit to fall into. Thinking of yourself as the main character in a story, who can therefore never come to serious harm. “I don’t know how I’ll make it out of this” you might think, “but it’ll be okay.” Not because it necessarily will, but because the alternative is too distressing to contemplate.

I’m not going to be okay. I will never be okay again. My future, so far as I could tell, would be a possibly never-ending cycle of feasting and rejuvenation that I could imagine no escape from. So, I began at least trying to make myself as comfortable as possible.

No easy task, given how little I had to work with. But the bugs left scraps of my skin behind that I soon realized I could tan in the sunlight. I used my own urine in place of tannic acid as I once read you can make salmon leather that way. The only alternative was to make stiff rawhide which wouldn’t be much use.

It was a complete disaster the first few times I tried it. But that gave me time to strategize. If I pinned one of my arms or legs beneath a sizable rock just before they came to feast, more often than not it was still there after I pulled myself from the black pool.

That gave me much larger contiguous pieces of skin to work with. That, plus an increasingly refined tanning methodology, soon produced usable pieces of leather. I noticed in the process that two of the others, who never acknowledged me until now, were closely studying how I went about it.

I asked what they wanted, but got no response. So I just kept at it until I had enough for a blanket. It was promptly stolen from me. I made another in the same way, and another, until they had all the blankets they wanted. Only then was I left alone with mine.

Eventually I had enough for crude but serviceable garments. The others were routinely collecting their own remains by this point, copying the tactics they saw me use to trick the bugs into leaving whole limbs behind.

It didn’t do much to keep me warm, but having clothes to wear restored some meager feeling of control over my own life. Even though every night, I could do nothing else but disrobe and stack all of it beneath a nearby rock if I wanted it to still be there the following morning.

What a strange feeling, to wear your own skin. I suppose I always have...just not so indirectly. Indignity upon indignity, though of course that was far from the worst of it. The days blew by in this manner as I continued stockpiling my remains, this time in order to fashion weapons from the bones.

But at the same time, I noticed my body changing. Not at a linear rate either, but with accelerating severity. First it was the fingernail under my knuckle, which then sprouted into an entire additional finger. Then I found a new eyeball just above my right nipple which I could actually see out of.

The human brain isn’t wired properly for more than two eyes, so I kept it shut most of the time as otherwise it was nauseating. Just a bandage on a gaping wound, which only further widened by the minute. Teeth appeared on one of my shoulders, eventually forming into an eyeless set of jaws.

My hair started falling out. Slowly enough at first that I wondered if perhaps it might be down to the stress. But before long I was totally bald, and could feel that even my cranium was starting to change shape.

I fretted and wailed, realizing that not even the purity and self consistency of my body would be spared, but it made as little difference as ever. The bugs still came to feast every evening, and I still dragged my drenched body out of the black pool every morning like clockwork.

I estimate a month went by, give or take, before I changed so much that the bugs no longer recognized me as human. The others aren’t as far along and have shunned me due to my comparatively more grotesque form.

The fools. They don’t realize they’ll be like me soon. If I’d known on my first night what I knew now, I might’ve sought closeness with them. That ship has sailed, hardly the first I’ve watched indifferently from the shores even before I wound up here.

It didn’t stop the bugs from feasting on me. However, when I next strayed from the sunlit area surrounding the pool, they didn’t come to shoo me back towards it. It was the first significant change in their behavior I’d so far witnessed, so it stuck out in my mind.

It only took the next feasting cycle to convince me it was worth it to press further into the darkness. Whatever I might find out there, it had to be better than this. There’s not much I can think of, however foul, that doesn’t beat being torn apart and eaten by giant insects.

So, upon dragging myself out of the black pool the next morning and scrubbing my body as best I could, I set off into the shadows. Not hoping for escape, as by then I’d given up on it, but for change. Any change at all to the usual cycle.

I’ve changed enough now that I don’t fear the unknown anymore. I am the unknown. Maybe that’s how it happens for anyone. There’s not likely to be anything out there, hiding in the darkness, that’s worse than me. So I left the others behind.

Despite my convictions, I felt foolish walking away from the only guaranteed light and warmth in this place that I knew of. What if the darkness really does go on forever? Without the black pool to regenerate me, wouldn’t I simply starve to death after a while?

But even that was preferable to business as usual. I didn’t even look back, no sense in inviting temptation. I found myself wishing for a mirror as I walked. The only sense I had of how advanced my mutation had thus far come were the parts of my own body I could see, and the reactions of the others.

I had nothing resembling skin anymore, except on my face. Instead, my limbs were chitinous. An exoskeleton. Not quite insectoid, still flesh colored, but also unmistakably inhuman. The movement of my elbows and knee joints now felt almost mechanical, as did the movement of individual fingers.

Oh, those fingers. They’d grown so long and spindly since I arrived. The tips, now hard and pointed, were coated in countless tiny little bristles that were very sensitive indeed. What would’ve become of me if I stayed by the pool?

No way of knowing, and no intention to ever find out. But based on the changes to my body, I could work it out for myself. This must be how they increase their numbers, by this gradual metamorphosis from human to insect. For what purpose?

With no sense of their intelligence, it was enough to assume they were simply pursuing an instinctual drive to continue their species. When they herded me back into the light, it suggested some rudimentary intellect...but even ants deliberately farm other insects.

I almost wished I’d stuck around to observe their behavior more thoroughly. I couldn’t make myself go back out of curiosity though, I knew enough about them by now to stay the fuck away. I just kept walking until exhaustion forced me to collapse and sleep, then continued when I next awoke.

That is, until I reached the end of the darkness. I can’t really wrap my head around how there could be a physically discrete end to it, but there was. When I passed out of that wispy black fog, I suddenly witnessed something so beautiful to me that I struggle to describe it. A sight I dared not hope for all this time.

Freedom...of a sort. There had never been any cavern walls. I could now see that the cavern floor and ceiling didn’t come together anywhere, standing awestruck at the very edge of what I’d assumed until then was a subterranean cavity.

Where is this? How can all of this be at the bottom of some random hole in a field? A vast expanse of faint white fog spread out in front of me, punctuated by split stone pillars. Natural formations near as I could tell, if improbably regular in their distribution and proportions. It struck me as similar to a forest of petrified tree trunks, shrouded in luminous white mist.

The pillars were clustered closely enough together that I could faintly make out movement in the one nearest me. The two halves of the pillar almost came together but not quite, leaving a thin sliver of open space between them.

By my estimation, about the same distance as there was from the floor of the “cavern” I now stood in and the ceiling. That’s when it dawned on me. I was currently standing within one of those split stone pillars. The space where they don’t quite meet.

It was never anything like a cavern. Am I even underground? What is all of this? What the fuck is it? How can it be here? As if to underscore my confusion, a flock of winged insects lazily passed in the distance, changing direction as a unified swarm in the manner I remembered seeing birds do it.

Those memories already felt like a lifetime ago. Back when I still thought this was only a hole in the middle of a field. Confronted by overwhelming proof to the contrary, all I could do was stand there, dumbstruck by all of it.

If this was all inside of a much larger cavern, I could see no signs of it. No rocky floor or ceiling were discernible on account of the white fog. The visibility was much better than the black fog, such that I could see even relatively distant split pillars. So if there actually are a floor and ceiling, they must be extremely far above and below me respectively.

The pillars must connect to something though, surely? Bit by bit, I pieced together in my mind a rough idea of how this place must be structured. Imagining then that it was possible for me to fully understand it, or that it couldn’t still surprise me.

The flock drew closer. I didn’t realize I was in any danger until it was nearly upon me. I threw myself to the ground just in time to avoid being knocked out as the swarm rushed overhead. They took up roost on the ceiling, clinging to stalactites.

Sensing an opportunity, I picked up a rock and threw it at one of them. Startled, it fell from its perch and I lunged at it. Wrestling something so vile, with so many bristly legs isn’t my idea of a good time. But once I tired it out, it grudgingly accepted its new passenger.

The winged bug proved much more docile than the ones which tended to the “cattle” at the sunlit pool. By tugging at clusters of long bristles behind its eyes I found I could steer it much as you would a horse. I had some doubts as to whether it could still fly with my added weight.

Those doubts were put to rest as it took flight, wings beating deafeningly to either side of me. I panicked as I had no idea how to direct it while airborne, but it seemed to instinctively maintain the appropriate altitude for traveling between the empty spaces which bisect the stone pillars.

Like countless little worlds unto themselves. Or islands in a sea of clouds. No telling what I’d find in the next one, but all I dared hope for was that it would be different from what I left behind. The next split pillar loomed larger and larger as I approached.

But something else also came into view. Just a massive, faint silhouette at first, which grew gradually more solid and clear. Even when I could see it properly, I couldn’t make sense of it. Something like a biological blimp?

The gas bag was covered in huge bioluminescent, transparent bubble-like pustules. Dozens of long, thin tendrils dangled from the creature’s body, like those of a jellyfish. Winged bugs buzzed around it, helplessly attracted to the light emitted by the pustules.

What is it? What could it possibly be? I had to get a closer look. A bulging cluster of what I assumed were vital organs dangled beneath the gas sack. On the tail end was a sail-like fin I assumed it flapped from side to side for thrust.

Without warning, the instant I flew close enough, one of the tendrils whipped towards me. In the split second before it impaled my winged mount, I noticed the tips were sharply pointed. I tumbled off its back...right into the open edge of the split pillar.

I blacked out on impact. Death, finally. But of course, I couldn’t escape so easily. Instead I awoke with a pounding head, coated in both the winged bug’s blood and some of my own. The creature which stood over me, studying my wounds with apparent concern, was at least as mutated as I.

He looked gaunt and white as driven snow, his mouth a ring of sharp little teeth with nothing resembling a lower jaw. Quite like the mouth of a lamprey eel. He was covered all over in weeping sores and his left leg terminated in a stump that apparently wouldn’t regenerate for some reason, but he could prop himself upright nonetheless.

He did this using a fleshy, pulsating trunk of flesh which sprouted from the left side of his head and neck, then extended down to the ground, terminating in something like a betentacled round foot. Despite myself, I recoiled from the sight.

Surely I’m no less disgusting by now. This new creature, formerly as human as I was, continued to study me for a time. I sensed no hostility from it, only curiosity. Then it spoke. It startled me, even though I knew of no reason it shouldn’t be able to.

I live in a world of monsters now, where I can assume nothing about anyone. Even the bugs may be brighter than they seem. It spoke with a man’s voice, asking if I could walk. I found I could stand alright but I’d landed on my arm, which felt as if I must’ve broken it in several places.

Shooting pain nearly made me collapse, but the stranger came to my aid, holding me on my feet. I mistook it for kindness until he slipped a leathery loop of rope around my neck. I pulled away and tried to flee, but it only tightened as he yanked me back.

“What do you want from me?” He told me I couldn’t be trusted yet. That I might be dangerous, but that if I came quietly he could heal my injuries. I grudgingly obeyed, taking note along the way that the rope had the same consistency as my garments.

The entire time I was on the lookout for opportunities to slip my bonds and make a run for it. But once we reached the middle of the pillar, such thoughts immediately evaporated. Before me stood a dingy white fortress, walls made of rough, pale bricks. Once we got close enough to examine them, the main doors turned out to be fashioned from bones, lashed together with leathery cord.

“I don’t understand. There’s no black fog here. Where I came from, there was this dense black fog everywhere.” He explained that the black fog is an illusion meant to keep us from straying too far from the “rejuvenation pits”, as he called them.

“Once you crossed the boundary, it no longer had any hold on you. So the illusion fell away. That’s also how the rest of us escaped.” The rest of us? He swung the door open and my jaw dropped. There was an entire village inside, populated with all manner of partially metamorphosed monstrosities like us.

The absolute last thing I expected to encounter down here was any semblance of civilization. As he led me inside, I studied the various tents distributed throughout the interior of the fortress. The tent poles were all fashioned from bone, the fabric was predictably the same sort of leather I’d fashioned my garments from.

“This is incredible. How did you build all this?” He pointed to one of the mutants, currently busy pouring steaming white sludge into brick shaped molds. “The bricks are made from powdered bone, bound together with an adhesive made from boiled ligaments. Our own remains, fished out of the black jelly.”

Indeed, there was a pit of black goo in the center of the settlement with a shaft above it. I stopped in my tracks, but he reassured me we were safe. I didn’t believe him until he led me to a stable, also made from lashed together bones, in which several bugs were restrained.

Another monstrosity milked the abdomen of the nearest bug. It secreted familiar black sludge into a bowl fashioned from the top half of a human skull. “You’ve...been down here a while” I muttered, “haven’t you.” He stared wistfully into space. “We all have.”

I then asked why they didn’t simply build a structure with which to reach the surface. “No need. We can just ride the bugs. That’s how we conduct raids of the surface to bring back more food for the captive insects.”

I choked. “You what? You mean to tell me you bring innocent strangers down here and feed them to those things?” He didn’t take kindly to being judged. “We’re just making the best of a bad situation. Same as you were before I found you, isn’t that right?”

I insisted it wasn’t remotely comparable. “After all you’ve been through, how could you subject other people to it?” He assumed a subtly defensive posture. “Who said anything about people? If you saw them yourself, you wouldn’t...Look, there’s a lot you don’t know about this place. You’ll understand if you go up the shaft.”

In order to do that, I first had to fix my arm. This entailed biting down on a piece of leather as one of the villagers amputated it with a saw which was itself carved from bone. After that, I submerged myself up to the neck in their black pool. When I emerged, my arm had fully regrown.

The next step was to request permission from their leader. They warned me before entering his tent, the largest and most ornate of the bunch, that he’s suffered more mutation than any of them. It turned out to be a severe understatement.

The tent interior was dark enough that I could barely make him out. Or her. No way to tell until it spoke. But even when the first words escaped its convoluted mouthparts, it was too far abstracted from human vocal patterns to say anything concrete about who or what this creature was before the bugs did their thing.

“Why have you come here” it gurgled. I explained everything as best I could remember, from the day that I saw the suited men removing the insectoid remains to present. “...I see. Do you come from another settlement?” I shook my head and described the time I spent by the sunlit pool with the others.

The mountainous, jiggling mass of mismatched body parts released a guttural sight. “Primitives. How I hoped you had resources to pool with ours. No matter. I’m told you don’t yet comprehend where you are. What it is that you’re inside of.”

I disputed that, describing the cosmology of this place I had so far worked out in my head. “Still just a glimpse” it insisted. “You have my permission to ascend the shaft and see for yourself. Then you’ll understand.”

That’s all I needed to hear. Soon I’d be back home. None of this would matter. I wouldn’t need to understand anything more about this place if I could escape it! The hobbling creature with the lamprey mouth then led me to the center of the settlement.

Another of the mutants brought me a docile bug fit with a saddle and reins. I was offered brief lessons in how to ride it but I declined, eager to be on my way. With a little experimentation I worked out on my own how to control the beast. Gripping the edges of its carapace tightly to avoid falling off, I rode it up the nearest wall of the fortress and onto the rocky ceiling.

I then made my way to the bottom end of the shaft. What exhilaration when I passed over the rim and began ascending it! At last, a way out of this fucking nightmare. On and on it went, the tiny speck of light in the distance growing ever larger along the way.

The closer I got, the more the texture of the tunnel around me changed. Where it had been rocky at the bottom of the shaft, it now transitioned gradually into a soft, undulating, fleshy material I couldn’t guess at the nature of. Nor did I particularly care, so long as I could leave it behind and return to a normal life.

I emerged onto the roof of a rusty, circular iron building of some kind. All manner of pipes and clunky air circulation machines surrounded me. When I looked back at the tunnel I stepped out of, I nearly collapsed in shock.

It wasn’t an opening in the Earth, but the orifice of an unfathomably long, thick tendril which trailed up into the sky. When my eyes followed it up to its source, just as promised, I at once understood. The entire sky was blocked out by a massive, pale, veiny creature.

Jet black eyes all over its surface from horizon to horizon periodically opened and closed. “What the fuck is that thing” I thought. “What holds it up?” As I scanned my surroundings I realized this was just one of thousands of towers, densely clustered, blanketing the landscape in every direction as far as the eye could see.

No grass or trees anywhere. Just endless rusty machinery, pipelines snaking across barren, rocky terrain from one tower to the next. It was bitterly cold, so it must’ve been fumes in the air rather than heat which made distant towers appear hazy. Everything further than a mile away shimmered subtly, like a mirage.

I began coughing erratically as the thick air pollution invaded my lungs. My eyes were also beginning to water. Everywhere I looked I saw another thick fleshy tendril, like the one I emerged from, reaching down to the top level of every other tower. Where am I? There’s no place like this on Earth that I know of.

Rather than wait to be seen, or worse, captured, I headed back into the tendril’s orifice. I didn’t especially want to, having just seen what it’s attached to, but I still meant to return home somehow. “This just wasn’t the right way” I told myself.

The transition was reversed this time, fleshy walls slowly hardening into stone as I progressed. Gravity also changed direction along the way, something I failed to notice before as the excitement of escape consumed me.

But there would be no escape for me. At least not that easily. When I arrived at the bottom of the shaft, my disfigured friend with the eel mouth was waiting for me. I can’t readily interpret his expressions, but he did look more than a little smug.

“Do you see now?” he asked as I dismounted the bug and led it back to the stable. “I’m not really sure what I saw” I confessed, “but whatever we’re inside of is alive.” He nodded soberly. “A form of life which dwells natively in interdimensional space. Having evolved to such a size that even all of the life on a single planet cannot sustain it, instead it connects itself to countless different places and times in order to feed.”

It made sense of what I saw. I also had no reason to doubt any of it, given that even my immediate surroundings would’ve been unbelievable to me before I was abducted. He went on to explain that the black stuff is what it uses to digest nutrients, as well as serving a purpose similar to blood.

“The insects exist in symbiosis with the larger organism, capturing prey which they divide more or less evenly with their host. Their larvae gestate within the jelly, entering the bodies of those rejuvenated by it, transforming them.”

I knew that much. Still, every time I thought I finally grasped the scale of my environment and the severity of my situation, it only expanded further. “...Is there any way to kill it?” He shook his head mournfully.

“In all of our searches we’ve found nothing resembling a brain, a heart or other organs. It could be that they’re further down, towards the core. Or it could be that the portion of the organism we inhabit is only the part which intersects with three dimensional space.”

I couldn’t accept it. Something of this nature couldn’t be allowed to go on living, given how it nourishes itself. “Can individual openings be blocked, or destroyed?” He confirmed it, but added that the creature could simply withdraw that tendril and connect to some other point on the planet.

“There is no hope for creatures of our size to kill the thing we’re standing in now, any more than a few ants could kill you. But there is still hope that you might return home, if you remember which of the shafts you were brought here through.” In fact I didn’t. I’d been in such a hurry to leave that place, I just headed straight for the nearest pillar with no thought of how to return.

I calmed down somewhat when I realized it had to be one of the immediately adjacent pillars. So long as I didn’t lose track of this one, I could simply check the pillars around it one at a time until I found the one I came here from.

At their leader’s insistence, I put that off until the next day. Insofar as there’s such a thing as a “day” down here. When it came time to sleep, the lights were covered with leathery hoods. There was no obvious source of electricity. When I took a closer look at one of the lights, it was just a translucent sack of bioluminescent vapor they must’ve harvested from that blimp-like creature.

I felt reluctant to make myself vulnerable to a bunch of strangers. Hideous, deformed ones at that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the distinction between them and myself existed only in my mind. I’m just as strange as they are. Or as normal, in another sense.

As I settled into the bed, though it was fashioned from bones and cushioned with leather I knew all too well the probable source of, I couldn’t help but be delighted by how comfortable it was. By comparison with sleeping on cold, damp rock anyway.

It was the closest thing to real, physical comfort I’d felt since before the abduction. How incredible that such different creatures from such different backgrounds, possibly even different planets of origin, could come together and put their literal blood, sweat and tears into improving one another’s lives.

I surprised myself by choking up as I thought about it. Then once more when I found myself thinking of Camille. I couldn’t exactly say why, but neither could I stop picturing her. Recalling the home cooked meal she brought me when I moved in, or how she came to check on me the night of my abduction.

At least I spared the poor girl. At least she didn’t get tangled up with such a trainwreck of a person. My thoughts then turned to Shawna. That’s her name, surely? I could have at least bothered to learn that much about her. What I wouldn’t give to crack jokes with her now.

What I wouldn’t give to have it all back for that matter. Any of it, really. To see the sun, the trees and the clouds. Even a swamp! How I wished to smell the air again. What a fool I was to turn my nose up at it, simply for not being exactly what I prefer.

The possibility that it could all be taken away so abruptly never crossed my mind back then. That I might one day be plunged into a world of darkness and despair, where even the most frivolous aspects of the world I once knew would become my fondest memories.

I cried hot, salty tears while wishing desperate, impossible wishes. To have my old body back. My old life. It wasn’t that bad, was it? No it wasn’t. I only isolated myself because of a broken heart. All the while, ignoring people who might’ve helped me fix it...because they weren’t her.

If only I had another chance, I’d make things right. Those beautiful, friendly people with their shining faces. They’re not monsters. I was the real monster, even before this. What poor fortune those girls had, in particular, to meet me.

I think that’s why I never pursued Camille. She was just such a sweetheart, I didn’t want to poison her. Didn’t want her heart to become polluted upon contact with my own. Thank goodness I’m out of her life now.

When at last I drifted off, shadowy forms once again swirled about my subconscious. But this time, they began to coalesce into something. More and more solid, until I recognized it as Camille. Soft, gentle, sultry. Beckoning to me.

I tried to apologize for everything, but she put a finger to my lips. Then replaced it with her own. How I longed for it all this time without even realizing what I wanted. Perhaps not allowing myself to. Then I felt a strange sensation in my throat.

Before I could react, something wriggled up my throat, through my parted lips and into Camille’s mouth. She withdrew, choking. I tried to help her as she collapsed, but her convulsions only grew more violent. Finally she lay still.

When I felt for a heartbeat, her eyes and mouth suddenly opened and cockroaches poured out. I cried out in terror and fell backwards. The shiny, crawling black torrent just continued to issue forth, leaving behind only an empty Camille-shaped bag of skin.

I awoke screaming. The fellow who found me the other day rushed to my side, asking what was the matter. “Just...Just a nightmare.” He patted my shoulder and nodded knowingly. “The trouble with nightmares down here is that you cannot truly wake up from them, except into another.”

He recounted how nightmares plagued him for the first few years after he was brought here. “I wouldn’t say my dreams are pleasant now. Just that what they show me isn’t all that different from our surroundings. It’s amazing what you can grow accustomed to.”

I didn’t want to grow accustomed to any of this. I wanted out. I wanted my old body back. I cried, and to my surprise, he held me. I didn’t fight it. There was no denying that, whoever he’d been before, he understood what I’d gone through since my abduction.

Of all the places to bond with someone. Of all the things to bond over! But strangely, it was nice. Just to be with someone I could feel certain had experienced suffering similar to my own. He stayed with me until I calmed down, then departed for his own tent.

The old me would’ve immediately turned him away just for being strange. Perhaps it’s not only my body that’s changed. I got to wondering whether the metamorphosis might, in some ways, be an improvement. It proved distracting enough that I soon returned to sleep.

When I next awoke, the village bustled with activity. The flimsy leather walls of my tent did nothing to muffle the racket, the cause of which was revealed as soon as I emerged from its flaps. A procession of mutants came in through the main entry, bearing leathery sacks of something or other on their backs.

“What’s this all about?” I asked Eel mouth. “There’s been a successful raid! Not of our own shaft but a neighboring one.” I wondered if they might’ve been through the shaft I was brought down. When I described the field and the garden trail to one of the creatures, now busy unloading his sack, he shook his malformed head.

“Just another planet the bugs have already overrun. They don’t fare well on worlds populated with intelligent life, but the worlds with only rudimentary fauna make for easy pickings. Or sometimes it just connects to an earlier era on that same world, before intelligence arose.”

I wondered whether it may have tampered with the history of life on Earth in this fashion. I’ve never seen any cave paintings of giant bugs though. If there are some, anthropologists would probably mistake them for magnified depictions of normal insects.

He pulled a football sized chrysalis from the sack and thrust it at me. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked. He carefully cut it open with a knife that looked to be fashioned from a bone shard, the handle wrapped tightly in leather.

The translucent white pod split open to reveal a bizarre little larval creature inside. Beady little black eyes, a mess of pudgy little legs similar to those of a caterpillar and a body closely resembling an unusually shortened grub.

It repeatedly squeaked...in fear? Can it feel fear? “What is it?” I asked. “This is what the little white worms become if they’re not implanted. If allowed to fully mature, they imprint on the bugs. Then they serve them tirelessly as drones, subsisting on whatever scraps they can scavenge.”

Not as reassuring as I hoped. But something about the wiggly little bundle charmed me as I cradled it in my arms. “It’s not often that we can steal so many” he added. “Look after yours, you won’t get another any time soon.” I asked why I should want one to begin with.

He demonstrated by massaging his own pudgy white grub until it secreted a familiar black fluid from its abdomen. “This way if we’re injured or hungry during a raid, we can make our own black jelly on demand rather than having to backtrack all the way to our own pool.”

He made them sound like convenient portable appliances. But the thing I now held in my arms as it gurgled and squeaked appeared very much alive. “What should I name it?” He frowned. “Don’t get attached. They’re short lived and infertile, that’s why we can’t simply breed more.”

Don’t get attached? Shouldn’t be a problem, that’s what I’m best at. If I could believe that nutter back at the sunlit pool I came from, it’s even how I wound up down here in the first place. Or at least it has something to do with it.

One of the mutants asked for a hand with his bag. I declined, explaining that I meant to return to the shaft I was brought down here through shortly. “Well that’s a hell of a way to repay our hospitality. You just breeze on in, we heal you, give you a bed to sleep in, then you’re on your way?”

I could find nothing to say in my defense. So I wrapped the little grub in a leather blanket, stashed it in the tent I slept in, then joined the others in their task. To my surprise I found it quite satisfying to labor alongside them, working up a viscous black sweat as I exerted myself.

After we finished distributing the grubs, there were several tents in need of repair, as well as maintenance to be performed on the outer surface of the brick walls. I didn’t agree to all this, they just kept piling on more work. But I also couldn’t turn them down given how helpful they’d been.

“Feeling overloaded?” My eel mouthed friend joined me, the two of us lifting a replacement brick into place. “Actually it’s nice to be useful” I admitted. “In my old life, I didn’t fit in anywhere. There just wasn’t any place for me.” He raised one eyebrow. At least I think so, his face is rather lopsided. “Were you really looking?”

I mulled it over while we returned to the fortress interior. There was a modest banquet prepared to feed us, a trio of bug corpses in the process of being divided up into sections and cooked. I had to fight back the urge to puke when the smell hit me.

Eel mouth laughed. “They taste better than they smell. It’s a lot like lobster, actually.” I didn’t believe him, but my growling stomach persuaded me to take a chance. I’d have pinched my nose if I still had one.

“Of course, you don’t have to eat anything if you don’t want to. Just soak in the black jelly for a bit and the hunger goes away.” What he left unsaid is that there would be a price. That each time I did so, it would only further corrupt my body.

So, driven by a mixture of exhaustion and hunger, I dug in. The tender, jiggling white meat proved every bit as satisfying as I was led to expect. Lobster might be pushing it, but it really was quite tasty, and to be surrounded by merry company while I ate was its own sort of nourishment.

Following the meal, I volunteered to help clean it up. I knew I meant to leave soon, but some part of me craved just a bit more time with these creatures. These...unlikely comrades. The feeling turned out to be mutual.

As I mounted a winged insect with Eel mouth’s help, he lamented that I was leaving so soon. He handed me the little grub, which he’d tucked into a satchel. “I’ve gotta go back” I insisted. “That’s all there is to it.” He asked if I was happy there.

What a strange question. I brushed it off, thanked him for everything, then headed for the rim of the pillar. His words returned more than once to trouble me on my journey. Was I happy there? I suppose not. But still, what else could I do but return?

There’s my family to think of. There’s Goblin. Surgeons may still be able to reverse much of what’s happened to my body...though I couldn’t imagine how to explain to them, or anybody else, how I became like this.

I wished for a compass as I approached the edge. Some way to navigate in this baffling continuum of identical looking pillars. The best I could come up with was to remove the bioluminescent gas sack fastened to my mount’s harness, propping it up on a pile of rocks. This way I wouldn’t lose track of where I set out from.

With that taken care of I took flight, setting off for the pillar nearest me. On the way, wind rushing past, I peeked into the leather satchel to find my chubby little passenger sound asleep. Now that I got a good look at him, he’s not that ugly. Or her, maybe?

On a whim, I tickled one of its legs. It quivered, then promptly rolled up into a ball. Didn’t even know it could do that. Below us, great puffy clouds of the ever-present white vapor rolled past. I could say nothing of what lay beneath them...except that I dare not investigate.

Only when the next pillar was nearly upon me did I remember that I’ve never actually landed one of these things before. However it seemed to understand what to do on its own, and a minute later I was dismounting onto the rocky shores of what I hoped would be the final stop on my journey.

The trek was long and arduous. I might’ve ridden my mount, but didn’t know what I might find further in, so I didn’t risk it. I brought blankets, but the longer I stayed down here the more I adapted to the cold. It seeps into your body after a while, you stop fighting it, and it becomes the new normal.

The mutation probably has something to do with it. I first noticed while laboring to earn my meal with the others that my new body is significantly stronger. There are aches and pains where some part of it is halfway formed, but for the most part everything but the appearance is greatly improved.

I don’t remember when I stopped shivering. The first month was now just one long smear in my memory. I just know that once most of my humanity bled away, the discomfort vanished along with it. I still laid down some blankets before sleeping though.

The grub groggily poked its head out of my satchel as though hatching anew. It cautiously extended its little feelers, waving them about until satisfied that it was safe to come out. I don’t know why it slept next to me, the inside of the satchel was probably warmer.

“You weird little monster” I muttered. As if in response, it gurgled, chirped, then threw up on itself a bit. With some experimentation, I found that it made a wonderful pillow. If it objected to this new arrangement it gave no indication, instead falling asleep after a few minutes and emitting a droning sound I interpreted as snoring.

I followed suit, exhausted from the day’s travel. As I was now in possession of both an endo and exoskeleton, I discovered that when I focused, I could feel the latter expanding slowly. Decompressing the way your spine does as you sleep, because the weight’s been taken off.

I thought about anything and everything, unrelated fragments popping into my consciousness as they often do just before I fall asleep. How could my life have turned into this? How could it ever return to normal, even if I find my way out?

To think all of this was down here, or wherever it is, all along. For my entire life maybe? Or longer. Waiting to be discovered by some poor fool at the bottom of an innocuous hole. Curiosity kills the cat...if it’s lucky.

I dreamt I was a young boy again. Perhaps three or four, playing in the back yard. With some effort I flipped over a large stone, then recoiled in shock. The flattened soil beneath the stone teemed with beetles, worms and spiders, all of which must’ve burrowed under it for shelter.

They scattered this way and that as I backed off, brushing at my overalls to make sure none of them got on me. “What are you up to, kiddo?” I turned and clung to my father’s leg, tearing up. He chuckled. “You know, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

I was about to respond, but when I looked up at him, his head was that of an insect. Bulbous compound eyes, chittering segmented mouthparts and a pair of long, delicate antennae. I screamed, and my face froze that way. A single perfect, eternal scream of absolute terror, resonating forever.

I awoke to find the little grub gnawing on my head. A few bugs clung to the ceiling nearby, as well as a pair watching me from beside a stalagmite with idle curiosity. As before, they made no motion to stop me.

A few hours later, I spotted a black pool in the distance. There were people around it. Not naked captives, but about