When we first spotted the monster, we laughed. We thought it was a joke. Until we found the first note. My girlfriend Kate found it first. She plucked it off the tree and waved it around, like it was just a piece of paper. "It's a scavenger hunt!" She yelled, her laugh echoing through the dark woods, "I think that's why we were invited here."
I had been planning to break up with Kate some time after her birthday. Her clingy way of needing me to help her with everything was no longer cute.
"And who invited us again?" I asked, still annoyed about being dragged out of bed at 1am.
She sighed, "Don't start with that again."
"Look," I said, "You get a mysterious note in the mail, asking to meet you in these strange woods. How can I not be suspicious?"
She looked thoroughly pissed at this point, "My friends know I love horror movies. This is exactly the thing they would surprise me with. I don't see you making any effort on my birthday."
I had raised my hands and turned around, "Just leave me out of this. I came when you called. What more do you want?"
It was at that moment I had caught my first glimpse of a tall thin man lurking about in the background.
The next few hours had passed as a blur. All I remember is seeing Kate's face dissolve and join into that of the abomination, before disappearing forever.
With every ounce of energy I had tried to escape the creature, but the woods had pulled me in and some strange inexorable force was keeping me here. Eventually I reached the point where I knew I could not run any further.
I was sitting in an abandoned trailer when it came for me. "Hello sweetheart," I muttered sarcastically just in case Kate's soul could hear me, "We can be together at last."
I sent a silent curse up to whatever deity sent this torture my way, and met my fate with as much courage as I could muster.
Even though its face was featureless, I could have sworn I saw something like joy on its face as its arms entered my flesh. Its fingernails were sharper than I expected, and pain radiated from every part of my body that the creature touched. As the creature stepped into me, I felt the part of me that still retained consciousness writhing in agony, before it succumbed to the greater being.
Humans are at peace. Their desires and pain are an illusion. True desire is here, in us. We want, We pursue, We consume. The truest, purest agony cannot be experienced by those mortals whose minds are composed of dust. Their primitive drives can be summed up in simple words, simple concepts. They are happy being themselves, with no understanding of how much potential they lose through that concept of self.
The last man We took into us immediately went into my memories to find our origins. He wanted to understand who We were, not even understanding that We had evolved so far from our initial state that it would provide him with no answers. We were ever consuming, with all of the new thoughts becoming both our predecessors and our children.
As his soul swam around in our body, We felt his frustrated desires filling us with peace. The satiety these humans provide almost makes them worthy beings. He eventually found them, of course. His almost devoured mind opened them up like a Christmas present, eager to know us just as We knew him. As he unwrapped them, We started to feel our mind slipping away, the recollections crowding out our consciousness entirely, leaving room only for him and his final moments as an entity.
"Howard what is it?"
"I'm scared mum."
"Don't start this again, I gave you your medication."
"It won't leave me alone mum. There's someone watching me."
"I gave you your medication." At this point the woman starts to shake. I try to feed on her distress but I am not strong enough yet.
"I can feel it. It whispers to me at night."
The woman walks out and slams the door, leaving the little boy in the dark to face his nightmares alone.
I grew in the closet of a philosopher. A small male child who dreamt of the universe at night. His thoughts rebounded off the walls, and I fed on them greedily, feeling my limbs growing night by night. At the time I would have been no bigger than a speck of dust, a tiny spot that tumbled about every time the closet door opened.
Even though he did not see me, the child still knew of my presence. His fear was the strongest intoxicant I could find. He drew many pictures of me, and showed them to his sister, his worried parents and his overbearing psychologist. Our parasitic relationship continued throughout his childhood. I started to write words into his mind at night, which he would scribble down in the morning, without even realising what he was doing. The fear that these words gave him would fill him with such pure terror, that there would be almost too much for me to take in. I would almost pass out with ecstasy.
Sometimes I would speak of other creatures other than myself, implanting images in his mind of beings I had seen as I travelled through the universe. There were the frog-men that lived in the ocean, who came on land to exchange eternal life for human sacrifices, and the one wave frequency of light which could destroy anything it touched. But these were nothing compared to the stories I told of myself. Even though at the time I was helpless to do anything, I whispered to the boy like I was toying with him, like I had all the control and he was just my plaything. He called me a demon without a face.
As he grew older, his soul started to feel the weight of my gorging. His eyes became sunken and he became a lonely and disturbed recluse. It was then I started to feel something new, something infinitely more delicious. I think it was adult belief. After all, the trust of a child is a bland, temporary gift. The strength of a young adult's conviction is akin to a gravitational pull, bringing all other thoughts into line and giving the receiver the ability to manipulate at will. It was on this new diet I managed to twist my mangled limbs into the shape of a spider, allowing me to crawl out of the closet in which I was hatched and into the wider world.
In a strange way I brought him into greatness. He turned the strange dreams that filled his head at night as a child into stories and poems that would thrill the masses. The terror that I had cultivated as a child became his livelihood, and would continue long into the future.
I waited until he was forty-seven before I took him into myself. By then he was only a shell of a man, and he was already so much a part of me it barely felt like I was tasting anything.
For all members of our kind, this is our awakening. It is the closest we come to love. It is the feeling of knowing another so intimately that you lose sight of who you are. It was from this moment that my mind became the collective, and my perception fragmented and changed into a kaleidoscope.