Author's note: To the few readers who lurk, you may have noticed I deleted a few chapters. I realized I accidentally posted them from an older manuscript, which had plot threads that may spoil future plot twists. My file organization is a mess and I keep procrastinating when it comes to sorting it out. But I do apologize for the confusion. 

 

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The Stalker, the IRS office, the incompetent asses who ran it, the horrible weather that caught him, the car crash, the deer that crashed through his windshield, all the events that led up to him screaming at an alien sky with vocal cords that did not belong to him. They were all too horrible and absurd, even by the standards previously set by his fucked-up mind. But a strange calm settled upon him after the fit ran its course. There was an explanation for all of this, he had to just slow down and walk through it.

“This is fucked up,” he tried to say, but again, his mouth was not his own. The shape was not meant for human speech. Dave understood him, nonetheless.

“I know. What they did to you is some screwed up shit Cordell.”

“No,” Vincent shook his head. “Nobody did anything to me. This isn't happening.”

“You're in denial.”

“None of this is happening,” he repeated as he tried to fight off the static in his head. “I got impaled by a deer. The...the damn thing jumped right into my windshield, and it impaled me.” The planets above almost seemed to listen in on his explanation. “The fact that I am still alive means somebody must have found me in time and got me to a hospital. That's where I am right now, lying on some bed having this...this weird dream."

He closed his eyes. "That transformation? The Stalker's attack? Well, the deer must have struck my spine and caused my nerves to go crazy. Or the surgeons who saved my life must have forgotten to use anesthetic when they were operating on me. I must have been conscious enough to feel it. But now, I'm sedated and I'm sleeping in a hospital bed. This...this is all a bad dream. They're pumping me full of drugs...and I'm having the trip of a lifetime.”

He was right, it was all a bad dream. Or maybe it wasn't, maybe he had escaped from the car crash somehow. Perhaps he had gone completely off the rails and was now wandering through the woods naked laughing like a maniac.

Soon somebody will find him wandering through their lawn without any clothes on, fulfilling the antics expected out of all loons. Or more likely...he'd die of hypothermia. What a way to go if that were the case.

“You think this is a dream? How do you explain the fact that you can feel your new limbs, boy?”

The question left Vincent floundering for a few seconds. He had to fight through static to refute it.

“The brain is weird. It created you, didn't it? I hear you speaking, but you're...you're not real. I have nerve trauma and it's giving me phantom sensations."

“You've grown up.”

Vincent waited for Dave to elaborate, but the phantom remained silent. Medication, one of the many fruits of science and chemistry, had kept them at bay for many years. The pills were by no means perfect and every now and then, he would catch hints of a whisper, but they were rarely more than a passing notion.

But now, in this dream, the voices were back. If the circumstances had been more normal, perhaps there would have been a nostalgic delight to the sergeant’s return. Dave was one of the few phantoms he knew that gave itself a name. It was a phenomenon that was rare even in the voice-hearing community. In a way, it was like catching up with an old friend.

“So...what do I do now?”

“Shut up and stargaze. I'm enjoying this place,” was Dave's answer.

The grass, mottled green and red, fluttered with the wind, revealing an iridescent sheen as it caught the sunlight. Insects of exotic colors and shapes climbed their stalks and flew away to pollinate species of flower never seen by man. Vincent clung to the idea that this world was his own manifestation. But even if it is a dream, then it is quite an impressive one considering how much detail seemed to go into creating it.

“Come on Vinny, be logical. There's nothing there.”

A common phrase that surmised his childhood. Logic was what allowed him to pass as normal in recent years. It allowed him to fight against his madness and to dispel the illusions. What did logic say right now? It reminded him that there were schizophrenics who believed they weren't human, it said many believed they had extra appendages, some could even feel them. What he was experiencing now wasn't exactly unheard of.

But he was not them. He was all too aware of his insanity and that gave him an edge. Lucidity was a gift he strove to hold onto when he knew something was wrong. What happened with that rare breed of schizo who felt phantom limbs is exactly what's happening with him.

“So I'm stuck,” he said, after allowing a few minutes of silence to pass. “I'm stuck in a really weird place and my phantoms are back.”

“You never cared about us,” one said before disappearing in with the wind.

More phantoms murmured their agreement. It was an absurd charge, considering they were nothing more than manifestations of his broken mind. But he felt a pang of guilt nonetheless. So he laid there and stared up at the celestials in the sky. What did he do now?

If he was still on the operating table or if he was still recovering, but asleep, there was nothing he could do. Obviously if this world was real, then his goal was simple: find a way to get back home. His ear twitched. As a person who had never in his entire life had an ear that could twitch, he was startled by the sensation.

He was pondering why it would do such a thing when he heard voices. At first, he thought it was the phantoms' murmuring. But there was a difference between the quality of the phantoms’ voices. They had a “closeness” real voices lacked. These were real voices with real flesh-and-blood owners.

“Cordell,” Dave whispered, “you better get up and look.”

Vincent carefully rolled onto his stomach, wincing as the action crushed the wing. He pulled the knife he had stolen from the belt he had been fitted with. The tall grass prevented him from seeing anything without sitting up. So he carefully parted the reeds with his hands.

He couldn’t see the owners of the voices at first, but he could hear them approaching, accompanied by the clanging of metal. There was high-pitched laughter, like that of a child's. And that’s when he saw them coming up the dirt path.

There were three bipedal creatures: an adult accompanied by two children. Each of them had a pair of wings, a tail, and a lizard-like snout. A large belt wrapped around their chests kept the wings flat against their backs and their figures were adorned in leather garments, similar in style to the clothes Vincent was currently wearing. The three of them were covered in reptilian flesh whose texture resembled scales.

A triangle in the shape of an orange widow's peak marked the adult's otherwise black head, while its arms, legs, and tail were mottled with yellow and black. Two horns jutted from the top of its skull. Both were covered by a leather webbing that spanned the space between and covered the sharp tips. In some ways, the garment resembled a baseball glove that had been fitted for two overly long fingers.

The winged youths had a similar coloration as the adult. One of them was yellow and black while the other yellow and white like an albino python. They too, wore the same “cap” on their horns. The adult carried some sort of instrument over his shoulders. It looked like a disassembled windmill whose blades had been removed and strung together with a strand of twine. There were many questions that came into Vincent’s mind, but none were more eloquent or to-the-point than Dave’s inquiry:

“What in the fuck are those supposed to be?!” the phantom exclaimed.

“Gargoyles.”

“Dragons.”

“Stay hidden.”

“Look at them...look at them walk.”

“He's panicking.”

“Don’t let them see you.”

Vincent lay low to the ground, staring at the strange, impossible creatures. The phantoms continued to whisper their paranoid observations into his ears while Dave badgered him.

“Cordell, what in the hell are those?” he demanded, as if their presence was somehow his fault. “Answer me right now!”

“I don’t know!” Vincent whispered, “shut up!”

“They look like fucking dragons! Have you been reading children's books?!”

“Dave...I said shut the hell up!”

As he glared at these creatures, he wanted to look away. They belonged in fairy tales. But it was this very trait that kept his eyes glued to them. They were creatures of fiction, yet they seemed as solid and as believable as the stone he walked on earlier.

His hand clenched the handle of the knife as he watched one of the youths, the white and yellow one, pick up a clod of dirt and throw it at the other. It exploded in a plume of dust. There was a sharp scolding, followed by laughter.

“Stay completely still...” Dave warned.

“I know.” Vincent whispered.

The youth brushed the dirt off of his shirt while the other phantoms began to chime in.

“Run away.”

“If they see you, be prepared to use that knife.”

“He’s going to die.”

Despite the adult's reprimand, the youth gathered another clod of dirt and prepared to throw it.

“They aren't human, Cordell.”

“Aren’t human aren’t human aren’t human aren’t human...”

“Human”

“Human”

“Aren’t human.”

“I can see that. You all need to shut the hell up!”

Something caught the youth's eye, and he turned in Vincent's direction. An ear on his head twitched as he tried to register what he saw. It was impossible; the grass should have completely hidden Vincent from sight. The youth took a few steps forward to get a closer look, but then he stumbled backward from fright and dropped the mud clod. He ran calling after the adult.

“Xali'ka! Xali'ka!” he cried.

“What the hell is ‘Xali’ka’?” Dave wondered.

Vincent tightened his grip on the knife. How the hell had he been spotted? He hoped the creature would simply brush off the child. Instead, it turned around and looked in his direction, squinted its eyes until it spotted him. It turned and said something to both of the children. They appeared to protest at first, but the adult barked an order and they both scurried back towards the dwelling.

“Shit...shit...shit,” Vincent whispered under his breath.

How in the hell?! A gust of wind tugged on his back, revealing why he had been spotted. One of the wings, sticking straight up from the grass without him knowing, was as good as a flag marking his location. There was a clank of metal plates as the creature set them down and looked right at him and began to head his way.

Stay away...Vincent thought, don’t come any closer...

As if sensing his thoughts, the creature stopped short of the grass and called out to him. There was something familiar about the voice even though the wind drowned out its words. When Vincent failed to respond, it took a step into the grass and called again. It hesitated for a second time before taking another step.

Stop it! Vincent thought, you can't exist.

It was now close enough that he could see the sun catching in the golden irises of its eyes, and there was something familiar about its profile.

“Sirai,” it said, “el lok fita posh?”

Sirai, golden eyes, suffocation, drowning. Now he knew why the voice sounded so familiar. It was the last thing he heard after he was pulled out of the water. Figuring it was useless to hide, he pushed himself up into the best sitting position that he could manage, making sure the knife was hidden from view, then he got a good look at this creature.

It was normal for one with his condition to see the occasional abomination, for stuff of nightmares to come and visit him. In comparison to some of the Gothic grotesqueries his mind conjured, the creature that stood in front of him was nothing. Instead, it was the opposite. It was something that stepped straight out of a Jim Henson film.

It was the realness of its presence that left his mind blank. It was the texture of its flesh, the way its rough skin hung from its aged face, the light of the sun reflecting off its cracked horns. It was the sentience of its eyes and the subtle, confused expressions that ticked across its pointed countenance as it waited for an answer. It was the manner in which it held itself, wings folded, and body bent slightly forward. Even a scent carried itself on the wind, the creature had a smell that reminded him of anise oil, cloves, mixed with a hint of musk and sweat. He could only gawk at it in silence.

The creature offended him for reasons he was unable to identify. Even when it took a few more steps until it was only a few feet away, he could not bring himself to believe it existed. Even though it knelt on its knees and extended a clawed hand in a gesture of trust, he could not accept it. It was the very manifestation of everything he grew to detest about his condition. It was fantasy incarnate, leapt right out from the pages of some asinine fable. He looked at the thing’s clawed hand, then he returned to its eyes, his lips pulled back in disgust.

“It saved you.”

“It’s your hero.”

“No!!” Adrenaline electrified his nerves and the knife flashed. Perhaps if the creature had not been so aged, it would have reacted faster. But the blade sliced into its palm, spraying the grass with a spatter of blue. There was a roar of pain and profuse swearing. Or at least Vincent assumed the creature was swearing, the words it spoke were in its own dialect. He stumbled to his feet wild-eyed and trembling.

“NO!!” Vincent repeated in a cracked shout. It came out guttural, but its meaning was clear: Get the hell away from me! The creature clutched onto its bleeding hand and screamed in outrage, glaring. Though its language was incomprehensible, he could guess what it was saying: What the fuck is wrong with you?!

He brandished the knife at the creature as a warning. Even as he struggled to maintain his balance, he held it out and made it clear he would not hesitate to defend himself. A chorus of phantoms whispered their observations, but they went unheard by anybody except for their host.

He took a step toward the road and tripped over the grass. His knees and elbows scraped against the dirt, but he scrambled to get back up. The creature followed him with its gaze. It gestured with its uncut hand at him and said something.

“Stay back!” Vincent shouted. “Keep the hell away from me!”

He could not tell if the creature understood any of his vocalizations, but a variety of expressions crossed its face. He half-expected it to spew fire out of its mouth and attack him. Instead, it glared at him while caressing its bleeding palm, allowing a stream of blue droplets to fall into the wind. Without taking his eyes off it, Vincent crawled over to a nearby tree and used it as support.

“Unt!” it shouted abruptly, giving him a start. He gaped at it, holding the knife up at eye level.

“Unt!” it repeated, gesturing using both wing and hand. “Shrisk la lok tulethi samith! Unt!”

It was a shooing gesture, indicating that he get the hell out of there. Vincent took a few measured steps backward while holding the knife up in front of him, daring the thing to follow. It did not. It turned on the spot and stormed away shouting.

Its language was unintelligible, but it did not take a rocket scientist to tell when something was calling you a crazy bastard. The creature's angry shouting continued to echo through the woods, scattering birds among the treetops.