It appeared to be a pink, greasy, segmented thing, about the size of a child’s hand, its body polka-dotted with shiny black spots (or eyes?) from one end to the other. The spots were hexagonal and, as we watched, they would expand until they covered the creature’s body. Then, they would change color and project its camouflage, somehow. Along the bottom were two rows of thin little legs that ended in flexing, hooked feet. It had a large pair of translucent wings like a housefly, one of which had been damaged.
Amy said, “I assume we’ve never run into one of these before?”
John said, “It’s my turn to name it.”
I said, “No, John. Not unless you give it a name that actually makes sense.”
John is very big on having us name every species and phenomena we come across, insisting that we should take a scientific approach and create a Charles Darwin-esque catalogue of our discoveries. We have to rotate this task because, despite claiming that it’s all for science, John also insists on coming up with just horrendously unhelpful names. He was the one who classified a supernatural abduction as a “screaming clown dick,” for instance. An insect-like parasite we observed inhabiting a person’s mouth and speaking in their voice was dubbed the “flip whippleblip,” and the inky black entities with the incomprehensible power to shape reality according to their whims are now known as “night sharts.” You might have noticed that his names are too busy being whimsical or profane to actually be descriptive at all, rendering them impossible to remember and thus utterly defeating the purpose.
John thought carefully, then said, “It’s limp and pink like a dick, and has wings like an insect. I hereby christen this organism ‘the fuckroach.’”
Amy sighed.
The fuckroach buzzed clumsily around inside the pitcher, its gimpy wing having been damaged during our encounter and/or while being chewed on by Diogee. Convinced it couldn’t escape its prison, it settled to the bottom and folded its wings over its body.
I said, “Well, Dr. Marconi definitely needs to see this.”
John said, “I’ll try his number.” Then he pulled out his knife and started cutting open the pitcher. He was doing it because he needed his phone, and his phone was currently sitting at the bottom of said pitcher, which was otherwise empty.
Amy and I actually watched John slice around the tape and start prying off the lid. Then Amy shook her head like she was waking up from a trance and quickly reached out to snatch John’s wrist.
“Wait. What are we doing?”
John stopped and all of us stared for a moment. I blinked, and the cell phone became that bug thing again, the image of the phone vanishing into its cluster of black, shimmering eyes. It tried to fly again, bouncing off the lid.
John said, “Okay, that was weird.”
I said, “It didn’t just make itself look like a phone. It convinced me it was a phone. Like, against all other evidence to the contrary.”
John said, “It’s like it can reach in and just turn off all the logic circuits in your brain. All of your critical thought goes out the window, like in a dream. Suddenly you’re back in high school and a parrot with the voice of your gym coach is pulling all of your teeth out with its beak, but the whole time your only thought is: How am I going to explain this to the dentist?”
Amy said, “It happened when it put its wings down. I think its body can make it look like something else, but when it layers the wings it becomes … hypnotic. Or something. I think we need to cover it up. So we can’t see it.”
John grabbed the American flag blanket from the back of a nearby armchair and tossed it over the coffee table.
I said, “Well, do you even think it works by sight?”
Amy shrugged. “If not, I wouldn’t even know where to start, as far as precautions go.”
Still, John put it in the closet, just to add one more layer of protection in the form of a flimsy wooden door.
Amy said, “All right, let’s shift back into Sherlock mode. The thing wanted out of the pitcher and so turned itself into something that would make us want to free it. See? Even an alien bug thing operates on logic. So, what can we deduce from the other forms it’s taken?”
John said, “Well, we know it plays on fear. Ted is a father and he saw a pedophile. I saw a Wall Street type because, as you know, I am concerned about issues of economic justice and class exploitation. Dave, what did you see? A clown? Your landlord? Fred Durst? Vegetarian meatloaf? Your own sexual inadequacy?”
“I saw myself. A cooler, healthier version.”
John said, “Well, we’d be here all night unpacking that.”
Amy said, “It couldn’t fool the dog. It was trying to eat it, so its camouflage couldn’t trick him. That’s good, right? We’ve got a, uh, fudge roach detector. He tries to bite somebody, we know to be suspicious.”
“Assuming,” I said, “that there’s more of these things.”
“There are. John was dealing with Nymph at the same time I was dealing with the fake you. So yes, there’s at least one more person’s worth of these things out there.”
John said, “There could be at least two more, if they’re both midgets.”
I could feel a headache coming on. I pressed my fingers to my temples and said, “Or a thousand. I mean, how deep does this go?”
Amy sat back on the sofa and ran her hand through her hair. “Well, what matters is we got the little girl back. As far as I’m concerned, that means we won today.”
9. ANOTHER CHILD GOES MISSING
It was midafternoon when Amy and I got back home. The overflowing drainage ditches had brought burbling water just twenty feet from the foundation of the dildo store. For a moment, I was thankful we were on the second floor, but if the first floor flooded we couldn’t just keep living up there and mocking the peasants drowning in the streets below us. I assumed the power would go out as wiring got submerged, plus the roads would be impassable. So, if the rain didn’t stop and the floodwater kept coming, where would we go? I guess the first option would be to stay at John’s place, but his neighborhood didn’t seem to be on much higher ground than mine and about two days under the same roof would surely mean the end of our friendship.
Amy got out of her wet clothes and collapsed on the bed as soon as we got inside. She had to be back at work at eleven. You know, to keep food on my table. I lay there with her for a while, my arm around her shoulders, her facing away from me.
“Are you … okay?”
She muttered, “As okay as is reasonable to expect a person to be after this particular day.”
She lay in silence for a bit, while I tried to think of how to phrase this next question.
I said, “The thing that was pretending to be me, my doppelganger … it didn’t, uh, hurt you, did it? It didn’t try to … assault you?”
“No. No.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
“But I know you’re not telling me something.”
“I swear to god, David, that I’ve told you every piece of useful information I can remember and if I remember more I’ll tell you that, too. But no, I don’t feel like reliving every single moment of what happened today. That shouldn’t be this hard to understand.”
“It’s just … you don’t keep things from me. Ever. That’s not you.”
“I keep things from you that you don’t want to know.”
“That’s … no. Like what?”
“David, I need to sleep. When we fight, I cry, and I get this adrenaline rush and then instead of sleeping I lay here for six straight hours thinking about what we yelled at each other. Just … let me sleep.”
“I don’t want to fight. But, like, what do you keep from me? Just give me an example. What do you feel like you can’t tell me? You told me how the painkillers make you constipated, if you were comfortable sharing that—”