Amy said, “I’m not sure. You know, we’re still just trying to help however we can…”
“Well, I know there’s more to this,” said Loretta, causing a little flap of skin to bounce around her throat. “Maggie wasn’t acting right, before the abduction, I mean. I know this was something … unusual.”
Amy said, “Has Maggie acted strangely since she’s come back?”
“Not considering what she’s been through, you know.”
“Can I see her?”
Loretta invited Amy to follow her to Maggie’s bedroom, and the camera tracked the mutilated woman down the hall. She opened a bedroom door a crack and said, “Mags? You awake?”
The answer that came from the bedroom was a terrifying guttural squeal. John glanced at me. Amy reacted like she heard an adorable child’s voice and said, “Oh, you can just let her sleep. I didn’t intend to—”
Loretta said into the bedroom, “I have someone who wants to see you, real quick. Won’t be one minute.”
“KREEEEE … KUKUKUKUKUK!”
“It’s okay, she’s helping the police.”
“EEEEUUUUK. Eeeeeee…”
Loretta pushed the door open.
Lying on the bed was a maggot.
It was approximately the same size as a human child. Its skin was translucent and I could see its digestive system working, grinding up what looked like scraps of meat and leather.
John said, “Huh.”
I said, “I’m going in—”
“Wait.”
Amy said, “Maggie?” and moved gingerly into the room. The view from the phone leaned over the bed. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Maggie” screeched and clucked and made sucking noises.
Loretta sat down on the bed with “Maggie” and the creature squished its way over to her. The mother laid her hand across the maggot’s back, the monster’s face resting a circular row of teeth against Loretta’s abdomen.
“I’m just so happy to have her back home. My heart breaks for the other parents missing their babies today but I have to admit, I’m selfish. I’m happy to have Maggie back and above all else, I want to make sure they never try to take her again. If you guys can help me with that, nothing else matters.”
I knew that the lingering effects of the Soy Sauce were the difference between what John and I were seeing versus everyone else—if I concentrated, I found I could actually see the formation of fuckroaches swarming around the maggot, twitching and writhing in the vague shape of a girl. If I concentrated a bit more, I could see the little blond girl they were projecting to the rest of the world, the child Amy was seeing, the one that had been woven into all of Loretta Knoll’s memories. Then in a blink it was back to the larva. Hungry, pulsing.
“Maggie” opened her slimy mouth and took a bite out of Loretta’s belly, ripping skin and fat and chewing noisily. Loretta didn’t even flinch.
BOOK III
An Excerpt from Fear: Hell’s Parasite by Dr. Albert Marconi
There used to be a famous thought experiment that went something like this:
A child is born blind. She has in her possession two wooden toys—a ball and a block. After years of playing with both, she knows the contours of each object intimately by touch—the sphere and the cube. Then, late in childhood, she is given surgery to correct her eyesight. Now that she can see for the first time, would this young lady be able to distinguish the block from the ball on sight alone?
I say this “used” to be a thought experiment, because we now know the answer: no. Real subjects who have had their sight restored, upon seeing a cube for the first time, cannot connect it with the eight pointy corners they remember feeling in their hands. They fully expect it to feel like the smooth sphere, until they hold it and learn otherwise.
The lesson? You do not see with your eyes. You see with your brain.
The visual data that enters your optic nerve is meaningless noise without the brain’s ability to overlay meaning upon it. This means, quite simply, that what you see (in a real, not metaphorical, sense) is a result of what you have been built to see, and nothing more. If you would like a comparison, imagine the family dog lying in a room while its masters watch a film on television. Dogs cannot see television (their eyes are quite different from yours) so all they know is that the humans in the room are sitting motionless, staring listlessly at a noisy square object on the wall. The canine may note voices or other familiar sounds from that device, but because those sounds are not accompanied by smells, they do not represent anything of interest to it. Even if the dog could learn to converse with humans, it would be next to impossible to explain to the animal that the motionless, silent people in the room are interacting with other living beings located thousands of miles away, performing actions that actually occurred years earlier. Which is to say, the family and the dog are in the same room, but experiencing very different realities.
The very next day, the family takes that dog for a walk in the park. They are amused at how their pet frantically sniffs patches of grass, enthralled by seemingly nothing at all. They are mystified at its obsession with smelling the anuses of other dogs, yanking on its leash and discouraging it from indulging what they figure must be a curious fetish. How could the dog ever explain that its sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive than theirs, that it can, in mere seconds, sniff out an entire life-or-death drama that played out in that very patch of empty grass weeks earlier? One whiff told the hound that an animal had recently urinated there, that said animal’s metabolism was failing, and that it was extremely frightened. A sniff of another dog’s posterior spells out its entire biography—its age, success as a hunter, its suitability as a mate and/or likelihood of winning a fight to the death.
Same park. Two different realities.
This is despite the fact that man and canine both evolved in the same environment, with extremely similar biology. Now imagine the difference between two beings who evolved in different worlds entirely.
Knowing my line of work, I suppose you have already guessed why this is relevant to my interests. If a being from another universe were to appear in ours, our ability to understand it would be exactly as limited as the formerly blind teenager trying to identify his or her beloved toys by sight alone. Our brains would paw around madly for some context to make sense of the entity but, finding none, would frantically try to construct a crude analog. Some of us would see demons, some would see aliens, some would see nothing at all.
When those conflicting impressions clash with one another, well, you need only to open a history book to see the result. We will live and die according to how we interpret the unfamiliar. All of human culture is nothing more than that very process, playing out again and again.
18. ONCE AGAIN, MARCONI SELFISHLY TRIES TO STEAL THE SPOTLIGHT
Amy slid back into the Jeep, took one look at our faces, and said, “What?”
I said, “I don’t know how to put this, but while Maggie appears to you as an adorable eight-year-old child, she is in reality a huge carnivorous larva that is slowly eating her mother.”
Amy said, “I guess I don’t have to ask if that’s just a metaphor. So during your drug trip, you left yourself a note to come here, so you could see that, right? So now what?”