Miles B. Collier
When I saw Them, it was nighttime.
Driving clears my head. It’s been a constant thing, ever since I was a kid. My mom would buckle me into the passenger seat of her shitty pickup truck, turn on one of her mixtapes, and we would drive. Sometimes just around the neighborhood, the streetlamps a constant heartbeat that made my mind quiet down. Every five seconds, we’d dip through another pool of light, and warmth would wrap itself around me and encourage me to relax. Then, darkness again.
One, two, three, four, five, light.
On the heavier nights, we’d drive out to the countryside. The streetlamps would fade, until the only light on the road was the golden headlights of the truck. Outside the window, fields. Some had cows, horses, others had houses with shrubby trees out front, their shuttered blinds keeping in any light. No matter what time of year it was, it was cold. We’d roll all the windows down, and the Indigo Girls would sing together as the world around me finally sunk into a pleasant blur.
The stars above us flickered in the darkness. Back then, the light pollution wasn’t so bad, so we could see everything. Every constellation that I learned from the books I’d disappear into for hours on end shone above us in an endless expanse, reaching, pulling at something in my chest that I couldn’t name. It wasn’t an instinct, it wasn’t a fear, it wasn’t anything other than a slight twinge of homesickness for a world I could never really understand.
Out there, in the darkness, there was nothing. So many people hate the feeling of insignificance, but I crave it. Always have, ever since I was a kid. In a world where everything feels too much, where every little noise echoes in your brain, where every texture burns your skin unless it’s just right, it’s hard not to desperately seek out the moments of emptiness.
I don’t fear oblivion. I don’t fear the darkness. I don’t fear the unknown, either. I’m not afraid of driving for hours on end down an empty highway, with nothing between you and the vast expanse of the universe but the windshield of a car and the music you’ve put on to distract yourself from your thoughts. That’s my safe haven, the one time I feel truly human in this world. It’s the same thrill some people get from parties, or drinking, or laughing with friends as they walk through the streets. My fix is just different.
That night, I needed something. There was that feeling in my limbs, an agitation that I knew would cause me to shut down if I didn’t disconnect. It starts like that, a tightness in my hands, a restlessness in my feet. I grind my teeth and chew the inside of my cheek where the constant stim has made the tissue scar and harden. I shake my hands to try to rid myself of the tension, but all it does is make them tingle with more energy that I can’t release. It flooded through my entire body, that night, and as I got into my mom’s pickup truck and the engine spluttered, finally easing into a dull murmur as I pushed my CD into the player, I knew it would be a long, long night.
It’s strange, feeling inhuman. It changes a person after a long time. It starts as a kid, when you realize that everyone has rules and a script and can blend their interests in with ease. It continues through adulthood, when you realize that the person your coworkers think you are is just the mask you put on to pretend to be like everyone else. As far as I know, it never fades. It never goes away, not really, because maybe you’re not human enough for the rest of existence. Better to lean into other areas and allow yourself the space, just for once, to be yourself.
(Whoever “yourself” is.)
It’s not just that I feel inhuman, either. I see it in the looks people give me. The way their eyes wander as they try to place exactly who I am, what I am, why I am the way I am. My mom
used to joke that back when she was a kid, her parents would insist she was replaced by a changeling, a creature from Irish fae tales that mimics everything about a child except for their penchant for mischief. Her little changeling, she’d call me, but we both knew it wasn’t because I was a mischievous kid. I was just… off.
My teachers in school never had problems with me. I did my work, I sat quietly when they scolded the class clowns for making fun of me, I read grades above the level I was supposed to. I burnt out, but didn’t everyone in high school? I got my diagnoses, I got the assistance I was supposed to need, but no one questioned me academically. I gave them no reason to, so they didn’t.
Still, I saw it in their eyes as they read the accommodations that my psychiatrist insisted I give to them, “just in case”. I saw the realization cross over their faces as finally, they had a word to describe why I had always seemed so “other”, so “different”, so “abnormal”.
Maybe that was why I saw Them that night.
If someone is used to being something other than human, they have a special connection to the world around them. Maybe it’s like oil and water, the way it beads up on the surface until it finds an equally viscous liquid to merge with. Or maybe it was some sort of twisted fate that led me to the abandoned highway that night, my hands tense and tingling, gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline. Perforated leather pressed against my cold hands, warmed only marginally by the fingerless gloves I’d taken to wearing after receiving them as a gift.
The night was clear. The wind that whistled through my open windows smelled of damp grass and mud, a reminder of the autumn storms we’d been having throughout the previous week. There was something in the air that night that felt intoxicating, urging me to push my foot
against the gas and press forward into the darkness, as if simply by existing with the void I would finally find the answers to the things that had escaped me throughout my life.
While the night didn’t hold answers, it did whisper promises of relief to me as I felt my jaw start to unclench. The looks, the questions, the ropes that bound me to my life, all of them began to untether themselves from me as I just existed. For one brief, fleeting moment, driving along the open road with nothing above me but the vastness of the night and nothing surrounding me but a dingy old pickup truck, I felt truly free. I felt infinite, as if I could let go and float up into the sky and be left as simply nothing.
And then, I saw it.
It began as a creeping shadow, something barely perceptible on the side of the road that I could have easily passed off as a trick of the night. A reaching, twisting shadow that couldn’t be explained away by the car headlights, or the shrubs that speckled the side of the road, or the spindly trees that appeared every so often, curved like bony fingers, illuminated for only a second before they vanished into the nighttime. This darkness, this shadow that stretched further than it should have, that stayed in the corner of my vision for just a moment too long, it was darker than the world around it, standing out like someone had poorly edited it in.
It was then that I noticed my radio had grown silent. Maybe the CD’s run had ended, but there was something off about the silence that sunk into my bones and curled up. My foot’s press on the pedal had lessened, and the blurred horizon that had filled the world around me was now coming into clarity as the truck slowed to a stop in the middle of the road.
The strange thing about it was the lack of fear I felt. Perhaps I should have felt fear, as the realization struck and I processed that my car had all but stalled in the middle of nowhere, with something in the world outside. Any rational person would have, and while I knew then
(and know now) that I should have run, or phoned someone, or hidden in the backseat and waited for it to pass… I just didn’t.
I didn’t move as the shadows outside doubled, with two distinct figures becoming prominent in the nighttime. Then, four, then eight, then they kept emerging from who knows where, and finally, a twinge of dread began to settle in my stomach. It took me until cold, dead hands curled around my wrist on the wheel that I realized they were in the car with me.
I turned to my right, to the passenger seat that was supposed to be empty.
It smiled back at me.
Perfect teeth, straight and white, glinting in the darkness. Eyes that seemed to hold some secret, something that they were keeping from me, something that mocked me. There was something terrifying about it, something that I had seen so many times, something that dug its way into my bones and crawled beneath my skin. They knew something, and yet, they would not tell me.
The too-sharp fingernails of the Thing dug into my skin, and I felt white-hot pain blossom as blood welled from the cuts. And yet, I still did not move. I still didn’t react, for all I could do was stare into the laughing eyes of the Thing.
Around me they swarmed, like moths to a flame. I didn’t feel like a flame; I felt cold, and scared, and strangely numb, surrounded by things that looked just a bit too much like the people that surrounded me throughout my life. They weren’t exact replicas; quite the opposite, really, some strange amalgamation, shifting and swirling, morphing and twisting, some combination of everyone I had known who had looked at me with the same eyes and laughed with the same teeth and given me that sympathetic smile that burned me with guilt for simply being.
They surrounded me, digging their fingernails into my shoulders, and my arms, and thighs, and throat, and they spoke in phrases I couldn’t understand as they dragged me from my car and stood around me. The night tried to reassure me, tried to whisper promises of safety, but they were there, and I was so sure that they would tear me apart and dance in the silver moonlight with my limbs and organs and mock me.
And then, they shifted. They changed, so like the stories that my mom had told me. I watched one, with the eyes of my supervisor at work, tilt its head just a bit too far. I heard the crunching of bones, saw the too-sharp teeth glint as the smile widened too far to be human, watched as the skin itself shifted on the thing’s face. Pulsating, squelching noises came from the thing as muscle and bone and tissue shifted and distorted, pulling the face of someone I thought I had known into something decidedly not him.
I tried to scream. I tried to yell, but I was frozen, numb, watching everything happen from outside of my body. I tried to shield myself, as a mask of my own face began to emerge from the Thing, eyes too bright and smile too wide to truly be myself. Still, the curve of the thing’s jaw, which it cracked into place with ease and a sickening crunch was decidedly mine. The eyes, too full of life, were the same hue as my own. The lips were mine – though, mine were chewed raw, a nervous habit I had picked up too young. This other me, her smile was perfect.
The voice that came from her was full of life as well, and she spoke in words and phrases that sounded alien coming from my throat. They sounded wrong, and I choked on my own words as I watched Her stare back at me.
The shadows surrounded me. The night, the endless void overhead, offered no protection.
The nightmares were already there, and they offered no reprieve.