[DRAFT. CURRENTLY UNEDITED]
Fortunately for Ben, the depths of suffering are so beyond the comprehension of the human mind that they can only be felt, not understood. As such, memory fails to record them. Ben awakes in a hospital bed and remembers the false Kat and the monster she became. He remembers that her gaze was horrible, but the quality of its horror is lost. The disintegration of his sanity is locked to that moment in the time and does not extend beyond it.
He is still not safe, however. And fresh horrors arise immediately in this new setting. He cannot move. His body is completely paralyzed, laid stiffly against the clinical blue sheets of a hospital bed. It had taken his disintegrated mind several hours to pull its shattered pieces back together. He has no memory of how he got here from the park. He mistakenly thinks that the park was only a dream until he notices the oversaturated dampness that remains in his skin and the sting of the cut on his leg. It is a strange thing to panic without movement, for the mind to writhe without consequence. He is not even able to move his eyes. They are frozen to the same spot on the wall below a sharps disposal bin. Dimly he remembers his eyesight was arrested in the park with the false Kat too.
This specific agony does not last, at least. Soon a creeping darkness encloses on the edges of his vision. Barely noticeable at first but it creeps in steadily, reducing his vision to only the sharps bin before long. At first he thinks it is unconsciousness gradually taking him, a replacement to his current consciousness that he welcomes. But now it has almost blinked out his sight altogether and he is no less awake. It is like he is being sunk into a hole, a burrow, descending deeper and deeper until the distant entrance is sealed and he is left screaming soundlessly in his dark cell.
This particular horror lasts for an unmeasurable amount of time until his voice returns and he is screaming properly. His body returns with it and he gains some calm to flex his fingers, shut his mouth, stand and walk. He remains at the bottom of a sealed burrow, no sign of the hospital or anything but himself. This is still perhaps a dream, he concludes, though it is less a real assessment of the situation and more of a desperate hope. He is most relieved to have ocular control restored, though there is nothing to look at in this seemingly endless void.
Then he notices a tickle on his face, something stuck to the skin right between his eyes. He plucks it off, holds it between his thumb and finger to examine. A cooked grain of rice? It squirms. A maggot!
He flings the repulsive worm into the darkness. But he watches as it returns to him squirming along the unseen ground in a beeline towards him. A shudder runs through his spine. He steps away from the maggot and it continues for him. He takes several steps back and it doggedly pursues. The pulsating undulations of its soft body increase in pace, no matter how fast or far he runs it remains a few feet away, squirming after him. He breaks into a full sprint to no avail. And what’s worse, each time he throws his head over his shoulder to check his pursuer it has grown larger. The maggot is now the size and shape of a chubby toddlers arm. Ben sees its clear detail now the rings of muscle that propel it throbbing under its pale skin, its mandibles like tiny black hooks reaching eager for Ben’s flesh. It conjures fresh waves of terror and with each wave the maggot wriggles excitedly faster, grows larger. It will surely overtake him soon.
Before it can, Ben collides into a wall of a man. The man wraps Ben into an embrace that is gentle but very firm. Ben, terrified by the maggot and gripped by panic, squirms ferociously to escape. But the man does not let him budge.
“Ben. It’s alright. You’re alright. It can’t hurt you.” The man said, and his voice too is firm but very gentle.
Ben cries out like a caught animal, a primal yelp trailing into an exhausted squeal. He tries to turn his head and check the maggot, but the man’s hold on him especially prevents this.
“I’m going to let you go. But you need to calm yourself first.” The slow, careful rhythm of the man’s words give Ben something stable to cling to. He is the only other thing here in the void burrow with him. “The worm is gone. You’re safe. I’ll let you go, but are you calm?”
Calm is not high on the list of words Ben might use to describe his current state, but his panic is reduced enough to allow speech, at least. “What’s going on?”
“Calm first. Then I will explain.”
“Okay.” Still Ben’s neck tenses against the man’s arms. Surely the maggot is about to bite into his heels any second now.
The man anticipates the thought. “If it could hurt you, it would have done it already. Breath. I’m going to let you go. You are going to calmly turn and you are going to see that the worm is gone. Okay?”
The man’s voice possesses the quality common among kindergarten teachers and mothers. It directs without harshness or hostility. Ben does not know this huge stranger. He thinks that he may also be a threat, and that should frighten him. But it doesn’t. The man’s eyes are too overflowing with warmth. His grip is as gentle as it is unyielding.
“Okay.”
The man releases him. Ben spins around and the maggot is indeed vanished. There is nothing here except him and the giant man who has now earned his complete trust. “I can explain what’s happening,” he says, “but the most important thing is that we stay calm. Are you alright?”
Ben takes a moment as his breathing relaxes. He nods.
“I’m Carlos. What’s your name?”
“I’m- but you already know my name. How? What’s happening to me? Am I sick? Where is everything…else? What happened to the maggot?”
“One question at a time. Let’s start with everything else. You’re in a place you like, actually. Somewhere calm and comfortable. Look around. Can you see it?”
Ben does as Carlos tells him because out of desperation he trusts him, and because he trusts him, he sees exactly what Carlos describes. The nothingness around them vanishes as if only a brief mistake of perception. The pair of them now stand on real ground at the bottom of a ditch. It is choked with weeds. A rotting wooden fence delineates one of the upper edges of the ditch from private property. The other side is met by a tide of thorny sawbriar that gradually transitions into a sparse forest of scrawny pines. The humid air carried the aroma of cut grass and stagnant rainwater. Crickets or cicadas or some kind of insects hum from all sides. Somewhere more distantly Ben can hear passing cars. This is the empty retention pond he played in as a child. Exactly how he remembers it. Only this place exists in a small town hundreds of miles south of New York, and he hasn’t set foot there in over a decade.
“You’re wondering how you got here, right?” Carlos anticipates his thoughts again. “You aren’t really here. This is a memory of yours. Right now, you’re actually lying in a hospital bed. The first thing you need to know is that you’re safe there, and I’m here to help. It’s going to be alright, so we can stay calm together.”
Ben could only swivel his head from Carlos to his surroundings and back. He couldn’t square the strangeness of what he said with the steady inviting tone he used. Yet absurd as it was, there was a hint of truth to it. He did remember waking in the hospital, if only briefly before he sank into the dark, as if receding into himself. This place also had an uncanny quality in how perfectly everything matched his memory. Every aspect, from the irregular shape of the ditch to height of the fence to the exact itchiness of the bahia grass on his calves, confronted him as perfectly familiar. Not a single aspect of the scene resisted what he felt it should be.
Carlos let his words sink in. Then, slowly, he continued. “You’re in a coma because you have a parasite. We call it a Godworm. I’m sort of like a special kind of doctor. I’m here to take the parasite out of you.” “This is all in my head?” Ben asked, just as slowly.
“Yes.”
“Then… how are you here? Aren’t you imaginary too? Like a dream?” This man, Carlos, would have to be imaginary for this to even begin to make sense. Yet he was the only point of novelty in the ditch. He resembled no one Ben knew, he spoke with an original personality. His long coat and all black attire did lend him a professional air.
“Like I said, you can think of me as a special kind of doctor. I’m able to put myself in people’s heads, when I need to. We call ourselves Extrospectors.”
“And this parasite, that’s what the maggot was?” Ben scanned the ground around them, wary of the oversized grub possibly hiding in the grass. Nothing but grasshoppers, thankfully.
“Yes. But it can’t hurt you. Remember that.”
Ben isn’t sure he can believe it, but he stands in what really does seem like a memory more than anything else.
“So, what do I do?” He asks, deciding to go along with the only explanation available, regardless of its absurdity. It helps that this Carlos guy seems very warm and comfortable and handsome.
“You’re already doing great. Now, the worm that scared you earlier-“
“Maggot. Not a worm. I’m not scared of worms.”
“Right. Well, it will be back, but in a new form.”
This struck Ben with a fresh tinge of fear, and with it came the shadow of night. The intense sunshine baking the ditch vanishes as darkness spreads across the sky. In an instant, the sunny site of play changes its dress. Now clothed in shadow and moonlight, it becomes a place of long-forgotten childhood fears where the unknown stalks at the edge of the forest. Indeed, when Ben inevitably casts his eyes toward that ominous liminal zone, it seethes with hostile motion. The trickle of moonlight illuminates the gaps between the trees just enough to give hint of writhing limbs, darting bodies, glinting teeth, and alien silhouettes melting into and out of each other like mutant bodies swimming through ink. A menagerie of the monstrous that resists all attempts to discern form. The only clear and constant feature are the eyes, so many wide eyes staring out from the dark. The moonlight catches on their vast white sclera, reflecting all along the length of the forest edge. That edge overtakes all sides of the ditch, replacing the fence and encircling the pair in its center. This sudden trap, plus Carlos’s firm grip on his shoulder, is all that keeps Ben from bolting.
“Already? This is a stronger one then I’ve seen in-” Carlos aborts the sentence halfway through. It seems he did not mean to say it out loud. “Okay, this will have to go faster than planned. Not a problem. Remember to stay calm.” Ben detects the slightest uncertainty in his tone. He does not run, but he dare not take his eyes off the seething dark. “This is the parasite. It doesn’t have a physical body. It draws on your psyche to form itself out of your fears. That’s what it feeds on. Fear. Negative emotional response. Yours. It wants to scare you. But if you don’t feed it, it can’t grow, and I can take it out. So, I need you to stay calm.”
It’s a miracle that Ben has even enough calm left to process what Carlos is telling him. The eyes among the trees are the same as the false Kat had. Eyes that look but do not see. Eyes that refuse connection. Eyes that impress the cold emptiness of the universe in all its horrific inevitability. His heart rate surges and with it the forest itself surges forwards, tightening its grip around the shrinking clearing of grass where Ben and Carlos stand.
“What do we do?”
“If you stay calm, we don’t have to do anything. It can’t hurt you if you don’t feed it. Right now it’s searching your mind for fears it can exploit. Godworms, the parasites, they usually start with basic common fears, like the dark.”
“Or maggots?”
“Exactly. But they move on to the higher order stuff once they find it. But they need energy to find it. If you stay calm, don’t feed them, they get no energy and wither. Then extraction is easy.”
“And what if I am afraid?” Ben’s eyes remain glued to the roiling forest edge. Any moment it seems some hideous and hateful creature will burst out from it.
“Well… Don’t be.”
Ben does his best to look at the dark forest of unseeing eyes and not perceive a threat. It is not easy. In its depths he catches hints of gnashing teeth, rotting bodies, and uncanny faces surfacing and falling away. He urges himself to believe Carlos, that it cannot hurt him if he is not afraid. He can muster only a frail trust, but as he does, the writhing of the forest dark does indeed seem to slow. Its horror stales.
Carlos notices. “There you go, exactly like that. Don’t give it anything and it can’t harm you.” It’s a positive feedback loop working for him. The steadier his mind, the more lethargic the seething dark becomes, and the easier it is to assert calm to its gaze. The clearing expands, bit by bit. Carlos steps towards the eyes. His fearlessness is further encouragement.
Then something shifts in the highest boughs. Something of more definite form looms there, high above them. Its silhouette is broken by branches, but a discernible humanoid figure stirs. It has no neck, its head lumped together with its torso like an owl. It is black as a shadow, featureless except for two enormous eyes that shine a brilliant red and convey the same paralyzing unseeing gaze as pseudo-Kat and the forest. Huge black wings spread out from the figure in a wingspan triple the height of a man.
“It’s still got some tricks, huh.” Carlos says, almost able to mask his worry.
The monster raises its wings high, glaring down at them like the towering idol of a dark god. Its name slips unconsciously from Ben’s lips. “Mothman.”
“What?”
“From a TV show. When I was a kid. Couldn’t sleep for weeks.” The explanation comes in a whisper.
“I see. Well, nothing has changed. You’ll be alright if you can just resist the fear.”
“I-” Ben begins, but then the mothman plunges, his stomach follows, and his mind is taken again by primal terror. The mothman makes its newfound vigor known with a blood curdling screech as it dives, slicing through the air, icepick talons outstretched, death from the sky.
Ben spins around to run, but he does not make a single step. The mothman talon’s catch him and Carlos each and effortlessly pluck them from the ground. It soars upwards with their bodies dangling like rags in tow. Ben’s field of vision spins violently between the black starless sky and the vanishing earth far below. Anything that is not the purest panic flees Ben’s psyche when, from what must be hundreds of feet above the treetops, the mothman drops them.