The Time Eater

by Aaron J. French

  My attention latched to the sight of James, filled with needles, sitting up in bed. He was leering at me, face like a rabid animal, eyes wide and filled with intensity. The needles covering his body, like a coat of spiny fur, glimmered and twinkled.

  “You lied to me, Roger,” he said.

  I jumped to my feet. “James, I—”

  He blew me off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t give me your excuses, man. I’m not as dumb as you think I am. Just because I didn’t spend my youth with my nose in a book like you doesn’t mean I don’t know anything. I know plenty. I know you said you were going to give me my medicine and instead I get this—more pain.”

  He held his arms out, the needles running all along them. For a moment he resembled the crucified Jesus from my earlier vision. Seeing him in this state filled me with sympathy and guilt. My God, I thought, what have I done to him?

  “James, I’m sorry. You said you wanted to live, you told me that—”

  “What I want,” he said, raising his voice, “is to have my fucking medicine now!”

  The energy in the room darkened to match James’s emotions. There was a sound like white noise or static. I sensed movement—massive movement—gliding soundlessly overhead, behind us, beneath us, everywhere.

  The Time Eater had come.

  Wind. A sucking, pulling wind, snatching my clothes, my hair, and the corners of the bed sheets. In the remote distance, stars and planets and other cosmic phenomena were drawn toward something unseen, lurking beyond the limits of perception.

  James’s rat-like face split into a grin. “You won’t give me what I want, I know something else that will,” he said. A beam of swirling light suddenly shone from above, pinpointing James like a spotlight. He arched his back, sticking his chest out. He didn’t seem to be accomplishing this feat of his own free will. It was like something was pulling him, had lassoed him around the waist, tightened the rope, now tugging. His head thrust backward, eyes rolling, torso bulging out unnaturally. The myriad needles shimmered.

  “Christ, James!” I said, rushing to the bed. The moment my knees touched down on the mattress, the spotlight grew brighter, so bright I had to shield my eyes. I lost sight of James, the room, the world. The only thing visible was the bouquet of acupuncture needles gouged into his skin.

  As the light dimmed, pooled, then petered away, he collapsed to his knees, looking like a martyr in supplication. To my horror I saw the needles were gone. They’d changed somehow into hypodermic syringes, filled with a clear fluid I knew was morphine.

  He rose, a tattered angel, limp arms hanging like wings. But he grinned, the wickedest, most vile grin I had ever seen. It put fear into my heart. The syringes dangled, spiny tips bending, thumb plungers depressing of their own accord. All at once, the barrels began to empty, flooding James’s bloodstream with a god-awful amount of narcotics.

  “Yes…” he said. The word whistled through his clenched teeth. “That is what I needed, yes…”

  His body began to shiver. All at once his skin flushed. When the barrels were empty, the syringes hung limply, clinging to the spoiled flesh. James sagged, bloodshot eyes awash with confusion and disorientation.

  “Goddam you!” I screamed at the surrounding dark. “We are gonna get rid of you, we’re gonna send you to Hell!”

  There was a rumble of thunder from the empty abyss hanging above us. James shook on the mattress, writhing in drug-induced ecstasy. Seeing him that way made me feel ill, hopeless, defeated.

  Searching for Annabelle and Dr. Li, my eyes lifted, scanning. In the distant black depths beyond the bed, where the stars and the colorful space clouds were being sucked away, I saw it. Coming from the space in the wall, now far-off, nearly imperceptible, but coming…

  The sight of it effectively threw off my perception of size. I was five foot eleven and the hole in the wall was a mere three inches, but the Time Eater was as immense as an entire planet, huge and vast and trundling. The only reason I saw it in its entirety was because it was far away in the distance, like looking through a telescope. But in reality, it was only several feet away.

  It came crawling out of the bottomless pit at the other end of the room. Colossal, shaped like an inkblot, screaming and warbling. A massive patch housed in a purple membranous wall, moving like an underwater creature, a pulsating jellyfish, splitting apart at times, then merging back together. I saw grand and terrible visions of alien landscapes, but I couldn’t be certain because overall I saw blackness. I was disoriented, and I thought, perhaps, I was shrinking.

  The wind picked up, tugging silently. On the bed James was turned onto his side. I wanted to go to him, help him, pull one of those horrific syringes out—something—but I remained paralyzed in the presence of the Time Eater.

  I watched in horror as James was nearly stripped off the bed. But at the last instant Dr. Li emerged from the dark with Annabelle in tow. He wore his fiercest, most intense expression. He tugged at his beard, showing his tiny square teeth.

  One hand raised, I saw he was wielding his acupuncture needle like a slasher’s blade. He slid right up behind James, grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed the needle against the side of his head—his left temple. With a lightning-quick flick of his wrist, he implanted the needle in the flesh, casting the insertion tube away.

  A look of serenity entered the doctor’s face the moment before he went down, collapsing into a heap. He looked me right in the eyes and mouthed the word, You.

  I didn’t understand, so I shook my head, but I could tell he was overjoyed and endlessly pleased with himself. He’d done it. He’d completed the procedure and finished the pattern. After he fell over Annabelle followed after him, making sure he was all right.

  Left alone in the darkness, the wind whipping into a frenzy, threatening to swipe me off my feet. I tried to make sense of what was happening. James floated off the bed like a puppet, held aloft by unseen strings. The moment Dr. Li put the last needle into him, he came apart with light, splitting like a fractured stained glass window. Now he appeared unwhole, a disassembled jigsaw puzzle of himself, spewing light in all directions, a human chandelier. I clenched my breath against the sheer awesomeness of it.

  His body started to rotate, round and round, sending out light beams, penetrating the dark. Beyond him, bulbous and jittering overhead, the Time Eater descended with tremendous speed.

  Finally, we were fighting back.

  I wanted to grab James, pull him down, but the moment I got too close, the Time Eater lurched forward. It seemed to come out of nowhere, falling down, around, on top of me, the bed, the whole room. The wind was a tempest, blowing in all directions. For one horrible moment, I could see the being suspended over me; its vast warbling body became the sky, its imperceptible wailing filled the air.

  It swallowed us, I thought. We’re inside it now, dead, dying, being digested. It’s won. It’s removed us from time—

  —but my attention was drawn back to James’s spinning, hovering body. Shafts of light fell outward through cracks in his skin, as he spun and spun and spun. The syringes had turned back into needles, and I happened to catch a glimpse of his face flying by and nearly had a heart attack.

  No. Impossible. Can’t be—

  Frozen, I waited for him to come back around, my gaze fixed firmly in place. The wind and the vast shape of the Time Eater threatened to divert me, but I held fast—I had to see. I had to know.

  Had it been…

  All along…

  Here it comes…

  I watched, hoping I was mistaken. But as he whirled toward me I looked into his face. It was not James. Not his eyes, cheeks, nose, or mouth, not his hair. It happened in slow motion, the moment becoming eternity, and I suddenly understood, suddenly recognized the awful truth.

  The weight of it was crushing. My knees fell apart and I thought I would collapse. James (who the hell is James?) went whirling back, taking his horrible truth with him. His secret. Light spilled forth, engulfing the room, as I reca
lled what Dr. Li had said to me, his last and final word before going down—

  You.

  Me, had he meant me?

  This is all a dream, I told myself. Any moment you are going to wake up back in your apartment, still alone, still divorced, still bitter, the way it’s always been.

  I couldn’t believe that, no, I had to fight that kind of thinking. What I’d seen, what I had recognized in James’s passing face, must have been a trick, a deception on the part of the Time Eater. I couldn’t allow myself to believe it; to believe was to surely go insane.

  The Time Eater, encompassing everything in sight, trembled and wailed. The purple membrane that housed it shone brighter so that the corners of every direction were a purple band. Up above, the terrible blackness reached.

  And it was coming fast…

  Stars, planets, and drifting clouds of space-dust were obliterated in its stygian depths. I saw them as in a vision being grinded soundlessly apart, without effort, simply dematerializing. I’m not sure what it was about seeing this that struck me. As I watched the cosmic phenomena, I became aware that everything in the room was dissolving. Everything was floating away: piles of junk and clothes hauled up by the wind, curtains, walls, doors, the tray of Dr. Li’s paraphernalia, everything collapsing like cardboard cutouts.

  The bed was pulled down through the floor, which had become a yawning pit. James, too, left to hover and rotate a moment longer, was flicked as by some unseen finger to pinwheel off in the darkness where the Time Eater got him, absorbed him.

  I stood in emptiness and it became too much, the wind became too strong, and then I was overwhelmed and started falling. The last thing I saw on my way to oblivion was my dear, sweet Annabelle being taken from me. Arms outstretched, she beckoned, but I was already on my way out.

  I could see the message she was trying to impart, the final offering escaping mutely from her lips, words fueled by power and meaning.

  I love you too, Roger, she said.

  Then I was ashes.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We have a feeling in childhood that vanishes after puberty—or, if it doesn’t vanish, then it remains in a much smaller distribution. This feeling is green, broad, and magical. We are born with a superabundance of this stuff, but we lose it by degrees as we grow older, as we learn about the world in which we live. We adapt to the pressures of our parents, teachers, religious advisors, friends, until this feeling gets snubbed out and we are left hollow, angry, alone.

  My mother died on the day I was born. Complications from the direction I was facing. I also heard rumors of hemorrhaging. I never got a straight answer from my father about it. He’d always placated my questioning, explaining to me—rather cynically—that it must’ve been God’s will.

  But my mother’s brother—Uncle Dennis—he was there that day. Although he’s dead now too, I got to ask him my questions before he died. He told me that after an excruciating couple of hours, during which the doctors and nurses worked to get me delivered, I was finally liberated, umbilicus cut, and placed on my mother’s soft, taut belly. This moment of skin-to-skin contact lasted five seconds. Then machines started beeping, doctors started shouting. Ripped from my mother’s body, I was handed to a nurse. I never felt my mother’s touch again. Five seconds: that’s all I got.

  Strangely, I’ve retained fragmentary images of this event, lodged in the depths of my unconscious, and yet surfacing once in a while in my dreams. I see myself going down the hall in the nurse’s arms. I see the lights and the long clear windows. I experience the horrible detachment I felt being taken away from her. I had experienced my mother’s warm skin, her safety, her nurturing presence, and then just as suddenly, snatched away and cold again, clutched in someone’s rubbery-gloved hands.

  It’s here that I feel myself split. Part of me wanted to be back with her so badly—as if I knew intuitively she was dying and would never get another chance—that this part willed itself back to her, or at least tried to. Who knows how far it got. Would anyone have noticed shattered fragments of a newborn baby’s psyche floating through the air to its mother? Not likely.

  Still, that’s what I see: part of me straining back to return to the delivery room, and the other part being ferried away. Accompanying these images is a feeling of extreme terror and rage that I can only re-experience at half the intensity. Re-experiencing it fully would break me down in tears or leave me suicidal. Beyond this, any thoughts and images of my birth and my mother end.

  Then comes a sinking feeling, especially since I was to be around my father all the time. I don’t think he ever reconciled my mother’s death. He never remarried—a telling sign. He couldn’t be affectionate with me because to look into my eyes was to see his own grief mirrored back at him. So there we were, two human males lost in a world where the woman in their lives had been taken.

  This was the sad, unloving environment I was raised in.

  Unable to cope, and overcome by work, my father hired a live-in midwife named Sandy. Sandy was an attractive young woman who spent copious hours with me, even breastfed me. I believe it’s safe to say that despite her attractive appearance and nurturing capability, my father never slept with her. No, by then he’d already given up completely.

  As I grew older, Sandy was replaced by a series of babysitters. Most were either teenage girls or incredibly gray-looking women. I don’t have many memories of them or of building any significant bonds. I do, however, get glimpses of my father from this time. I can see him, tall and gaunt, dressed in his work clothes, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper or in front of the TV, drinking Italian beer. The impression I get is one of deep guilt and sadness.

  We lived in Upstate New York, in the house where my mother and father conceived me. Even after she died, my father refused to get rid of her things. It wasn’t until I went off to college at Ohio State that he finally consented, transferring the bulk of her wardrobe to a spare bedroom.

  When that time came, I couldn’t get out the door and on the airplane fast enough. The world I’d lived in had been perpetually shrinking and the confining atmosphere was beginning to drive me stir crazy. I’ve suspected that I was the last anchor holding my father back from the edge, and so after I left the rest of the world closed in on him, and he died not long after. I didn’t attend his funeral.

  What I remember most about those years in Upstate New York, aside from my father’s endless moping and my string of indifferent babysitters, were the woods. In the backyard, out past the deck and the grassy plot dotted with towering maples and a few unused hammocks, stretched a deep forested area that reached all the way back to a flowing stream. This became my saving grace, my habitual playground.

  At a young age, probably around six, I started wandering off into the woods behind our home. My father, a constant recluse, encouraged this activity, but he told me never to venture beyond the stream. A stone-lined path cut through the maze of gnarled trunks, and as long as I stuck to that, he said, I’d be fine.

  I experienced overwhelming emotions of fear and abandonment, which arrived suddenly without external cause. Thanks to the years I spent married to Jenny—and all the talking we did—I recognized these feelings later as maternal depravation. I never had a mother; instinctively, I knew I was supposed to have one; and, on an intuitive level, I knew that by being born I had in fact killed my mother.

  So, according to Jenny (whom I for one believed), the feeling of loss was based on the belief that she’d abandoned me because I’d somehow been bad, failed her. Having been bad, I deserved to be punished, and that punishment was coming… I just didn’t know when.

  As a child, whenever these emotions came on I liked to escape into the woods, into a world of magic. I left my other self, the normal kid living a normal life, and embraced another part of me, a part less distinctive, more fluid, a part possessing greater spiritual inheritance.

  In the woods, I could experience this part with all of my being. Since the reducing and contaminati
ve elements of the adult world had not yet set in, my imagination was alive. The trees were angels, every blade of grass was a star, and the ferns and other red shrubs were living creatures of wonder and awe. The branches reached their leafy limbs above me, creating security, while underfoot stretched a floor of silken dirt.

  These woods were my hideaway from the grief of my father, the babysitters and cleaning women, from the schools I attended where I felt disdained by other students, away from ordinary life, immersing myself in a world I had created.

  It’s impossible to say how much time I spent in the wooded arms of that wonderland. I do remember how much I loved the stream at the end of the path. Crystal as a clear sky in summer, its waters came swirling out of the upper regions of the Adirondacks to go trickling over a bed of jeweled rocks. I would often sit by the shore listening to its babbling song, a gurgling concerto filling the air. I imagined it was playing just for me. In this world of magic I’d created for my other self, all things knew me and loved me and worshiped me. They were all my friends, and I was never alone.

  (Here’s where my memories become patchy, only… now I seem to be recovering—)

  I recall sitting by the stream one day—Christ, I must have been eight years old—listening and watching the sunlight reflecting in the water. I was selecting flat stones from along the bank, skipping them across the surface.

  A man emerged out of the trees on my left. Was it a man? I felt unsure. I was frightened because I thought it was an animal, a wolf, a stag, or a black bear. But when I looked up from the little pile of flat stones I’d been assembling, I saw it was a man. He stood there, thin, angular, wearing tattered blue overalls, brown boots, and a straw hat.

  When he noticed me, he stopped. I saw he had a long thin weed hanging over his bottom lip, which he chewed. Behind those lips… teeth black and crooked and slightly bared. Eyes like two lumps of coal set into fresh bread dough. I remember that put me off more than anything—the horror of his eyes—because it was like looking at a dead person.