SHORT STORIES : Xenophobia

This is an experimental story, which means you'll probably either like it or hate it. If you don't like stories involving alien abduction, or science fiction in general, you won't like this story. But if you are interested in stories of that nature, you might enjoy this one here. Xenophobia is also special in its own way because while I allowed someone to read a few of my earlier short stories back in January 2001 to give general feedback, this is the first story that I've actually had someone read through and extensively proofread.

You are getting very sleepy, very relaxed. You will respond only to my voice and you will remain calm. If you feel frightened, I want you to go the special tree. You can go to that tree at any time throughout this session and bask in the warm forgiving sunlight as you lay in the lush green grass, alone yet seeking comfort from nature. Now, I want you to remember the events of last Tuesday night, Jack, the ones your conscious mind won’t allow you to recall. I want you to give me a clear narrative of everything that happened to you, and everything that went on in your mind at the time.

I am laying down in the darkness, struggling to sleep as I often do night after night. On a conscious level, I don’t know why I find myself unable to sleep.

Aside from the normal stresses we all go through in life, work-related stresses such as whether or not I am doing a good job and whether my students have learned anything from me by the end of the semester. I am a Biology professor at URI, so I like to believe that my job is secure and I don’t have to worry about being outsourced to India, or being laid off because of an ever slowing economy. I live in a safe neighborhood in Cranston, which is virtually crime-free, so I have nothing to worry about. I can go out at night and know that I am most likely safe.

I’ve always thought of myself as a rational man. Perhaps when I was a child, like most children, I feared irrational things such as vampires, ghosts, and monsters under my bed, but I am fifty-years old now, with graying hair and a receding hairline and have given up such childish fears decades ago and they are now long forgotten. I don’t believe in paranormal activity; there are no ghosts or psychics, and UFOs are probably just a bunch of lights in the sky. I scoff at New Age beliefs and anything that’s in any way supernatural or superstitious. Even religious matters hold no sway with me, because I refuse to believe that there could be a god, any god. In time, science will fully explain how consciousness is possible, debunking the existence of an immortal soul. Without an immortal soul, there can be no afterlife, thus when we die, our bodies simply decompose and return to the earth from whence we came, while our consciousness is completely extinguished and entirely, returning to the nothingness in which we resided before birth. The world beyond earth is a cold, vast, empty wasteland of rocks, stars, and light still traveling from stars that were extinguished billions of years ago. There are answers to be found, but I believe that someday science will give us these answers, and it is to science that we should look to as a guide to explain the workings of the universe.

I look now into the darkness of my rented condominium, afraid, but unwilling to acknowledge this fear on a conscious level, because it is an irrational fear, a fear of beings I refuse to believe exist.

Do you know what it is you’re afraid of?

Not on a conscious level, no.

They come for me from time to time, always at night, and take me, but by the next morning I have completely forgotten what happened. They don’t come every night, but often enough so that I should remember them, if only I could retain any conscious memory of what they do to me when they take me. But I don’t. And during the day, I go through life as though it isn’t happening at all, because I have no conscious awareness that anything out of the ordinary or supernatural is happening.

But deep within my unconscious, a part of me knows. A part of me remembers.

This is why I have such trouble falling asleep at night. Because on an unconscious level I know that if I fall asleep, they may come for me again. It won’t always happen, and I go through many dreamless slumbers, or dream of happy things. But I know that what happens to me with those things isn’t a dream somehow. Although they erase any conscious memory of what happens (or perhaps my own mind represses those memories) I know it is really happening on an unconscious level, even if I am completely unaware of such fears while I lay there, tossing and turning in bed, striving for blissful slumber.

My apprehensions produce no physical symptoms—I don’t get cold sweats and my heartbeat doesn’t speed up, so I don’t even know that I am afraid, but a part of me knows, and that’s why I am unable to fall asleep. But I don’t know the reasoning behind my insomnia, and after two hours of restlessness, I grow frustrated. Although I’m not sick, I down a cup full of Nyquil anyway, because I know it will put me out quickly. I dread how it might make me feel the next morning, but in the moment, I only want sleep. Within moments of the ingestion, my mind finally reluctantly submits to my body’s demands for slumber.

No sooner am I asleep than I am abruptly awakened by a bright light.

Where is this light coming from?

I don’t know. It seems to be coming from everywhere, filling my bedroom, like the ever-expanding flash of a nuclear detonation. The light is blinding. Before I could see nothing but darkness, until my night vision set in (however poor it has gotten over the years) and I can see faint gray outlines of the furniture in my bedroom. Now I could see nothing but the bright luminescence that engulfs everything. Panic sets in and now I can feel my heart beating rapidly inside my chest, pounding madly against my rib cage as my lungs harden, leaving me completely unable to breathe. I cannot move either, except to part my lips slightly, like a car door left slightly ajar and my eyes are aflame from this searing brightness. I try to cry for help, but my screams are not just muffled, they are completely silenced, and I am able only to gasp and belch. My flesh tingles, itches, and burns as my body disintegrates quickly into the light, and I am once more taken to a place that is both foreign and familiar to me, the source of all my fears.

Where have they taken you?

Some kind of an operating room, but not like any that would be in a hospital on earth. There are no windows allowing me to see what the outside world looks like, giving me any indication of where this place might be located, whether it is in some foreign land, on the bottom of the sea, or at some top-secret government moon base. Yet I know somehow that I am aboard a space craft and am now out in space somewhere, in orbit around Earth.

How do you know you are out in space?

I don’t know that either. It’s just something I know instinctively, the way we know when we’re hungry, thirsty, or tired. It also comes from a dismal sense of déjà vu. The truth is, I don’t really know where I am, but I know I’ve been here before, many times since I was a child. The place reeks of haunting familiarity. Oh God, not again, I think, although I cannot consciously remember having been here before.

I am laying naked on some kind of platform, completely paralyzed except for my eyes, which swivel in all directions throughout the room, trying to take in my surroundings. My body is otherwise numb, and although I am no longer breathing, I know that I am still alive. Even though I do not feel the need to breathe here, there is no sense of suffocation. Mounting panic continues to build within me, however, because while I don’t know what will be done with me, I know it will horrible, cruel beyond imagination.

The room is lit up by a soft light emanating from some place I cannot see, and all of the walls, the ceiling, and the floor are white. It is an infinite whiteness that looms in every direction. The walls are there, but not there at the same time somehow, like transparent, rippling glass that covers the endless white space beyond. There seems to be static interference the distorting the atmosphere—not quite like a broken TV set, but the air seems to quiver, to somehow expand and contrast invisibly before my eyes, if that makes sense.

And then I see my captors, and the atmosphere goes from being distorted to being surreal and dreamlike, for the people who abducted me are not humans at all, but alien creatures with a grayish hue. They are the stereotypical gray beings that people report seeing and being abducted by time to time; the aliens that appeared on that show The X-Files (a show I’ve always thought to be complete rubbish, I might add; I’ll never understand how some people can subject themselves to such garbage). Their heads are huge, but the rest of their bodies are frail and they cannot be more than around four feet tall. They have no noses and their lips are little more than a small crevice slightly bigger than a fingernail clipping, but their black eyes are huge and emotionless, but are rather black bubbles protruding from their faces. Their bodies have no hair and they do not seem to possess sexual organs, which leads me to believe that it is either impossible for humans to tell what gender they are or that they have no gender differences and are of one sex. These gray creatures surround me from all directions, encircling the platform I lay motionless, scrutinizing me for reasons I cannot ascertain.

What do you want from me? I want to ask, but am unable to, for I cannot move, breathe, nor speak. I can only move my eyes, while everything else remains little nothing more than useless slabs of meat encasing my frightened and confused mind.

Do the aliens speak to you?

I can hear faint murmurs of distant conversation coming from them. I cannot tell which one of them is speaking at any given time, and I cannot tell the tone or connotation of their dialogue—whether they are arguing, debating, planning, or just having a leisurely social conversation. But they speak to one another in their own tongue, which is foreign to me and probably unknown to the rest of humanity as well.

So you have no idea what they might be talking about?

I don’t know. But I assume it must have something to do with me, and I can feel cold chills sweep over my body as my skin breaks out in goose flesh. I would shudder and trembled if my body was not entirely paralyzed, but I can still feel my heart racing, and I dread the horrible fate that is sure to befall me. Although I am unable to breathe and somehow don’t need to breathe here, I can still imagine my respiration increasing with the thumping of my heart, breathing raggedly, despite the fact that I haven’t taken in a single breath since I got here.

What exactly are the aliens doing to you?

I can suddenly feel localized heat around my solar plexus, like just a tiny dot from the laser beam shooting at me from above, but the pain is excruciating, like a burning jig saw slicing hotly into my internal organs. Again, I want to scream, but my lips are glued shut and my throat is sealed off in a wad of what feels like tightly-packed cotton. The only cries I can let out are screams within my shattering mind as what feels like hot coals drill and eats their way into my flesh and internal organs. My eyes water profusely as the laser encircles my navel, but that is the extent of the outward reaction I am allowed for my immense suffering. Nausea ensues, coupled with burning agony, and I can feel my stomach acids bubbling out, eating away at the inside of my flesh before the heat of the laser evaporates them completely. With the circular incision completed, one of the aliens removes the piece of detached flesh from my stomach, leaving a perfectly circular hole inside my abdomen roughly the size of four baseballs, spanning from my ribs all the way down to my pelvis. Although my stomach, intestines, and liver are now exposed, there is not a drop of blood, and my organs remain firmly in place, except for my stomach, which has been painfully ruptured open. My stomach juices are no longer leaking out and scorching the rest of my body, for they have all but dried up, it seems.

A gray head, smaller, but similar in color and shape to the other aliens, protrudes from the hole in my stomach. I can see those distant, emotionless black eyes gazing blankly at me before it lifts its head almost timidly and crawls out of the hole and onto my chest.

The baby alien is so small that I could probably put it in my pocket—it is barely bigger than my wallet, yet I can feel its weight pressing down on my chest as it crawls closer toward my chin. This thing has been incubating inside my stomach for no telling how long, and male humans are not equipped to carry offspring, whether their own or that of some other race, for we don’t have wombs. In sheer revulsion for what I have just witnessed, I wonder how it is possible for an organism such as this to survive and even to thrive inside my stomach, knowing how hazardous the human stomach truly is. Yet the baby alien seems unharmed and perfectly healthy despite having gestated in my stomach juices, which drips from its small body onto my skin and itches and burns madly, but is little more than an irritation compared to what I have just been through.

How could such a creature have gotten inside you in the first place?

I have no idea. I can’t—

Oh shit, I do know.

My mind flashes back to when I was abducted by these very same aliens exactly one year ago. I can remember a giant syringe. The sheer length and girth of the hypodermic needle was surreal and comical, appearing as big as a sports car with a circumference of around at least four feet for the tube and the needle itself, while only two inches thick, was still six feet long. I cannot see the crane that would be needed to elevate this syringe, for now the needle itself dominates my senses with rapidly-growing alarm, as it is slowly inserts into my abdomen, just below the rib cage. The needle doesn’t prick me so much as it impales me like a blade plunging deep into my belly and injects some acrid chemical which surges painfully through my entire body, as though I am burning from the inside.

The aliens watch my throes of agony with complete indifference. Perhaps they do feel some compassion and remorse for what they put me through, but there is no indication of any such emotions over their faces, which is pure indifference and scientific nonbiased. I am the literal lab rat, the guinea pig in their intergalactic laboratory while they are the scientists running their cruel experiments and injecting me with all sorts of hazardous chemicals just to see what effect they would have on me.

Oh God, the pain is unbearable! Every hair on my body is burning while my flesh is charred from the inside. My blood is boiling painfully, frying my veins as it circulates all over. The heat threatens to rupture both my eyes and my testicles as I lay naked, wanting nothing more than to scream as I writhe internally and the pain doubles and triples as it consumes me completely. My entire body is on fire; an inferno sweeps across my insides as though with sulfuric acid is being used as an accelerant.

Oh God, make it stop! Please make it stop!

There is no pain, Jack. Listen to me; you are not in any pain. Now I want you to go to that place I told you about. Go to the tree.

Pain, horrible pain!

No, Jack, there is no pain. Now I want you to calm down, and go to that tree I told you about. The tree will comfort you; it will make the pain go away. Go to the tree and bask in the sunshine and order of nature.

Yes, nature, the tree; I am there now.

Good. Now I want you to stay there and relax. You’re going to be okay now. Nothing is going to hurt you.

Yes, I am in nature, laying beside the tree and observing the natural order of everything as the setting sun paints the sky a beautiful amber. I can hear the birds chirping in the sky, while fish swim in the pond, and everything is beautiful and I am in a serene frame of mind, where I feel nothing can hurt me.

There are predators residing in nature, of course. The state of nature is a harsh environment, but all is in order. The snake eats the mouse while birds and frogs eat insects, and humans remain at the top of the food chain because that is how it is supposed to be. Everything has been worked out in nature somehow, leaving very little to be unknown or unexplainable. It is just a matter of learning how everything works, which is the job of scientists. While nature is cruel at times, its motives can be known, and I take a certain comfort in that. Even though everything is random, certain patterns can still be sought and distinguished. There is nothing supernatural or spiritual here; it is all just a matter of learn and observing all we can inside the short span of our lives.

Nature isn’t like that other place, that wretched alien ship where they take me against my will again and again and subject me to unknown tortures and torment me mercilessly. I regard that ship not with wonder, but with horror and grave uncertainty, for I do not know why they are doing this to me, what they hope to find, or even who or what these creatures are. They are an enigma—one that no one can solve. What’s even more frightening is what they do to me, the unbearable tortures and experiments they put me through.

How are you feeling now?

I am at peace here in nature.

I want you to go back to the ship. Can you do that, Jack? Can you go back to that alien spacecraft?

No…I don’t want to…I can’t. Please, you can’t make me go back there…oh God, please don’t put me back in that awful place with their inhumane experiments! Please…you can’t do that to me...you can’t! I can’t go back there, please—

It’s okay, Jack. Remember, you can go back to that tree anytime you want.

For now, though, I need you to return to the craft. I need you to explain to me what happened after the aliens removed their offspring from your stomach.

I don’t know if I can even call it their offspring since it came out of me. I can’t even begin to imagine how they might give birth, how they procreate. It can’t be  through abductions, otherwise they would have been extinct long ago, I would imagine, because they would have had no way of giving birth before they managed to leave wherever their planet might be and travel through hundreds of light years into space. It’s impossible.

Then why would they have needed to implant the alien fetus inside you in the first place, then?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a means of alien impregnation, sort of like artificial insemination. I don’t know. Probably part of whatever experiment they were running. Maybe they’re like us humans, and only want to understand the workings of the universe.

Do you take any comfort in this theory of yours?

It’s hard to say. Knowing what they put me through every time they abduct me offers no comfort, though, only pain and torture. I dread the next abduction, even if it is only on an unconscious level and in my conscious thoughts I don’t even believe this to be possible…or maybe I just don’t want to believe.

I suppose that’s possible.

But now I want you now to go back to that craft and describe what happened after they took their baby out of your stomach. What became of the infant, and what condition were you in when it all happened?

I don’t know what happened to the alien baby. They took it away minutes after they removed it from me and fixed me up, making it look as though nothing happened. I still lay completely paralyzed and unable to breathe on the platform, but I seem to be fully healed after they closed up my wound. Not only is there a trace of blood anywhere on my body, but there isn’t a scratch or a single blemish anywhere on my flesh, not even singed hair. There are no surgical scars or pain, and it is as though the operation was never performed. The memory of what happened still lingers, haunting my mind, and I lay there aghast and terrified over what the aliens may have in store for me afterward.

The grays still surround me, talking amongst themselves in their alien tongue, which sounds like murmured gibberish to my ears. I wonder briefly if they might be discussing the miracle of birth, but more likely they are discussing what should be done with me, and knowing this chills my skin to the bone.

I can almost feel myself trembling on that platform, but I know that to be impossible, since while my nerves are still capable of receiving pain, my muscles have been at least temporarily disabled. I yearn to beg for mercy, but to plead with them to return me to earth, but feel only renewed distress as I realize once again that I am unable to speak. No matter how hard I struggle to move, my body remains completely inert. It isn’t as though I can’t feel anything, for I can struggle to move, but it is as though my body is bolted down, and regardless of how hard I try to bend my joints, they remain completely still, as though an enormous weight has been placed to keep my body immobile.

Christ, what’s happening to me? I ask myself frantically as my panic quickly reaches its peak.

And then I see what looks like a lizard crawling across my crotch and standing on my stomach, its claws piercing my skin, digging in just deep enough so that, while it draws no blood, I can feel it cutting and stretching my skin painfully. Had I not been muted by the cotton in my throat, I would surely moan miserably. This lizard-thing appears to be reptilian, or the aliens’ version of a reptile, for although it has taken on the appearance of a lizard in body shape, mass, and size, it shares the same gray skin tone as the aliens themselves. Its black eyes are one forth the size of a dime, yet piercing black, like those of the aliens as well, and it gazed at me with cold indifference.

The lizard-alien slings its pasty, translucent tail into the air like a whip, the tip tickling my stomach as it makes its way into my navel. I don’t know how it made its way in there, but its tail somehow plunges deep inside me, as though it was an already-open orifice, stretching lightly the skin around it until the tail is completely in there.

The alien lizard hisses eerily and I can almost see smoke billowing from its lips. My stomach and digestive organs swell painfully. I can feel my appendix and spleen burst in two, the sharp pain of other rupturing organs and nausea wracking my body as the flesh around my distended belly fades from pink to black, like a gangrenous wound. From the stretch marks splitting open around my belly, thick green ichor oozes out and immediately hardens like crusting mucous against my skin.

My body jolts and spasms from the pain and while I am not yet able to move freely, it is apparent that whatever invisible restraints those alien sons of bitches put on me have been removed. My lips part as the cotton in my throat breaks apart, but I am able only to gasp, belch, and gag as sudden heat washes over my face.

I can move slightly enough to curl my fingers inward. Movement gradually returns to my body, but most of it is in response to the agony that overtakes my body as each organ within my digestive track swells. My intestines curl tightly around my rupturing liver as they too burst open and stomach acids dissolve the inner lining of my flesh. The skin around my body has now completely blackened while pus soaks the decaying meat.

What feels like boiling water trails the back of my throat and inside my mouth, until finally my lips are forced open and I vomit the black tar from my mouth, shooting it into the air like a geyser of oil. As it erupts from me, my lips are eaten away, quickly dissolved from the intense heat of the acid, which also burns away my tongue and chars my teeth. As that boiling rain sprinkles on my face, it melts away the flesh. I imagine it appears as reddened splotches forming over my contorted features, darkening expanding throughout until the roasting flesh erodes, first eating away my cheeks and leaving my charred teeth exposed, until finally my forehead, nose, and chin are burned away as well and my blackened skull is clearly visible.

By the time I have stopped vomiting, I am completely blind as well, for the oil, acid, or whatever I have vomited has scorched my eyes away within their sockets until there is nothing left of them. Although my nose has been eaten away and I am little more than a bag of bones, I can still smell the fetid stench of my decomposing stomach as the decaying flesh splits open with dampening moisture.

My hands swing blindly across my belly until the fingers of my left hand find purchase and close tightly around the lizard thing that is still attached to me. The alien lizard shrieks as I tear it from my body. I hear a wet crunching sound as its tail snaps off from the rest of its body and feel a sudden flood of fluids as its blood sprays all over me. Its scaly skin has a waxy texture and it slides through my fingers, struggling to free itself. My grip tightens until it is impossible for the creature to wiggle free. For a few seconds its hissing shrieks of terror and agony grow louder as its bones splinter within its body, until finally I can hear a wet explosion of its head bursting apart, and the thing’s movements completely cease except for a few faint twitches.

Footsteps...I hear footsteps now…thousands of them. The aliens are coming and there are hundreds of them. I can feel their crushing presence as they gather around me, a large mass of creatures surrounding as I lay there, screaming in rage, fear, and agony, which still shoots through my entire body. Like an ocean of bodies, they swarm over me and I can feel their arms and legs slapping and lashing against me as they hold me still, crawling over me and crushing me beneath them. I hear them screaming and murmuring as they pile on me until there’s a huge mountain of aliens on top me and I can feel my bones beginning to crack and fracture from their immense weight.

A light blooms like a supernova in space as my eyes slowly reconstruct and my vision gradually returns. I can see the darkening outlines of the aliens’ bodies as they lay upon me, like elongated shadows in abysmal nightfall. The aliens disperse and once more I am motionless as light pervades my field of vision and completely engulfs me. There is heat emitting from the light, but I feel no pain, only the comforting rejuvenation as my body quickly heals and whatever organs and body parts I have lost reform. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I feel reborn in the fiery light as it washes away my anguish and physical agony.

From there, I am returned to my bedroom and my body is mysteriously restored, leaving not a mark or blemish to reveal the horror I have just endured. When I awaken, I will have no memory of what happened, leaving me blissfully ignorant of what I experienced during night and completely oblivious to the fact that I am going to have to deal with the abductions and the experiments for the rest of my life.

I am going to snap my finger now, Jack, and when I do, you will awaken. You will not remember the aliens, or anything else we have talked about, and you will be at peace.

Snap.

 

The End

May 16, 2004
May 22, 2004