Chapter 5: The First Emergence

Chapter 5: The First Emergence

The pleasure from the feeding had faded, leaving behind a greasy residue of self-loathing and a strange, humming stillness in his gut. The ravenous agony was gone, but the sated calm was not peaceful. It was the quiet of a predator digesting its meal. Leo had retreated to his grandfather’s bedroom, the very heart of the house’s decay, as if drawn there by some morbid instinct.

Tonight was the full moon.

It rose over the jagged black silhouette of the mountains, a perfect, luminous disk, flooding the desert with a light so bright it bleached the colour from the world. The light that streamed through the grimy window wasn't gentle or romantic; it was an alien radiance, a cold, silent waterfall that turned the dust motes dancing in the air into a galaxy of tiny, shimmering stars. It was the light from his nightmare, the light from Abuelo’s obsessive photographs. Leo felt it on his skin not as warmth, but as a distinct pressure, a summons.

The humming in his core intensified, shifting from a gentle purr to a low, powerful vibration that resonated in his bones. The scratching was gone, replaced by a slow, coiling sensation, like a thick rope being deliberately tightened in his belly. He sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clenched into fists, willing his body to be still, to fight whatever was coming. He was Leo Martinez, an architect, a man of reason. He was in control.

His right hand twitched, the fingers splaying and clenching in a gesture that was not his own.

He stared at it, a cold spike of dread piercing his gut. He tried to make a fist again, but his fingers refused to obey, twitching to their own alien rhythm. The rebellion spread. A muscle in his calf contracted, pulling his leg taut. He tried to force it to relax, pitting his will against this internal insurrection, but it was like arguing with a tidal wave. He was a whisper of protest against a deafening command.

Slowly, inexorably, his body began to rise.

It was the most terrifying sensation of his life. He was a puppet, his limbs moved by unseen strings pulled from within. His legs straightened, locking his knees with a rigid, unnatural stiffness. He was standing, but he hadn't stood. He was a prisoner behind his own eyes, watching the room tilt as his body moved without permission. The coiling in his gut was the epicentre of the force, a puppeteer pulling him into a grotesque dance.

His feet, clumsy and uncoordinated, began to shamble forward. No, he screamed in the silent cage of his mind. Stop. But his legs continued their march, dragging him across the dusty floorboards. He was being walked to the window, drawn to the relentless, silver light.

He stood before the glass, his unwilled hands rising to rest against the cool pane. He stared out at the moon-drenched landscape, at the skeletal arms of the palo verde trees, at the endless, indifferent desert. The moonlight felt like it was pouring directly into his eyes, a stream of liquid energy that bypassed his brain and fed the coiled thing inside him. It was drinking the light, just as Abuelo's notes had said.

Then, with the same horrifying, deliberate slowness, his body turned from the window. It pivoted on his heels, a mechanical, jerky motion, until he was facing the tall, dark-wood dresser against the opposite wall. Above it hung a large, oval mirror, its surface clouded with age and dust. It reflected the room back at him—a pale, terrified man standing in a river of moonlight.

He was being forced to watch.

The pressure inside him began to build, a nauseating surge that rose from his stomach into his chest, constricting his lungs. He couldn't breathe. His throat was tightening, his jaw aching as an immense force pushed it open, wider and wider, past the point of comfort, to the brink of dislocation. A gag reflex seized him, a violent, full-body heave that produced nothing but a strangled, choking sound.

And then, he saw it in the mirror.

Something pale and wet pushed its way up from his throat. It was the smooth, featureless, milky-white nub he remembered from the nightmare. The head of the creature. It emerged from between his lips, glistening obscenely in the lunar glow. It was followed by the first segmented portion of its body, and then another, and another.

A silent scream of pure, abject horror echoed in his skull. This was real. It was happening.

It was unspooling from his mouth.

He watched in the mirror, paralyzed, a spectator to his own desecration. He could feel the slick, cold passage of its body against his tongue, the scrape of its countless, thread-like legs on the roof of his mouth. It kept coming, an endless ribbon of living horror. It was thicker than his arm, its pearlescent skin shimmering, seeming to drink in the moonlight that filled the room. It was so much larger than he could have imagined, impossibly contained within his frame. The feeding had nourished it, swelled its size.

Its long, segmented body slithered over his shoulder, its weight a disgusting pressure on his collarbone. It coiled onto the floor beside him, the rhythmic ch-thk… ch-thk… ch-thk… of its silver legs on the dusty wood a sound that would haunt him forever. Still, it continued to emerge from his throat, a grotesque parody of birth. He was the gateway. The conduit. He was not its host; he was its nest.

Finally, after an eternity of violation, the emergence stopped. At least five feet of the creature lay coiled on the floor, its obscene length a testament to the impossible space it occupied within him. But its tail remained rooted deep inside his gut, anchoring it to him. He was its tether to the world.

The creature's head lifted from the coiled mass, its antennae twitching, tasting the air. It basked in the moonlight, its entire body seeming to pulse with a faint, internal luminescence. It was beautiful and it was monstrous, a piece of fallen starlight, a thing of impossible biology feasting on the rays of the moon.

Leo watched his own reflection. His face was a mask of slack-jawed horror, tears streaming from his wide, unblinking eyes. He was a prisoner in his own flesh, a cage of bone and blood forced to serve as a stage for this celestial parasite's debut. The grinning reflection he’d seen before was a gentle mockery compared to this. This was the truth. He was nothing. Just a vessel.

For a long, silent moment, the creature simply existed, half in and half out of him, a living bridge between his world and some other, colder one. Then, as if it had drunk its fill, the process began to reverse.

The head swiveled back towards his face. The coils on the floor tightened. With the same slow, sickening deliberation, it began to retract. He felt the horror anew as it slid back into his mouth, a thick, living rope of flesh forcing its way back down his throat. He choked, he gagged, his body convulsing with each segment it re-swallowed.

One inch at a time, the nightmare devoured itself, retreating into the darkness of his body. The last tip of its tail slid past his lips, a final, violating touch.

His jaw snapped shut. His body, released from its puppeteer, collapsed. He fell to the floor in a heap, gasping, sobbing, the taste of ozone and alien slickness coating his tongue.

The moonlight continued to pour through the window, indifferent. He was alone in the room. But he knew, with a certainty that had burned away every last shred of his old life, that he was not, and would never be, alone again.