Skitter - Part 3

Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.

Skitter Part 1

Skitter Part 2

Wood Axe - A5, ink and marker. By Skives

I met a girl and fell in love at first touch. A heaving dancefloor, her fingertips on the skin at the small of my back, it was the kind of moment other people describe as electric, a spark. But it wasn’t that. It felt like a spinning compass finding North.

A few years later, the girl rode pillion on my GSXR as we hooned down the A303 towards Gloucestershire. Inside my crash helmet, a red mist had come down. I was pushing hard, feeling one with the bike, leaning it around cars with my knees and featherweight pressure on the bars. Stone Henge loomed into view and the slow-ass coach ahead signaled a right turn, obviously taking the slip road to the stone circle. I dropped a gear, opened the throttle, and lurched the bike left to undertake.

Instant information overload. A broken-down car in the road ahead. The coach pulling around the obstacle, not turning off to the right. The girl’s arms tightening their grip around my waist with a panicked twitch. No room to move, too close to stop.

It sounds cliche, but time slowed down. My right hand reached for the brake, but we were into the gap before my fingers touched the lever. I saw 86 on the speedo. I felt the slab side of the coach brush my right shoulder and saw the flash of an open-mouthed face in my left mirror. There was time for just one thought.

“I’ve killed her”

But we survived. Instead of being crushed to pulp between coach and car, somehow the too-small gap spat us out like the Millenium Falcon fleeing an exploding Death Star. The girl on the back of my bike clonked her crash helmet into mine, and I heard a muffled ‘woo hoo, that was close, ha ha ha!’ I thumped her knee with a gloved hand and gave her a thumbs-up, but I wasn’t laughing. Beneath the layers of protective leather and kevlar, I was shaking like a shitting dog.

The Stone Henge incident taught me two things: assumptions can kill, and time slows down during moments of peril. Both lessons came crashing back to relevance this morning, when I found myself standing on the front porch with a deer skull between my feet and a full-blown anomaly hovering six feet from my face. Time slowed down, and numerous assumptions jostled for attention.

This thing has been stalking me.

It put the skull outside my door as a warning.

It must want to harm me.

I must defend myself.

I reached for a wood axe leaning against the wall behind me. The shimmering blob of anomalous energy watched impassively. Rather, I assumed it watched impassively. Remember, assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups, I whispered to myself, deciding against defensive, pre-emptive violence. I pulled my hand away from the axe, and the anomaly moved closer. I took a step forward, the anomaly reciprocated. There was no sound, but I could feel a kind of fizzing energy fill the space between us.

The anomaly and I were now just two or three feet apart. I could see no reflection in its glassy, warped-light field, just the blurry outline of trees behind it. The outer surface of the anomaly was covered with thin seams that looked like transparent veins, carrying who-knows-what. These rivulets moved and flowed around the skin of the field like petrol on a puddle, the motion was mesmerising. The veins began to converge at a single point level with my face, a few at first, then many, then all. I guessed what was about to happen, but it still shocked me. An otherworldly, transparent field-limb emerged from the point of convergence and stretched towards me. It crossed the short distance between us, then hung motionless in the air six inches from my nose, fizzing with silent energy.

Fuck me, I said out loud.

I think it wants me to touch it.

Skitter Part 1

Skitter Part 2

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