The Thing Itself Read Online Free PDF

There was a ship, lit up like a Christmas decoration, balanced very precisely on top of its own lit reflection. I must have been ten degrees of latitude, or more, further away from the pole, enough to lift the moon up over the horizon. The texture of the sea was a million burrin-marks of white light on a million wavelets, like pewter. There was no doubting what I was seeing. My whole body trembled with pain, with the cold, and I said to myself I’m dying , and I’m hallucinating because I’m dying . I must have run in the wrong direction. I felt as if I’d been running all my life, all my ancestors’ lives combined.
    There was a weird inward fillip, or lurch, or clonic jerk, or something folding over something else. I was conscious of thinking: I’ve run the wrong way. I’ve missed the base.
    And there was the base. Now that I was there, I could see that Roy had covered the common room window on the inside with something – cloth, cardboard – to make a blackout screen. He had not wanted me to see the light and follow it as a beacon. Now that I was there, I could just make out the faint line of illumination around the edges. I couldn’t feel my hands, or my feet, and my face was covered with a pinching, scratchy mask – snot, sick, tears, frost, whatever, frozen by the impossible cold to a hard crust.
    I slumped against the wall, and the fabric of my shirt stuck. It was so stiffened it snapped. It ripped clean away when I got up.
    The door. I had to get to the door – that was when I saw … I was going to say when I saw them but the plural doesn’t really describe the circumstance. Not that there was only one, either. It is very hard to put into words. There was the door, in front of me, and just enough starlight to shine a faint glint off the metal handle. I could not use my hands, so I leant on the handle with my elbow, but of course it did not give way. Locked, of course locked. And of course Roy would not be opening it for me this time. Then I saw – what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that ‘it’ did not burn, or gleam, or shine. ‘It’ is the wrong word for it. ‘It’ felt, or looked, like a great tumbling of scree down an endless slope. Or rubble gathering at the bottom and falling up the mountain. Forwards, backwards.
    It was the most terrifying thing I ever saw.
    Flames about me, and black coals the size of mountains.
    There was a hint of – I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air articles. It was a pulse in the mind. It was a shudder of the soul.
    Flames all about me, and the blackness of night rolled into giant coals. I was in some titanic fireplace being burned, and the burning consumed me. Sylphs of light, like the aurora australis in the sky, flickered about my head. It wasn’t my head. My head was wholly and acephalically gone. Top of the world, Ma. Top of the world.
    The world-serpent slid monstrous from its den and I knew it was going to devour me.
    I could not get inside the base, and I was going to die. I felt the horrid cold in the very core of my being. Then ‘it’, or ‘they’, or the boojummy whatever the hell (I choose my words carefully, here) it was, expanded. Or undid whatever process of congealing that brought it – I don’t know.
    Where I stood experienced a second as-it-were convulsive, almost muscular contraction. Everything folded over, and flipped back again. ‘It’, or ‘they’ were not here any longer. In fact they had been here aeons ago, or were not yet here at all.
    I was standing inside the common room.
    Do not demand to know how I passed