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NOT ALL VISITORS ARE by John M. Williams
NOT ALL VISITORS ARE by John M. Williams
I’m remembering this as best I can. While I can.
It started with Ernie. He had a repertoire of barks—in the daytime more of an agitated whining, followed by a centipede-like charge across the yard that had the same chance of success you’d give a walrus. Ernie is a full-figured miniature dachshund, equal parts brave and stupid—but the daytime posed no real danger, just squirrels and the occasional cat. In the nighttime it was different, as I would sit on the back porch looking across the yard into the woods with a meandering brain, Ernie in sentry mode beside me: he would catch a scent or sound, sit up—red alert, people!—then make his charge, braying one of three distinct barks: one for deer outside the fence, another for an armadillo that had waddled onto the premises, another for a possum.
On the night I’m remembering it was none of the above. He jerked up on the couch with a wild look, like the vet was taking his temperature, and made an otherworldly noise—a terrorized yelp that made the hair stand up on my neck. My first thought was coyotes, which I knew were out there, based on a sighting a few years back as I was reading in my reading chair when a movement out the window caught my eye and I looked out to see one trotting nonchalantly down the middle of the street in broad daylight. Twenty-five years in that house—just that one time. And now I reached over to grab Ernie, but I was too slow—he bounded off the couch and lit out across the yard emitting one long insane howl.
“Ernie!” I cried, uselessly, then hurried off after him.
The back yard was pretty big, and on the right side a row of scuppernong vines paralleled the fence, with a space wide enough for a mower in between, for about eighty feet. Ernie stopped short of the vines, then turned cautious, his tail straight up, all his senses seemingly trying to decipher something utterly alien. I was terrified, especially since in the low light something along the honeysuckle-smothered fence line didn’t look right. I turned on my phone flashlight and took a few steps closer. Imagining everything from a pack of coyotes to a crouched panther to a crocodile, I shone the light into the blackness by the fence, then saw, or felt, an undulating movement. What the hell was I seeing? Blackness. I walked along the line of vines and it didn’t change. A gigantic shadow along the bottom of the fence that shouldn’t be there. And then, almost at the very end, I saw it: the shadow elevated, ending in a gigantic head with shining eye slits and a restless tongue testing the air.
I scooped up Ernie and hightailed it back to the house.
*
I didn’t know who to call so I called the sheriff, sounding I’m sure like an hysterical crackhead, but even though it was near midnight, in about ten minutes a car pulled up. I was waiting in the driveway.
Two deputies listened to me, I thought, smirkingly, then unfastened their flashlights and followed me. Of course I totally expected the thing to be gone, leaving me to question my own sanity for the rest of my life, which I already had a pretty good head start on, but to my horror and relief, it was still there.
“Damn, Lamar,” one of the deputies said, “you ever seen anything like that?”
“Naw,” said Lamar, backing up.
It was the size of a sewer pipe—I’m serious—three feet in diameter, and it wasn’t clear how long it was—the tail end just disappeared into the darkness. But it was at least as long as the side fence, and maybe draped over the back fence and kept going—a hundred feet? two hundred? It didn’t look injured or dormant or even remotely intimidated. To be honest, it looked like it was waiting. For something.
“What do we do?” the first deputy asked, bravely taking a step closer and shining his flashlight on the creature’s ponderous head.
“Report it to Animal Control—” Lamar said, but that’s as far as he got. What happened next was so quick it had already happened before it happened.
The head lurched, the mouth became a terrifyingly huge orifice, and in seconds the other deputy’s upper body was engulfed, then the legs kicking out the mouth, then gone.
Me and Lamar hauled ass. I stowed Ernie safely inside.
*
Not long after that, my yard was filled with flashing lights and crackling radios and the street was blocked off. The neighbors poured out of their houses in nightclothes and got various versions of the story from each other. Everybody wanted at least a glimpse, but the police kept everybody way back, and no one ventured near the thing. It was still lying along the fence line, but whenever it did make any kind of movement a collective squeal went up from the gallery and they surged backwards. You had the impression the star attraction, its head up like a nightmare periscope, was sizing up the activity around it and wasn’t much impressed. The authorities, including several veterinary experts, held an ongoing confabulation, but they didn’t even come close to a consensus for a plan of action.
Artillery was suggested but rejected. It was a stalemate.
Then the creature went on the move.
It came around the grape vines and started across the yard. The entire throng of spectators bolted into a run like from a lava flow. The thing appeared to be heading toward my house, and the length of him just kept coming. Just as I was thinking “where the hell is the tail?” I remembered Ernie and dashed for the back door.
Of course he was barking his terrified head off. I could feel the thing slithering behind me. I blew through the back door, closed and locked it, scooped up Ernie and hit the front door just as the unspeakable head crashed through the glass of the back door and needless to say, I didn’t hang around to look.
For a while after that, nothing happened, and then dawn began to lighten the eastern horizon. A brave, or stupid, soul or two approached the house and shone lights through the windows. All you could see was the thick body along the baseboards of the center room and study and kitchen, then down the hall and into the bedrooms. No sign of head or tail.
Nobody had a clue what to do. The sheriff himself showed up and wasn’t a lot of help.
“What about Deputy Simmons?” someone asked.
“That’s up to the authorities,” the sheriff replied.
“You are the authorities.”
“Well, that will be up to the coroner.”
“Shouldn’t we notify the family?”
“Yes, notify the family.”
I began to sense a general sentiment from everybody that the thing was in the house now and maybe that was good enough. I also sensed the general mood starting to turn against me.
“Why your house?” asked a woman in a sweatsuit.
“Hell, I don’t know. It could have been yours.”
“I don’t think so, since I don’t practice satanism.”
“Neither do I!”
“You obviously practice something.”
And somebody else added, “You attracted that thing out of the depths of hell and up here into our family-oriented, business-friendly town and you can’t wriggle your way out of that.”
How do you respond to something like that?
Predictably, after a couple of days, the sensation wore off, the thing showed no inclination to vacate its new quarters, and everybody started crossing their arms when they saw me.
That was the night me and Ernie became homeless, and we have lived as satanic exiles ever since. Like the new tenant of our no-longer house, we are ignored—I guess, forgotten—left alone to navigate our fate however we can.
Sometimes we walk by our old house, its new owner seemingly happily settled in, and the townspeople like it that way. It’s the new normal.
I know Ernie can’t live forever, and as for me, I am slowly losing myself. I can feel pieces of my identity, my self, my memories, atrophying away, leaving blank holes.
I think about what I left in that house—my notebooks, all my work, my books, my art, my music, my photo albums, my habits, and I wonder about him, or her, the same as people probably wonder about me: what does he eat?
I’m not eating much at all. But he’s eating my life.
