RESILIENCE

It visited me again last night.

There was no time to prepare myself for its coming. It struck as I was on the verge of sleep—

Running low on stimulants. Can’t keep this up.

—invading me, forcing its way inside me, its psychic influence greedily worming its way into my mind, touching and scraping at the insides of my skull with cruel, alien fingers; searching me, my thoughts, in what was our most intimate ritual, this wretched game of keep-away.

It is the end of all things: The Sky-eater.

I could only barely stifle my cries—giving what little strength I had left in me to steel myself against the grueling weight of its presence, refusing to give my tormentor even the slightest bit of the depraved satisfaction I knew it derived from my suffering—when, finally, quicker than any time before:

Hello again, sweetling.

My mind reeled at the sudden intrusion of that baleful, too-familiar voice and the twisted way it seemed to speak with words never heard but instead experienced—sensed, endured—as a kind of vile telepathic tremor felt in the tips of your fingers, in your bones, your teeth, your thoughts, in the floor beneath your feet and the walls that surround you. It is everywhere at once, everything you know, and yet, despite my grudging intimacy with the sensation, I know it will forever remain alien, otherworldly, to me.

It is not something you grow used to.

Talk to us. We want only what is best for you, sweetling.

Rarely does the thing speak with a single tongue, the way you and I might have talked, had this calamity never… rather, it calls out from its spectral perch in the skies above in a guttural voice of voices, each of them so dreadfully familiar and dear. You could almost bring yourself to believe you counted your mother’s voice among them, as well as your father’s, your husband’s, and even your—

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It is such a grotesque thing, that inhuman chorus-voice from the sky, and yet—

Are you all right?

Don’t you want to go home?

Rest now, sweetling. Sleep calls to you.

—and yet, you want for nothing but to answer those voices, to trust them—

You don’t have to be alone.

You don’t have to be frightened.

Open yourself to us.

—to believe in them, to do what they ask of you, because they are familiar and dear and almost kind; and because they are all you have left—

Let us in.

Do you want to see him again?

We can all go home together.

—but deep down, you know it is a lie, just another of the Sky-eater’s tricks, a thing meant to make you lower your guard, to relax the mental barriers you’ve struggled night after night to maintain…

To surrender to it everything you know.

And that, for reasons I dare not think on, I can never allow.

To trust it, to open myself to it, would mean the undoing of so much.

It is time to go home, Ava-sweetling. Show us the way.

(Fuck you,) I had thought back. Stupid.

Wrong, sweetling.

I hadn’t even a moment before it erupted within me, what I could only describe as a sprawling hellstorm of white-hot oblivion flame forcibly compressed down to the size and shape of a needlepoint, thrust deep and exact into the base of my skull. I fell to my knees, then to the floor on my side, writhing against it, my teeth pressed so tightly together I swore they might crack from the pressure I exerted upon them.

We don’t enjoy hurting you.

(Liar.)

An involuntary thought, a reflex, but to the starspawn it was cause enough to mete out a second course of torment. Another prick-point of that skull-splitting agony erupted within my head, blossoming outwards like blistering flower petals—wilder and less exact than before, but still measured enough not to fracture me completely.

The time for these games is past, sweetling.

I remember freezing then, just as I was peeling myself off the floor, the air catching in my throat as I fought to keep at bay the frenzied panic worming its way into my thoughts, knowing what was to come.

It is time to go home. Show us the way. Show him.

Don’t. Don’t let it in.

I focused—hard—on conjuring up an idea, any idea, that could keep my mind’s eye from wandering—

The Waltz of Three Black Stars, one of my favorite books as a child.

The memory of my first Ithalyn sunset.

The electrum locket my father had given me for my eleventh birthday, cast in the shape of a heart, containing an artist's minimalist sketch of my parents.

Acing the Exodus examinations.

Two years of a HyperVac internship.

The taste of strawberries.

Thunderstorms.

Falling in love.

—all too keenly aware that even the vaguest memory would summon him from out of the dark, and it was precisely him that I did not want to see again.

Never again, not like that.

We can return him to you, Ava-sweetling. Would you like that?

Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in.

It was all I could do to keep my thoughts from turning to him—

Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in. Don’t let it in.

All I could do not to think of what had been taken from me, stolen from me by the abhorrent thing in the sky—

Don’t let it in. Stupid. Stupid, stupid. It will wear him. You know that.

One stray thought is all it would take—

Don’t, I had thought, biting back hard. Don’t let it in! No, no, no!

One momentary lapse in focus—

It smiled at me.

The sound of his laughter—

It saw only me.

The smell of his hair—

Faceless, formless, I saw it smile. The Sky-eater grinned at me.

Even his name—

Forgive me.

His name—

Adam.

I remember glancing in the direction of the access corridor then—sensing movement in the gloom of the unlit hall—and what I saw nearly stopped my heart: The briefest flash of what I can only describe as a child’s face, almost completely featureless, appeared from out of the darkness. It was eyeless, lacking ears and a nose, but it grinned at me with a mouth full of crooked teeth. The thing slipped back into the shadows then, out of view, but I could hear the wet, shallow rasp of its labored breathing just beyond the entryway.

Taking shape. Not yet whole—but it would be soon enough.

A few seconds more and this aberrant creature’s face would ripple and undulate, splitting open to reveal the familiar features of my son, my Adam—his bright blue eyes, the dimple that formed like a pocket in his right cheek whenever he smiled, his always-messy, sandy-blond hair, and even that pale scar on his chin he’d received after excitedly running face-first into an observatory window aboard the Stargazer transport shuttle we’d arrived on three years ago.

It would be a near-perfect recreation of my child, almost flawless in its execution, but—

But I could see the strings and the monster holding them.

“Mommy, show us the way home,” came Adam’s gentle voice at last.

I screamed and shut my eyes then, fighting with everything I had left to me, every ounce of strength, every trace of willpower, to shut out the vision the Sky-eater was forcing into my head. I fell back against the wall, sliding down onto my ass, my arms wrapped around my legs, face pressed into my knees.

It had been stupid to think of him then, under the watchful gaze of the Sky-eater—

Stupid to think of him now.

—knowing firsthand, better than anyone else alive, the depths to which it will sink to take from you what it desires most, but there is only so much of myself I can give for you, only so much of my person that I am willing to sacrifice at the altar of your future. If I must pay with my sanity, my sanctity, and my very sense of self to protect you from its knowing, I will do so gladly and without regret. If I must part with my past, my present, and what would have been my future so that all you will ever know is the unfettered green of open fields and the glowing warmth of so many bright suns, I will abandon everything I am to make it so.

But you cannot—and will not—have my son.

His memory is mine and mine alone.

“Mommy, why are you hiding from me?”

It drew closer, free of the surrogate dark that spawned it. I could hear the wet slap of its greasy footsteps shift quietly—subtly—to the softer patter of a child’s carefree stride along the sleek metal floor.

Not yet whole, not yet realized—

“Silly mommy, you can’t hide from me.”

But it would be soon enough.

“Look at me, mommy.”

It has come to me before in the shape of my mother and father, their faces twisted into masks of false concern, always encouraging me to put aside the stimulants, to drift away and sleep; so, too, have I seen old friends emerge from the shadows sporting cold, lifeless smiles, offering me their dead company, to share the dreadful weight of my post; but worst of all—

Worse than anything else—

“Mommy, it’s me. Adam.”

Can you imagine what that’s like?

It’s disgusting—no, worse than disgusting. It is the cruelest, most wretched torture any sane person could be made to endure. To see your son—your dead fucking son—alive and well, spared from the hideous fate you failed to save him from, but feeling, sensing, that grotesque alien presence squirming and writhing within him, animating him, using him, giving him shape and weight and form and the words he speaks to you. He is a vision of warmth and happiness, reminiscent of everything you loved about your son, your child, but you can see through the illusion, past the lies; you can see it for what it is: An empty husk. A lifeless construct. A hateful puppet on marionette strings, pulled to and fro by the grinning calamity in the sky, master showman of the nightmare circus. And if you look closely and carefully enough—

A sprawling ocean of eyes and teeth.

—you can see it lurking there in the dark, just behind the puppet.

Watching hungrily.

“Don’t you want to see me, mommy?”

Even in that moment, cognizant of the thing’s true nature, its purpose, I wanted to—more than anything.

“It’s me, mommy.”

To see him again. To have him again.

“It’s Adam!”

His voice was so gentle and warm, so genuine, so real. I could almost believe that he was here, standing only inches away from me now.

“I’m here, mommy.”

I could reach out and grab him if I wanted to, hold him close, hold him tight. Never again let him go.

“Don’t you want to see me?”

Of course, I do.

“I’ve missed you, mommy.”

If only I could have you back—

But it was then that it came to me, the one thought that has haunted me more than any other since this dreadful nightmare began: What happens to the people it eats?

“I’ve missed you so much, mommy.”

Do they die the very same way they would have if they had never come here to this awful place? Do they pass on? Are they welcomed past the empyrean gates of Heaven, banished into the fiery pits of Hell? And if these places are illusion, fantasy, then are they allowed even to fade into the utter black of the void, the end, where one must assuredly be freed from the immense burden of sentience, of knowing, of human awareness?

I wondered then as I wonder now: Is death a release from the Sky-eater’s embrace?

I wish I could believe it was. Almost more than anything, I wish I could accept the idea that my son, my family, my friends, and my people were gone from this place, that despite their suffering at the unseen hands of the primordial starspawn in the sky, they could at last find peace and repose in death, but I can’t.

Deep down, I know better than to hope.

And yet, despite everything I’ve witnessed, everything I’ve endured, I found some small part of myself clinging to that vainest hope—Could it really be him? Could it really be Adam? And if it was… If it really, truly was…

“We can go home together. Please, mommy, let’s go.”

I felt something surge in me then.

It would be a near-perfect recreation of my child, my Adam, almost flawless in its execution, but—

“Mommy, I want to go home…”

But—

“Show us the way to Earth.”

But I could see the strings and the monster holding them.

“Get away from me, you disgusting fucking freak!” I nearly wailed, lunging forward and blindly lashing out at the puppet-creature with the armored gauntlet fastened to my hand—using all the force of mind and body I could muster in the blind aim that I might banish it completely and rid myself of its presence forever—before it could utter another hate-sweet word.

I felt my fist punch through what must have been the thing’s rib cage and tear through its body completely, as if it had been rendered from papier-mâché and warm gelatin. My arm, rooted now within the cavity of the creature’s torso, felt suddenly and dreadfully damp.

In truth, I had expected the puppet-thing to shriek, to cry out in pain or to retaliate in defense of itself, but there came nothing in response to my attack, save for a guttural, raspy intake of air and a mewling whisper:

“Why w-would you do that?”

Another sharp draw of air and then: “Why? Mommy, w-why would you hurt me?”

It occurred to me then, my eyes still forced shut in a refusal to look at the thing wearing my son’s visage, my back pressed against the wall, that the creature was speaking through tears—it was weeping.

I couldn’t resist it any longer. I opened my eyes.

It was grinning at me.

A ghastly sneer marred the features of what had assuredly once been Adam’s handsome face, the corners of its obscene mouth stretching nearly to its ears in a cartoonish extreme. Grotesque gangrenous-black lips, too large for the head sporting them, were drawn back to display a maw full of glistening, jagged teeth and a gnarled tongue caught in the grip of withering decay. Its unblinking milky-yellow-white eyes peered down at me from the recessed sockets of a deformed prepubescent skull, haggard cheeks stained with the residuum of its false tears.

A mad, unconscionable parody rendered in the likeness and shape of my son, my Adam.

“Only bad mommies hurt their children, Ava-sweetling,” the profane caricature hissed, that abhorrent smile still warping its features. “But you can make up for the awful thing you’ve done. All you have to do—”

—is show us the way home.

I found that I could no longer move, no longer speak, that even breathing had become a nearly insurmountable struggle. Terror had taken control, robbed me of both reason and sense. I began to cry. I could feel the cylinders of my mind fire off, one after another, in a frenzied cascade meant to plunge me into the chasmic depths of fervent torpor, a kind of self-induced state of forced unconsciousness rendering me safe and shielded from the mad visions of the Sky-eater. I wanted for nothing but to embrace that blissful sleep, to abandon any remaining sense of self and escape into the dreamless slumber of the unthinking animal-mind, beyond the reach of this nightmare circus and its master showman.

But I knew then, as I have always known, what it would mean to abandon my claim of self, to resign from my sentinel post here on this dead world—

Untold suffering.

Annihilation on a scale beyond even our worst projections.

Death that is not death.

How many billions of Adams would I be responsible for in turning my back on my duty? In renouncing my promise to protect you and yours?

—and so, rather than surrendering to the invitation of that sweet repose, I chose instead to fight it, to struggle and rage against it, to cling to the bleeding edge of the present, my conscious stake in reality.

And in that moment, my anger fully eclipsed my terror.

“You are not my child,” I suddenly whispered, not certain at first those words had been my own. I tested them again, to be sure: “You are not my son.”

“What did you say?” the ghoul rasped, cocking its head, seeming almost incredulous at my assertion.

“You are not my son,” I growled back, glaring at the thing directly, refusing to break our shared gaze, “you are not Adam.”

“Of course, I’m Adam!” it shriek-sang dissonantly, hatefully, that awful shark-jaw grin spreading somehow even further. “Mommy, don’t you know me? Don’t you recognize me?!”

I ignored it, attempted to pull my arm from the ragged hole I had made in the creature’s torso and found that I could not tear myself free of the thing.

But I heard it hiss then, taking another frayed breath, and say in a voice that was not Adam’s: “Don’t you love me anymore?!”

I felt my heart dart at those ugly words.

Don’t you love me anymore?

To hear them spill obscene from the jaws of that chittering facsimile did not—could not—lessen their impact on me; nor could I seek comfort in the belief that these words were yet another contemptible ploy by the Sky-eater to make me doubt my resolve, to falter in my purchase against its designs.

Because, even then, lost to the depths of my despair, I could intuit the truth. I knew it for what it was. I just didn’t want to face it, didn’t want to accept it—

What happens to the people it eats?

I couldn’t accept it.

Do they die the very same way they would have if they had never come here to this awful place? Do they pass on? Are they welcomed past the empyrean gates of Heaven, banished into the fiery pits of Hell? And if these places are illusion, fantasy, then are they allowed even to fade into the utter black of the void, the end, where one must assuredly be freed from the immense burden of sentience, of knowing, of human awareness?

But the truth remains the truth, no matter what I do.

Is death a release from the Sky-eater’s embrace?

And the truth is—

My anger turned to rage.

“I love you more than anything, Adam,” I said honestly, earnestly. “I love you more than you could ever truly know. That’s why—”

I felt that burning rage spark tenfold, spread through me like a blazing wildfire of hate, regret, hurt, shame, and—

“That’s why—”

Hope.

My hand, jutting out of the ghoul’s back, twisted into a fist, my fingers clenched so tightly I could feel my knuckles turning white.

“That’s why you’ll never break me! Because I love you, Adam, more than anything! More than this planet, more than the universe, more than life itself!” I screamed, tearing my arm through the gelatinous flesh of the puppet-creature’s warped body, freeing myself from its hold.

This time it did scream, shrieking in so many alien voices—that guttural voice of voices—as it recoiled, collapsing against the ground into a pile of itself, the creature’s spider-like limbs flailing wildly in a fit of pure agony.

“Mommy, why—”

“Shut up!” I screamed and fell upon the thing, tearing at it with my hands, smashing it with my fists. I wanted only to destroy it, to obliterate it, to reduce the beastly parody to nothing.

“Momm—”

I worked my hands into that hideous, gibbering mouth, rooting my fingers into it as best I could, and tore away with all the strength my anger had made available to me, ripping the monster’s lower jaw free of its misshapen head.

I would not suffer another hate-sweet word.

“Mawlmmy, -leaze—”

“Shut up and die!”

“Mawl—”

“Die!”

“Maw—”

“Fucking die!”

I don’t remember how long I kept at it, tearing away at the thing. I only know that when I was done, when finally my rage was spent, all that remained of it was a twitching heap of fleshy pulp dissolving away into dream vapor.