RESILIENCE, CONTEST ENTRY

Like a waking dream, the Sky-eater came to me again last night.

There was no time to prepare myself as the too-terribly-familiar presence of the nightmare in the sky invaded me, forced its way inside me, the monumental psychic girth of its presence worming into my mind, touching and scraping at the insides of my skull with cruel, questing fingers. Searching me, my thoughts, in what was our most intimate ritual, this nightly game of keep-away.

I could only barely stifle my cries—giving everything I had to steel myself against the grueling agony of its touch, refusing to give my tormentor even the slightest bit of the depraved satisfaction I knew it derived from my suffering, most especially my screams—when, finally, quicker than any time before:

Hello again, sweetling.

Body and mind reeled at the sudden intrusion of that baleful alien voice and the 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 of the prison that surround you. It is everywhere and everything at once.

And despite my dreadful familiarity with the sensation, I know it will forever remain alien, otherworldly, to me. It is not something you grow used to.

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

Rarely ever does the nightmare speak with a single tongue; rather, it calls out from the sky in a guttural voice of voices, a black chorus of so many gossamer whispers that sing and murmur and intone in grotesque unison. You could almost mistake its utterances as kindly, gentle and concerned—

Are you all right, sweetling?

Don’t you want to go home?

Rest now, sweetling. Sleep calls to you.

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

You don’t have to be afraid.

You don’t have to be alone anymore.

Open yourself to us.

—to believe in them, to do what they ask of you—

Let us in.

Do you want to see him again?

We can all go home together. Show us the way.

—but deep down, you know it is a lie, a trick by the greedy thing in the skies above to make you lower your guard, to relax the mental barriers you have struggled night after night to maintain, to open yourself to its crawling, sickly influence.

To surrender to it everything you know and everything you are.

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. Show us the way, sweetling. Show him.

I remember pausing then, the air catching in my throat as I fought to keep at bay the frenzied panic spreading through me, focusing—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, rendered in the shape of a heart.

Acing the Exodus examinations.

The taste of strawberries.

Thunderstorms.

Falling in love.

—too keenly aware that any thought, any restless 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.

Don’t, I remember thinking, biting back at the thought. Don’t think of him. It’s awake. It’s watching.

Don’t you want to see him? Don’t you want to see your—

Adam.

I remember glancing in the direction of the access corridor then—foolishly, stupidly—and what I saw almost 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.

It was not yet Adam, not fully, but it would be, I knew; a few seconds more and this grotesque puppet’s face would ripple and undulate, tearing apart at the seams to reveal the familiar features of my son—his bright blue eyes, a dimple that formed in his right cheek whenever he smiled, his always-messy, sandy-blond hair, and even that pale scar on his chin he’d received 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, my Adam, almost flawless in its execution, but—

But I could see the showman lurking in the dark, just behind the puppet.

Watching hungrily.

“Mommy, I want to go home,” came Adam’s gentle voice at last.

I screamed and shut my eyes then, fighting with everything I had left of myself, everything I had ever been, 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, in that moment, under the ever-watchful, psychic gaze of the Sky-eater—

Stupid to think of him now.

—knowing firsthand, better than anyone else alive, the depths to which the nightmare 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.

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

It drew closer, free of the terrible darkness that had 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.

Almost whole.

“Mommy, stop playing! I want to go home!”

Don’t look.

“Mommy, it’s me! It's your Adam!”

Whatever you do, don’t look.

“Mommy, p-please,” it begged, and it occurred to me, 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.

“Mommy, I do— don’t like this. I’m scared.”

Hearing the hurt in his—its—voice was too much. 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. Its unblinking milky-yellow-white eyes peered across 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.

“What’s wrong, mommy? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

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 felt the cylinders of my mind fire off, one after another, in a frenzied cascade meant to plunge me into the comfortable, calming depths of deepest torpor, a self-induced state of 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 the nightmare.

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

Suffering.

Annihilation.

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 my present, my conscious stake in reality.

Only to delve deep within myself.

My mind became a whirlwind of churning images, memories flooding and crashing into one another, overwhelming all rational sense. I would give the Sky-eater nothing but what had already transpired.

It grinned at me. Faceless, formless, I saw it smile.

It had been months since this terrible nightmare began, and yet, in that moment as I recall it, it seemed to me as if no time had passed at all. I could see it so clearly, so vividly, in my mind’s eye, the memory of it seared into me.

I remember dozens upon dozens of star-craft—merchant cruisers, research vessels, resource freighters, and personnel transports much like the Stargazer—had been brought low by what I now know was the sudden manifestation of the invisible nightmare, looming unseen in the sky, and were scattered across the open fields surrounding Central-1, their ruined husks alight with pale chemical fires that struggled against the falling rain, passengers surely dead.

I remember it hitting me, falling over me, a sense of dreadful insignificance—of smallness—that I had never before known or experienced in my life, as if the shadow of some monumental thing had fallen over the entire world, dwarfing the planet with its presence, drowning it in total darkness. I felt the blood in my veins turn to ice, the air catch in my throat, and an overwhelming, insatiable urge took root within me, a hideous impulse to lift my gaze from the carnage below, to look up, up, up…

At the sprawling sea of eyes and teeth in the sky.

I remember laughing then, and crying, delirious, feverish, wild and unchained, my mind unraveling at the sight of the Sky-eater, manifesting itself in such a way that our eyes could perceive it, revealing itself to us.

But what I remember most was the realization that it was looking at me.

In that moment, I knew it saw only me.

And it smiled then, knowing—foreseeing—the horror it would visit on me.

“Shut up!” I screamed, suddenly, viscerally rooted in the present, drawn from my recollections, and fell upon that chittering facsimile, tearing at the thing that was not my son—could never be my son—with my hands, smashing it with my fists. I wanted only to destroy it, to obliterate it, reduce the beastly parody to nothing.

I would not suffer another hate-sweet word.

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.

I could then swear I heard the Sky-eater’s cruel laughter in the distance.

Does it think it’s won?