That Thing

It has been many years since the day I came across the small figure within the small shop of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinatown is full of shops with numerous items for tourists to collect and to bring home to wherever they may have hailed from. It was in one such shop that I came across that small figurine. A black stone carving of unknown determined origin whose intricate carving work had not fared well with time. Two inches wide and a few inches tall, three or four at most. At first, I thought it was a curious stamp face for the numerous calligraphy items to be purchased as many stalls boasted one or the other of the chirographical itinerary. Each stamp press was to denote an end to the letters as the author's signature. Or to be used to create a wax seal for the reader to easily note who had sent them the parchment. Along the rows of the shop’s offerings were the standard factory-made fans and numerous stainless-steel offerings for those of a martial taste in eccentric wants.

The shop attendant was a younger woman who looked out dryly to the hot streets and the numerous passersby. Her unamused expression gave away the lackluster in her day to day avarice when it came to making sales quotas. I tried to amuse her and asked about this small unassuming item in her shop and was given a short although not a curt response, of it being worth, “one dollar and fifty cents”.

I moved to pick the item from its place amongst the variety of stamps when she realized what I was about to purchase, with a flare of up roaring disbelief and unintelligible mutters. She had snatched up the black figurine and in her broken English, proceeded to tell me, that was a mistaken item and not for any sale. I was taken back by her outburst and began to protest against such unequivocal rudeness, when from the back of the store harshly coughed out an under toned message. The young woman who was already pale and pallid in complexion managed to lose even more blood flow in her face as the order and command struck her with fear.

I could not but think that the true owner of the store was making their presence known and I was as bewildered as the small black calligraphy stamp in the clerk’s white knuckled grip.

Again, the voice from the back of the store sounded in a coughing order and she nodded in obeisance. I looked in vain for the whereabouts of my unknown helper, but only saw the trembling hands of the clerk as she gift wrapped the accursed item hurriedly. I paid for the item with a five dollar bill and soon received the stamp as graciously as I could manage in the hand over, where she simultaneously returned the handful of coins I was due: three and fifty cents. .

Her now cowed expression mixed with horror as she watched the wrapped item unceremoniously be placed into my jacket’s front pocket. I gave a nod and loud graciously toned voice of thanks to the mysterious voice who pushed the girl to accept the sale and turned on my way out of the store and to my place of work which lay on the outskirts of Chinatown where the border ended and Little Italy began. In older times it would be known as Little Australia when the city of San Francisco had not known its great catastrophic earthquake and following floods and fires.

I had forgotten all about the piece in my front jacket pocket and had arrived at the store where I passed the day selling, cleaning and shining jewelry the store owner had received to sell. The store shall not be named here during this telling because it will be in another tale. All of which deserve an adventurous wandering of its owner and that I am not at liberty to speak of as of yet without the owner's consent to my embellishment of his wishes of history. As was stated the day passed unceremoniously to night, I locked up the store and walked to a small eatery.

It was a place that hosted many of the City’s night goers that were drawn by the exotic meats and pizzas offered. A line stretched out and down the street for the enjoyment of eating shoulder to shoulder in a cramped hallway where numerous hopefuls laughed and joked as they enjoyed the cool night air; waiting to enjoy the fresh made hamburgers and fries. I placed my order and waited patiently as I watched the food be prepared in front of me by the staff. The line had begun to dwindle down to a handful of waiting customers when I purchased my meal and began the walk to my apartment at the time.

The building, if it could be called such, was a brick in the middle of many other offensive bricks within the landscape of the antiqued City by the Sea. Modernity was at odds with civility and not so much as ancient as the city had been rebuilt over the destruction of the great earthquake. The citizens of this once great hub of mingling, had to the best of their ability learned well from the mistakes of the past and grew her to her finest they could with the mindset of their period, and so restored and refurbished little. They built anew over the old and expanded further than they could have otherwise, and so created: the monstrosity, of sun baked and red stained grime, I called home.

I lived in a downstairs studio on Bush Street where the single bedroom that acted as living and dining space which was separated by a very small and cramped kitchen that contained a large stove oven as well as a working fridge. My cabinet spaces were empty, save for the dried subsidiaries I collected in order to continue my considerance of living. Inside the fridge were the collection of easily perishable goods, and soft drinks which I would drink with my happily acquired meal.

I will not comment on the rental agreements, for it was not so much as an agreement as it was a sentencing that was the most affordable within the area. The building managers looked more at home in the tenderloin district, like so many of the rabble that snuck up into the higher reaches of the dark city. They stank of the acrid foulness that the tenderloin’s residents, in their seedier mentalities, exhumed as they would prey upon the folk of the other areas of the city.

Upon entry into my suit de Bush street, I set my food down and began to remove my outer layers, and found that the purchase I had made earlier that day was still nicely seated in my front pocket of my jacket. I sat down on my couch and bed and began to look over the little oddity of my day. While eating a very nourishing and flavor filled hamburger and its still crispy fries, I studied this little figurine. It was hewed from a black stone that was more akin to a single toned dark marble, but a dark marble that showed no veins of its naming.

The image carved upon it was stranger still: it bore the features of a bat with its wings wrapped around it as most of the Chiroptera do. Yet it did not bear a face of the nocturnal creatures that chirp and hang upside down in caves. Instead it was almost snake like and upon fixing my jewelers loop to it. I found the minute details of its head was that of a scaled beast, a dragon with whiskers, which stood out as different to the dragon depictions from Asia I was familiar with. Curiously, the little stone sculpture had the features of a man, or what could be closely resembling that of a man in the act of sneering outward in as menacing a tone as it could muster. The details showed that its skin was scaled like that of a snake and where there would be hair, there was only the smoothed jewels of scales, and where the neck would be - was the start of its thinning hood. Shoulders gave way to black bat wings and the pointed ends exposed the feet which ended in claws. The bottom half was taloned like the flying predators of hawks and eagles...But it gripped the stone it stood upon in menace which was compounded by what looked like the tip end of a scorpion’s tail wrapped around its ankles. I looked at the bottom of the figurine, to see what symbol it used as its stamp, and found only the smooth edge of its base.

I placed the figurine on my desk and began to look up what this demonic figure resembled or what it was called but saw nothing on any of the inquiries I made. Having spent an exhaustive amount of time on the search for the title or name of this figurine. I went to bed and listened as the city sounds crept into my apartment from the open windows to allow cool air in. I know that before I had gone to bed that I had left the oddity that was the stone figurine on my work desk where I had placed it during my efforts to dig for any information I could gather on this anomaly of a stone carving. It was not anything I have ever seen, and I admit that I was put off by the fact that all searches I ran ended up revealing nothing to the enigma that I had purchased earlier in the day.

I lulled into a dream and from the first set of images and scenes, I do not recall. Yet I distinctly recall being woken from one dream and placed into another where I found myself standing at the foot of my bed. The apartment was skewed by the absence of the city lights and I found myself turning to examine the confines of what I understood was my residence. I walked around and found that things had been rifled through, and many of my items had been scattered about the whole place. Amongst the mess of my belongings, I found that there was a unique quality of unease within my abode.

I looked down onto my bed and found myself looking into a miasma of what was and what is, and what was thought of, and what was forgotten. Before me, lay the body of myself as I was and yet of someone who was not and even still to my disoriented state. I could only step back as I wanted to relieve myself of being the witness to some unknown error of the physical realm. I found in my retreat, I had walked into the desk and turned quickly to see the figurine tilted from the impact. It was in the process of tipping over and falling on its side and I moved as quickly as I could from the impact to catch it before it fell over. To my shock, it tilted and remained in that suspended act of defiance over gravity, and all-natural movement, for too long of a moment. Then, it slowly corrected its imbalanced act of rebellion against all laws in this reality.

I gazed upon this black figurine, and for a slight moment so slight I questioned myself and my sanity. The object of my fanciful whims of randomness and strange nuance from the day previously had brought with it a hidden and unwanted feeling of repulsion and unease. I could not take my eyes away from making contact with the eyes that were accompanied by a large canined toothed sneer that snarled with a rictus that only a hissing feline could produce adequately. I pondered at it as I could now just see clearly that its neck did form the hood of a snake as it hissed violence and a promise of pain and fear. This loathsome, scowling creature perched atop a black obelisk that acted as its tower to look over at the world with an anger and a loathing I could only imagine.

I stepped back from the desk with my eyes still fixated on the figurine that glared out at me. I can speculate that with the tenebrous aura of my apartment that it appeared to stare back, and we studied each other in the caliginous hours of my unconscious.

Keeping my eyes fixed on it, I sat back onto my bed and for the briefest moment I could hear only my breathing and the emptiness of the state of myself. It was not something that happened in this City by the Sea. The stillness and noiselessness from her people, sent a cold and iced chill up my back as if feeling the cold touch from a frost kissed wall. I was able to break my line of sight by closing my eyes as I felt a quick tremor throughout my body.

When I looked back to the desk, I saw it was no longer standing and facing me, but was on its side. I was released from the spell that overwhelmed me tremendously in unmistakable fear and began to blink. Had I dreamed that waking moment and had I been sleepwalking, I questioned myself awake and pondered it as I heard the cars passing by on the street outside my window. I looked at my watch and found that it was three in the morning. Feeling the tug and warmth of my bed once more, I laid back down and sighed aloud to myself to reassure my own mind that it was a dream and nothing more.

I awoke the next day with a renewed vigor and found the object of my accursed state still at the desk with all its hideousness gazing out into my room, Which was not rummaged through, and was orderly- without the clutterings of the night’s previous scene. I got up and dressed quickly before making my way to the item and picked it up once more to examine it. This was no ordinary stamp and I had concluded that I would be returning to the stall in the Chinese market soon with it in hand to find out what I had purchased.

Late in the afternoon, I rounded the high corner of the market area designated for all the tourists and their travels through the city. I found that the woman who had sold me the item was still there and looked nonplussed as she greeted tourists with neither a smile nor variation of emotion. Instead, she busied herself with the rituals of the day: barely fixing any of the items so that she could show them to be sold.

I stepped into the store and was greeted by her as she had so many others- paid no mind as I approached and pulled from my pocket the statue of the black figurine. And like a wave hitting the shore to her island of memory, I became her only image and she grimaced as the recollections began to form in her mind. I was about to be ushered out from the store until I noticed that it wasn’t me that had taken her mind into darker territory but the item, I held up to her. In a flurry of her language and broken English, she began to push me towards the exit of the store and upon my protests came the same booming sound of the voice as was before. This was done in very well-spoken English.

The Clerk was turning paler than she could have ever been and I wondered at length why the item I held had power over them. In response to this and with another order given by the unknown voice, I was ushered and pushed to the back room. A single light hung from the ceiling of the room and it cast shadows strongly upon the desk and chairs around the room.

A horizon of clouds from the incense stick lay beyond the old man who sat in a chair holding a cigarette in his left hand at the tips of his index and thumb as he sat with a leg over another. The squat Asian man looked up from aged eyes as he lightly pecked at the cigarette and blew small wisps of smoke in by direction as he motioned me to sit before him at the table between us.

I was not scared as I took a seat before him and looked about at the room’s small commonplace, ancestral altar to their ancestor as most of them had a shrine to such. Red painted wood carvings adorned green and gold statues of tigers and even dragons with small spheres in their mouths. Yet when we spoke, it was about the idol I carried in my hand. I presented him the figurine now and set it standing upward in the middle of the table before him. His eyes kept on the figure as he took a few more short drags and blew them onto the object before relaying to me that the item is not from any of the collection that he had gathered to be sold and that he would gladly return my money for the item.

I pressed for further information about the item and if he knew what it was a statue of. He informed me it was not of Chinese origin. I did not take my money back from him but continued to ask him about what he had said yesterday about the sale. He laughed and stated that the woman was good for nothing and only sought to look at her phone, that she needed to make sales for the store or that she would lose out on her pay. I must admit that I was profoundly concerned with that and remonstrated my thoughts and emotions to the elder.

Yet of the item in question, he could not say, nor would he offer me any sort of knowledge of even ever having the item. He referred me to the Art students that frequent the city and mentioned that it was probably one of them that created the piece -that I should inquire with them. Unsatisfied with him and his meek counterpart, I left the shop and made my way to Montgomery street to inquire from one of the many art students what they may know of this item or its creator.

I confess, I only knew this street because the University was vast, and its buildings scattered around the city. I could gather from my wanderings that the two buildings I knew of were not of the same degree type, and I talked to random students and was directed to a building Downtown, a thankfully near part of the city. I thanked the few students who could answer my questions and made my way to the sculpting building.

After an hour of walking through the busy streets of traffic lights and students travelling to and from places of work and school, I found the building to be that of a refurbished brick building. The building had been repainted and all inside her were remodeled to have an esthetic that only modern artists could appreciate in the plain white or black. It was at the doorsteps that I inquired and met one of the students who recognized the piece and even invited me to meet its creator. I was led up the streets and was shocked to note that where we had walked to was my own building of residence. On further questioning as we took the stairs and not the elevator, the student informed me that it was her roommate who had created the pieces during the start of the school year.

We arrived on the third floor and upon entry to her apartment I saw that the two lived in very close proximity to each other. Their shared apartment was divided by dressers and work desks. Both women were students, and both had arrived home an hour apart from each other. I introduced myself and pulled from my pocket the object to its creator.

There were many scenarios of her reaction that I played in my mind as we made our way here. The first was that she would laugh about my story and that I would simply be played as an idiot for letting my imagination run as rampant as it had. I would then invite both for dinner and possibly make new friends. I did not receive that scenario and in fact, I also had the notion that she would inform me that her piece was one of many that she had scattered to numerous places where her joke would be as a marketing scheme.

Neither scenario played out as she looked fixedly at the item in my hand with shock and her pallor turned as white as the painted walls of the school’s buildings. She shared that the item was from a dream she had in a strange daze as she partook of narcotics with alcohol during a party some time ago.

She found herself in the vistas of some unknown place that looked familiar to her and yet seemed distantly forgotten to the corrosive sands of time. As she walked on the shores of a cobble and sand beach by the forest line of what she could only describe as beautiful and truly wild. She saw a small island away from the shores and watched the waves as they crashed on the rocks. Thousands of sea lions rested and sunned themselves on this rocky coastal shore. Along the line where the sand turned into dirt and shrubs and even into trees, she saw some sort of native tribe.

As they saw her making her way towards them, they began to panic. She was immediately taken up and tied down by harsh hemp rope and brought before what must have been the elders and tribal leaders. They spoke in a language that seemed almost native but a its dialect she knew nothing of. They then took her to the shoreline where they laid her in reed boats. This and other boats were cast, and they began rowing her to the barren and bird filled island through the rough waters that churned underneath.

She did not struggle but simply allowed this dream to play out as she explained. She had no fear and knew herself to be in a dream, yet she admitted that during the course of the dream, she was terrified of the ordeal and settled on trying to wake from her dream.

They made it to the island where there were a few men and women already. She was lifted and set in front of the inhabitants of the island and quickly she was dropped onto the ground. Her assailants quickly rowed away without looking back.

One of the inhabitants released her, and she found that only a handful had just arrived, and many of them were sickly. They were worn and beaten and even looked to be on the edge of starvation. Still others were pleading with the mainlanders as they rowed away, and it looked as if they were begging to be released from their prison. She too began to call out and was equally ignored as they rowed feverishly to the land they had come from.

Despite her efforts, none of the natives could understand her, by nightfall she had explored this island and found that it was roughly 22 acres with dying or dead shrubs and more piles of bird droppings than she could manage. The shoreline where landings were possible were sparse and she recalled how hard it was to make land on the tiny shoreline.

As the sun was setting she found some small remnants of shallow caves where higher tides had struck the rock she sat on, she noticed that the inhabitants of the island were huddled together, whimpering and crying as night encroached. That is when she saw the creature descend from the darkened heavens. Its wings outstretched and its feet out to grasp at the unlucky prey. A scream went out and a young woman was lifted from the ground. The agonized wailings cut short by a guttural sputter as the beast dispatched its victim in the flight.

By the end of the night three more victims had been taken from the island and one of the younger members of the island had in a rage dived into the waters. He was taken by the nocturnal ocean predators on their hunt and the terrified few remaining clung to one another as the creatures all landed on the ground, creating a circle that trapped them all inside it. She was horrified as she counted five winged beasts, all of them snarling as they approached the small survivors.

When they came close, she mustered enough courage to lash out as best she could, hitting one in the face as it took a confused step back before it smiled and regained its stance. She had given her everything in that punch and it now focused on her as she screamed a challenge to come closer. It was then that it as well as its four other companions began to focus their attention on her. She recoiled in terror as she realized her folly. Another challenged her bravery as it stepped toward her from the left and she turned as quickly as she could in order to keep them at bay. They merely stepped closer and closed the circle around her to remind her how futile her action had been. She braced herself for them to attack from any of the numerous angles they had her from and then she was awake in her bed covered in the nightmarish sweat from the dream.

Her head was pulsing as it should never have been and the pressure from it stung her harder as she tried to move from her bed. Yet she couldn’t and was held down by cold clammy hands. Above her was that hideous face as she recalled from waking from that strange dream. One of them had climbed on top of her in her drug fueled sleep and now it drooled atop her holding her in a vice grip.

She tried to scream, but it hissed at her and spoke in a guttural growl that came from a demonic shore long before Latin coalesced with other languages to form what we refer to as English. “Thousands of winters and we are free from that gate, to feed freely on the kin of the hairless ones.” She managed to let out a screech as it attempted to bite into her throat. Her roommate, having heard the commotion, rushed into her room and she two saw the black leather like wings and the scaled body of the evil spirit. Upon her entry, the beast leapt to the window and with a loud flapping sound, took itself high into the night sky.

Both women ran to the care of each other’s arms as the survivor of the attack began to realize that the cursed island fortress was the same, she had visited before. In a time before the settlers of the eastern world had ever dreamed of, she showed me the scar on her shoulder from the nightmarish creature. The beast was carved from the memory of that night whose details she recalled so fluidly that she could barely contain her fear at the sight of the last remaining statue she had made.

She made it by using clay mixed with ashes and coal, then blackened with soot to the point where it would absorb light rather than reflect it. A perfect rendition made to help cope through the agony from which she sought counseling to help her understand that which she could not gather or even fathom. She had made five pieces, each one representing the five monstrosities that she had encountered. Each piece was destroyed, save for this final one. It remained with her and she used it as a means to keep a grip on her own sanity. But as time went on, she could endure it no longer and asked her roommate to get rid of the piece.

But that thing had learned to speak our language and was now free from the island. No longer taking banished souls but hunts freely in this realm. How it came to be placed and sold to me was her roommate who had deposited the black figure on an unsuspecting shop in Chinatown. Knowing full well the tourists from lands far away would transport that hellish thing away from this city and be lost to the sands where memory would erode it as time does to us all.

I remained in close talks with both of them as the months dragged on and graduation set in. The traveler who was hunted throughout the eons moved as far away as she could and the last I heard, she had found safety at last in the arms of a husband and family. As for her roommate, she too left the city and its evil spirit, to where, I know not.

I held the item for some time after hearing the tale and with an uneasy laughter, set it aside in memory. As night fell some months later, the City by the Sea had her lights glossed from the rolling clouds of fog. As they floated down into the city, I was leaving a party that was hosted by a few of my friends and found myself captivated by the shimmering and glowing rays of the lamps that littered the streets. I was enjoying the cold breeze kissing my cheeks and shivered as I made my way up one of the high angled streets to my home. I admit that I was mildly influenced by the sweet drinks and the merriment of the party when I screamed in terror as I found myself lifted up violently. I looked up and I saw with horror as the final piece was manifested in snarling reality. Panicked, I began to struggle and fight, flailing in my terror. It hissed at me and we flew to the center of the city, where the large park rested, and trees and bushes would hide us.

I was dropped harshly into a thick mound of dead bushes where I tumbled and rolled until I was stopped by the side of a large and well-hidden nest. I groaned and staggered to my feet as I clenched and climbed up to stand. I looked around and heard more snapping sounds as dried branches cracked loudly under me. There was something else with me, I strained my eyes and tried to swallow any amount of air. I gulped down the cold air painfully into my coarse and dry beaten throat. It helped and I collected my thoughts.

I now understood what I was seeing, hearing and realizing as my conscious mind began to function again. There were two bodies on the other side of the space I was dumped into. They were being gorged upon by two smaller versions of the one that took me. I could hear the crunching sound of tendons being torn and the wet ripping of flesh as two of the hellish beasts feasted on their victims.

I then felt a dripping on my head and looked up to see a third one as it clung upside down from a tree branch, drooling above me. I dropped and rolled away as it dropped down to land on me. It landed on its belly as its wings curled behind it, all the while, its eyes on me as I darted away. It sprung at me then and I, with a last-ditch effort to get away, swung a wide arched fist at it. I struck it poorly, yet it was effective enough to cause it pain as it staggered and rolled on the ground covering its face. It let out a demonic screeching as it did so, and I grasped that moment and rushed the sides of the nest. I began to climb as fast as I could muster myself and as soon as I reached the peak of the hidden nest. I felt claws grip my sides and teeth gnash into my shoulder. I screamed in agony as I felt the fiend tug me backwards into the nest and fought against my attacker. We both tumbled down over the nest and into a wooded area that was too far from prying eyes to ever notice.

We fell upon the ground hard and it was then that I felt the teeth clench and pull loose clothing and skin free. The impact of us falling and its bite left us separated and I doubled onto it. I turned and faced it as it was rolling onto its front, my blood and layers of my clothing in its jaws. I took it off guard and began to thrash it with all my might, I pounded my fists into its face until its struggling had subsided and I felt my knuckles cracked and shattered from the violence. I then got up in pain and began to run as fast as my broken body could muster. Running between trees and bushes in order to prevent it from attacking me or even the parent that took me.

I recall that I collapsed in the light of one of the building entrances in the park, a scream from a woman was one of the few sounds I could make out. I awoke in a hospital bed as nurses and doctors had bandaged my sides. My hands were cut, and bone was exposed from my knuckles. The police questioned me, and I could only explain in gibberish, the hellish events that occurred to me. I could not give any information to the nest’s location. The story and “subsequent laps in reality” resulted in scheduled Counseling. I was looked upon as a mad man. I was ashamed that I was thought of as such, but with the aid of friends and family did I recover somewhat of the semblance of my past self.

I have not had any night terrors of the beast, but there have been nights when the fog set in from the ocean, where the lights from the city dim and the golden bridge is hidden in the clouds. That a large, winged creature breaks the fog and cuts like a knife through it and I am left shuddering and seeking the safety of numbers in bright lit areas. As for the figurine that I mistakenly bought, I placed it in another stall in another shop in Chinatown. Hidden amongst the other items so that it would be sold off to a tourist who would no doubt see it as an oddity from the jade kingdom. And with a bit of luck, take that hellish thing with them, they may have the same nightmares, but they will not know its origin. They will only see the strange and bizarre item as nothing more than a paper weight and of no significant value. They will never know its ties to an island close to the city which turned hands from the Spanish, then to the America’s and then used as it was always used for. A means to banish those unwanted, a sacrifice to the evil spirits of ancient times when the tribes of early natives told of evil spirits that dwelled and were birthed on that accursed island near the City by the Sea.