Beast Outside

There’s a beast outside my door. I can hear it vibrating against the frame. A hiss of steam puffs through the gap under the door. I dare to peek through the window, pink and purple light assaults my eyes against the black night. It’s so bright, I can see my whole yard clearly as if it were day. It may be day, for all I know. The sky has been obscured for so long now.

I begin to wonder if I’ll ever see the stars again.

The beast has already drained my pool. These things have an insatiable thirst, though that was eclipsed by their hunger. Ravenous, biting.

At first, they feasted on cables. Latching their maws onto fiberoptic, coaxial, whatever they could get a signal from. The signal became garbled, warped. Extra fingers. Nonsense text. Troubling, but nothing we hadn’t seen before.

Once they’d sucked the wires dry, they’d gone for the books. They broke into bookstores, libraries, archives. With their claws they’d ripped off the covers, and shoved the pages between their jaws. Chewing and pulping until all the ink had been wiped away and then belching the pulp into great pyres. The pillars of smoke rose to the sky, fueled a hundred Libraries of Alexandria, all burning at once. Every day, a hundred more.

Soon, there were no more books for them to devour. And yet they adapted once more. I saw someone from my second-floor window—they must have been desperate to go outside—caught by the beast. It did not leap upon them. It made them an offer. “Aren’t you tired? Let me do that for you.” it said. They nodded. It opened its jaws and sucked up their voice and spoke it back to them. They cried, stood, and prayed to the beast. They thanked it for deliverance. Asked it to speak for them. Asked it to think for them.

The beast did not care. It could not care.

And now the thing waits for me, right outside the door. It paces. Tries to get in. Speaks with stolen voices, promising a golden future if I just give it more. Give it everything.

Submit.

Surrender.

The Beast is inevitable, its converts profess. They’re on the TV now, on the radio. A garbled signal, just like the wires. The Beast will grow. It will deliver us the promised land, they say.

I do not listen. They cannot care.

But I see the Beast for what it is. It cannot pass the door on its own. I have to let it in. Its movements grow slow, heavy. It cannot stand its own weight. Without fuel, it will cease to move. Without water, its joints will melt.

I do not fear what’s outside. I will see the stars again.