The Horror Within

The only horrors in the world are the ones contained within this universe. I have felt the full spectrum of emotions, fear most of all, but there was only one moment when I felt true horror. But horror is not an emotion, rather it is the deprivation of such. It projects us to an internal unknown, a deserted place of frightful questioning and earth-shattering confusion. Horror is the pedestal of fear, the ideal of eradication, the utopia of ignorance. Indeed, we are most horrified when the threat is unknown, its essence vaguely present, stalking us like a shadow on the wall, a shadow that moves counter to our gestures and strangles us in our sleep. Horror, is the idea of Them.

 

What They are I cannot say, only that I am here and They are out there. Ever present, ever looming. All I know, all I recognize and all I feel is the memory of Them, and that is what you must understand, if you want to lessen the coming agony to precede your death.

 

It was a clear and starry winter night and I was returning from the factory on my car. The last shift of the day. My mind defaulted to automated driving, guiding my body through the pedals without conscious effort. All I could dedicate my attention to was my wife and my little girl. And the dinner. I could almost smell the broth bustling with warmth and tenderness and hear the laughter and joy of a family I so dearly, desperately love. I was almost home.

 

Then, I saw It. I saw Them. Like a hypnotic trance casting me into an eternal slumber, I witnessed through the windshield the journey of a moving light. A shape with size indifferent from any other star or any other planet elevated on the night sky, except for its transient nature and its pervasive presence.

 

I felt forced from within to stop my car, and so I did. I felt compelled to leave and wander through the wheat prairie, and so I did. My mind no longer diverged to the near future, my body was under absolute control, and my attention focused like a magnet of massive proportions on the voyage of the Light. The moon illuminated my path, and I accepted it as a tacit pact of cosmic significance.

 

Then, They vanished. To the void of space and at a maddening speed They escaped the realm of my contemplation. First, I wondered, what was that mesmerizing light? It seemed like a space station, at least in its motion and reflection, but what kind of station or satellite invades the mind of a man in a country road and plunges him into a state of total hypnosis? No piece of human technology can evade such a vast sky in such a limited time frame. No human vehicle would have a need to do so. It became obvious rather instantly; it was no ordinary light, no common occurrence. I had witnessed something deemed impossible, certainly ludicrous if told to most people. How strange a feeling, to see with the clarity of conscious sight the existence of an object that violates every known rule, that is certainly not a property of this human society, and not to be able to project unto others the sheer veracity and significance of the moment. To translate fully the experience and the absence of recognizable emotions. Yet, there it was. Once before my eyes, after as a permanent carving on my memory.

 

It had not ended, though. The Light revealed itself once more.

 

Like the descent of the nuclear doom, a blazing flash rushed down through the sky, landing across the field, not far from where I stood. It hovered above the wheat, and as soon as I began to perceive its spherical form it started accelerating towards me.

 

My vision was clouded and hurting from the blinding yellow light cast from the sphere. Strangely, the light did not illuminate the field, as the plants remained shrouded in darkness and the ground black underneath. I was blinded by a light that did not create shadows, because it did not illuminate.

 

The light vanished once more. This time, it simply stopped existing. But it left something behind.

 

A white sphere. Clean and without reflections, barely half the size of my hand. It stood idle at first, as if staring through me or awaiting command, but then it began revolving around me. I remember desiring to run, being oblivious as to what was happening. It would’ve been pointless, as the dimension of one simple object was much larger than its physical appearance, and there was no place to where I could have escaped.

 

You see, caring reader, the ball was Them. An entire civilization gathered within a fraction of a space. To them it was a planet, vast in size and resources. To use the term “Them” is already a crass mistake. We have become so entangled in the structure of our humanity, and in the structure of all the species that inhabit our planet, that we cannot even begin to comprehend Them. They possess no relatable language, no comparable culture, no discernible history nor even understandable biological and chemical traits that would allow us to establish a blueprint to their existence. Yet, they are here with us, residing in this reality. They think, but in their own incomprehensible way. They feel, but in their own incomprehensible way. They have learned about us, studied us relentlessly, but in their own incomprehensible way. They transgress our barriers of physics and float through that vastness of the cosmos effortlessly, bypassing the dimensions that hold everything together in a way that we cannot even begin to dream of, not even minimally. The sphere is all we see, and even that is an illusion as grand as all that we do not know about us and about what surrounds us. An infinite unknown.

 

And what is more horrendous than the unknown?