The Aliens Without the Unseen Bites by Matt Vest (Random Title #5)

Caroline raked the comb across her forearm, like a saw, over and over, causing folds of flesh to rise up in “V” shapes.  She once told me that as a teenager she had used a knife, but had taught herself to do it this way instead.  I often noticed this behavior when she had something important on her mind.

I had a feeling she was going to tell me they’d been biting her again.

“They’ve been biting me again,” she said.

“Who?” I pretended.

“The aliens in the ship over Portland!  Who do you think? I was there last night. Owl Spirit led me.”

“Owl Spirit? When was this?”

“After you went to bed, I went to my altar and lit the flame and smudged and put on some Korn and was centering myself. I was just about to invite my guides, when I sensed something. I can’t say how, but I knew it was her. I closed my eyes and invited her into my space. She manifested as a beautiful older woman, in silver robes, wearing this plastic owl-beak and glasses, kind of like the Groucho thing, but one side of the glasses wasn’t glasses. It was an eye-patch, and it said ‘fuck’ on it.”

“It said ‘fuck’?”

“Yes.”  Caroline put down the comb and slid her left hand across my chest, squeezing my right nipple.  She pulled herself up and held her lips just above mine, so I could feel her breath. “Fuck,” she whispered, drawing her knee up to my crotch.

“Fuck?” I asked again, trying to kiss her.  But she held me down, just letting my lips brush against hers, then she pushed off and rolled over to her side of the bed.

“So Owl Spirit reaches out, and I reach out to her, and suddenly I’m having an OBE, floating up above myself, and she’s right next to me, holding my hand, and then we’re flying through the roof and shit, and then we’re out in the moonlight, over the city, just zooming towards this giant invisible ship, only it’s not invisible to me because I’m in my aetheric body.”

“Right. Then what?”

“They fired missiles at us or something, but Owl Spirit is fucking bad ass! We just flip right over one, and then the second one is just like, ‘Ka-fizzz!’ right into our energy shield!  Gone!  And I’m like, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ And she’s like ‘Fuck these pussies.  We’re boarding this bitch!’  So the next thing I know, I’m onboard. Again. Only this time, I’m all ready to kick asses because Owl Spirit has my back. But once we’re on board, they do some shit that lets aetheric bodies through, but keeps spirit bodies out, so I’m like, ‘Fuck! Owl Spirit is locked out!’ You know?”

“So what happened?”

“What do you think happened? They strapped me onto the table and bit me all the fuck over – again – and then licked up the blood, and the whole time, they were watching some stupid alien soap opera.  Like I was a bowl of popcorn to them! The aliens on the screen were making these honking noises and shaking the blobs on top of their mouths around, which I realized was crying to them, and then other aliens were obviously scheming to get even with other aliens. It was so predictable what was going to happen. I was getting bored with it.”

“That’s awful.”

She threw a pillow at me. “Fuck you, Chucker! You don’t even believe me!”

I hated that she called me that.  My name is Charles Linseed, and I am a professor of Anthropology.  Her professor of Anthropology 203: European Folklore and Folklife, to be exact.

I know, I know.

“I am skeptical,” I said, “let’s just leave it at that. Maybe you fell asleep while meditating, or maybe you just got really deep into visualizing things, and–”

“Bullshit, Chucker! I’m a shaman. I know what the fuck happened. Don’t fucking question me!”

“You’re right, of course. So what’s the plan? How do you intend to remedy this situation?”

“Orgone energy.”

“Oregon energy?”

“No, stupid! Orgone!”

She got up, walked over to my dresser, and pulled two bracelets from a yellow plastic bag. She placed one on her nightstand and handed the other to me. It was made of copper wire, hammered and twisted amateurishly and formed into a central spiral wrapped around a quartz crystal and sealed in a rough rectangle of epoxy resin. I was not impressed.

“Put it on,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

“I’m coming with you.”  It was a question.  I put on the bracelet.

Apparently she did not recognize the question without a tonal change. “These will shield our aetheric bodies, raise our vibrational level, and protect us from electronic fields and shit like that.”

“It’s a piece of wire in epoxy.”

“And you’re a pile of atoms, dumbass. So what?”

She had a point. Maybe. At any rate, it pleased me to watch her talk.

“Once we’re on board, we’ll have to work fast. We have to stop them from doing what they’re doing.”

“I’m sorry, what exactly are they doing?”

“They’re vampires, stupid! They’re sucking aetheric blood, which is the same as life-force, vital energy, fucking spirit! And not just from me. They’re parked up there sucking energy off of the whole city.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to hijack their ship.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll crash it. Shit, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. But we won’t be hurt in our aetheric bodies.”

“Right. And when are we leaving on this mission?”

“Tonight. I’m yanking your ass out of sleep, because you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. It’s the only way to get you up there.”

I was just about to raise an objection when a brilliant bar of white light extended horizontally across the room, about four feet over the foot of the bed. A profound and completely incongruous sense of calm suddenly came over me. I watched as the bar “unrolled” and a kind of doorway opened in the middle of the room into a white, plastic looking room beyond.  I continued to watch as four beings that looked very much like large wingless, featherless turkeys, with angler-fish mouths and great bulbous, caruncled blobs of flesh flopping from the tops of their heads, scampered through the threshold and onto my bed.

I turned to look at Caroline. She too seemed to regard the new developments with impressive detachment. One of the beings let out a long, loud ululation and another one appeared, bringing with it two smaller, ball-shaped creatures which seemed to be mostly mouth, with what may have been an anus situated prominently in a fold just below the lower lip. They had no apparent eyes and seemed to be made to levitate by their handler, directed about as if on energy leashes.

One of these creatures floated toward me, and then stopped abruptly. The Turkoids had what may have been a discussion. Then it turned and floated back into the alien room. Meanwhile, the other ball alien floated toward Caroline. I watched as it tore savagely into her upper right leg, leaving a wide, jagged wound. These were not unseen, aetheric bites. This was very obviously real.

A part of me was sure that this was a horrifying thing to witness, but that part of me was busy being very calm. Similarly, Caroline’s expression seemed to be more of perplexity than of pain. The beast chewed and swallowed and then moved forward and took another bite, this time out of the right side of her abdomen. It excreted some material through what I was now sure was an anus. Judging by the size of the creature and the size of it’s bites, the feces-as-such must have been a part of Caroline’s leg moments before.  Let it suffice to say that it continued in this manner for several minutes until Caroline was clearly dead. All the while, the Turkoids made a horrible honking sound, wildly flailing their globular head wattles.  In my calm state, the only thing I could think was that Caroline must have been wrong in attributing this behavior to a manifestation of grief.

I don’t know why they spared me.  I can only assume it was the Orgone bracelet.   I still wear it to this day.

On nights like tonight, I will begin to drift off to sleep, and will suddenly become aware of how calm I feel, and my heart will instantly stutter and race, and I will reach for my wrist.  On nights like tonight, I fear the Turkoids will return, and bring the other aliens.  The smaller ones, without the unseen bites.  And I lay awake, fingering my epoxy and copper talisman, and holding firmly in my mind an image of Wilhelm Reich, surrounded by a milky, golden light.

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Matt VesMatt Vest is the author of numerous unpublished and unfinished short stories, novels and a brief bio about himself written in the third person. He is too worried about sounding like he's bragging or something to tell you the other stuff that might impress you. Oh, and he lives in Asheville, NC, in case you want to stalk him.