Bewere the Night

GO HOME STRANGER by Justin Howe

Thank you for your recent visit to our island. We hope you found everything you desired. As with all vacations, you believe your memories will fade with time. We guarantee they will not.

Maybe it is better to embrace what you have done. Embrace what you are. Respectability infects us all at times. Even now it is compelling you to forget what you sought and bury the memories, push them aside, and bury them deep.

If only it were so easy. Revelation is always hard to face, and fear is often the first response to a glimpse of our own reflection when the veneer is stripped away and ultimate objectivity stumbled upon. We do not always like what we are. Take heart. Know that what you were is no longer. Who and what you are now is simple.

You are a monster.

Do not fear this. Do not flee it. Do not believe it is punishment. Shed what you were, become what you are. A desire has been satisfied. Only it was not yours.

It was ours.

Remember the friend who first spoke of us? They spoke about our island and whispered of moonlight and the embrace of warm bodies. Their words rose from them like the scent of an orchard: inviting, promising, a heaven close enough to touch.

This friend spoke and you listened. Curiosity infected you like a virus. It grew over days and weeks, a persistent desire that intruded into all your thoughts. Palms, sand, and the rolling blue surf stretching as far as the horizon, an island getaway, exactly what you deserved. We promised succor to a wound within you never until now acknowledged. An image of moonlit beaches and bodies. Reward. Desire. Satisfaction. Weren’t these what you sought?

A jet brought you here, and as you dove beneath the waves and lazed upon the sand, you remembered your friend’s words. The visions they described. Paradise. Curiosity became fever. But had you noticed your friend’s slow decline? How they withdrew from social life until they disappeared entirely? Or did your desire overshadow your concern?

Your friend once sat where you sit now. Their thoughts mirrored yours. They too sought to forget. But they could not.

Quietly, as a lover sneaking across the sand, you approached one of the hotel’s staff.

At first they refused. They warned you away. Yet they would not tell you why. Their evasiveness only heightened your desire. You mistook their reticence for greed.

You named a sum, for your kind believes truth may be purchased. They gave in, and pocketed what you gave them. They told you to be outside on the road near midnight.

Do you remember the warm breeze that rustled the palms as you stood in the dark with the resort compound behind you and the air ripe with the scent of blossoms? The toads chirped in their ponds, and your heart leapt at the cough of a jeep’s approaching engine.

Besides the driver, a taciturn native with a cataract clouding one eye, there were others. Like you, they had come from far away, following the half remembered words of a whispered conversation. Like you, they sought an end to their desires. Yet, despite all you had in common, you avoided eye contact. The jeep carried you deeper into the swamps and up into the hills to where the trees bowed overhead, their leaves bending down to brush against you like tongues. The headlamps illuminated a clearing. Your pulse quickened. Great stone steps climbed to a rock bluff overlooking the water.

The moon was rising from the sea, massive and white, breaching the surface and climbing to the sky.

The dancers welcomed you. The fairest the island had to offer. They emerged from the darkness, promising to fulfill your desires.

The dancers beckoned. They danced a step away and then another, each step a promise, a suggestion. To witness it meant you must follow. They climbed ever higher into the starless night, drawing you up the steps towards the moon that captured and tethered your soul.

Remember the sight? Remember the song of the waves and the glow upon the water? At first you believed it but a reflection of the moon, until it dissolved into fragments, each one a luminous swimmer that heaved itself out of the water. The surf roared and in the foam churned those swimmers. The dancers brought you to the precipice. You could go no further. At the edge you glanced down to where the swimmers waited. Did not one of them call you by name? In those transformed features, bulbous and phosphorescent as undersea corals, did you not recognize that friend you had so long ago forgotten? Did they not beckon and invite you into the water with them? And as they embraced you beneath the watching eyes of the dancers, did panic make you forget that this is what you wanted?

Call us inhuman. Call us monsters. Yet it was you who came here seeking only to satisfy your desires by consuming others. How are we worse for using this to our purpose? Do not believe you are now other than what we are. We are not something you may simply set down and leave behind. What we are resides inside you now. Growing. Metastasizing. And the words will come soon. The ones your friend spoke to you. You now will tell another.

As you sit, returning to the drudgery of your previous existence, you should give thanks. We have given you more than you desired. Satiety is a lie. Desires never die. They can only be satisfied like hunger until they return. We have freed you from this cycle and cut you loose from your bonds.

Speak of us, but know you will be misunderstood.

Transformation. Permanence. You simply found more than you hoped for. The life you led is over. Already our purpose grows. When the next full moon rises, the water’s call will be too strong. Do not fight this.

Embrace it.

Flee the familiar. Go home stranger.