As William climbs the stairs, a bag of fast food cooling in his hand, he pauses outside his apartment door. Through the window, a shadowy figure stands motionless in his kitchen.
Somebody’s in my place, he thinks. What if that news story was right about stalkers?
The intruder is tall. Will feels alarmed. He hurries back downstairs, opens his garage, and gets into his car to retrieve the pepper spray he keeps in his glove compartment. The loud snoring of the tent guy next door goes completely unnoticed as he retrieves his self-defense weapon. He returns to his front door, slowly and carefully unlocking it. He opens it as quietly as possible and is immediately barraged with a thick cedar and pine oil stench. He coughs quietly once before quickly covering his nose. His eyes begin to water, and his skin feels the heavy weight of what he can only guess is the air itself.
He slowly puts the food down on his black plastic end table just past his front door. He starts to low crawl across his old, lightly stained brown carpet. Slowly, he maneuvers around his living room wall to get to his kitchen. At the corner, he jumps up quickly and yells, “Don’t fucking move, asshole!”
Frozen like an arctic icicle he gawks.
Slack-jawed he thinks, Unbelievable! This can’t be real.
In front of him stands a freshly grown plant, seven feet tall, with a trunk nearly a foot wide and branches as thick as his arm. It reminds him of a Christmas tree, but sturdier, almost prehistoric. Twelve branches radiate from the trunk, each heavy with beans, some already scattered on the ground at its base.
As he steps closer, he swears the trunk resembles a human being. Wooden grooves outline the faintest slits of eye sockets, a nose, a mouth, and an ear on each side. Its eyelids appear closed, as if lost in deep slumber. A cold chill shoots through him as he stumbles back, studying the trunk from a safer distance.
He steps forward again, inspecting it more closely. There’s something uncannily familiar about its features, though he can’t pin down exactly who or what it resembles. The creature’s heavy, caveman-like forehead juts out over deep-set eyes, and tangled veins snake across its face, actively pulsing just beneath the surface.
William’s eyes widened and began to twitch as he leaped back to his table so fast he was momentarily catlike. It must have been the pulsating veins that jarred him so much that a mysterious burly energy flux, like the drop felt from a rollercoaster, invaded William beginning at his stomach and liberally spread in every direction of his flabby body. Instantly his fingers lose their grip on his pepper spray where it falls and almost activates. His eyes start rolling to the back of his skull while his lids try to chase them. Unable to withstand this version of reality any longer, he lets go of consciousness with the help of his legs deciding to take his body to the floor for a brief nap.
While his twitching body lies on his kitchen floor, William dreams of a stone room with an operating table in an old dirty castle. There’s a figure lying strapped to it covered in a white sheet. The name: Caliban Dewcawlion is embroidered into the sheet in yellow and green. At first, he thought maybe his role was a doctor. No, that was someone else’s. A shadowy figure he just couldn’t clearly make out. Instead, Will seemed to be the assistant. He noticed his own body’s hunched posture as he walked up to a lever and pulled it. The operating table began to rise up high into an opening in the castle’s roof. Strange bombastic classical music played from below as if the floor was made of speakers. Thunder clapped, and lightning arcs exploded all around the body when it reached its final destination. Jerky movements were plainly visible underneath the sheet. The smell of athletic sweat pervaded the atmosphere while the subject was being layered with natural electricity producing sparks and the sounds of metal conducting current.
“It’s Alive!”
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