Caleb’s Contact

by Anton Kukal 

Caleb Carr hurried down the path as quickly as his tired legs would carry him. Lost in the wildlife management area, he blamed his doctor for this terrible misadventure. The know-it-all youth, fresh out of medical school, in his pristine white coat, had said walking would be good for a heart clogged with the sludge of fifty-five years of sloppy eating. 

Each step forward only made the trail look less familiar to him. Had he come this way before? The moon, high and cold, shone bright, its light shafting down between the gnarled tree branches to fall on the mist-shrouded ground. Everything looked so different in the silver dappled darkness. If only he’d charged his phone. If only he’d just stayed home.

The woods pressed in on Caleb. Tall black trunks loomed over him like the bars of a cage. Leafless branches entwined above him. Briars lined the path around him. The forest was a cage keeping him from his life, preventing him from getting home to his comfortable recliner and his widescreen television that also served as a display for his gaming computer.

He paused, drawing in a long breath of the chill autumn air, wishing he was online right now beating some boss monster. Life was so much easier when it was lived on a flat screen. He sighed. This was why he hated the outdoors. He cursed that young, arrogant doctor who had convinced him to take this walk. Exercise was overrated. A sedentary lifestyle avoided these kinds of complications.

Somewhere far off, an owl called once and went silent. Then, even the insects stopped making sounds. No chirp. No rustle. Caleb heard the sound of his pulse hammering in his ears. He felt the pain in his shoulder that traveled down his arm. His breath came in shallow gasps. A twenty-minute health stroll had turned into a five-hour tramp down endless trails into darkness, and his heart was starting to feel the strain.

Pushing on, he had only taken a few steps when he saw the pin-prick of light to his left in a small clearing of grass and rocks. The light flickered at first, a trembling spot of color lighting the small, silent grove. He thought it might be a lantern, or a campfire struggling to stay alive. People? Help? Running his right hand down his aching left arm, he staggered between the trees, leaving the trail behind.

As he drew nearer, the flicker expanded into a ring of lights floating in midair. Sharp spots of brilliance hung suspended in a perfect circle six-inches above the ground and tall enough for a person to step through. The inside of the circle was a shimmering field of white energy, not fire, not light, but something that rippled like lake water in a breeze. It was the sort of thing from a video game or a late-night sci-fi show, but this was no screen, no fiction.

Caleb’s throat tightened. In what reality did shimmering portals open to other worlds? This could not be happening, not on his Earth where his easy lifestyle gave him all the joys of modern mundane living. After working his soul-sucking job, he had plenty of time to game or binge watch his favorite shows while eating fast food or microwaved meals. His life was a comfortable drudgery. A fine static existence of complacency, where there was no place for opening portals.

A slim twisting length of flesh pushed through the shimmering surface contained within the ring of lights. He wanted to run, to flee this unnatural formation, but his feet felt planted into the soil, rooted to the ground. His whole body had seemed to freeze into a paralytic state, an immobility born of horror and shock. He could not even move his mouth to utter a scream. All he could do was stare, helpless, transfixed by the unfolding aberration.

The length of flesh elongated, swirling out of the opaque field of white. The skin was pock-marked and dripping with a slimy wetness. A tentacle? Another appendage followed, slithering forward in the air to join the first. Both were dark green with black mottling on the top side. Lighter green sucker pores ringed the underneath. They twisted in the air, writhing, as tasting the world like serpents.

 A second wave of shock passed over Caleb as a cylinder of flesh, slick with slime, followed the pair of ductile appendages into the world. The creature’s bulbous body was covered by short wiggling phalanges. Above the fleshy, muck-mired torso, a grotesque nodule jutted from hunched shoulders. This head-like protrusion had drooping jowls and a pair of round black eyes. Where a mouth should have been, dozens of little orifices opened and closed, spewing slime and gurgling discordant sounds no human ear was meant to endure. 

With muscles locked in horror, Caleb’s mind struggled to piece together his new reality. A world where magical portals opened to admit creatures of cosmic horror into his rational world of video games and late-night movies.

His breath came shallow, chest tight, his body locked between fight and flight. The air was heavy with the smell of rot and ruin. His mind filled with images of a watery world, with oceans full of floating body parts churned by these tentacled monsters.

The creature had no mouth, but the voice still came, loud and clear. Not sound, but pressure, a tide of thought forced into his skull along with the mind-images of carnage.

“We are the Shaggotts.”

Caleb’s heart lurched. The creature’s words vibrated in his skull amid the charnel visions of horror. He struggled against a rising hopelessness. He clutched his temples, desperate to shut the voice out, desperate to stop the watery images of death on a pan-galactic scale that stretched the texture of his sanity.

Finally managing to move, Caleb took a shaky, stumbling step away from the creature. If he could reach the path, perhaps he could escape. The monster did not have legs. Surely those short pseudopods on which the creature’s bulk rested were not evolved for earthy locomotion. From the images forced into his mind, the things appeared to prefer a watery habitat, an ocean filled with floating corpses and rotting flesh.

Caleb had only taken seven, shaky steps back toward his mundane life, when a twisting tentacle lashed out to encircle his waist. Cold and clammy, he felt the slime soak through his light jacket, slick against his skin. The creature’s embrace held him fast. He knew then, there was no escaping his fate. He would meet his end floating in that ocean of death, dying amid the slaughtered refuse of a thousand doomed worlds. 

“Please,” Caleb gasped. “I just went for a walk. I’m trying to be healthy. Please let me go.”

The creature began pulling Caleb to the portal. The rings of lights twinkled. Red. Blue. Green. Grey. Lime, Cyan. Purple. Pink. He counted twenty different colors in all as the monster slowly dragged him to the portal.

“Why are you doing this?” Caleb cried but received no response.

A dozen shaggotts had come out of the portal to stand in small groups. They gurgled to each other spewing liquid from their orifices. The greenish ones all had tentacles, but a few had a reddish hue to their slime-coated skin. These had short wicked looking claws and seemed to be the ones in charge. When they moved toward, the greenish ones followed.

“What do you want with me?” Caleb demanded, his voice hysterical. Tears ran down his face.

In the silence of the forest, as the shaggott pulled him toward the portal, Caleb understood. The shaggotts did not want him. They had not come for him. They had come for everyone… for everything. They wanted the world.

Caleb screamed.