The Thing Too Hideous to Describe _________________________________ DAVID J. SCHOW Every once in a while we'll both decide we like a story enough to include in this series; hut discover we like it for totally different reasons. Dave Schow's story is a great example of this-while one of us found it to be a subtle, inverted parody of the dear, old Fifties monster movies, the other loved its ability to pin down and lay bare the best and worst aspects of our humanity. ... slapped a pseudopod across the SNOOZE button on Its alarm clock. It liked to be half-awake when midnight actually clicked over, so Its alarm was habitually set to 11:59 P.M. The blue glow of the numerals pleased It, reminded It of some of the biogenous hues It could produce in Its tentacled extremities when satisfied or amused, so It had appropriated the device during some pre-dawn wander or other, from one of the townies who had been imbued in sufficient fear to abandon her bedroom in the middle of the night. Its carapace was running red-glowing softly, from worry, taken to bed and slept on. It was not as young as It used to be (what on Earth was?); slithering to the sink was becoming a chore. It tried not to make the grunts and huffs the elderly use to punctuate every movement. It yawned wide instead, freeing a few flying insects who had invested sleeptime (Its own, not theirs) in the determined consumption of tartar flecks from Its back molars. The little monsters never drowned, they never suffocated, they were a nuisance, they were pestilent, riddled with germs, yet perfectly suited to their scavenging purpose. Salve, for the burns. The Thing applied an herbal poultice to the gelid patches of still-healing flesh, repellantly smooth and tender to the touch, like a bubo swollen with dead antibodies. Fire had purged detail from Its cratered brown exodermis, the way a child might use an eraser to obliterate portions of a photograph of the Moon's natural topography. It had lost a sucker from the tip of one of Its retractile protrusions. The wounds would scab thickly, then re-armor. They always did. Last night's close call had been nothing new. Outside, the tarn beckoned. The Thing always felt better after a wake-up rinse and a bit of a roil in the sludge. It furled its feelers for the downhill roll, eyestalks whipping around and causing a rollercoaster sort of dizziness. It flattened Itself to a glistening membrane on the surface of the brackish water, soaking up some lunar rays, and letting the tidal influences provide inspiration. When It rolled out, nearly all the water sluiced free. Its skin was not absorbent. It was time to go find some teenagers. ------------ Maysville was one of those antique, rural Kentucky bergs that rolled up the sidewalks promptly at dusk, and whose church steeple still constituted its highest structural elevation. The bell tower therein had been tolling the hour, and half hour, for more than fifty years without breakdown or incident. The church itself-alabaster, roofed in green shingles-glowered over the town square, where rustic benches and litter baskets were em-placed with the precision of chess pieces. The manicured, triangular greensward it faced was a sort of local picnic spot for those unimaginative enough to venture into the woods. It was near the business district at the intersection of Main and Center Streets, where local merchants closed shop promptly at five in the afternoon. At quitting time, the locals did familial rituals, talking ceaselessly about food or the weather, sitting on porches in rockers or swinging loveseats on creaking chains. Then they started drinking-most alarmingly, at a watering hole whose neon sign proclaimed it as BAR. If you telephoned the place, the proprietor, a burly ex-boxer with a buzzing, dysfunctional voice and only the vaguest grasp of the world beyond his batwing doors, would answer "Tommy's." The Thing had never called Tommy's; the Thing had no use for telephones, although It recognized that when one human or another grabbed one, it usually meant trouble. Generally, the residents of Maysville kept to their homes (the better to service the exponential care and feeding of town gossip) and, at night, banded into drunken groups to hunt down the Thing once and for all. Maysville needed a monster, apparently, to rationalize its hidebound prejudices, its oddball religion, its social dynamic, and to unify the townsfolk against some common enemy ... mostly so they did not tear each other apart. The Thing Too Hideous to Describe did not know of any monsters in the vicinity; that was one of the reasons It had chosen the area for Its semi-retirement. No werewolves or incubi, no demonic apparitions or defrocked Indian burial tracts. No real estate hauntings, no unspeakable, lowering molochs, and practically no children possessed by devils, although sometimes the Thing was not so sure. The kids here had inherited their progenitors' sense of superstitious paranoia and hidebound, inbred fear, and frequently they acted monstrously, but the Thing was capable of appreciating the difference. No real monsters... ... unless you counted the townsfolk, who got incredibly intolerant when they got liquored up at Tommy's. The formula was always the same: they complained, and drank, and groused, and drank, and started stamping then-feet, while drinking some more, and before you could say boo, you had a gang of violent alcoholics storming up your nether port-drunk, deluded, waving torches and pointy farm implements, screaming with bloodlust in a democracy of madness and mob unreason. There were already plenty of frightening things in the world, thought the Thing. Circus clowns, for example. Cartoonists and writers-creatures who invented the kind of lurid pulp that could inflame the basest frenzies of unthinking, potentially dangerous crowds. Such artisans of corruption sat in their high places, and distorted form, and made a mockery of all life, and did not care that their exploitative claptrap sank fear into the souls of the ignorant. The Thing had once seen a photograph of one of their minor gods. The portrait depicted some gloomy Gus, all hangdog and horrific and mostly hairless, his eyes broadcasting doom and cosmic apocalypse, hinting at a near-blasphemous tunnel vision that hated all it saw, and saw only that which could kindle the otherworldly passions resident in the fetid lobes of the man's dark and hateful brain. The Thing Too Hideous to Describe spooked a couple of smooching high-schoolers, about a block from the town square, against a fence, behind some trees near the cemetery, where these nascent fornicators had assumed they might swap fluids and DNA unnoticed. It was a transient thrill. The humans emitted high, squealing noises and took clumsy flight, colliding with trees and each other in their haste to escape. That buoyed the spirits of the Thing only momentarily. Now the offspring would hurriedly report an extravagant exaggeration of what they had seen, amplifying the disgust factor in order to hide their own guilt in the shadow of the more sensational. Then the local authorities, the town leaders, and their parents would all use that as an excuse to partake of more abundantly-available booze, and soon enough the whole process would culminate in smoking torches and riot behavior. The mob would never cross the tarn, however-none of them would ever be that brave. There were too many hazards not governed by hysteria: bloodsuckers, quick-mud, venomous reptiles; no streetlights or convenience markets. Beyond that, a treacherous maze of rocks and switchbacks, where precipitous heights waited to plummet the curious to broken-boned death on sharp rocks, or the lack of geographical benchmarks threatened starvation within a labyrinth. No, the mob would never manage to seek out the lair of the Thing Too Hideous to Describe, because indigenous legend had it that once you went in, you never came out. Yet upon its return for lunch break, the Thing Too Hideous to Describe saw light. Human light, the artificial light of a battery-operated beam. Once, a group of be-smocked know-it-alls in helicopters had buzzed unnerv-ingly close, convinced that the Thing might be some sort of alien invader from another planet. They had given up and retreated to the safety of their grandiose theorizing. They always gave up, when it came to actually learning something. It was more profitable to fall back on whatever make-believe they were selling unwary consumers, this week. Whomever had chanced upon the Thing's home did not look like a scientist, nor did he appear to be a representative of the military. He looked like a clerk. He was wearing a bulky down jacket and hiking boots. He wore spectacles and had a hairless face (the way humans scraped off their pelts had always made the Thing a bit queasy). It was comical to watch him feel around the edges of the nondescript cave that led down to the Thing's home. He did not appear repulsed by the slime coating the ingress. He sniffed it, from the tips of his gloves. His flashlight beam strayed wild again, as he consulted a big metal notebook he held crooked into one arm. The Thing Too Hideous to Describe held steady and watched, as this Outsider-for that was definitely what the man was, not from around here-stiffened, the way humans always did when they felt there was some creepy lurker, monitoring them. Now would be an excellent opportunity to pull the old stalk-and-scare, making the guy look toward the most likely source of monsterishness, then drop tentacles down on him, from above. But before the Thing could indulge Itself, the flashlight ray crossed Its big, ebony orbs, causing a stab of pain like a migraine. Before the Thing could rally, the man-creature in the bulky coat spoke to It; "Oh! Hi the...
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