The Malignant Watcher
Le Papillon, Bathsheba
Barbados
January 13th, 2017
The night’s cloak swallowed all shadows except one. A brooding shadow darker than the sunless sky. It possessed a name – one rarely and never safely uttered. Water was illuminated like liquid neon in the ancient creature’s vengeful gaze, the human’s hands slicing through its surface, over and over. Above the swinging limbs its eyes lingered on a fluid electric-blue that shimmered on the undersides of overhanging coconut palms and swathes of bougainvillea. In the swimming pool’s spectral glow the foliage appeared to float – rootless and untethered.
The creature hung there in its latest transitory form – a void – a fetid smear of eternal sentient misery. Time and again it watched the human’s head gasp, purging and sucking at the warm air. Stifled mercury tears of laughter welled in its undead eyes, mocking the mortal’s stunted vision as he snatched glimpses of the darkness. A simmering darkness about which it knew mankind understood very little, but had always dreaded. A besieging darkness within which humans were prone and nearly always defenceless. Its shapeless mass convulsed and extended a dry cracked tongue to savour the scent of fear – subtle, but perceptible on the air. And so sweet! Every fibre of the creature yearned for fruition, but it remained patient in the way only the eldest ones can. The parchment fragment it sought was still to be found, a scrap borne across the ocean by blemished human hands . . . but it was so close! Soon the creature would be free to crush all the enchantments – trivial and otherwise – that the human had invoked and constructed. It wished to taste blood again, the blood it had been sent by another to reap.
Close to the deep end of the pool the creature lurked, impervious to light, at the spiny ragged base of a macaw palm thicket. It pressed against their deadly spines, shivering with pleasure as they pierced its skin. With confident indifference it neither recoiled nor hid from the doomed human. Indeed it pulsed darker when the mortal’s strokes brought flesh within reach of its talons. The creature wallowed in temptation’s exquisite tenderness, changing its shape at will. A bargain made in Bloomsbury would soon be fulfilled.