All American Horror of the 21st Century

How Sweet It Was. Thomas F. Monteleone-3

We all listened to a short simple tale about a sailing schooner, which lost a mast and drifted into the frozen south polar regions, where it became locked into the eternal ice. The crew became infected by a strange spore, which either killed them or ... transformed them. The survivors were picked up by another ship called the Emma, but the ship vanished before making safe port.

In one sense, it was a tale almost nonsensical and silly, but I knew it was hardly typical material for a kid’s TV show—especially when you factored in how utterly unsophisticated programming was back then.

No, this was weirdly compelling. Unsettling. And dripping with déjà vu.

We didn’t know what it meant, but on a purely instinctive, atavistic level most of us felt it was something bad.

The redhead continued to probe, and Long Island Railroad offered up one more oddity: “I tell you this ... every day ... because it is important. Most of you will never remember this story ... or any other. We only need those of you who will.”

And then Long Island Railroad’s head dipped and he dropped off into a near anesthesia-like state. The doctor checked him, then gestured for some help to get him off to a more comfortable place. As for the rest of us, we all sat there looking at each other with expressions ranging from puzzled to terrified.

Just exactly what did that all mean?

Inexorably, we extracted more information from a series of injected volunteers and questions. The interrogations unfolded like a strange, absurdist stage play. Someone spoke of a race called the Yithians. Another mentioned an ancient city, Pnakotos. At first I felt like I was watching a parody of a cheesy Bible-thumping TV extravaganza—where they bring people up to the platform to bear witness to God, then carry them off when they become suffused with the power of the Holy Spirit.

But it was a lot more than that.

We had become miners in the ebon tunnels of our deepest memories, our darkest fears. As I sat in the audience, I swear I could sense this kind of Jungian, collective consciousness that webbed us all together in some unarticulated way. Despite the obvious physical and intellectual differences that defined and separated us all, there was some as yet unknown commonality here. We had become this large hive-like entity, this gestalten thing whose spiritual excrescence would surely absorb us all. Something was happening to us and an unspoken awareness flooded throughout the group: none of us would ever be the same.

Perhaps the most frightening revelation came from the evening’s final volunteer—me. I felt the seductive sting of the needle in my arm and the white-heat rush of CIA soup taking the carotid express to the gray room. I felt the tumblers to lifelong locks tripping into place and terrible truths fall from the vault of my now-empty soul.

The redhead whispered to me and I spoke to her in the ancient tongue I learned at the altar of my Emerson television. The words leapt from me as if finally escaping the prison of my flesh to become flesh of their own.

That’s when it started ...

At first just a low frequency humming, then it gradually built itself into a true sound, a cadenced emission of unintelligible words, a chant. It grew like the insectsong of an unseen chitinous horde.

But it was coming from us.

As if I’d been some kind of trigger, some kind of primer to the alien cacophony, now everyone, the enclave of “special ones” (as one of our more optimistic attendees had called us), began to unwind like spools, and the strangeness unraveled from us unending. We were helpless to stop the unknown language as it streamed from us. As I sat there, drugged to my eyelids, enthralled by the rhythmic chant of arcane syllables, I was suddenly struck by this almost-funny image: someone hitting the play button on some monolithic recording device.

And then, with a hot, whirling drill-bit immediacy, a searing truth bore into my thoughts. I had somehow stumbled upon part of the truth. And suddenly a memory from Mr. Curiosity rushed in to fill a bit more of the vacuum of ignorance still with me—with the great passages of time, absorbing the catastrophic changes of our world, they were losing their repositories of knowledge. Their libraries, along with the rest of their great cities had been pressed against the grinding wheel of time, reduced to dust. New vessels were required ...

... and were found.

* * *

And so, it seems we’ve only lifted the corner of the sheet. We’ve only just barely glimpsed what lay beneath it, what reality hints at its shape and substance.

And there’s one more thing. Something I haven’t been able to make myself share with the others. Maybe because it will make it more real if I give it voice ... I don’t know. You see, when I was in that trance, I caught glimpses of things that I wish I never had. A simple thing like the configuration of a doorway can tell you a lot about the shape and size of what it allows to pass through it. And the insane geometry I saw was only a warm-up for those who’d devised it.

You see, they were not like us. They are not like us. Us and our thin, transparent flesh, our stick-like limbs, our knobby little heads. No match for the achievement of their biologic tyranny.

My group does not yet know the old maps were true: Here be monsters ...

What they do now know is not pleasant, not at all. It appears that something is probably coming to reclaim its place on this world, and it has selected some of us to ease its passage, while discarding the rest.

Call me crazy, but I keep thinking we weren’t the lucky ones ...

* * *

The British claim they invented television, as do the Russians. Har-dee-har-har, say Jackie Gleason and I. Howdy Doody, Winky Dink, I Love Lucy, Watch Mr. Wizard, Gunsmoke . . . What do you Brits counter with, Morning with Mum or The Tiptoe Through the Tulips Show? Ruskies—The Herring Hour? Blini Bob and The Boyar Band? Tom Monteleone probably watched no more or no less early TV than any other kid of his generation, but it obviously had a greater effect on him.