Like any good-natured and truthfully contributing member of society, Francis Draft had always suffered from semi-frequent bouts of hallucinations. These were not of the in-your-face, cartoon pink elephant montage, snapping demons on the subway variety. They were much more subtle, and sometimes even appreciable, if Francis was in a good mood.  Passers-by giving strange, often frightening glances that were in truth imagined. Perhaps a third eye appearing on their forehead or one of their cheeks, a live-action breathing Picasso. Maybe he’d see pointed, glistening teeth in the beak of a cawing raven, or fiery demonic intelligence glittering behind the eyes of a rat. The shadow of a UFO in the corner of his eye, or even just a flicker of odd-colored light.

In short, he was used to it. The fantastic and confusing had become mundane and ordinary, and he thought he didn’t let it affect him beyond a certain colorful touch in his columns which would raise the occasional eyebrow.

With this acceptance of the grotesque, it seemed that it would take quite a bit to shock Francis Draft into his current state, that of a raving, bug-eyed lunatic, head wrapped in tinfoil, crouched behind an IKEA furniture barricade in a dusty apartment, double-barreled shotgun clutched in shaking hands.

When he was lucid enough to reflect on his degradation, usually squatting in the darkness, facefirst in a cup of half-cooked ramen, Francis could dimly decide that it had begun when he was shifted from his small-town newspaper–with such headlines as “Officer Martin Recommends that Citizens Cut Down Branches Obscuring Stop Signs”–to the big city, ostensibly a promotion.

“Good luck, Draft,” his old boss told him when he heard the news.  He chuckled, adding; “that city will eat you alive.”

Francis shuddered remembering that line, curling up in his haphazard, dark, whiskey-stained womb, the shotgun still clutched against his chest like a funeral bouquet. He watched nervously as cockroaches scuttled about the tightly-closed shutters at the edge of his vision.

Yes, it had all begun when he’d been summoned to that litter-lined maze, the smoky and dense jungle of steel and concrete and transportation, buzzing lights and screaming horns.

He remembered the day he took the exit from the countryside highway, experiencing the initial shock at the abrupt shift of surroundings. It seemed that there was a thin line crudely drawn between cornfields and this sudden, great looming grey thing, the twisted centipede of roads and highways. Smoke billowed forth from smokestacks, ruinous poison breath from a cyclopean metal monster. The highrises poked through this cacophony of smog and concrete, thick spiderlegs in the misty air.

Francis’ musings were not quite so fanciful at first sight, but there was a strange, unnerved sense that filled him as he approached the place. His life had been a stream of suburban and rural living, with the city being where he went for the occasional concert, slinking away after the show like a trespassing spy on foreign shores.

Now the beast stood before him, and he was expected to live in its belly.  Taking one white hand off the wheel, he shoved a cigarette in his mouth.

His experience in the city was a paradox, simultaneous agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Everything was so huge, but at the same time so small.  His apartment was such a dingy, tiny, dark little room, but it was one of dozens in a great beehive of units. The streets were so narrow and choked but there were so many of them snaking around in their seemingly non-Euclidean fashion, orderless and fathomless. The towering monstrosities of buildings loomed like grand grim necropolises, but were cloistered together so closely in a bowling-pin arrangement.

And the news he covered–it was so much more violent, so much more relentless and merciless. Rapes, murders, assaults. Fires didn’t start at barbecues and end in mild property damage, but were set on purpose and killed at least three. His anxiety skyrocketed as he continued on these cases, and all the while strange things continued to gather at the edges of his vision, half-glimpsed hallucinations that were actually beginning to bother him in this unfamiliar state of mind and being. Distant highrises swayed and undulated like tendrils in the hazy sky, and the smoke from factory chimneys began to form disturbing faces in the air. The gutter water would run black, at times, though Francis was fairly sure that was not imagined.

After weeks of violent crime coverage and increasingly Bosch-esque imagery, Francis was relieved and excited when the next assignment came in. He was summoned to a benefit event, some standard yuppie gala where they raised a lot of money, talked a lot about the less fortunate in far-flung countries, and sent it all over in a big box for the ultimately responsible warlords to enjoy. Francis was to give a few of these types their fair shake, let them say a few words about all the good they were doing and how great it was to be rich and make a difference.  More importantly, he had access to the open bar.

He arrived at the luxury hotel at 8 pm on a mild winter night, underdressed in a sport coat and slacks but ultimately not worried about it. He was an outsider anywhere he went, it seemed, and never more so than here. The people, guests and hosts alike, looked like they were molded from white plastic, on display like dolls against a fashionable backdrop, the golden walls and red curtains. The place itself was a modern-day Versailles, absolutely dripping with an alien elegance which seemed extraordinarily foreign to Francis, moreso than anything else that he’d seen in the city so far. The space was vast, and made up greatly of emptiness, save for knots of well-dressed men and women who were almost impossible to tell apart.  There was a small dancefloor nearby, speakers spitting out top 40 hit after hit, and more doll-like men and women danced slow and fast alike, a few of the leerier, older men getting uncomfortably close to the younger, prettier women.

Then he spotted that glorious oasis in the far left corner–the bar. He made a beeline for it, snapping a few token photos along the way.

Weeks later, Francis awoke to the face of a spider filling his vision. He started, screamed, contemplated shooting it with his shotgun, but ultimately just spasmed and swatted it away. He momentarily forgot where he was, and the crawling of the shadows about him did not help.

He searched about himself in the darkness. A deep parabolic field of cigarette butts, empty whiskey bottles, and discarded cups of ramen surrounded him where he lay, fetus-like, behind his IKEA barricade.

Francis sighed. He had fallen asleep halfway through his reminiscence, but truthfully, that was all he did these days. Slept and remembered that which he wished to forget.

He drank a lot, too, which he hoped would help. Still lying down, he picked up the nearest fifth of whiskey and let a few drops slither down his throat, shaking as it burned him. He stared at his cracked ceiling, his shuttered windows, and wondered vaguely what time it was before he slipped back into his dark memories.

Four Manhattans in on that fateful evening, feeling the comfortable haze of intoxication, Francis decided to do his job. He took one last gulp and sighed. Giving the bartender–a fellow outsider, as far as he was concerned–one last understanding glance, he plunged into the depths.

He got three interviews in–one with a strangely tall man and two with near-identical blonde plasticy women. Each sounded as if they’d rehearsed their lines in the mirror over and over again. There was a general thread running through each one’s statements, which sort of seemed to be along the lines of “I saw a starving African kid on a commercial and dammit, I was so sad”, but Francis couldn’t be bothered to remember it now.  He’d burned the notes he’d taken at the party long before.

The only thing he did remember–if only because of the eerie foreshadowing of the later events–was the tall man patting him on the shoulder, looking him in the eyes and saying, “I hope you have a good time tonight,” flashing a smile. But there was something about his face that simply didn’t come together correctly.  The eyes were glassy, and not from drunkenness–as if they were fake. The teeth were too perfect, but at the same time seemed large, sharp, and intimidating. There was no discernible emotion in that face.

But really, almost everyone at the party seemed that way. Francis nodded, grunted something affirmative, and absconded to the back door.

Sadly–it being the modern age of modern medicine–this place was no-smoking. Couldn’t trouble the fragile lungs of the rich, so instead he needed to put his vice on display to the world at large. He crammed a smoke into his mouth and inhaled deeply, only noticing now a homeless man slumped against the wall, whom he’d mistaken for a pile of rags.

“Evening,” Francis said nervously. Homeless people intimidated him, bumpkin that he was.

This one looked at him with a face like a basset hound; his lips formed a slow smile with a tinge of sadness. “Evenin’,” he grunted good-naturedly.  He motioned toward the door, muffled sounds of the party going on inside.  “How do ya get into one of those?”

“I dunno,” Francis answered honestly. “I’m just a reporter. Wouldn’t recommend it. Cigarette?”

The hobo nodded an affirmative, reached out a sticklike arm for the prize.  Francis lit it for him and stuck around for a friendly conversation, feeling his earlier prejudice start to chip away. Some of these bums were scary, he figured, but this guy seemed alright.  Better than most of the people he was being paid to talk to, anyhow.

He wondered at jotting a few notes down–adding this encounter as an interesting counterbalance for his column – and realized he’d left his notebook at the bar. Perfect excuse to get more to drink.

Noticing the hobo was almost done his smoke, he took out his pack, opened it, gave it a second thought, and gave the man the whole thing. Why not. Then he vanished back into the party, the bum giving him a small salute with his paper-bag-wrapped forty.

He dodged the glances of socialites, beelining again for the bar.  He ordered two Manhattans this time–figuring the homeless man might appreciate something better than malt liquor–grabbed his notes, and made his way back to the backdoor. He took brief note of the men and women he passed–Barbie doll, Patrick Bateman, mannequin-looking babe, Rush Limbaugh wannabe – and emerged again through the door into the suddenly-colder night air.

Time sank to a crawl as Francis realized that something was miserably wrong. A feeling washed inexplicably over him, a premonition of sorts, that this would be the defining moment of his life–an even dividing line between all that came before, and all that came after. This was the moment he’d never forget, as much as he wanted to.

The first things he noticed were the mundane details. The way that his breath turned into a column of smoke as he entered the now-frigid outdoors. He noticed a mostly-unfinished cigarette still smoldering fresh, un-stomped-upon, on the ground by the hobo’s boot. Then he noticed that the hobo’s boots were suspended a few inches above the ground. Then he noticed why the man was suspended.

Behind the homeless man, who hovered in a crucifix-like pose, was the unusually tall man that he’d interviewed earlier. The man’s face was as normal as it could get for the most part, although the pupils seemed to have filled the eyes with inhuman darkness. The rest of the body–well, that had split down the middle like an open suit jacket, skin hanging limply off of his back, revealing what lay beneath. A body like a fat centipede–covered in crawlers and feelers, each of which was stabbing into the homeless man’s body at dozens of different places, holding him in the air grotesquely. Worst of all were the two proboscis-like appendages branching off of the yuppie’s throat, which had plunged into the homeless man’s temples, pulsating and breathing, making a terrible suction sound.

This all would have been terrible beyond reckoning, beyond bearing, even if the hobo was at least dead. But as Francis looked disbelievingly from the eldritch thing which gibbered before him to its helpless victim, he watched the man’s mouth opening and closing like a fish on land, and saw his eyes roll ever-so-slowly towards him, agonized and pleading.

Francis’ ears were suddenly assaulted by a high, chittering screech that he recognized as the sound of a cicada’s call, louder than anything he’d heard before. He screamed in pain and horror as he ran back inside, dropping both Manhattans on the pavement in a tinkling crash that managed to cut through that miserable sound. For an instant, just a fleeting instant, his eyes were met not only by the homeless man’s, but also by that unfathomable creature which worked its will upon him.

Slamming the door behind him, disturbing a few vapid guests’ revelries, Francis gave in to his natural urge and immediately ran to the bathroom, which was mercifully close to the back door. It was empty; perfect for his purposes, which was to vomit in an indiscriminate spray that at least mostly got into the toilet. For about ten minutes he remained there, partly due to his fear of going back anywhere, but mostly because of his continued need to throw up.

Finished with this task, Francis stumbled around to see one yuppie crouched over the sink, doing as yuppies do – namely, inhaling deeply, face buried in a pile of cocaine. Francis hadn’t done drugs since college, but today seemed like a high time to do them again. Besides, coke-fueled clarity seemed to be exactly what he needed–he was certain what he had seen was his imagination. It was probably the alcohol, his nerves, and his hallucinations, coming together to spook him with a particularly unsubtle metaphor.

The yuppie looked up with a look of vaguely disguised disgust as the bile-smelling reporter stumbled towards him in a haze. He grunted something unintelligible, indicated  the coke, and threw a handful of money at him.  With a shrug, the yuppie motioned to a line; gratefully, Francis came forward and snorted with such enthusiasm that he slipped on a puddle by the sink and fell heavily against the wall.

Supporting himself with one hand, Francis stared at the tile floor.  He felt the room swim less and less, felt the liar’s clarity of cocaine flowing into his vision. All that mattered was that he was thinking straight–all that mattered was that the grotesquerie he’d seen was imagination.  He chuckled, straightened up, and screamed.

In the mirror, he saw the yuppie, insectoid and horrible, pincers snapping and drooling on a ruined version of a human face, tendrils and spiderlegs emerging from his tuxedo, ripping through the cloth. As the creature advanced, Francis felt a sharp pain in his nose, saw a black, tarlike substance leak from it in the mirror. He clasped his hands to his face, spun about just as the tendrils and feelers began to tear at his sport coat, and dashed out the bathroom door like a madman.

The Top 40 hits had become a discordant alien melody, shrieking chords and percussive booms in a pattern which made no sense to a human mind–and rising above it in a sickly crescendo, the chittering screech of the cicada.  Looking about him with wide eyes, he saw the mad revelers from whatever nightmare dimension they’d crawled forth from, insectile beasts that writhed about and chattered and screamed. He saw the creatures gathered around the hors d’oeuvres table, dipping into bowls and plates of what looked like human blood, intestines, teeth and bone, snapping and slurping and gurgling with their pincers, their feelers, their proboscises, their outer human shells hanging limply from their carapaces like torn-up curtains, the slashed and malformed remnants of faces staring at him with mocking expressions.

Shrieking and stumbling, without a care for who perceived him, Francis clumsily ran toward the backdoor as the creatures howled with laughter and jeers, pointing at him with awful claws. Talons and stingers grabbed at him, tried to pull him back in, tearing his sport coat and most of his dress shirt to shreds as he struggled through the door and slammed it behind him, running full-tilt down the alley. He spared one look back–madly hoping, perhaps, that the homeless man would be still alive and well, proving his vision a false one–but he saw the man’s mummy-like corpse piled under refuse from the party, food and otherwise, papery skin drawn completely flush with bone, one eye visible still gaping with fear, one arm frozen as it reached through the garbage pleadingly, as if making one final, desperate call for help.

Francis stumbled through the streets lined with that black tar gutter substance, much like that which now ran down his face. Seemingly miles above, the vast gibbering buildings towered over, casting their shadows upon him. He tried to get in a cab, only to immediately launch out of it when he saw the cabbie’s jabbering beetle jaw and segmented eyes. He tried to wave down a roaming police cruiser, halting when he saw one of the officers scratching at an antenna that poked from beneath his hat.

In every citizen, he saw the nightmarish insect puppeteers; in every vagrant, he saw the shuddering paper skin and the gaping fish mouth of the dying that would haunt his dreams for the rest of his days. The cacophonous sounds of the city mixed in with the horrid screech which now filled his brain, that insectoid call that only continued to build and build in intensity. Flying through the streets, he finally tripped and fell into a blackwater gutter in an alley, laid for a time, and cried, wept for the days when he did not understand the world so deeply.

After somehow making it back to the apartment through the most harrowing journey of his life, Francis laid for weeks behind boarded-up windows and doors, behind the bulwark of cheap fragile furniture, subsisting off of liquor and ramen and cigarettes. He had no concept of the passage of time, no feelings for the outside world or those he had known, no concern for his occupation. His phone rang three times before he destroyed it; the sound reminded him oddly of a cicada.

Footfalls in the hallways terrified him, and voices sounded like the demonic chittering of the monsters from the party. For weeks, the only living things he saw were skittering creatures, cockroaches, spiders, flies, ants…

…creatures that he vaguely began to realize were growing in number.

As that final night came–as the first horrid thud landed on the boarded-up door, rattling it in his hinges – Francis started, cried, and looked around him at the teeming mass of insects that crawled around him. Each and every single one stared at him–stared at him with an impossible and unfathomable intelligence. He saw in their beady eyes the looks and shrieks of the partygoers as they participated in their horrific revels, and the cicada buzz grew again in his mind.

“These bugs,” he breathed disbelievingly, “are fucking narcs.”

He lashed and thrashed about, trying to crush as many as he could as the door pounded and shook in its frame. More of the crawlers came forth now, centipedes and beetles and worms, crawling through the cracks in the floor and ceiling, breaking through the windows with their combined weight, coming in torrents from under the door. Waves and waves of insects barreled towards him, and as he thrashed about, clutching his shotgun, screaming under the psychic assault of the cicada call, the door slammed open.

The shrieking screech in his brain was so overpowering that he did not hear the splintering of his wooden door, its crash against the ground, or his own earsplitting scream. He did not see the sickly yellow light of the horrid outside world fill his dark haven. He did not feel the crawling horde as it covered him, enveloped him, began to devour him, and he did not perceive that tall dark shadow that advanced into the apartment.

And as he screamed and thrashed he did not see, hear, or feel the shotgun ignite and lurch in his hands, but only saw as the whole world turned that sickly, sickly yellow, and heard the unbearable crescendo of the cicada’s cry.

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