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I went inside and closed the door behind me. Turn on the light, my creature said to me, and so I did. Sit in the chair, my creature said, and so I did, further drawing it close to the bed when he so commanded.
The man in the bed was an older inmate, a man who had been old even when I had first arrived. The little hair he had left was like a haze around his skull, the flesh liver-spotted and his forehead pale. Uncover him, my creature said, and I did, and saw that he lay there with his skin loose and unhealthy, looking all but dead. His creature was wound around him but losing shape, resembling him less and less. And when I leaned closer to the man his creature hissed, more like the double of a snake than that of a man.
I turned toward the creature wrapped around me, regarded it questioningly. Watch, it suggested. And so I turned back and watched.
With my physical eye alone I would have missed the transition. There was little to tell me physically when the man died. But with the other eye, the missing one, I could see his death happen. Not because of the man himself, but rather because of his creature, for as he approached death he grew smaller, less and less distinct, until he was little more than a shadow. And then, suddenly, he dropped out of existence altogether.
Where does he go? my creature wanted to know. Why does he leave? What becomes of him? I thought at first he meant the man himself, as I would have meant, but as he continued to speak on, whispering away in a susurrating language that seemed at once identical to and absolutely distinct from my own, I realized that it was the man’s creature he was asking about. To him the man meant nothing, but the disappearance of the creature meant everything, for in it he foresaw the disappearance of himself.
I tried to talk to my creature, tried to console it with the so-called wisdom we humans use when facing the knowledge of our own death. But my words were too complex for it to be able to read them well from my lips and the creature grew quickly frustrated and dissatisfied. So I took pencil and paper and began to write words out for it, but when I blinked my human eye I realized that what I saw as words the creature saw as much less, as hardly marks as all. Indeed, to make words it could understand, I had to trace the words over again and again, and flourish them. Only then, once the paper seemed to my good eye an inextricable maze of lines, did it read to my absent eye as words.
What the creature had gained from its proximity to my mind that allowed it to read my tongue I don’t know, but when I first started to trace, it became interested and I saw it startle with recognition when at last the words were revealed. Yet it took me long enough to do my trace work that by the time I finished, my purpose was no longer the same as when I had begun. Rather than telling the creature something along the lines of It is vain to shrink from what ca
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IV
What did I write? It hardly matters now. I wrote what I had to write to convince my creature to aid me in shaking my way free of the institution, and then engraved my lie over and over again with stroke after stroke of the pencil until the creature too could read it.
What I wrote was in essence an offer of help. I did not know where the other creature had gone, I claimed, but if anyone could find out, I said, it was I, someone with a foot in both worlds. I was willing to search, willing to try to find out. I was, I lied, a sort of detective. If he would only agree to aid and assist me, he had my promise that I would dedicate my life to finding the answer to his questions, questions that I privately figured from the very begi
And thus it was that we entered into a kind of compact in which, by pretending to be a detective, I in fact became one. We agreed that for me to be able to answer his questions, I would have to have a free hand, so to speak. Arrangements were made among the various creatures attached to those confined to the asylum, such that at the end of another month I found the right doors left open to me and a series of sleeping guards along my path. With the help of my creature, I walked unimpeded out of the sanitarium and never looked back.
In the years that followed I traveled the earth, looking, searching, for any sign of what might become of a creature when its host died. I have learned little, perhaps nothing. I have played the role of detective, and have gotten my hands dirty. I have stood among the tombs of the dead looking for wisps of smoke to arise or fall that might be the remnants of the creatures. I have lain on my back wrapped deep in furs, staring up at the northern lights and wondering if the glow might not be their unearthly remains. I have stood late at night in the wards of the comatose, watching drowsy figures swaying gently above motionless bodies. I have shot a man in order to witness the moment of his death. I have poisoned a man and attempted to capture the creature wound around him in a bottle before it could disappear. All to no avail.
But the majority of my life has not been spent nearly so romantically. These moments are the exceptions rather than the rule. What I most often do, day after day, is await the moment when my creature begins to direct my footsteps, leading me to a new corpse. Once there, I make notes of the scene and then interview, with the help of my creature, any others close enough to have seen the moment of death. Name? I used to begin, but came quickly to realize that this is not a word they understood. So instead it became, What happened? What did you see? Was there any hint of where he went? And so on. And then I search for clues, strangenesses in the scene of the crime, disturbances visible only to my missing eye. I write down the responses and record whatever clues I find or pretend to find all in the overlapped script that they can read, and then I take the pages and I leave them pi
The irony is through this process, unearthly though it is, I might learn enough to know if a man has been murdered, and even have some sense of who his killer is. I often acquire sufficient information to make a call to the police, give them a nudge or two in the right direction. I do not know how many crimes, in how many countries, have been solved by me, how many criminals brought to justice, but I suspect there have been many.
But as to the matter of where our creatures go upon our death, I find myself no closer to having an answer than I was when I first began. My investigation, admittedly, began as a ruse, but as time has gone on I find I ca
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I am writing this not in the overlapped and baroque letters that have become second nature to me, but in the normal human way, as ordinary letters on an ordinary page. Mostly I feel there is no point writing this. Nothing will come of it, I know, and any who read it can only think me mad. But I do not know what else to do.