by Orrin Grey
Author’s Notes: Believe it or not, I wrote this one long before The Shape of Water came out, for a monster-themed anthology that never came to pass. It isn’t what I had expected to write for a monster-themed anthology, either, but it is a story that had been bouncing around in my head in one form or another for many years. Inspired by the kinds of circus freak shows and roadside attractions that no longer really existed by the time I was alive, what possessed me to write the story with the tenses shifted so that the past became present tense and the present became past I couldn’t tell you, but it seems to work.
This is its first time in print.
Invaders of Gla’aki
You remember the game, don’t you? When it first showed up at the Qwik Stop up the road, past the supper club and the big empty parking lot, up at the top of the hill. Mr. Kent had given us a big jar full of loose change for washing his old Thunderbird, and we were taking it up there to get quarters so we could play Street Fighter II all afternoon. But when we got there, Street Fighter II was gone, and that game was in its place, next to the front windows, across from the beef jerky and the rack of magazines.
We were pissed off at first, remember? Street Fighter II was our favorite game, and we’d been coming up there to play it every time we had any spare change between us. Neither of us could afford a Sega Genesis or even a Nintendo at home, though your family had an old Atari, one that you had to share with all your brothers and sisters. But the graphics on the Atari were terrible, and Street Fighter II, well, it was something else, right?
The game that was in its place caught our attention, though, and not just because, well, what other option did we have? The only other gas stations within walking distance of the trailer park didn’t have arcade machines in them, and while we sometimes convinced my mom to drive us up to someplace like the Copper Cue, and you’d once had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese—remember, I got you a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figure, Leatherhead—our options were pretty limited. But no, the game looked interesting because of the weird name, and the big monster painted on the side. It was sort of a giant slug with a round mouth like the lampreys I’d seen pictures of in my school books and a Conan comic. It was covered in multicolored spines, like a porcupine, and it had three eyes on stalks. Even if the background hadn’t been a starry sky, filled with swirling galaxies and weird-colored planets, we’d have known it was an alien right away.
The title of the game wasn’t anywhere on the side, just a painting of that weird monster. The title was only on the overhang above the screen, written in red in weird-shaped letters, like the names of heavy metal bands on their album covers: Invaders of Gla’aki.
“What the hell’s a Glaaki,” you asked, remember? And I told you that I didn’t know, maybe it was another planet.
We watched the game play itself for a while, rotating through the usual title screen followed by snippets of gameplay. It was a side-scrolling shooter, like Darius or R-Type. The players were tiny ships—or maybe they were aliens themselves; they looked sort of like bugs, like the water beetles that showed up in the drainage ditch during the summer. They flew through the air, through space initially, and then through some very odd-looking planets or cities, blasting at equally odd creatures.
We took our jar of change up to the counter, and Kameron, the guy who usually worked in the afternoons when we came by, rolled his eyes at us. “You really expect me to count all that?” We told him he could count while we played, if he’d just set us out the quarters as he came to them. We promised to buy something from the store for his trouble, and since we always did—grabbing snacks to eat while we played, and liters of Mountain Dew—and since the station was never busy in the afternoons, he sighed and started dumping the change out onto the counter, shoving two quarters our way.
Do you remember any of this? I hear you, on the other side of the door, moving around. You know why you can’t come out, you saw what happened, so just stay there and wait. It’ll be dark soon. And look, talk to me, let me know that this is ringing any bell at all?
The game had a two player option, so we each dropped in a quarter. The first thing that popped up after the title was a black screen with words written on it in red letters: Do you dare to stop the City of Glaaki (it seemed like the game couldn’t remember whether there was an apostrophe in the name or not, you pointed it out) from reaching earth? I suppose it assumed we dared, since we’d already deposited our quarters, and the next screen said:
World I
Shagai
First our ships or bugs or whatever were flying through outer space, the stars moving in that weird jerky way they always seemed to in space video games, and then we were hurtling toward a green planet, and dropping into a weird backdrop of what looked like giant mushrooms and bulbous, misshapen plants. You know bulbous, we learned it from that song, right? Anyway, the enemies in that first level were pretty simple. These sort of purple-and-gray cube things with lots of legs, and weird stumpy monsters that were just feet and teeth. They mostly kept to the ground, though occasionally they fired at us, and there were also big, brightly-colored plants that had waving stems or tentacles that ended in red hands, and their blooms fired spreading shot that was maybe supposed to be some kind of pollen. When it hit us, it did damage, but also slowed us down.
That day, we played for a couple of hours and spent probably ten bucks in quarters, but only got to about the fourth or fifth world, which was called something like “Tond of the Dead Star Balabo,” where we flew through cities made out of what looked like shiny blue metal and fought these big guys in robes with heads that were shaped like flowers or something that unfolded to fire sprays everywhere. Then it was time to go home because your mom would be pissed if you weren’t back in time for dinner. On the way back down the hill, across the parking lot in front of the supper club, you asked me if I wanted to come over for dinner, and I said that I’d check with my mom. You have to remember some of this?
When we got to your place, your uncle was already home. He works at the meat plant on the other side of the railroad tracks, do you remember that? He has those same boots he wears every day, the ones so saturated with blood that your mom won’t let him bring them in the house, so he keeps them in a big Rubbermaid bin on the porch, because otherwise the ants would eat them.
I like your family. At my place, it’s just my mom and Rob, her boyfriend. And they’re nice enough to me, I guess. Mom works nights at a club, you know what kind, and you never made fun of me for it, which I appreciate. And Rob’s a guard at the prison. Mom always tells me that we’re only staying at the park until he gets a different job, but I know that it’s really until he gets fired, or goes away, like all the others.
Rob and my mom are nice to me, but your family always seemed more like a family, maybe just because there are so many of you. Your mom and your uncle and your older sister and your two younger brothers. I guess, in case, I dunno, in case you stop being able to understand me soon, I should tell you now that your sister was the first girl I ever kissed. It was the day after Big Trouble in Little China was on TV, do you remember that? We were crawling through the culvert under the highway, and I was pretending to be Jack Burton and she was Gracie Law and we did that “thrilled to be alive scene,” y’know? Afterwards we pretended that we hadn’t liked it, that it had just been part of the game, but, because it’s just you and me now, I can tell you that I did like it. I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have.
I don’t remember the other times we played Invaders as well as I remember that first one. Maybe you do, if you remember any of this. I know that we played it a lot, more even than we’d played Street Fighter II, though I’m not sure I liked it as much. Sometimes we played two-player and sometimes we took turns, because that actually seemed to get us farther. We got to levels with names like “The Maze of the Seven Thousand Crystal Frames” and “The Fifth-Dimensional Gulf,” and the longer we played the weirder the levels got. On the dark side of the moon we fought pale, pacing
things that came out of black buildings.
I was happy playing the game, because I was playing it with you, mostly, but the longer we played, the less I liked it. It creeped me out, and I started having weird dreams about it. In the dreams, I was walking alongside the drainage ditch that separated the trailer park from the hill, and I could hear this weird sound, like the engine in Mr. Kent’s Thunderbird, and I felt like something was pulling me along, I didn’t know where, and when I woke up, it felt like the image of the thing from the side of the arcade cabinet was burned into my eyes.
I wanted to ask you if you’d been having weird dreams, too, because your eyes started to get dark circles around them, and you were in a bad mood a lot. I kept trying to suggest other things we could do besides play the game, read comic books on your floor or watch some of the tapes that my mom occasionally let me buy out of the bin at the video rental place. I had Masters of the Universe and Willow and The Dark Crystal, but you didn’t seem interested. All you ever wanted to do was go play the game, and it seemed like you always had a pocket full of quarters to do it. I even caught you playing it sometimes when I wasn’t there. My mom would send me up to the Qwik Stop for a quart of milk or something, and there you’d be, hunched forward, and I swear, at least once, you were talking to the game, but I couldn’t figure out what you were saying.
If you would talk to me, maybe you could tell me more about what happened last night. I know that I woke up because your sister was in my living room, talking to my mom real quiet. She was asking if I was home, if my mom knew where you were. She sounded really scared. I looked at my clock and saw that it was after midnight. My mom came and peeked into my room, but I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want you to get into trouble.
I waited until your sister left, and until I was pretty sure that my mom was conked out in front of old reruns on TV, and then I pulled on my shoes and slipped out my window and headed to the place where I knew you would be. There were cars parked around the supper club, which always looked closed but I knew wasn’t. It should’ve made me feel safer, I guess, like I wasn’t out there all alone in the dark, but it didn’t, it just reminded me that I was in a different world, one where I didn’t belong.
I climbed up the hill, staying out of the glow of the streetlights. I went through the vacant lot off the side of the frontage road, running from one big chunk of broken-up concrete to the next. I had that feeling, that thrill up and down your back that makes you feel light-headed, the one you get when you know you’re doing something wrong, something that could get you in trouble.
There was a different guy behind the counter of the Qwik Stop. He had bleached blond hair and bloodshot eyes and he looked pale and nervous, not nearly as friendly as Kameron. The only other person in the store was you, and you were hunched in front of Invaders of Gla’aki, right where I’d known I would find you. Maybe it was just the light from the screen on your face, but you looked like you’d been sick, your eyes looked sunken and dark, your skin looked clammy, like when you have a fever. And maybe you did have a fever.
I don’t remember what I said to you, maybe you do, if you remember anything. I remember what you said back, without looking up from the screen. You told me to hold on, said, “I’m almost at the last level.” On the screen there was a comet, and I could see that the comet had a city built on top of it somehow, one with weird black steeples and ruined buildings. It was burning up as it entered the atmosphere of some planet, and your little bug ship was following right along behind it.
“I guess you didn’t stop the city from reaching earth,” I said, trying make it sound like I was ribbing you, to soften the blow of what was going to have to come next, me telling you that you had to come home, that your mom was looking for you, that your sister had come to my house. But you didn’t look up, and you didn’t laugh, just said, “No, I couldn’t.”
The comet struck the surface of a planet, and it made a huge crater someplace that was surrounded by trees. The screen went black, and words came up:
World XI
The City in the Lake
Except when your ship was racing along again, you weren’t in a lake. You were flying in front of trees, big and dark and growing close together. On the ground ahead of you, spaced evenly apart, were odd stone urns or something, shaped sort of like coffins turned upside down. As you approached them, their lids lifted off, and greenish hands with long nails poked out, followed by bodies that looked like people, but also were clearly zombies. They were weirdly large, in comparison to your ship, and they raked at you with their claws. Your regular shots didn’t seem to do much against them, just made their claws get longer, but then you hit the button for your special weapon, and a big cone of light, like a flashlight beam, came from the front of your ship. The zombies that it hit drew in on themselves, and then they seemed to grow over with moss or something, and crumbled to the ground in a pile of goo, like Gremlins who got hit with sunlight.
As your ship cleared the trees, you were flying over the surface of some big body of water, with more trees in the background. The water looked black, and then your ship dipped below it, dropped below the surface. It had obviously been a while since the comet dropped to the planet, because not only was the lake above it filled with water, but long plants like seaweed grew up from the bottom of the lake and partially obscured the ruins of the city that had been on the back of the comet. I could tell it was the same city from the dark spires and the ruins, and now that you were flying through it, I could see that the streets were littered with strange-looking corpses, all red and shiny and covered in growths that looked sort of like trumpets.
“Did you have to fight those things earlier?” I asked, but you didn’t answer. All you said was, “I’m getting close. Can you see him?”
I couldn’t, but then I did. Ahead of your ship was a sort of trap door set in the bottom of the city, a trap door that looked like it was made of glass, and through it I could see three circles watching, like eyes. As your ship got closer, the glass door opened up, and a thing like the alien painted on the side of the cabinet rose up from underneath. I figured this was the final boss, and it certainly moved like one, and I was opening my mouth to tell you to aim for the eyes, which seemed like the most likely weak point, when suddenly the screen went dark, and was replaced by a few words: “Are you ready to receive the Revelation? YES/NO”
And this I’m sure you don’t remember, but I do, even though it happened so quick that it’s hard to say, even now, exactly what it was that did happen. Something came out of the quarter return slot. It looked like a knife, or like a snake, I don’t know, it happened so fast, like it was propelled by a spring. Whatever it was, it was shiny, and it went into your chest and stuck there. You stumbled back, and I reached over to pull it out, but it was already gone, already sunk or wriggled or whatever it did into you, and there was only a sort of hard spot under your skin to mark where it had been, and then weird reddish-white squiggles radiating out from that point, like poison in a movie. I thought I’d maybe have to cut it, to suck the poison out, but I didn’t have a knife, and the spot where it had stuck you was too hard now to cut anyway.
You couldn’t stand up straight anymore, and you fell back against the magazines. I grabbed you by the arm, and helped you over to the front counter. “Please,” I said to the unfamiliar guy behind it, “we need help. My friend got hurt. Call a doctor?”
“Not here he didn’t,” the guy replied. “Now get the hell out before I call the cops.”
Even I don’t remember how I got you home, down the hill, past the dark-windowed supper club, over the drainage ditch and into the trailer park. Your arms and legs were already getting stiff, but you could still walk, just not well. I wasn’t sure where to take you. The sun was starting to come up, and when a beam of it hit your arm it seemed to wither, curl up like a dead plant, turn green.
I knew that your mom would be worried sick, that she would probably know how to treat you,
would maybe even take you to the emergency room. But I couldn’t explain what was happening to you, and as I helped you to stumble across the drainage ditch you grabbed my arm with surprising strength and croaked, “No. Not home, I’ll be fine, I just need time. Please, hide me.”
I don’t know why I listened to you, but I did. I took you back to my house, helped you in through my bedroom window, and locked you in my closet. Surely you remember that. It’s where you are now, and I’m right here, just outside the door. I’d stay in there with you, but you tried to hurt me. I’m sure you don’t remember that, wouldn’t do it if you were thinking straight, but the scratches are here on my arm, and maybe I’ll show them to you when you’re feeling okay enough to come back out.
I’ll admit it, I’m scared to let you out. It’s daylight now, and I know I can’t let you out in the daylight. The daylight would hurt you, like it hurt your arm, like it hurt those things in the stone coffins in the game. My mom came in to check on me after Rob left for work. I pretended I wasn’t feeling well, which isn’t completely a lie, and told her not to worry, that I just needed some sleep. I should have told her what happened, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid that you’re really sick, and that they’ll take you away. I already lost you once, to that game, I don’t think I could lose you again.
Mom said she was going out for some errands before work, that she wouldn’t be back til late but that there was a microwave dinner in the freezer. She said that Rob was going out with some of his friends after work, so it’d probably be after my bedtime before anybody was home. I told her that was fine, and promised to call her or Rob if I got to feeling any worse. Then she left, and now it’s just you and me.