My name is Captain John Phillips Thompson and I am of two minds. I fought in the Great War and came home, but not all in one piece. My body came back whole, but my mind had issues. I saw things while overseas that men were not meant to see. Some things that were made or done by other men, and some things that could have never been made by man except in nightmares. The doctors say I did not really see these things, but they were real to me as I saw people die by the thousands, even if proof was never found.
I spend my time in the hospital now. My mother sits with me most days, knitting and singing along to hymns on the radio. Sometimes I switch it to blues and jazz, but she gets upset and tells me how it is evil. I know evil though, and that music does not begin to touch it. In the beginning I tried to tell her, but she would only hush me and call a nurse to give me medicine which would spin me into the murky grey depths of quasi sleep. And it is in that state that I can see them moving in the shadows.
They are the size of children, at least for now. They dart across the floor, crouched and skittering on all fours. During the war I saw them reach full grown, but my mind slips when I am awake, and it is like remembering a dream and I cannot hold the vision of what they looked like. I am living in two worlds, one of memory and one of reality. One is made of sleep, and the other one is made of awareness.
The draining effect of the medicine washes over me now. As my mother leaves and closes the door, I can see the creatures scurry closer as my eyes close. And for the briefest moment I see them as they pry my eyelid open to peer inside, before I slip into sweet sleep and that other world where I am a complete man, and not laying broken in a bed.
Aetheric Elements: The Rise of a Steampunk Reality Page 55