And so do I pass a period of very restless slumber. I am in the bed, though which bed I cannot know; I sleep and thrash about in a froth of hot sweat. The straps they cut at me, and hold me paralyzed. Sometimes Genvieve, she come to me and whisper the soothing words. She put to my roasting brow the cool sponge. The light, she is too bright and my eyelids are but poor visors.

The sight of this Zygonian disappearing into the underbrush, and the suspicion that I had loosed a great evil upon my race, conspired to unman me. My legs failed, and I did swoon into darkness.

What I saw next was perhaps a dream. I cannot know. My mind was not clear, and it lasted for but a moment. Was I really transported to the future, many thousands of years hence? Did I truly look out into a ruined, unreal city and watch it burn? Were there indeed Zygonians squirming as parasites in the streets below, feasting on the dead and dying? Did the sky boil above me? In another moment, all was black again.

Seeing the creature, that I knew not yet to be a Zygonian, but only to be a monster most strange to me, I was much discomposed. And despite myself, I let a cry escape my throat before I could snatch it back. And so did the beast wheel to face me; it was quick for one so huge, and though I could perceive no eyes, I felt its gaze run me through.

And then it was no more. Vanished, faster than my eye could make blink. And in its place stood a man.

“My boy,” said he. “I hope not to have frightened you.”

So tall and handsome a man had I never before beheld; beside him even my master, the Marquis D’Esperois, was as a plain toadstool. In face and figure he more seemed a god than any of woman born; I gaped as though before Apollo.

“The monster you saw just now, my dear boy, was an illusion. I am a hunter, like you, and when I hunt I conjure the appearance of an abominable creature; it drives my prey to confusion.”

“How can you–” I began, still too admired to move.

“Come now, child, and don’t be stupid. You’ve seen stranger things in your young life, have you not?” he smiled to me, shining like the stars. “How much stranger is the magic you must wield, being the only of your kind.”

I told him I was not the only of my kind, but had only traveled a long way from home.

“There are others like you there,” said he. “And they also are called–human?”

An idiot, I nodded. How often have I not wished to retrieve that simple assent! To have told him, “No, none other like myself! I am the Alpha and Omega, and never shall have companion!”

“And they,” he went on, circling me with great attention, “Walk upright as you do? And with their mouths form speech, and think not as the brutes do, but in abstractions?”

“Yes,” said I.

“And are they not then dangerous?” he stopped, fixing his eyes upon my own. “Do they not arm themselves, and array as for war?”

“They do,” said I. “My master has an army, and with it serves the crown of France to fight the foes of Christendom, and also the English, the Spanish, and any who make bold–”

He stopped my mouth with a frown.

“These foes of Christendom; these English, Spanish, and so forth; are they not human too?”

I thought a moment, perplexed still more. “They are, Sir.”

“And so are all your armies, then, marshaled not against some other race, but against each other?”

“Each other,” said I, considering his meaning. He could only mean that whence I came men fought other men, though what else they might fight I could not imagine. “Yes, Monsieur. Men fight other men. They have none else to fight; the beasts of the wood are but prey to hunt, and the beasts of the farm are but chattel for slaughter. Men have only men to fight, and so they do.”

“What a bright, precocious lad,” said the man. “And how well-mannered, and how well-spoken. My boy, would you believe me if I told you that your words will carry to the very stars? Yes, and far beyond any star in your sky, to the very ends of the cosmos? And would you believe me, boy, if I told you that I, who am a general, shall for your sake become a mere courier? For I shall be feathered Mercury, and in a trice deliver this intelligence of yours.”

Now he had lost me altogether. The strangeness of the scene, the magic of his shape-shifting and his weird familiarity, all had I accepted in the course of a life already much bizarre. But what knew I of the heavens? How could I even dream of the Empire spreading as a cancer across a million worlds? Man’s fate was written on these worlds, now suppurating wounds in space, their peoples slaughtered, feasted on and enslaved. I knew none of this, nor even the faintest notion of its possibility. So there I stood, still, and I think smiled.

“Were you not so foul to smell,” said the man, smiling back to me, “I might now dine. But I am sated, and weary. And so I take my leave.” And at this, he took again the shape of the maggot-creature, which I now perceived to be his true and natural form. And like Lucifer from the garden did he crawl into the wood.

A maggot, burrowed in a rotten wound, will seize the soft decay with tiny hooks and gorge itself. Blind, insensible of all but its feast, it will writhe in desperate spasms, as though it were dying and not coming to life.

The thing I saw before me was not a maggot, but a thing more monstrous and foreign to nature. It seemed too huge to be of the animal kingdom; rather like a hill of glistening slime than any beast. Yet in its movements, in its hunger, it was unmistakably a creature ensouled and animate. And it was feeding. The insides of the animals from the watering hole were piled in the sun, and over this pile the creature crawled, embracing it. Though monstrous in scale, it fed slowly and with the great labor and seeming pain. It was as a childbirth in reverse, or a feeding frenzy in the slow motion. And more awful than the site of this larval abomination was the smell, like the ripest hour of a garbage heap in concentrate, as though its every cell were a compacted corpse. And worse than the smell, my friend, was the sound. A sound like a million flies eating at my ear drums.

And thus I had the honor to meet the foe with whom my entire life since has been the contest. For I now, for the first time, beheld a Zygonian.

At the edge of the woods I crouched, inching toward an open glade where the animals watered themselves. My movements were of the second nature by now; silent, steady as the ancient tree. I was not now a boy, but the panther. My spear was a coiled snake, hungry to strike. My eyes ravened for the prey. The insects were my mind, ranging out, alerting me.

Slowly did I part the elephant grass that obscured my sight. And when I could see down into the glade, then was it only my perfect self-mastery that stopped the scream in my throat.

The beasts lay dead or dying in the sun. Some still trembled, though their trunks almost were inside-out. The mighty elephant, the rhino, the swift deer; their bodies lay twisted in the aspect most unnatural. Not merely slain, but broken, twisted, like the dolls. Some torn in half as though by the colossal hands. And they lay not desultorily, but in a pattern definite and strange, like words written in depravity and blood.

I crept into the glade, heedless of the threat. Into the open chests of the beasts I peer, seeing how clean they are scooped out. The flies now are screaming in my ears. The heat, she shimmers in the air like the water.

And I see an elephant, she is still breathe. As in a trance, I go to her. She is not long to live. The tears are on her face. She sigh.

I put my hand onto her huge brow. I know it cools her, for she burns in the sun. For a moment, she close her eyes. She stop her shaking and lie still.

Then her eyes snap open, and she stare, in horror, at something just behind me. And I turn to see.

Born a peasant. Elevated to the princely station. And then, my friend, was I reduced infinitely beyond the wretchedness of my birth to the ilk of the animals.

It was six years as you reckon time. Six years, with neither calendar nor clock to mark by. Six years I wandered the ancient wood, eating what I could kill, drinking what I could wring from the vegetation or the muddy, swarming rivers. By night, and in inclement hours I huddled most alone in caves or under the towering palms. I learned to face the hurricano, never more shedding the tears. Beasts did I contend with, monsters unknown to the world of men. When sick, I made for high ground. When afraid, I steeled my jaw. When lonesome, I sang songs of my Genviève, always swearing to return to her. But by what means? I had a talent to travel through time, it seemed, but never had I used it deliberately. Like the quick beat of the pulse, it had come unbidden and would not answer my command.

As the years passed, I lost my cultivation. I ceased to wear the clothes, to say the prayers of evening. I spoke not to myself no more. Only of the memory of Genviève was my link to the world of the humanity. And even this was almost more than I could bear. I grew to hate her, to flee her face that pursued me. My life was the food, the heat, the insect.

Then one morning as I made the hunt, I saw the sight I would all my days dread as the greatest horror of the world.

So! You are awaken. And from this I dare deduce that you have until this moment been asleep. And that you have not been listening to my tale. So much the worse for you. I shall repeat not a word of it, and you shall have to try to fill in the gaps.

The music on my gramophone? It is an unfamiliar style to you, I see. And no wonder. This record is my own, but I record it in what is to you the future: 1964. So you have not heard this prodigious branch of the musical tree, my friend, before now. It is called the rock and roll.

Of course it sounds not like the music to you! You are the square. You know not of the groove. But were you of the sixties time, you could not escape to have heard such hits as:

Les Zygonians (You I call the evil ones)
What I am to do (with these idiots)
I come using Le Technology (of the mind)
Will you not hold the phone (Miss Molly Sloan)
Now and then There is the Fool (Such as Timmy Mendez)

How long and how far did I not walk the hills and glens of this jungle, my friend? On legs so weak like the very stems of flowers did I walk. The day, the night, what does it matter? Nothing to divert my mind. Nothing to lead me this way instead of that.

So I walk straight as I can. I eat the detritus of the mountainous trees; what fruit I find on the ground I eat without brushing away the ants. And sometimes I eat the ants only, from the anthills I find, eating while they are stinging my hands and my face and my mouth. And my skin is like the tomato that is too ripe. It is inflamed not just by the bugs but by the heat, the thirst, the tall grass like the razors, the rough leaves that cling, the rough ground when I fall, or when I try to sleep. Yet in my despair, howsoever great it be, I do not suspect the real horror of my case.

For I believe, my friend, week in and week out I believe always that I am to find some sign of man’s presence. That I shall find some habitation, some village, some artifact though of the humblest.

But the truth, it creeps in at night. It insinuates itself, like the flies that crawl into my ears and into my nose, like the ceaseless roar of the wild. The truth, my friend, is that I am to find no man, because no man is to be found. My friend, can you grasp it? I am here before the coming of our race. I have been thrown back through the millions of years, across the very ages of the planet. I am the only human being in the world.

You may believe, my friend, I was much admired at the sight. Not the moment before, I had been in the candlelit chapel of my lord the Marquis D’Esperois. Now I lay beside the river, bright with day, and it was a river to run through such forest as I had never seen. These were not the fragrant pines of the Jura Pass, my friend, but spiny plants tremendous and bright. Ratty trees with the green at the top solely. And such a fever of the insects! How they hum in the shouting way.

The word “jungle” was not known to me. Nor any name of any plant to be seen. I felt I must have traveled some miles, to a strange part of my lord’s forest, though the means of such perambulation I could not recall. Much admired, much astonished, and indeed somewhat afraid was I, my friend. Yet I saw no grounds for delay. I must return to the chateau at once. Lunch, I supposed, would soon be at table.

After a drink from the river, I set out. Though the forest was most exceeding thick I judged by the steepening grade that I was on the right way–for my master, he live in the highest part of the province.

It was a long time, my friend, many hours, before I own up to the fact that never could I deny much longer. I was not, in all my labored hiking, any closer to the chateau. There was not the single mark of the land I recognize, but only an ever stranger land all about me. And little me, I start to crying. I am afraid.