Robert Sheckley - Beetle

BY ROBERT SHECKLEY

Chris was in the grip of a great flood of feeling. It was unfamiliar, but not unpleasing. Unsettling, but not unbearable. In fact, it was quite bearable. Who would not like to be in a great wave of feeling?

If you had been standing in the little thicket beside the footpath, you would have seen Chris coming. He was breathing hard, and he crashed through the bushes like a bull or some other reputedly clumsy beast. But there's no beast so clumsy as a man in a rage.

He was walking in his bare feet. He had come from his apartment in the center of town to Johan's house on the last lane within town limits.

He had been feeling this rage for hours. This rage, with its certainty, had propelled him to this spot on the edge of town, to the last row of houses before the hills began. To the house where Johan lived.

How had this rage begun? What marked its point of inception? What were its triggers?

At least he knew enough to not answer those questions. The feeling was its own proof of the rightness of what was going on. It was that rarest of things, a thing desirable in itself without being a stepping stone to something else.

Beneath his rage there was someone witnessing his rage and saying, "It's about time you felt this rage. It's right that you should feel it, because you're being robbed of the one and only thing that gives your life any meaning. That one thing is the possession of Annabelle. She was almost yours, and then this stranger, Johan, came to town and with his charming, deceitful ways and took possession of what had been yours. He is the only thing that stands in your way--because if he were gone, Annabelle would no longer resist you. She is soft, she is an object, she wants to be possessed.

And while he listened to this voice, there in the midst of his rage, Chris knew there was something behind and beneath that voice, witnessing both his rage and the voice commenting on it. This voice wasn't interested in the rights or wrongs of what the voice was urging Chris to do. This voice was only interested in commenting on the fact that a rage and a voice were existing.

But there was a voice behind that, commenting on how strange it was to be in this situation--at the window to Johan's house, small hatchet in his pocket, trembling on the brink of entering and doing something he didn't want to put into words. He didn't want to look at the voice that told him that this feeling and the voices commenting on it were of very recent origin, they had begun minutes ago, maybe seconds.

There might also have been a cautionary voice telling him he should be careful about doing what a voice that had suddenly sprung up in his head told him he should do, especially since that involved murder, and murder was one of those things that can change your life forever, so you should think about it at least for a moment or two before doing it.

But he didn't want to think about it! Too much time and agony, agony-tipped time, had gone into the making of the decision to kill what blocked him and then take when he wanted.

And the voices were taking his attention away from what he was doing. Right now he was opening the window into Johan's darkened parlor. He retained enough attention to do this skillfully, silently, the way the dream had told him it should be done.

He climbed in the window and out onto the moonlit rug in Johan's front room. He smelled the faint unmistakable trace of John, and overlaying it, the slight sweet fragrance of Annabelle. Quietly, quietly he entered the room. Only his emotions were noisy, and they didn't make a sound to any ears but his.

He stood, balanced on the balls of his feet, and ahead of him, in the moonlight, he saw the dark shape of the staircase that led up to Johan's sleeping room on the second floor. Without ever having been there, he knew it was a square little room, with no windows. There was a bed with a white bedspread pushed up against the wall, and there was a little night stand beside it. Funny how you could know a thing like that before you could ever know it. But this was a strange night, and a lot of things were different tonight.

He went up the stairs, entered the room, and experienced a moment of shock when he found Johan not lying in the bed, as he had imagined, but sitting in a straight-backed chair beside it.

Something about Johan was different. It took Charles a moment to figure out what it was. Then he had it. Instead of being a young fellow in his middle thirties, as he had been only the previous day, Johan was now an enormous beetle with dark bronze armor. Sitting in a chair wasn't natural for a beetle, but Johan had managed it somehow. Johan had the triangular face of a beetle, and you might have thought that one beetle looks very much like another beetle, but that's to a human's eyes, whereas to a person like Charles---who was just starting to suspect he was not the person he had assumed himself to be, but something other, better, more interesting--to his eyes, Johan was fully characterized in his features, and showed up as a nice guy with a keen, intelligent face and two expressive eyes on the end of eye-stalks. And an expressive smile to his mouth slit.

"You've got it, don't you?" Johan asked. "The insect perception, I mean."

"I suppose I do," Charles said. Somehow he had never imagined that Johan would address him in this way--from a position inside the nightmare, you could say.

Johan shifted his thorax slightly. He folded one spindly leg over another. He said, "It's not so strange, you know. Mankind has always humanized insects, reptiles, birds, animals. Made them over in his own image. Might that not be because they are a part of him, part of his original makeup?"

"Seems possible," Charles said, his hand gripping the handle of the hatchet under his shirt, his eyes considering the distance between him and Johan. A distance he was slowly creeping into, slowly diminishing.

Finally, Charles said, "It's like a hallucination, isn't it?"

"Very much so," Johan said. "But hallucinations are unreal, and this is real. You're angry because I've stolen Annabelle, who used to be your girlfriend."

"What do you suppose we should do about that?" Johan said, continuing to edge forward, so that the hatchet stroke would be sure.

"Why don't we face facts. We both want her."

"And only one can have her."

"Wrong!" Johan cried. "That's the proposition I beg you to look at now. We both want her, for different reasons, and at different times."

"Where is she?" Charles asked.

"Right here, in the guest bedroom."

Johan uncrossed his legs. "Follow me." He walked toward the door on his many legs. Charles knew that that was the moment to strike, with Johan's head turned away. But he put if off--this was too interesting. Anyhow, he wanted to see Annabelle.

He followed Johan down the hall and into the next room. There was an overhead light on. By its glow, Charles could see Annabelle lying on the bed. She was all bloody. She didn't move.

"Damn you!" Charles said, and pulled out the hatchet.

"No, wait!" Johan said. And Charles wondered for a moment how many times this moment had been played out, and with what differing outcomes. He lifted the hatchet.

"This is a delicate moment," Johan said. "But I beg you to consider what you really want of Annabelle. I have merely prepared her for you."

Annabelle was quite dead, and there seemed to be a scum over the blood, which had already begun to dry.

"You killed her!"

"Well, yes, It's what I wanted to do. What I was born to do. I'm not an aggressive carnivorous beetle for nothing. But consider yourself, for a moment. Look at yourself in the tall pier-glass there beside the bed."

There is a moment before a nightmare becomes real when you can still refuse it; or think you can. And Charles was at that point now. There were many ways he could go. But he happened to look at himself in the mirror.