Second Fable for Mark T.

Once there was a man whose rugged good looks and sunny disposition masked a dark nature, or didn't - who can say? Whether he had a good soul, or an evil, or a divided, or none at all, the fact is that most days he spent his lunch-break doing a horrible thing in bookstores. He would go to the children's section and select a book with illustrations. Where the Wild Things Are was his favorite, but almost any would do. He'd take the book to a less well-lit and -frequented section - poetry, say, or physics - and when no one was looking darken the pictures. He would sharpen the monsters' fangs, add the hint of a tinge of blood to their claws, and subtly change their looks of comical menace to more of a psychotic leer. He would make the shadows a touch thicker, or seed them with the gleam of eyes. With a line or two he would change the hero's insouciant confidence to barely- suppressed panic. His quick improvements, if that's what they were, were never obtruse; no parent ever noticed the pictures weren't quite as they remembered from their own childhoods or realized why their kids were having so many nightmares. Nor did the man know why he was compelled to spend his lunch-breaks as he did, or whether the children whose books he had contributed to grew up warped or stronger and more creative than they would have been. He didn't think about it. Certainly he was dissatisfied with his computer industry job and had always wanted to be an artist. He had even thought about being a schoolteacher, but only liked kids in the abstract. He thought things had perhaps worked out for the best.

After several years of this life, when he had visited most of the bookstores of the city, he started feeling that he was being watched. Then he began to sense that he was being followed, that if he looked over his shoulder somehting awful would spring on him. One day he couldn't help himself and turned to look. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a shape like a man, but with something wrong with its face or shadow, stepping into a doorway. As time went by the sensation of being stalked became stronger and more frequent. He never clearly saw what pursued him - a trenchcoated man, a silent feral dog, something without any true form. Fearing to be cornered amid the high shelves, he abandoned his daily trips to bookstores. The anxiety grew unbearable - he couldn't concentrate at work or even sleep. One day, feeling that the encroaching things were ready to pounce, he quit his job, withdrew all his money, and took the nearest highway out of the city. He drove until he had to stop for gas, and then again, and then again. At last the feeling of dread eased, and he found a motel and slept all day and all night. But that morning he sensed a spider or some insect was crawling up the wall behind his bed and knew he would soon have to keep fleeing. After a few weeks he came to the coast, sold his car, and took passage on a ship. For a while the clean salt air seemed to blow away his fear, but one day he saw a line of foam as if from a just-submerged shark fin pointing towards the ship. By landfall he knew that tentacles, claw-tipped or covered with suckers, were reaching up from the depths.

He paid one of the sailors to smuggle him past the port authorities. He bought small amounts of local currency from the men who approached him on the street until he learned the black market exchange rate. The fear of being in a city he could not name, where he could not speak a single word, was nothing to him compared to the now-familiar dread that grew upon him and drove him from the city's twisting streets that might dead-end after any turning, to the outlying farmlands where men with slit throats might rise at any moment from the rice paddies, to mountain villages where the brains of the dead were given to the vultures that hopped and hunched about with knowing gleams in their black unblinking eyes. His occasional travelling companions quickly grew uneasy in his presence and turned aside or back. In the high passes he sometimes thought he could clearly see that which pursued him.

And so he fled from country to country, from continent to continent. In some places he had to flee to avoid a stoning, in others he would be taken into people's homes for a night and told in gestures of the shapes which had lurked in the nearby hills or in the moonlit mists. He began to make sketches of these images in a notebook he found on the side of the road. He was silent for months on end. Sometimes women were briefly drawn to his haunted look or the aura of menace that followed him and impelled him always onward. Whether he walked down a country road or a tree-lined boulevard in a metropolis, he knew that branches were reaching out towards him as he passed. In the jungle the shadows gathered into the shapes of upright-walking jaguars and ancient organic machines, in the desert the sands shifted beneath his feet as if giant snakes coiled beneath each dune were stirring, but nowhere was more horrible than the northen wastes, home of endless armies of ice crystals that formed impossible transparent monsters that exploded and recoalesced on the wind.

At last he found himself back in his old city. Standing in front of a bookstore he had often frequented, he realized that he could stand the fear that gripped his spine. After a few weeks in homeless shelters he found a job and an apartment, and he began trying to lead a normal life. The notebook was filled with his drawings of figures from his nightmares, of the fears of those he had met in his travels, of copied cave wall paintings, and above all his guesses at the appearance of the things that had pursued him so long. After several years of sending it to publishers of children's books he found someone willing to print it. Most adults found it unbearably disturbing, but children loved it, finding on every page images frightening but at the same time comfortingly familiar. Whether it affected them for good or ill, and whether he or any of them lived happily ever after, who can say?