The first time I saw the animal, I’ll admit I was tired. It was late at night and I had been drinking at a moderate pace for several hours. The animal could have been anything, the way it flashed across the room, and I was too slow to get a good look at it, as though my eyes had been insulated away from my mud-sozzled brain. Let’s hope that wasn’t a rat, I thought to myself. Why anyone should have hoped for it not being this over anything else, I couldn’t say, and nor, considering I was alone at the time of the first sighting, who the implicit ‘us’ was. As I said, I was tired, and sometimes sense doesn’t have to be made.
 
Nothing happened for a few days. Perhaps it had been an isolated incident, an anomaly. Perhaps it hadn’t been there at all, a trick of the eye or mind, wishful thinking, paranoia, hallucination. After a few days, a false memory.
 
But no. Some nights later, I half-saw the animal again (or perhaps a different one). It’s true that I had once again consumed several drinks that evening, but not so many as to mistrust the evidence of my own perceptions. One sighting could have amounted to a freak happening. Twice constituted the early signs of a pattern.
 
The next day I purchased a rat-trap. Setting traps was not an activity with which I had previously been familiar, so I was meticulous in following the instructions on the rat-trap’s packaging. Despite widespread depictions, it seems that cheese is not the most effective enticement for rodents of any size. I set the trap with a small piece of meat. Rats are, as further attested by the packaging, neophobes, and I prepared myself several days to wait for this particular one to work up the courage to get itself killed. In addition to occupying a chair from which I had a reasonable view of the trap, I checked the trap many times a day. I did not touch or move it which, so I had read, would likely have reduced the trap’s effectiveness.
 
Initially I’d been satisfied with the whole of my enterprise, but the trap was not successful. It trapped nothing, not even the slug which had worn away at the food scrap one evening and trailed off across the carpet, still in one piece. I was pleased not to trap the slug, which would have been unpleasant, though it was disappointing not to have trapped the rat, if that is what it had been. Perhaps or probably, I concluded, given no rat had been captured, the animal had not been a rat. The absence of  a rat would explain the failure of the rat-trap. And if the animal had not been a rat, so I reasoned, it was best not to have trapped it.
 
Life slowly returned to its previous pre-mammalian form. Nothing disturbed my living room for the next seven well-observed nights. The rat-trap had either been a false step or a complete success as a deterrent. Either way, I wrapped the trap in an old piece of plastic, and tucked it at the back of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. With a glass in hand, I returned to the lounge-chair. All was quiet. I could have imagined it, the whole thing, the animal, its paths, its peripherality. If I stopped imagining things, it would be for the better. People like me aren’t supposed to imagine things. Imagining things is a bad sign, and nobody likes bad signs.
 
And yet, one evening later, I couldn’t not see what I thought I saw. Surely not! Were there two of the creatures running across the room double-helix style, and was there me, sober as anything? And two nights beyond that, after a single quiet night, not one or two but three further little mammalian entities? The whisky level only moderately diminished. One, two, three creatures, and not a single clear sighting. I might have reset the trap, but I wanted first to identify the little mammals. Knowledge before outcome. I substituted a notepad and pen for the trap and meat.
 
Time passed. Hours, days, the less formal measure of bottles. No resolution. The notepad accumulated tally marks but no details. A tally mark represented a blur, a smear in time. There was nothing clear enough to be detailed. If anything, deterioration; the animal or animals became more common and perhaps a little larger, but also fuzzier, less distinct.
 
The fact of not getting a good look at them was hard to reconcile with the concrete nature of the world. Why were they always running across the edge of my vision and never through its middle? Why were they always just a bit too fast to see clearly but not too fast to see at all? Were they watching me, waiting for me not to watch them? If so, what was their purpose, or what was the purpose to which they had been put? Had setting the trap set them off me? Could I redeem myself through leaving food unconnected to trapping? Could I calm them through pure demeanour? These were all very good questions, as I assured myself.
 
I devised little experiments: I would stare at a certain point for fifteen minutes, in order to test whether the paths of the animals were somehow controlled  by the direction of my gaze. I placed elaborate roadblocks designed to funnel the animals toward my field of view. Why did they not appear at those times I had prepared myself, or at least when I had told myself I was ready for their appearance? Why did they only run in or through places or follow routes which had not been readied for them?
 
The animals were highly intelligent, so I concluded, and they must have waited for me to blink or shift my head before running across. Nothing I did hindered them in any way; no diversion seemed to divert them in the least. If I set up a camera and left the room, there was never anything to be seen. They were clever, these animals, and a little larger each day.
 
The larger they became, I reasoned, the more difficult it would be for them to maintain their hiding places. I searched the house for holes, burrows, hollows, anything that could have provided shelter. There were no signs of habitation.
 
Troubling as the complete failure of my investigation to that time had been, much more disturbing was what followed. The animals, if that’s what they were, slowed markedly. Their movements loosened and became more languorous. In slowing they acquired a—it was the phrase that came to me—divine grace as they followed these unmarked paths along which they could not be properly seen. And yet with their reduced speed, the creatures became no more visible and observable than they had been. I pursued my attempted surveillance with even more rigour and vigour, but with no success or even promise.
 
The animals were so large now they loomed from the edges of the room and cast shadows over everything I owned. They flowed from corner to corner alone or in pairs or trios, and I always felt as though I could with the right movement possess them and always I chose wrongly.
 
My calls to them were more desperate now, a pleading, the repetition of the word ‘please’, a whimpering which came from within me as though detached from my will. They must have been heartless: their lack of response, their continued pauseless drifting hither and thither, as though they had no will but were nasty earthbound clouds of flesh subject to the whim of a force unseen. I tried to hate them but I couldn’t; I only wanted them. Please.
 
The more they slowed, the more they grew. It was a vindictive non-Darwinian evolution. The room had the impression of being loomed over. The animals perhaps lost some of the grace they had earlier gained. My space diminished and I was pressed into its centre, the centre from which I ought to have been all-seeing. I had given up on my tallying by this point, as there always seemed to be at least one of the animals present, resistant as ever to observation. Despite the animals’ size and probably mammalian presence, the room itself became colder. I wore all the clothes I owned, rugged around me, slightly constrictive—but what choice did I have? If those animals were warm-blooded as they seemed, their warmth must have been taken from the air, all currents flowing towards them, sucking the heat from anything available, anything including me.
 
Violence is not really part of my nature, but I admit I tried violent responses to the continuing attacks by the animal or animals on my comfort and enjoyment of the property. I swung chairs. Eyes closed, I struck out with a fork, almost overbalancing due to the failure to make contact. With my eyes open I could see nothing.
 
They taunted me with their slow growth. Over time it seemed that the animals were growing together, coalescing, that there were no longer three or even two creatures just beyond my grasp, but a single vast entity. Was this possible? Vastness beyond measure or extent and invisibility brought together in the one entity?
 
It enveloped me. I desired nothing more than to leave this place, to abandon my home to the great heat-sapping beast and to go anywhere else, to find somewhere beyond its reach. This was the great contradiction: it reached me everywhere and yet I couldn’t come close to it.
 
Did I sleep? Did I wake? Did I move or was I held still? Did I love it as it loved me? Did it feel contempt for me as I resented it? Did it feel? Did I feel?
 
The numbness started in the pit of my stomach. It spread not by moving to contiguous parts but by establishing little colonies of absence in my knees and shoulders and elbows. It found a dwelling place at the back of my jaw.
 
There was nothing more to drink. I knew none of this could have been my own doing. It was all caused by this creature which had somehow discovered a path through me, through my body and my being. The numbness at times supplanted the cold and at times amplified it. If only I knew how to summon help. I felt as though I knew nothing anymore. In a prior existence I had had access to knowledge and to methods. Surely this was a true statement.
 
But I could no longer be certain. The feeling or, rather, the lack of feeling stretched up the back of my head, these formerly tight little colonies now sending out tendrils or (ivy-like) aerial rootlets along my main internal carriageways.
 
I could feel myself about to fall asleep, but I never did.
 
 
© Bernard Cohen 2018.
 
This story is from the collection of short stories also called When I Saw the Animal by Bernard Cohen. First published 2018 by University of Queensland Press.