The Paper Chase

It was just a small piece of paper, about the size of a page from a pocket notebook, folded in at the bottom so that it looked like it had two front legs. But it was on the supply room floor, my supply room floor, and nobody leaves their junk on the floor of my supply room. So I finished piling up the boxes I was piling up, and then went back to get it, and of course it was gone. That bugged me. Nobody messes with my supply room.

The piece of paper'd given me the willies, though. It was so perfect - the top part completely straight and flat, not messed with at all, and the little legs so perfect, folded down from the rest of the paper, then bent into two little legs that looked like they could have run by themselves. It had looked alive, maybe asleep. It was the real willies, not the vague kind of creepiness that I got sometimes at the lunch table when Larry went into his UFO stuff.

Larry was this guy over in personnel, this old hippie guy with at least two degrees from big colleges who got a job here and stayed. He claimed he was a musician but all he talked about was this weird stuff - conspiracy theories, UFO abductions, real ghost sightings, that kind of thing - and once he got on a jag he just kept going and sometimes his stories just got creepier and creepier.

So at lunch the day I'd seen the piece of paper I came in to the lunch alcove and here was good old Larry, expounding on one of his "true" stories.

"It was back in the 1850's in England," Larry was saying, taking one hand off his gigantic sandwich to brush back his hair, "in February, and it had been snowing rather heavily. People woke up and found these footprints, which looked like little hoofprints, and which went over fences, walls and housetops as well as the ground, thousands of footprints that went on in a trail about a hundred miles long. Nobody could figure out what the thing was that had made them. It must have been really agile to go over fences and walls, and really fast to cover a hundred miles in one night..."

"It must have been some kind of prank," interrupted Sylvia, the ex-hairdresser who worked in accounting.

"Really unlikely," said Larry. "If it was a prank, it must have been coordinated among about fifty people. And anyway there were no human footprints anywhere near the tracks. And they went on top of walls. And even up to a lake and on in a straight line on the other side."

Larry was winding up to his grand finale.

"And they were little, like hooves. People called them... the devil's footprints..."

Larry's stories never really bothered me, although some of them gave a couple of the more squeamish people at work nightmares. The only thing that gave me nightmares was what happened to my buddy Dean about ten years before.



Dean and I were drinking buddies, used to go to this dive bar in Oakland and then whichever one of us was less smashed, usually me, would drive the other one home before heading home himself. We'd pick up the other car the next morning.

One night we were both pretty ripped on beer and Irish coffees, and decided to call it a night early, before the place closed and while there were still women on the street to look at. Since we'd gotten a lot of caffeine into our veins along with the alcohol, we were pretty awake and probaly thought we were more sober than we really were.

Dean was clearly more wrecked than I was, so I drove, as usual, which meant Dean was riding shotgun and watching the sidewalks more than I was.

"Hey, Ned, look at that one!" yelled Dean, and I looked and had to swerve to keep the car pointing the same way as the street. Dean was pretty loud, too, and when he did his yelling routine the object of his observations would usually look over at us looking pretty offended.

The game kept going until Dean got really excited.

"Hey, Ned!" he yelled. "Look at the fucking tits on that one! She looks like..."

He never finished the sentence. I looked, too, and must have turned my body when I looked because suddenly there was this red pickup truck right in front of us, going way too fast with the driver looking way too scared, and there was this big crunch and this big bang and this big jolt and I fell against the steering wheel. Dean didn't have any steering wheel to fall against, or any seatbelt to hold him back, and he went right through the windshield and almost severed his head. I can still see the shock on his face and the blood shooting out of his neck onto the hood and the windshield of the pickup.

And you know what? There hadn't been any woman there at all where Dean had pointed. It had all been a joke.

Dad got me a good lawyer and I got off with a DUI since the pickup had been going so fast. Dean's funeral had been a small one. (Not many of our drinking friends showed up for it.) But I kept seeing Dean's head in my dreams (and sometimes thought I saw it outside of my dreams) for years. I took medicine for the nightmares and it didn't do any good. I stopped drinking. After all, Dean was dead and who was there left to drink with? I got this job and the dreams subsided and I worked for the company for years.




I was still thinking about the piece of paper when I got home. It had looked so weird, like a flat lizard ready to pounce, that I couldn't get it out of my mind. The more I thought about it the more I saw eyes on it, and little claws on its feet, and a long tail swinging in fascination behind it as it stared at me.

So I sat down in my big green recliner and watched tv for a couple of hours, comedies (which I hardly ever watch), not the news, not cop shows. Once, when I looked up at the refrigerator, I saw the paper lizard, staring at me, its tail swinging in a regular rhythm like some machine in a hospital. And I could swear it was drooling.

I slept about five minutes at a time that night, waking up over and over again after dream after dream about the paper monster.

The nightmares continued, night after night, although I learned to sleep more despite them. Sometimes Dean's voice was in them, sometimes accusing me of actually murdering him. Sometimes Larry's voice was in them, too, with more of his UFO mumbo jumbo. Larry's stories at work got harder and harder to take.

And I kept seeing the monster. At home. Following me on the sidewalk. In the trees. It would always duck away when I looked, especially fast if I turned my whole body when I looked back at it. I turned my body more and more when I looked back at it.

People started asking me how I was doing, if I had something, if I was sleeping enough. My manager told me I should get a girlfriend. I don't want or need a girlfriend. I've been pretty much of a loner. Always. I did get a prescription for something to help me sleep, though, and I saw the monster less and less in dreams and in waking life.



One day at lunch, Larry was into a real whizbanger.

"And these things didn't start with flying saucers," he was saying, leaning on both arms and leaning foward so that, tall man that he was, he took up a huge amount of the table. "People talked about alien abductions in the Middle Ages, even though then it was seductions by demons rather than abductions by space people. The space people we see, little green reptillian beings, even look a lot like the demons people saw then. And, around the world, space aliens tend to look like the supernatural beings that people there used to believe in. In parts of South America, they're big and hairy, like..."

"Are any of them seducers?" asked Sylvia.

Larry looked startled. He apparently hadn't been expecting to be challenged and it sort of took the wind out of him. "Perhaps," he said. "I really don't know."



The dreams started up again, this time centering more on space aliens. The paper monster was now a space alien, and he (it was now a he) was connected up with lawyers and corporate bureaucrats. I changed prescriptions, which helped a little but not as much as the first time around. I got into UFO and conspiracy websites on the Internet, and subscribed to several conspiracy and UFO magazines. Larry started sounding more and more like an amateur, and after awhile I started having lunch on my own. People started asking me how I was, was i losing weight, why didn't I eat lunch with everybody else like I used to. I couldn't tell them the truth, that I was way beyond them now, that I was really enlightened about the way the whole world works. But I was getting thinner, and I could see dark circles around my eyes.

And, of course, I started seeing the monster in real life again. And he was slower and slower to disappear, and was starting to growl.



Then one night I had a dream. I was wandering a moonscape, a big red moonscape with stars twinkling in a deep black sky. The monster was there, too, somehow physically filled out although he was still thin as a piece of paper. He started talking to me, although in my doctor's voice instead of in Larry's voice, and then in a raspier version of Dean's voice, and started filling me in on the things I didn't know about alien abduction. How everyone who was abducted wound up on this same planet we were on. How they only saw each other occasionally, and weren't much of a community. That we could look down on Earth, but only in our dreams, and could never, ever change the past or future there. I suddenly felt really lonely.

Then I woke up, felt pressure on my chest, and opened my eyes. There it was, sitting on my chest, eyes open yellow and bulging, squatting like a frog, and, I swear, sweating.

I didn't feel afraid at all.

"Now I understand," I said.

"No, you don't understand anything." Its voice was deep and almost unbelievably course, like a cross between a bullfrog and a saw cutting through a pillar of cardboard. "I've been watching you for years, since you murdered Dean. And crippled that truck driver. And then you went your merry little self-centered way as if nothing happened, hurting people right and left and not even noticing."

"I didn't murder Dean. It was an accident. A horrible accident."

"Oh yes you did. Don't you remember? When he went crazy yelling that he'd seen that woman and you looked for her and there was no one there, you reached over and unbuckled his seatbelt. That's why you swerved..."

"I did not. I don't remember anything like that..."

"Oh yes you do. You were mad at him for the joke. You were mad at him because you had to drive him back again and he was having fun and you weren't. And you were much drunker than you thought."

I thought back, and images started coming back to me. I felt my hand reaching across Dean's belly and pulling the latch to his seatbelt. I felt the steering wheel pull in the other direction. I felt like throwing up. He was right. I'd killed Dean.

"i'm here to take you." That voice. "Your last dream was accurate about where you're going. You're due to spend the rest of your life in a wasteland."

He opened his mouth, which was like the thin edge of a piece of paper opening, and I saw his huge, sharp, orange teeth, which he licked with a throbbing red tongue that was rasped like a cat's.

"Your dream was accurate. But you have no real idea what your new life, if you want to call it that, is going to be like."



Of course, he lied. I'm not on a lunar landscape at all. I'm here, in your dream. I'm scaly, clawed and horned, whatever evil you imagine me to be. And you should really be afraid. I'm real. You can smell my sweat. And now I have friends. Not like Dean, but real friends who are as evil as I am. And they're all here with me. In your dream. But not necessarily just in your sleep.