“You all don’t understand!” the man cackled, rocking gently back and forth.  “You don’t know them, don’t realize just how they are.  Ohh, they hunger, but for so much more than you ever can know!”

He didn’t seem to see me, I noted, even though he sat directly across the metal table from me.  His hands were attached to a ring on the table via metal cuffs, but he ignored how the bracelets tugged at his hands when he rocked back in his chair.

“Doctor Angell,” I repeated, waiting for the man to return back to a more lucid state.  “George, it’s me, Francis.  Please, try and stay calm.”

Dr. Angell’s eyes briefly focused on me, but then they darted off again as he kept on rocking back and forth, now muttering indistinctly to himself.  He always did eventually come around, but as of late it seemed to take longer and longer.  His mind’s grip on reality, the doctors at the sanitarium said, was slowly slipping away.

I didn’t know how much longer I had before he’d lose that tenuous grip and fully slip away.

I needed to try something else to get through.  “George, please,” I begged, reaching forward and placing my hands lightly over the man’s own on the table.  “Try and focus.”

Finally, Dr. Angell seemed to come back to himself.  His rocking slowed, and his eyes finally focused on me.  “Francis?” he repeated, his voice quavering.

I nodded, trying to keep the tears out of the corners of my eyes.  “Yes, George, it’s me.  Are you okay?”

Slowly, unsteadily, Dr. Angell nodded his head.  “How long has it been?” he asked, his voice barely above a broken whisper.

“Six months,” I told him gently.  I didn’t lie.  Even as little more than a broken shell, Dr. Angell deserved the truth.

“Six months,” he repeated, shaking his head.  “Oh Francis, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.  I can feel them hungering.  They lurk, they wait, but not for much longer.  They’ll break through when I give in, and I’m so tired!”  He sagged back on the chair, dropping his eyes down to stare at his lap.  “So very tired,” he murmured to himself.

I felt sympathy welling up in my chest until I was certain that my heart would burst.  “George, do you remember what happened on that last night?” I asked gently.  “Maybe if you can remember, you can find a way to beat this thing-“

“Beat it!?” Dr. Angell shouted back at me, suddenly bursting up to his feet.  Only the metal handcuffs binding his wrists to the table kept him from rising up fully, and the whole metal table shook.  Even after six months of wasting away in this sanitarium, Doctor George Angell still possessed his broad shoulders and powerful frame.

I did my best to not show any hint of panic at the outburst.  “Talk to me, George,” I repeated.

Slowly, bit by bit, he dropped back down into the chair.  “Beat it,” he snorted to himself, as if this was some sort of joke.  “Francis, we can’t beat them.  We can’t even comprehend what they are.”

“That night, George.  Please.”

He sighed, but the light in his eyes faded slightly as his memory gazed back.  “I was at the observatory, on the main telescope,” he recounted.  “The previous night, one of my assistants reported spotting a change in one of the red stars we were monitoring.  I tuned in to that sector of the sky, hoping to make the observations that would validate my theory on gas giant eruptions.”

I nodded, not interrupting.  Before his sudden commitment to the sanitarium, Dr. Angell had been one of the best known and most respected astronomers.  His work on documenting the slow burnout of the stars around us had been featured many times in the tabloids.

“I tuned into the sector of the sky with the red star,” Dr. Angell repeated, his voice quavering slightly.  “And there it was, glowing so balefully, red and diseased.  The nebula behind it made it easy to spot, an orb that hung in front of a great gas backdrop.”

“And then… then they came for it.”

At these last words, Dr. Angell gasped, and I could sense that he was on the brink of losing all control.  “They?  They who?” I repeated, trying to keep him in the realm of lucidity.

He shook his head violently, his long, scraggly hair whipping back and forth.  “The nebulas,” he whispered, maddened red eyes staring back at me.  “Oh, Francis, they’re alive!  They hide in the backdrop, slow as glaciers, but so hungry, waiting to devour it all!”

“Focus, George!  Don’t lose it now!”

“And then- the eye!” the doctor screamed, throwing his head back.  I could see his every muscle standing out, taut and stretched to its very limit.  “Oh, that red eye!  It turned on me- Francis, it saw me!  From a billion miles away, it saw me, sensed me, hungered for me!  It reached out – oh, it reached for me-“

The doctor collapsed, his words choking into gibbering babble.  “I felt it,” he gasped out.  “So hungry.  Forever hungry.  It will consume it all, mindless- it won’t be enough-“

I waited, even tried again, but Dr. Angell didn’t speak again for the rest of the visiting hour.  No amount of prodding or cajoling from me could bring him back from his half-paralyzed muttering.

Finally, after the orderlies had taken him away to his room, I stood outside, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my overcoat to protect against the chill.  The sun had dropped below the horizon, now, and stars lit up the sky.

“He is getting worse at a faster rate, now,” the head nurse told me after Dr. Angell had been escorted off to his room.  “He used to come and go from wakefulness, but now he’s almost always catatonic.  He likely won’t last much longer.”

I nodded, told them to do whatever they could.  I tried to keep a note of hope in my voice, although I knew as well as the head nurse that there was nothing they could do.  Dr. Angell stood no chance.

Now, outside, I stared up at the stars.  Even without the powerful telescope of the observatory, I could see their different colors, could make out the glow of the Milky Way in a band across the sky.  My eyes scrolled across the black dome above me, automatically noting the familiar landmarks of Polaris, Mars, the Seven Sisters, Orion’s belt, and others.

Suddenly, I paused, frowning.  There, just between Orion and Gemini, a reddish blotch glowed faintly against the darkness.  There was a nebula there, I knew, but it was usually too faint to see with the naked eye.

Staring up into the sky, for just an instant, my mind’s eye filled with a long finger, stretching out across millions of miles, stabbing out with unthinking hatred towards that puny mind that dared to touch it.  I saw a huge creature, a gaseous body stretching across a galaxy, a mind so ancient and cold as to be frozen over.  I imagined that I felt hatred, cold and reptilian, seeking to consume all light and warmth, an ocean swallowing the light of a candle.

“It will consume it all,” George had babbled, before he collapsed into senselessness.

As I walked home, most of my mind focused on composing my report to the Royal Guild of Astronomers on the unfortunate fate of the man who was once one of their most prominent members.  It would be a difficult report for me to deliver, but as Dr. Angell’s protege, I knew the duty was mine and mine alone.

Still, a tiny little part of me wondered about his last, mad rantings.  Surely, they were nothing but madness.

But I resolved to spend some time on the main telescope, turning it towards that reddish nebula that now glowed faintly but unmistakably in the night sky.

I stumbled into the bathroom, blinking as I tried to rub the remnants of sleep out of my eyes.  My bare feet padded across the cold tile, and I vaguely wished that I’d had the forethought to pull on my slippers.

Entering the bathroom, my hand banged against the wall, searching for the light switch.  I found it, and the fan in the ceiling hummed to life as the lights came on.

Glancing up at my mirror, I blinked.  Where was my reflection?

There it was.  For a moment, I’d thought that the mirror was blank, that nothing was echoed on its silver surface.  But no, there was my reflection, blinking back at me with the same mussed hair and half-asleep expression.

I turned on the water, letting it run as I brushed my teeth.  For a moment, I thought that steam was rising up from the bowl of the sink, but when I took a gulp of water to wash out the toothpaste from my mouth, it was ice cold.  I sloshed it around in my cheeks before spitting it back into the sink.

Leaving the bathroom, I returned to my bedroom.  Outside my window, the sun hadn’t yet broken above the horizon, but I had to get ready to leave for work.  I turned next to my closet, pulling open the sliding door.

For a second, I saw rows of pine trees, their heavy boughs covered in a thick coat of snow, stretching off into the distance.  I blinked, and the dark rows of trees became dark rows of coats, hanging from the pole stretched across the length of my closet.  Behind the row of coats, I saw nothing but the blank back wall.

I picked out one of the suits, brushing a few flakes of something white off of the collar.  Sure, that one would work.

Once changed, my tie still hanging half-knotted around my neck, I headed for the kitchen.  Had to get something into my stomach before I left.  I felt a gnawing hunger settling in the pit of my stomach, growling and roaring with each step, demanding sustenance.

Outside my bedroom, in the hallway, my foot bumped against a small crinkly ball, which rolled away from me.  I grimaced.  Jasper, my cat, passed away six months ago, but for some reason I kept on finding more of his toys, still strewn about the apartment.

For a moment, as I passed my little kitchen table, I thought I saw the skeletal outline of a cat lurking beneath, its bare skull glinting as it hissed up at me through exposed teeth.  I pushed the chairs in beneath the empty table.  There was no cat there, alive or dead.

Pulling open the door of my refrigerator, a putrid smell assaulted me, making me wrinkle my nose.  The smell seemed to be coming from the crisper drawer, which I almost never used.  My hand stretched down towards the drawer’s handle, trembling a little, but I changed my mind at the last second and picked up a small yogurt container instead.

I leaned against the counter as I peeled the top off of the yogurt.  When I reached into the silverware drawer, the spoon that emerged seemed to have a fine coating of some sort of dark, clinging slime.  I wiped it away with a thumb before digging into the yogurt.

A glance at my watch showed me that I was about to be running late.  Hurriedly, I tossed the empty yogurt container into the overflowing trash container beneath the sink.  I frowned in at the mound of decaying matter.  I’d have to take that out when I came home.

Heading for the front door, I only just remembered to grab my car keys off their little hook beside the door.  The ring of keys jingled, bouncing together as I scooped them up.

I stepped outside, but as I went to lock the door, I paused.  Holding the key ring up in front of my eyes, I frowned at one of the keys.  It seemed long, elaborately carved from a white substance.  Bone?  I didn’t recognize it.

But there, behind the bone key, I found the key to my front door, and locked my apartment.  I turned and headed downstairs, off on my way to work.

Just another normal day.