One

This old man came rolling into my home like a thief in the dead of night. An ancient thing. From another time, another place, another world, another space. Cowering beneath my covers I gazed on his goggle eyed and wizened features. I found myself seized by a debilitating paralysis as he played some sort of hoodoo nick-nack on my thumb. He grinned like a skull faced clown when he found what he was searching for. What he stole from me remains a mystery. Skin tissue? DNA? Blood sample?

All I know is that he left something of his own behind. Infectious traces. When I went down to the kitchen in the morning, the fish in my tropical aquarium were dancing in choreographed unison, like a chorus of scaly synchronised swimmers. And my dog, who should have been guarding my house against intruders, was gnawing on some bizarrely mutated bone, whose very shape filled me with dread.

It occurred to me that this was some awful payment for an unsolicited transaction. Had this old man had bounced me into a contract without negotiation or consent? Or had he simply left behind a footprint when he passed from this place to the next?

Two

This old man came rolling home again in the night. He seized my muscles, froze me firmly in place, I could only watch in terror as he stole my shoe. Whatever could he have wanted with a shoe? He wore no shoes at all on his cloven shaped feet. Perhaps he was fascinated by the notion of leather and laces. Perhaps it was merely a trophy, a symbol of his increasing dominance over me.

In the morning my dog had a new bone which looked as fat and flaccid as an overgrown maggot, but seemingly possessed of an uncharacteristic rigidness. His fur had started to fall from his back in fuzzy clumps, exposing raw, pink flesh below. In their tank my fish spiralled relentless dizzying reels, first leftwards, then rightwards, the leftwards again, creating whirlpools tossed up gravel into spinning eddies.

This old man was leaving his extra-terrestrial snail trail behind him whenever he came and went. Genetic metamorphosis a chain reaction of his cause and effect.

Three

On this night this old man played nick-nack on my knee. Rendered still as stone I saw his spindly fingers lifting the bedclothes and felt the eerie tickle as they scuttled like a predatory spider down my leg. His needle sharp fingernail penetrated my flesh, leaving behind a scarlet globule of blood.

His narrow black tongue lashed out in a serpentine coil and licked the red dregs from his obsidian nail, as if he were a vampire.

My dog had a disc shaped Frisbee-like bone clamped between his teeth when I descended the stairs, hairless tail swishing like the rope tail of a grotesquely oversized rodent. The eyes of my fish had grown to marsupial disproportions. They watched me and followed my every move, seemingly in a perpetual state of wide eyed and wide mouthed shock.

When might this stop? How might this stop?

Who was this old man? Was he a man with a plan? What was his plan? Was he even a man?

Four

This old man removed my bedroom door. I had locked and padlocked it for protection. But it was no deterrent. He came. He went. Did as he pleased as I lay frozen. I have no idea where my door was sent. It was there. It was locked. It fell open like butter melting before him. It went. To who knows where? It was gone. It is still gone. Perhaps it exists now on another plane. An act of deception? Or a door to perception?

My dog's breakfast was a scimitar bone like the curved shape of a nightmare. He guarded it protectively as he growled and watched me though the jaundiced yellow of eyes with a malicious vertical blink. Out of the piscine dip of their scaly bellies my fish had sprouted millipede legs with which to traverse the rainbow assorted gravel on the bed of their tank. The marched in a procession from left to right and right to left.

I couldn't tell anyone about this old man. I couldn't confide or confess. I couldn't whisper or type or text. I wasn't confident of his existence. Is a dream a lie? Is a lie a dream? Can a hallucination come in the wee small hours with such obvious presence and physical force?

Five

This old man manifested in my garden in the night. He depopulated my hives. Stole my bees and ate my honey. Are there no bees where he hails from? What sort of outlandishly exotic flowers do they pollinate now? Wherever it is he stole them to. Or did he regard them as some sort of delicacy? Popping them between the serrated ridges of his monolith teeth, savouring the mingling of their juices with the sweetness of the honeycomb? Was the agony of their sting a masochistic ecstasy against the raw walls of his monstrous throat?

My dog crunched down on a five fingered bone, the beginnings of petal wings sprouting from raised nubbins on his hairless back. My fish were facing upright, bodies straight, swishing their tails, heads breaking surface water, big eyes unblinking. As if they too ached to be gone to wherever my bees had vanished to.

Was the theft of my bees a tangible crime that the authorities could investigate? If the police dispatched a team would they disturb the traces of this old man? Somehow infect themselves with the same transformative malady as my dog and my fish? Might this spread to the rest of the populace? The flora and the fauna? Had there ever been bees? Had the hives always stood empty? Nothing was certain anymore.

Six

Knowing I was on my own I took a knife and sharpened sticks with which to defend myself. But this old man just nicked them and nacked them till they were rendered harmless. He bundled them under his insect arm and vanished them away for some intimate forensic examination. Left me helpless in the shadows, pondering the futility of my impotent resistance, certain now I had no defence.

My dog hovered around the kitchen on rapidly beating wings. What looked like a contorted ribcage hung from his slavering jaws. My fish watched with their huge bulbous eyes, breaking water to hover and emit chilling howls, like timber wolves on an Alaskan tundra.

I covered my eyes. I plugged my ears. Denying the truth. Wrestling my fears.

Seven

This old man came and paddiwhacked me to the heavens. The stars that night were big and bright. The moon was a balloon, a yellow fellow, beaming like a sunflower in vast of night. I spun stiff as cadaver, a million, million miles high. Planet Earth was blue and there was nothing I could do but watch through fearful eyes as this old man nicked me here and nacked me there, filling vials with the essential oils of my essence.

When I was returned my dog hung on talons from the light fitting, bleating and crooning as it chewed voraciously on a sinewy string of beaded bones. My fish had sprouted shaggy manes of hair that shimmered like strands of crawling weed as they navigated the glass interior of their tank.

I stood in my garden by empty hives, haunted by the ghosts of bees that were either dead or gone. I gazed into the deep blue yonder and pondered the improbability of my abduction. Was this old man watching? Could he see into my eyes? Could he see out of my eyes?

Eight

This old man showed me a gate. I crashed through it, or fell into it, or was levitated up to it. Who knows? I had no clue if it was early or late, or dark or light. Was it day? Was it night. I tumbled helter-skelter through a psychedelic kaleidoscope of colours. I saw mountains and deserts, and vast oceans, with crashing waves as tall as canyons. I saw miniscule motes of dust that seemed like worlds teeming with life. I saw gargantuan white dwarves devoid of even the tiniest microorganism. I gazed ahead into infinity. I gazed backwards into the reverse of infinity.

In the morning at the kitchen table my dog lit down on my lap and gnawed my wrist to the bone. I stroked his back, watching purple veins pulse beneath translucent flesh. My fish hung in festoons from my ears and nose and chin, adornments of living baubles that became bloated on the warm, tacky blood they drew.

Seeing is believing. I saw. I believed. There was more to the universe than met eye. An eye for an eye. A truth for a truth. I spied it all with my little eye. A nod was a good as a wink.

Nine

This old man paralysed me and flipped me over to work on my spine. He removed discs and dropped them into bell shaped sample jars. Deftly replaced them with humming circuit boards and components that sent mechanical judders shuddering through me. He had me dance like a marionette, casting phantasmagorical shadows to the wall. My little dog laughed to see such fun. And my fish flew away to the moon.

Morning came and my dog lay beside me on my bed, leathery wings spread flat to his hairless back, languidly tearing strips from my flesh till his teeth went click at the touch of bone.

Was I the sum of my parts? Or part of sum? I rattled and thrummed. I crackled and hummed. Electricity sparked were blood once flowed. I am not one thing nor another.

Ten

I am on my bed in the darkness. My dog nicks and nibbles, nacks and gnaws. I am more bone that skin now. More machine than man. I ponder on what has been taken from me and what has been left it its place. I swallow flies that feast on the festering remnants of my organic matter. I don't know why I swallow flies. Perhaps I'll die? If I swallowed a spider would it catch a fly?

I hear the distant honey drunk buzzing of my bees. I sense the undulating poetic close / open rhythm of the gills of my fish. My dog makes dolphin noises and ascends on the flutter of wings to circle my room. My room is the centre of the universe. The universe is the centre of my room.

I await the arrival of this old man, rolling home once more, with his nick and his knack and his paddiwhack. I am filled with anxiety and dread. I know he will come again and again and again to steal what he desires and leave behind his toxic traces.