“A hand formed, in the middle of the floor. A human hand, pink and the size of a baby’s. Stretching out from behind it, instead of an arm, was something like an insect leg. It was a foot long, springing out to length before our eyes like a radio antenna. Something like a shell took shape. I saw an eye, red and clustered like a fly’s. Another eye, this one with a round pupil, like a mammal, grew in next to it. Then another eye, yellow with a black slit down the center. Reptilian. The thing grew and grew some more, taking shape in the middle of the floor. It grew to the size of a rabbit, then a small dog, then stopped when it was about a foot and a half high and maybe three feet wide, probably the same overall mass as Molly. I wish I had a photograph of the thing, because describing it is a bitch. The finished creature seemed to be assembled from spare parts. It had a tail like a scorpion curling up off its back. It walked on seven—yes, seven—legs, each ending in one of those small, pink infantile hands. It had a head that was sort of an inverted heart-shape, a bank of mismatched eyes in an arc over a hooked, black beak, like a parrot’s. On its head, no kidding, it had a tuft of neatly-groomed blonde hair that I swear on my mother’s grave was a wig, held on with a rubber band chinstrap. What was strange about it, or rather, what was stranger about it was that the two sections of its body, the hind quarters and the abdomen, were not connected. There was a good two inches of space between them and when it turned sideways you could see right through the thing. But it moved in unison, as if they were connected by invisible tissue.”
