The professor sat behind his desk, precarious stacks of books littering his little office. After listening to my story, he sat back in his chair and nodded awhile. Finally, without the slightest change in his manner, his old voice croaked out:
“It’s not real if you don’t look at it. I know it sounds silly. Most of the time, with most things, when we’re afraid, light is the best medicine. More information, more knowledge, it works nine times out of ten, but not the tenth. This is different. This thing you’re afraid of, it only exists because of attention, because of fear. In one sense, a strange sense, it could be said to know this. As far as it is self-aware, it knows its continued reality is dependent upon us, humanity, on our natural inclination to face the thing we’re afraid of.
“I don’t know what it is, in its nature. It’s a sort of wrinkle, I suppose, an imperfection in the otherwise normal flow of reality. They’re rare, and they’re not always bad. Fear is just the most common and successful feedback loop that develops, and the most deadly. If I had to hazard a guess, I suppose things like big foot or Loch Ness are the tamer versions. I suppose things like nations too, they exist because we believe in them, though in that case, it’s love, or should be.
“But the end goal of this thing is creation. Now that it knows what it is, it knows it can cease. It wants the permanence reserved for hard realities, and we, humanity, is the doorway. We’re amphibians, existing in the realms of ideals and reality, spirit and body. The more it can engage your mind, dear boy, the more real it can become.”
“But suppose I—” a shiver stopped me.
The professor raised an eyebrow at me.
“Suppose,” I forced myself, “we created it different.”
“Different?”
“If it’s there now, feeding on fear, well, you said it wants attention really, what if we offered it some other kind of attention.”
“Is this your idea?” he asked. Gazing over his spectacles at me, his face growing hard and quizzical, he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Or did it give you the idea?”
I looked away.
“Sin is at your door,” he said. “And you must rule over it.”
Tale Told 