Genesis. Volume 1.

It was here before the world had a name. It did not come — it simply appeared, like a sickness or a shadow you only notice once it has already fallen across your face. In those times, when life was but a quiet whisper in the primordial soup, it fed on that whisper. The blind fear of the first, tiny creatures. They quivered, shrank in the gelatinous deeps of the ocean — and that quivering became food. Then came the giants. Monstrous reptiles whose footsteps shook continents and whose shadows covered valleys like storm clouds. Their fear was vast and simple: fear of being eaten, fear of fire from the cracks in the sky, fear of tumbling into the abyss. It became that fear. It had no form, but it could become a fissure in the ground beneath a heavy foot, a pocket of carbon monoxide in a hollow, the sudden shadow of a winged predator falling across a herbivore’s back. And then the sky ignited, and the world died. The giants fell. The source of loud, juicy fear dried up — their agony was too swift, too all-consuming, to feed on for long. It fell into hibernation. A stony, starless sleep for millions of years, beneath layers of sedimentary rock, beneath the indifferent weight of tectonic plates. A new sound woke it. Not the bellow of a reptile. A soft, nervous babble. Fear woven not of instincts, but of thoughts. Of images. Of guesses about a future that had not yet come. It was humans. It learned something new: fear, once sown, grows on its own. It becomes a legend. And a legend is food that does not spoil. You can eat it for centuries. Millennia passed. Glaciers advanced and retreated. Civilizations rose from the mud and crumbled to dust. On the site of ancient hunting grounds, a village grew. The village spread wide, sprouted cobblestone streets and streetlamps, and got a name: Brookfield. And one day a circus came to the village. Among the motley performers there was one — with a whitened face and an artificial smile. A man whose job it was to be funny. The Devourer sensed in him a strange, alluring fear — fear of not being accepted, fear of the void behind the makeup, a fear that had been accumulating for years beneath the roar of applause. The clown was not afraid of the audience. He was afraid of the silence after his act. That second when the laughter breaks off and you are left alone on the stage — painted, unwanted, like trash. He beckoned him with a shadow, a whisper from the thicket. And when the clown, curious and drunk (he had downed half a bottle of cheap whiskey before going on to steady the trembling in his fingers), wandered away from the lights, the entity entered him. It did not devour him — it possessed him. The human essence vanished in an instant, like a drop in the sea, like a match in a forge. But the shell remained. Now it had the perfect mask — one made to bring a smile, and beneath it you could hide anything. An abyss. Hunger. An age-old craving for living flesh. He went out to the people. He saw a child staring at him with wide eyes. Not with admiration — with fear. That old, good, primal fear smelled the best — sourish, sharp, like fresh blood. The clown leaned down, spoke gently, played. And then, when the boy’s fear had ripened like fruit, he yawned open again — from beneath the clown makeup, from the wide rouged mouth painted into an eternal grin. He took his trophy to his cave — a new lair. In time the cave collapsed, and he had to find a new home. He found an abandoned mansion on a hill, in the center of the growing town of Brookfield. People saw the lonely, strange clown and averted their eyes. “Town madman,” they thought. They did not know that beneath the mansion gaped a cellar as large as a cave. A perfect place for a collection. For waiting. But this was only one mask. One hunger. One dot on the map — too much, it turned out, for a single world. The Genesis mansion still stands in the center of town. Its cellar smells of earth, old blood, and greasepaint — sweetish, cloying, the kind they use in cheap circuses. And if at night you hear a soft, creaking laugh from the hill — don’t look. He has already chosen the next game. And it always begins with fear.