Stars should not cause fear and dread, for stars are mere fireballs thousands of light-years from Earth. But some things come from space that are not stars.
So it was with young Johnny and Ruth, a couple who had gathered in the woods to see the shooting stars the radio had announced weeks ago. The two were kids with a fondness for the stars, both of whom owned several star charts called star planispheres. When they went out, they both hunted for constellations like the Ophidian or Taurus. They were also fanatics about the conjunctions between the moon and the planets.
That day, they were the only ones in the village who camped out in the clearing to watch the stars. They both lay down and looked up at the sky and could see the wonders of the heavens, but they could also see one of them deviate from its trajectory and approach them.
They could barely move as the star entered the atmosphere, the atmosphere changed, and it was as if the fallen star tore the sky and the earth apart. The black color of the night changed to pink and then to green until it returned to its dark color.
A shooting star is a meteor composed of ice and rock dust that often detaches from comets. When it enters the atmosphere, it causes a characteristic color as it disintegrates by falling at high speed. But this was no shooting star, and the boys knew it.
They stepped back at the moment of impact, which did not cause much damage when it hit the ground. It was like a pencil falling to earth, it was a tiny object that when Johnny got closer to observe he could tell it was from a ship, he could tell by the tiny lights it emitted.
Johnny tried to keep Ruth away, but the girl was not half careful. She got close enough to touch him with her fingers, and what happened next was a disaster.
An electric shock went through Ruth's body, throwing her from the ship. She practically flew through the air until she hit the ground. At the same time, the ship's lights went out. Johnny went to help his friend, but he was terrified. The atmosphere had become ominous, and the small ship did not stop making eerie noises. Ruth stood up just before Johnny touched her. She was not herself, she made very strange movements.
Johnny grabbed her hand, but he felt it cold and lifeless as if she had already died. This frightened him and he had to face her partner, he saw her eyes. There was no life in them, they were glassy, but she was still moving towards the ship. Johnny did not know what to do, he tried to tell her not to approach the diabolical object. The boy was really scared, he was crying because he was so afraid, he did not want to leave her girlfriend alone. His body was telling him to run away from the clearing, but he couldn't. He wanted to push Ruth away and walk away. He wanted to push Ruth away and get out of there, but she seemed to have gotten heavier and stronger, so much so that she knocked him to the ground.
Johnny shouted as much as he could to wake her from her trance, but in the end, she put her hands back on the ship. The ominous tinkling sound that came from her caused Johnny to move even further away from the landing zone. Something strange and foul was coming from the ship. The night made it hard for Johnny to see, but that didn't stop him from getting closer. He could tell it was some kind of insect, resembling a dark mantis, but with several tentacles crawling along Ruth's hand.
Screaming, Johnny desperately called to her, but the damage was done. The tiny creature from outer space was perched on the back of Ruth's hand, its tentacles crawling up Ruth's nostrils. It was like watching a puppet, and the puppeteer was the space creature. Johnny could see the Machiavellian creature hiding in her girlfriend's breasts. She began to walk towards Johnny, shakily.
The boy didn't wait for her to approach, he fled like a man possessed. He made his way to his car and drove home in a daze. As Ruth slowly made her way down the street, it was midnight, and as she walked alone through the inhospitable place, she was picked up by four college students. Only one of them, named Orwell, saw something strange about the quiet girl and her strange ways.
The immature young men began to fondle the girl, who let them do so while keeping her eyes on the road. Until a thousand tentacles came out of her ears, lips, and nose. The poor boys could hardly do anything when those limbs entered their system. Any screams they might have uttered were stifled, and they all lay motionless until the car finally crashed into a tree.
Word spread quickly, as Johnny realized when he went into town the next day to report the unfortunate event with the spaceship. At the entrance to the town, he found an extensive network of tentacles connecting every person in the place. Each person walked strangely, one by one, entering tents and taking out objects to be collected at some point.
Johnny did not stay to investigate, he was still too afraid and retreated. The town had been infected by this strange insect that bound them together and robbed them of their willpower. The boy should have stayed to observe the strange activity everyone was doing and what the conglomerate's goal was.
All the people were looking for electronic objects, others were disassembling them, and from there some of them were assembling something with the instrument in question. Anyone who had seen them would have thought that the charred and barely alive body of Ruth was commanding them, but it was not visible to the naked eye. Along with the burned clothing, a small insect could be seen attached to her burned skin, which seemed to be slowly eating away at her body. Thousands of tentacles were coming out of the girl's orifices, and they were the ones that were entwining the entire crowd.
The time it took Johnny to call for backup and the authorities was wasted. It took them about 2 days to convince the locals and the police from another town to go to their place and look at them and find nothing. Once they arrived, they found loneliness. There was nothing, there was no extensive network of tentacles that controlled people like puppets, but there were no people either. It was as if they had all left, and in the middle of the square hundreds of clothes and dresses were scattered, as if the village had evaporated.
The strangest thing of all was that something seemed to have exploded in the middle of the square. It was as if a rocket had taken off and incinerated the whole place, but the strange thing was that, according to the investigators, it had to have been a minimal rocket.
From nowday, Johnny never looked at the stars the way he used to. He never wanted to know anything about constellations, stars, or planets.
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CONTEST | BLOODY VALENTINE'S DAY
Cover and Banner made in Canva; Separators made in photoshop