I

  In all my years of studying insects, particularly ants, I never realised that I would find something so otherworldly. Giant ants, the size of mares. A world beyond our own! I write this report to no one in particular. But I will start from the beginning.

  Call me by my nickname. Because my full name is embarrassing: Eurymedusa River. (My parents were hippies, after all). And, as a trained scientist, I do have a title. Doctor Eurymedusa River. But I never insist others use it. I simply go by Eury—pronounced like the Slavic, ‘Yuri’. That makes things easier.

  As an entomologist (my science, my trade), I am used to strange, long names. Because on my thirtieth birthday I discovered an ant of high interest to myself. It’s called Polyrhachis ammon. But there was something I was not used to; it was the size of an adult horse.

  This ant possessed a shiny, golden, and bulbous behind—about an arm’s span across. A long torso, obsidian in hue, bared several spines. These seemed like a rose’s thorns crossed with sharp rapiers. Protruding from its torso came an immense head, twice the width of mine, baring pincers. I imagined they could cut a car’s door in half.

  For the sake of simplicity, I will now call it a golden ant. Even though most of the ant was black, if not for a flicker of gold flecks along its back and behind like a strange, reptilian mane. The common name is also long winded: golden-tailed spiny ant.

  But once you set your eyes upon these creatures… No, these centaurs! You, too, shall understand their majesty! Already, I feel like I am beholden to these animals, these majestic beings. They took me to their wonderful domicile beyond our own reality, beyond our meek senses, beyond our frail minds.

  They took me on great quests across the galaxy. Ineffable, unthinkable things emerged from space. You will not believe me, listener, but it was the great chasms and voids of space that harboured these ants. Well, were they ants? I do not know. I believe they are celestial. That they are beyond terrestrial life, as our small consciousnesses can fathom any sort of life.

  In my report, I will have to leave some details out. I do not know how they can traverse the stars and allow me to ride their backs in the blackness of outer space. I do not know how I did not just die out there! Alas, the ants, or whatever they are, have surpassed our own understanding of the nature of objective reality. I know I must sound insane. Starking raving lunacy! All this, all this madness that I repeat to you, and undoubtedly it does sound like madness, must be far outside the current explanatory powers of the human sciences.

  When these things, these celestial demi-gods, brought me to the outer reaches of the galaxy, they showed me their forms of faster-than-light travel. It pertained to the holes in the universe that we perceive to be, wrongly, black holes. For the sights I saw must have undone all Einsteinian physics, as well as the observations about black holes we know from telescopes and astrophysics.

  I rode along the centaur-ant’s back, as it flew through a tunnel, a great snaking void that sucked in all particles of light and any molecules that dared to float through space. And I was sent headlong through the network of some unutterably vast and horrible hive! This hive that hid beyond perceptions, beyond whatever we call material reality. My God! These ants lived outside of time and space and reality!

  And I was brought, like some sort of offering, to that terrible and dreadful kingdom of heaven or hell. For the ant-things had created structures so large and alien that I could not exactly cognise the immense strangeness and mass of it all. Although some of it resembled buildings from Earth, these structures were almost non-material; indeed, it seemed these alien beings lived in something between light and dark, a sort of gloomy reality that was neither material, nor immaterial. But something in the crux between what I understood to be real and unreal.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  There were fleshy, breathing spires and castles of pulsating hexagons, which, interwoven like tesseracts, began to create a veritable citadel of ethereal translucence and spectral ghost-light; around these structures, flying beasts of gold and black whizzed and travailed the stagnant, void-like expanse.

  They possessed wings, these creatures. And they danced in swarms, or individually zipped hither and thither. These winged golden ants I will call Angels. Their lines of flight fill the starry stillness. Even now, I hear their incessant buzzing and moving. Once upon a time, they must have been regular ants. At least, I can only understand these things by reference to some other lifeform. Polyrhachis ammon are usually only an inch or two long. But these things were the size of much larger fauna; not even the size of mares now. No, these things were bordering on the mass of a blue whale!

  And they zipped through the vacuum, or whatever wind might have traversed through the void beyond voids. They danced like marionettes over the insane structures and fortresses of weirdness. And one swooped down only to open its mad maw open, between its mountain-like pincers and its twitching feelers. Breath, if it was breath and not the fumes of a putrescence after a nuclear holocaust, blew down upon me. I almost retched my entire innards, if it were not for the fact my body was no longer corporeal!

  By some strange, inexplicable phenomena, I was no longer a soul in a body. Instead, I was a disembodied spirit, a geist, that lurked in the horrible place beyond the universe. For the winged ants passed right through my intangible self. The giant could not eat me!

  II

  I grow mad. How I write this, how I dictate this, I do not know.

  I am in Elysium. I died long, long ago. Now, I drift through Elysium—this Paradiso, those Heavenly Heights—as another revenant …

  My ghost is flying. Blown along the currents of the West Wind, I settle on no island, on no stretch of land. The world was drowned—long, long ago. There are no touchstones. There are only the abstractions of what life once was: mandalas of strange designs and foreign shapes. Ethereal alterity. Geometries from beyond.

  In Paradiso, there is no single sun. That was the first thing I noticed about the place… if it is a place. I look around with my disembodied mind. I notice that there are a million suns. Faraway, castaway. Only the twinkling heavens linger above. That cool air, this chiling current, pushes me like a pulsating wave of a vast ocean.

  The wind was blown from the burrows. Those variegated burrows that ants made. They constructed tunnels: chambers for breeding; main tunnels for highways; side tunnels for hosting armoured guards; other tunnels to support the network-nest … Ad infinitum … These tunnels, ah, that worm their way through the celestial domains here.

  Stars twinkle, faraway ghosts of otherworldly suns.

  Winged ants fly through the air. They are called Angels. Their segments scintillate with bright myriads of light …

  Once, and long, long ago, I found an ant the size of a coin, about an inch or two across. And it swallowed me in its vastness, in its shadow that was cast underneath a terrible, infernal star. And its shadow grew and grew. It was the size of a centaur, of a dragon. It was in the shape of the legends of old! Cyclopean! Immense! Giant! Horrible!

  Do you know my name? I forget my name. What was my name? This is the raving of a lunatic, alas! The dragons are flying through the void beyond space and time. Ha! Ha! Ha! Can I hear myself? What frolics I have been on. What sights and scenes I have seen!

  I am mad now. I know I must be. I believe I am beyond time, beyond space, beyond Einstein. And only the craziest dictators, only the worst of Czars, ever tried to contradict the physical world.

  But, after everything, I remember the ant-centaurs, the dragons, the angels. Alas, I remember that shadow. That shadow cast by the ant. It was imperceptibly large—terrible, horrible, terrible, horrible! And the dragon blew its breath. And I was forever in a new prison, a new madhouse, when I was under the dark ebb of that shadow. Waves of insanity brought me to these new emanations, to these new sights and those different scenes. I am reminded of one of the very last of Ezra Pound’s canto: “the ant's a centaur in his dragon world”; it was written when the poet was locked up in a cage during the Second World War.

  And that is how I feel. I am a beast, a traitor, that they put inside a cage! The only thing to keep me company in this oubliette… is the shadow. The shadow of an alien, of a tiny ant, of an angel, of a mythical beast, of a chimera, of a centaur in his dragon world!