KRIS ASHTON

'The Larval Stage' - Andromeda Spaceways #70

Two unrelated things combined to inspire ‘The Larval Stage’: an illness and a dream.

Stories seldom come to me in dreams, and when they do they tend to burn off like fog five minutes after I wake – so if I don’t scribble down the idea immediately, it’s gone forever. ‘The Larval Stage’ survived. The entire Alludian life cycle played out in the movie theatre of my subconscious, and when I awoke it stayed with me.

A short while after this vivid dream, I got out of bed one morning find something wrong with my hands and feet. It felt as though they had become so engorged with blood they might split open. I could barely walk or make a fist. Yet to the naked eye, everything appeared fine.

I went to my GP, who was at a loss to explain the symptoms. He sent me off for a blood test, which came back normal. When I made a return visit to his surgery, he suggested it might have been a ‘protein imbalance’ – whatever that meant. I think he offered that diagnosis just for the sake of offering something. The tender hands and feet went away after a day or two, and the malady has never reappeared.

I subsequently wedded the dream – which owes more than a little to Alien – with my bizarre illness, to create a story.

I’m not one hundred per cent certain when I wrote ‘The Larval Stage’. I can find no digital submission records, so it must predate 2006. Mostly likely it was around 2003 or 2004. After a number of rejections, I put it in my TRUNK folder and gave it up for dead.

More than a decade later, I decided to dust it off and see what I could do with it. A fairly serious haircut and better delineation of its themes added energy and substance to a story that, disrobed of its sci-fi patter, is really just a well-worn horror trope. It found the perfect reader in Andromeda Spaceways #70 editor Eugen Bacon, who harbours a special interest in cross-genre fiction.