Dr. Maia Timmond watched her academic audience for signs of interest. They looked like zombies in bad suits.

'Actually', she mused, 'zombies have more engaging personalities'. She tried to gauge the hostility level in the lecture hall. Her lecture topic 'In Our Midst; Violence to Humans by a Xenoecolographic Species' for the XVth Annual Symposium on 'Environmental Contributors to Urban Violence and Societal Devolution' had been received with suspicion and seen as deliberately sensationalist. Maia, smiling bravely, began. "Have you ever had one of those experiences when you happen to see or hear something you're not supposed to? Like being 6 yrs old and walking in on your parents when they're talking about divorce? Or maybe, when you're 18 and catching your mother smile just after her sister died, then finding out your aunt had slept with your father? Or maybe when you're 30 and you over hear your siblings criticizing you before Christmas dinner. You spend the rest of the dinner watching them go through the motions, communicating in a secret way you'd never noticed before."

"Do you ever look up, at night, through the branches of trees? Do you ever look up at the tops of buildings when you're walking at night and just catch something that quickly slides from your view? Well if you had seen those things, in the night, in the sky, over head, you'd want to be that 6, 18, or 30 year old for anything in the world. Once Sarq smell your fear you'll never escape them."

"Pollution feeds them and hides them. Coal soot fed them in Europe over two hundred years ago. Before that, when there were few, it was the sulfurous gases from volcanic eruptions and methane found deep in caves. In 18th century England where pollution and heavy fogs camouflaged them and their deeds, they thrived. There was no Jack the Ripper, only Sarq".

Bored shuffling in the audience suddenly halted.

"They followed soot that came from the coal powered steamers that crossed the Atlantic. Now photochemical smogs hide them from view and serves as food. Human fat concentrates those pollutants, keeping it fresh. In our cities where their numbers are well established Sarq find the greatest concentration of these living storehouses. Now Sarq are as common as robins."

Scientists in the lecture hall, ill-mannered at the best of times, protested this statement with mutterings about the need for formulaic proofs. The professorial contingent of the audience harumphed indignantly from their intellectual pedestals. The criminologists were silent. They knew already. They had seen the photographs.

"What I am about to present to you is evidence of their existence in Toronto, based on the stories, not of survivors, but of witnesses who somehow passed unnoticed by the Sarq. While you listen to these witnesses' stories I want you to ask yourselves about the nature of evil and the sanctity of life. Are the Sarq evil? Or are they simply fulfilling an environmental purpose in a hitherto unfulfilled niche in the ecosystem, that of dominant predator in the food chain where humans once were supreme?" Maia paused thoughtfully.

"Sarq are the equivalent of Caulerpa Alga in the Mediterranean, the Kudzu vine in the United States or Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes. These latter cases are entities alien to the ecosystems to which they have spread, in which they threaten indigenous species. They were ferried to their new habitats by modern transportation systems, as were, indirectly, the Sarq. Nature has created the Sarq to eliminate a symbiotically combined contagion in her domain, one that is out of control. This contagion is the combined problem of pollution and the exploding human population."

A shocked stillness settled on the lecture hall's occupants.

"Let us begin with the first Sarq-identified incident recorded some 15 years ago."

****

Standing atop the Niagara Escarpment Sandy could see rolling purple green squares of Southern Ontario farm land hazily spreading out 150 meters below. She and her friends came to the Escarpment every weekend to test their mettle against the craggily rising stone sharps that butted against the country skyline. Pollution was heavy. Like a scratchy, ratty, wool blanket thickly swirling eddies of humid air irritated everything it touched.

As Sandy surveyed the horizon from the stone ledge serving as the group's base camp Tony's climbing rope swung and smacked the back of her head. Watching his rope play out she curled it into a snake at her feet. A little to her left was a black hole eroded into the flat limestone ledge. It was the 'Chute', a vertical tunnel descending 150 meters into the Escarpment carved by a millennia of rain action through the limestone. Moaning escaped from the tunnel. Local legend had it that the moaning came from the numerous dead who had not made it through the Chute. In fact the wailing came from wind escaping the water created caves from the subterranean system 170 meters through the Escarpment and below.

The four of them loved to descend through the Chute without lights seeing who could last the longest in the blackness. No one had the nerve to descend the entire Chute lampless, or to navigate the winding underground passages. Angela and Marcus were at the half way point, a chamber that climbers called the Devil's Goiter. It was used as a resting spot during the long descent. Sandy could tell by their lamps' flashes that both had given up descending in blackness.

Behind her Tony's rope began to jerk madly. Sandy turned thinking that Tony had somehow got himself caught on a rock shelf above. One time he got his ponytail caught in a winch, another time his belt became looped over a tree stump. Every weekend it was something with him.

"Hey Tony!, what's goin' on?" she yelled up at the rock promontory from where he was descending.

"Hey Boney Tony! Come on Boner." Calling him by his dreaded nick name Sandy had hoped to elicit a response from him.

Silence.

"Tony?"

Exasperated she called up into the shadowed reaches of the cliff. "Fine, be like that! We'll see who gets to the car first and who walks home."

Turning back to the Chute's whispering mouth she noticed that blood was slicking Tony's rope. As she stood frozen in shock Tony came rappelling down jerking to a halt just above the ledge's floor.

"Where did you come from? Have you cut yourself?" Sandy's voice was edged with both concern and annoyance.

He dangled silently, slumped in his harness.

Irritated Sandy spun him around. That last bit of momentum detached Tony's severed head from his body. It plopped wetly on the ledge's floor. Sandy stood gaping as her eyes took in gouges cut so deep into his chest that she could see the cliff's wall through them. There was something else that showed through the gouges.

At more than six feet tall it was a nightmare on two legs. It was somewhat human but with something else mixed in. It was too grotesquely, obscenely, horrific to take in all at once. Despite that she could see predatory power and keen intelligence in its deeply red eyes as it surveyed her.

Suddenly it launched itself on Tony, cramming ripped hunks of him into its lipless maw.

"Jesus!" Sandy yelled as she threw herself down the Chute. Hoping that the thing would be too busy eating to think about her as she rappelled down the Chute to the Goiter. Bursting through she interrupted Angela and Marcus in a decidedly nonclimbing related maneuver, she blurted,

"Tony's dead. There's some thing up there that may come after us."

Still terrorized, she gave a rapid fire explanation of what had happened. As they were trying to figure out what to do, Sandy was suddenly snapped off her feet by her climbing rope. The thing above was pulling her back up the Chute. Both Angela and Marcus struggled to pull her back in to the chamber. Their combined strength was not enough. Screaming Sandy stalled her fate at the Goiter's roof by hooking her hands and feet around the brim of the hole. Then she disappeared. Her screams suddenly reverberated around the chamber.

Standing in shock Angela and Marcus just stared at each other. Then they heard a scrambling noise coming down the Chute.

"Sandy?" Angela called out.

There was no answer.

"The caves!" they said in unison as they both reattached their lines and jumped down into the lower section of the Chute.

Finally, at the Chute's bottom, the roof of a cave, Angela disengaged her line and fell heavily. Her helmet's headlamp illuminated graffiti, old camp sites, and beer bottles. She took it as a sign that there must be a way out through the lower levels. She waited for Marcus to come out of the Chute above her.

Angela heard the sound of something descending the Chute. She called out to Marcus. There was no reply but the scrambling sound quickened. Panicking, she chose a direction and ran.

The sound of her gulped breaths seemed too loud. Her boots, as they waded through the talus and scree on the cave's floor, screamed her presence. She knew she should hide but her legs had a will of their own. Turning a corner she saw bright red sparks in front of her.

"A camp fire?", she thought as she ran toward the sparking lights.

Too late she realized what they were. Eyes. Her screams echoed for kilometers. Marcus arrived too late to help.

****

Pausing for effect, Maia surreptitiously surveyed faces in the assembly for a reaction to her paper thus far. They were unreadable. 'Typical anal retentive academics,' she observed to herself and continued reading.

"This incident happened a year ago. A co-worker gave this evidence to police."

****

It had been a long day at the office for Lionel Ingram III. He was pleased to be working for a big law firm, but the politics were getting to him.

"Maybe it'll be all worth it, the overheads are getting to know my work. Crawford, that S.O.B, almost told me that I'd done a good job on the Infotext account. I could see it in his eyes, but the bastard just wouldn't say the words." Ingram announced this aloud to himself as he sat astride one of the company's prized pieces of art, an Inuit bear sculpture on display outside Crawford's office. It was worth $40,000, carved from rare jade with walrus ivory inlays. Ingram took great pleasure in grinding his cigarette butt into an eye socket of the bear.

The Remy Martin was becoming a habit with Ingram. He liked to sit in the dark drinking and obsessing over his future. He got up and sauntered into the board room. The view was of the Toronto Islands. He stood looking out, taking swigs from his bottle. The island ferries, loaded with summer tourists, criss-crossed the harbour leaving luminous wake trails that sparkled from the city's lights. Although it was one of the older office buildings in Toronto, and therefore not the tallest, the Confederation Tower afforded a good view of the city's western skyline. It was designed with gothic nooks and crannies that pigeons and the occasional hawk would nest in.

In the dark boardroom Ingram looked out into the twilight and indulged in one of his regular fantasies.

"One day I'll be in one of those glass slivers on Bay Street with an office of my own, stock options, maybe my own start-up dot com." Ingram said this with a voice laced with bitterness.

It was then he noticed that something black, big, and fluttering was on the granite cornice outside.

"Bloody pigeons," Ingram slurred out loud.

Several points of reddish light glowed outside as well. He wove his way over to the large plate glass window, wondering why there were maintenance people smoking outside. 'Not at this time of night' he concluded silently, more curious than before. Slowly the red glowing lights came right up to the glass. This confused the inebriated Ingram, he flicked on an overhead light to get a better view. Then, like a sheet of summer lightning, everything became clear. Those were eyes he was looking at, that were looking back at him.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Ingram screamed. He backed away from window, turned and bolted from the boardroom. Unfortunately for Ingram, an elevator was available for him to take down.

The black shapes moved to the edge of the cornice, paused, then leapt skyward one by one. Their massive outstretched bodies were etched against the moonlit sky in a mad distortion of reality.

A co-worker, used to Ingram's nightly rants had ignored his mutterings and pacing until Ingram had screamed. She had run to find out what was wrong, only to arrive as the elevator's door closed.

"What a jerk. Talking to himself and drinking alone. He's either on his way to a coronary or a corner office," she mused cynically.

Outside, walking along Wellington, and then onto Bay Street, Ingram would have been refreshed by a breeze coming off the lake that was blowing away the smog that had hung over Toronto. Ingram's relief would have been short lived as a piercing, intense pain soon scythed his temples. Grabbing for his head his fingers would have felt immense talons gripping his skull.

He also would no longer have felt the ground beneath his feet. A security guard on patrol watched in horrored silence both the abduction and as pieces of Ingram fell to the ground as great winged things fought over Ingram's body as they flew over Bay Street.

****

"Ingram would have been annoyed," Maia said, "to find that the newspapers reported his 'disappearance' without mentioning that he was Lionel Ingram the Third and that he came from one of Toronto's oldest families. Being a lawyer, form mattered to Ingram, no matter the circumstances."

The audience grasped this slight comic relief with relish and laughed loudly, too loudly, in the way that people do when they need to release tension born from fear.

After a sip of water Maia began the most crucial section of her talk.

"We come now to our most current evidence of the Sarq in our midst. Some of you will remember this incident from just last week. Michelle Huo, Micky to her friends, was jogging back along Glen Road through the Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto."

Gasps rose from the assembly as none had made the connection bet ween the well publicized death of the young woman and the presence of such an other-worldly killer. Unconsciously, several of the audience members glared at Maia. She was making the Sarq a little too real.

"Imagine yourself with her as I talk about the incident," Maia instructed her audience, "Imagine if it had been someone you knew. Imagine if it had been you."

"Micky didn't live in one of the million dollar homes but she had a few favourites that she'd do stretching in front of, just to sneak a peek inside. We know this based on the testimony given by one of her friends who usually jogged with her."

The room darkened, then slides flashed showing Ms. Huo's home, her office and the jogging route she took every night. With each flash, the fate of the young woman gained increasing poignancy. Maia's voice continued through the flashing dark and light.

"Going over the Rosedale bridge, jogging up to Chorley Park where her car waited, Micky would have been anticipating seeing her children at home. In Chorley Park others had passed what they had thought was a game of tackle football. No doubt Micky thought the same. Had she noticed that the things being tossed weren't footballs, that the people being tackled weren't getting back up, she might still be with us today. Instead she continued on to where her car was parked and fumbled with her keys at the driver's side. Police think the sound of her keys drew attention to her presence."

"The 'footballers' were in front of her car by the time her engine was started and her car lights on. Her scream, 'Oh my God,' was heard by a passing jogger who fled when he saw what was surrounding her car. Micky reversed out and sped along Summerhill Lane, driving over sidewalks in her haste. Unfortunately the Sarq followed. By the time she made it to MacLannan Drive, they had smashed in her Volvo's wheel wells so they could no longer turn. Abandoning her car Micky thought she could find safety inside the enclosed orange metal walkway that spanned the CN/CP tracks that went from Ashpost over the track to Leederbrook Avenue. She knew no one in those exclusive homes would open their doors to her that time of night."

"Respite from her terror would have been brief inside the walkway. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she would have seen that one Sarq blocked her exit as another came up from where she had entered. In the distance a train whistle blew low, deep and long into the night. A practicing Catholic, she might have begun praying at this point as she would have been aware of the scraping and dragging of the Sarqs' talons as they closed in around her."

Lights came on in the lecture hall. The audience was visibly moved by what they had seen of Michelle Hou's life and death.

Maia added quietly, "As the Montreal to Chicago evening train rattled under the walkway it effectively cut off the screams of Micky's last moments on earth."

After discussing various statistical correlations of pollution levels, and unexplained disappearances over the past ten years in Southern Ontario, Maia brought her talk to a close commenting,

"Daily struggles with 'death' in our society today are largely confined to metaphorical 'deaths' due to redundancies or obsolete skill sets in the business arena. Predatory practices are confined to hostile take-overs or the stock market. Whatever would we do if we had to deal with a real predator in our midst? Well, there is a predator in our midst, what are we going to do about it?...I thank you for your time."

Before the moderator could announce that Dr. Timmond would take questions a scientist, who stood up in the full glory of his ill fitting suit and bad hair cut, shouted,

"You never said where these... things...originate from."

Maia replied, "My data is incomplete. I believe Sarq dwelled underground for millennia finding food in ancient coal and uranium mines. Then with ancient, and modern, mining accidents humans provided an additional gene pool from which the Sarq gained intelligence, physical bulk, the ability to plan, use tools and .... ."

Shocked, the scientist interrupted, "What are you saying exactly?"

"I'm saying that in ancient and modern mining accidents miners, men and some women, didn't perish in the cave-ins. They survived and inter-bred with whatever it was that was living in mines and subterranean caves. That is why Sarq are socially organized, resourceful and adaptable to our modern environments."

"Anecdotal evidence of their existence may be seen in medieval heraldic shields in which the wyvern are depicted. A wyvern is a winged, two-legged dragon or demon with a barbed tail. That imagery had to originate from reality in some form. Since it has been associated with heraldic emblems one can assume that those families were aware of the familial connection. Perhaps they were afforded some protection because of it. In addition, I believe that Bosch's paintings depict real creatures that are not, as is currently believed, purely symbolic in nature."

Silence followed Doctor Timmond's statement.

"What can we do?" That question came from a bespectacled graduate student standing to the side of the lecture hall.

"Well, we have some options which would require cross disciplinary co-operation. A politically challenging prospect, as we all know," the Doctor smiled gently.

This observation elicited knowing smiles from many academics.

"We need people to observe, if possible, the Sarq in their feeding and nesting environments. A dangerous option. We have an interesting case of parallel evolution here so another option would be to could capture one, run it through tests to study its cognitive skills, physical abilities and capacity for verbal communication. Or we might simply decide our lives' sanctity is more important than theirs and simply cut off their food source starving them into extinction."

"How would you propose to do that?" the moderator asked, breaking from her largely silent role, "if humans are their food source?"

"Well, strictly speaking it is air and water diffused pollution that is their food source, human fat is merely a convenient storage facility for that food. We could work world wide to reduce pollution, find alternatives for industrial power sources and materials. Specifically alternatives to coal powered generators as I suspect fossil fuels create their foods."

After this statement the lecture hall broke into spontaneous uproarious laughter. Shocked at first Doctor Timmond reluctantly joined in. Everyone realized that no government or industry would allow a few deaths to interfere with their power, profit, or GNP.

As quickly as the laughter started it stopped. The gathered group fell silent as society's predicament became apparent. They could do nothing until there were enough deaths to arouse fear in the general public i.e. voters. Before that no government would take steps for change. Until then, unexplained deaths and disappearances would continue while they could be comfortably ignored by civil authorities.

Attendees to the conference retired for the evening with one of Dr. Timmond's final comments resonating in their hearts and minds.

"Have you ever been confronted with something that on a deeply personal level caused you to reconsider your place in the world, to wonder if there was something going on beyond the facade of social commerce? How would you choose to live your life when cracks appeared in that social consensus we call reality?"

"I beg you, dear colleagues, to be careful when you go out at night. Be careful of what you cannot see, because it can see you, and it is hungry."

You got to tell them! Sarq is made of people! They're making our Sarq from people! PEEEEEPULLL!!!!