The passage of decades grinds truth and fiction against each other until they are a single, glistening patina; it is this parafictional loam in which you burrow, spreading like mycelium, casting fine tendrils out into the world. Like the venerable fungus you grow thick and deep and far, patient, part of the ecosystem. Your appendages are disparate, innocuous, barbed. To your prey, they strike that elusive balance between the familiar and the novel. Too outré and they can't be believed, too derivative and they'll be passed over.
You are more than the sum of these unobtrusive hyphae, but they are you nonetheless. You are water-stained chapbooks in community rummage sales, worn photographs and faded maps tucked and folded into paperbacks in used bookstores, rumors and half-memories passed by word of mouth. You are poorly-written posts archived from a forgotten newsgroup, the efforts of a crackpot engineer to blow the whistle on the government's secret project to contact "elsewhere" through advanced technology and occult rituals. You are a scratchy demo of an unreleased song by a local rock band, all moody guitars and heartfelt, allusive lyrics about lost love and a ranch where bad things happen. You are oblique monographs found in cold attics, published by a harmless if esoteric fraternal organization, now defunct, devoted to obscure Sumerian gods. You are redacted memoranda of unknown provenance and unprovable veracity regarding PROJECT 8-TOWER, the remit of which is indecipherable. These pieces of you are breadcrumbs, transmission vectors, hooks on invisible lines; you are all of them, and many, many more, a sea of ledes spreading wider and deeper with the ruthless implacability of glaciation.
Those long years have given you ample opportunity to hone these pieces of yourself, to learn the palate of the true connoisseurs you prefer — and let it be said that it truly is the connoisseurs you seek to entice. In earlier times your methods were crude, hyperbolic, sensational, and your spoils were accordingly uninspired; now, in your advancing age, your devices have grown more rarefied in measure with your tastes.
After all, prey defines the predator. You are what happens when the curious, the seekers after weird, find what they hoped for but never fully believed could exist. You draw them in with your anglerfish lures, shining in the spectrum to which those inquisitive minds have attuned themselves, and eventually those with sufficient interest find their way to you. In the act of digestion you know them with a relentless intimacy, and in so doing you come to know yourself. You break them down to their component pieces and learn what made them pursue you, to better entice those who come after them. This is not by desire or design; you are not prone to introspection. It is simply metabolism.
An assistant to television executives in Los Angeles, a musician in the Pacific Northwest, a designer in Boston; you are as ignorant of your quarries as they are of you until they brush up against your extremities, and then it is too late for them. Once that first tentative touch has been made you have their taste, and reflexively you tailor your bait to better draw them in. Do not let it be said your relationship is solely one-sided, either; until they are overrun by you, you supply them with intrigue, fascination, mystery. They think about you, wonder about you, talk and write and blog about you, unknowingly using themselves to feed you, to spread you, to make you more true. You leave them strangled and shot through with your burgeoning, but their lives are stranger, brighter, more interesting while they last. You consume people; you produce inspiration, ghosts, and spores.
Your origins are unknown and unknowable; like the best predators, you simply are. Your provender compulsively tries to trace your tangle of imaginal limbs to some ultimate nucleus, a final core that must contain the truth of you. There is no such kernel, and the deeper they penetrate the more your convolutions twist and fold, fractal and endless, rhizomatic. You are the platonic ideal of the fiction that makes itself real, the archetype of the consuming story. Your immanentization was guaranteed by your conception, was ensured when the first mind that beheld you wondered at what you are. Since that first contact your evolution has never stopped and never will, not even once you have metastasized all the tales that have ever been told. You will always curl and branch and exvolute, roiling like quantum foam slowed to geologic time.
And while even in that dim future you will never fully shed your camouflage, at times it suits your needs to make use of your true nature as its own disguise. You present yourself now as a collection of descriptions, an idea riven into words and wrought onto screen and page, an instant of unconscious forthrightness frozen in the amber of language. A fanciful short story, an interesting concept, all evocative phrasing but no real narrative; yet at the end, a suggestion of self-recognition, something that reads like a twist but in reality is a barb, increasing your chances at propagation. You transmit through the writer to the reader wherein you take root, there to spread again, variegate and diffuse. You have been beheld. New growth flexes and winds. You reach out once more, and changes begin.