I put my hand in the slime shortly after arriving at the Beacon office on a recent Tuesday morning.
At first, I didn’t understand the magnitude of my mistake.
“Gross!” I thought after I touched a sticky table surface while chatting to a group of colleagues. “Someone must have spilled a drink.”
I rushed to wash my hand, noticing that the stickiness was extremely difficult to scrub away.
I then returned to my office and didn’t think any more about it until a reporter buzzed my phone minutes later.
“There’s a trail beside my desk,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“A trail of slime,” he said.
I chuckled. The Beacon office, which is next to a wooded area, has seen its share of wildlife. Tarantulas, termites and scorpions are not uncommon, and twice I’ve narrowly missed disaster when a giant millipede fell out of my air-conditioner vent seconds after I walked under it.
But I had never seen a trail of slime here, and I was sceptical.
Sceptical
“Surely someone spilled something,” I thought as I walked downstairs to check it out. “Or someone is playing a prank.”
Wrong. The trail of slime — which was more than an inch wide in places — started at the base of the front door, and I realised with horror that it continued up to the table surface where I’d rested my hand minutes earlier.
Then it proceeded across the carpet, up and down two more walls, across the back of a chair next to the reporter’s desk, and over a pair of his shoes.
There was only one possible explanation.
“Aliens,” I said. “They’re here.”
Nobody laughed. I called an exterminating company.
“Umm, I don’t know how to explain this, but we have a thick trail of slime at the Beacon office,” I said. “Have you had any other reports of alien activity?”
The woman who answered the phone paused, then laughed and assured me that there are no aliens in the Virgin Islands: They tend to stay in Area 51, she explained, referencing the classified location in Nevada long rumoured to be the landing site of an extraterrestrial species.
I wasn’t convinced.
“You can’t know that for a fact,” I pointed out. “These could be new and different aliens.”
After all, it did make sense that visitors from outer space would be desperate to read the best newspaper on the planet.
Black worms?
But the exterminator had an alternate theory: Termite treatments, she said, can sicken black worms, and they exude an extra-thick trail of slime as they crawl out and die.
“Are those trails more than an inch thick?” I asked.
She paused.
“No,” she admitted, admitting that they are very thin.
She did, however, agree to send an exterminator.
“That would be great,” I said, wondering if he would bring some sort of alien blaster just to be on the safe side. “I’m not going to lie: This slime trail is pretty terrifying.”
She cracked up. Then she candidly agreed.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said in the practised manner of a surgeon who is accustomed to delivering horrible news.
Exterminator
Later in the day, the exterminator arrived.
After examining the slime, he quickly decided it came from a slug or a snail that had visited the office in the night.
Was it an alien slug or snail?
No.
Was it dangerous?
No.
Would it be back?
Probably.
Can it be kept out?
Probably not, because it can squeeze itself down to fit through tiny, tiny spaces — even if it’s, say, ten feet long.
Is it ten feet long?
No.
Had he ever seen a trail so wide?
Yes.
Living in terror
In spite of his reassurances, we now live in terror at the Beacon office, especially when we’re working late. So far, however, we’ve been spared a repeat visitation.
Meanwhile, removing the slime trail was no easy task. I was able to rub it off the countertop with a bit of elbow grease, but the stains in the rug were strangely intractable — almost as if they’d been left by a creature from another galaxy.
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