
To eat someone, it must usually stop singing, which endangers the hydra somewhat, since it can now be noticed. While it sings, the hydra exists in our blind spot. The eyes are wet holes.īut of course, none of this is noticed. It resembles a man's head, too, but white, hairless, and with thick deformities of the brow and lips. The head is only the size of a man's head at this point. The neck grows up, up until the head emerges from the ground. It is subtler than invisibility, and more reliable.Īt this point, the false hydra is only a torso - presumably about the same size as a man's - buried somewhere in the ground. It just creates gaps in your attention and then slips through them. Or pushes its face up through a broken cobblestone. It emerges in a basement, from behind the jars of fruit preserve. Fattened on worms, it has been growing upwards these last few days (weeks? years?), but has only now broken through the soil. The false hydra enters a town through a humble enough method.

Villages seized by some infectious insanity, or perhaps some subtle demon. These erudite scholars will stroke their chin and calmly tell you that there is no such thing as a false hydra. And perhaps the false hydra is still there, the black rot at the center of the bone. People do not revisit those sites, out of fear of vengeful ghosts. There are false alarms criminals and deserters have pleaded that they were merely under the influence of the false hydra, or that they were merely trying to escape it's influence. Everyone wants to know: Is it here? Is it in my town? Is that long, flaccid face watching me through the window even now? Paranoia dominates any discussion about it. In fact, so much about these abominations boggles the mind that scholars really don't know where to begin. Scholars agree, because they have no better idea. Supposedly, they germinate in response to lies, and that each falsehood causes a false hydra to swell larger. They spontaneously originate as undifferentiated masses of flesh potatoes that sprout from no seed.

Common wisdom holds that false hydras come from the ground.
