“On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow.”
Some days we’re the A Bao A Qu desperate for help to self-actualise.
Some days we’re the dreadful traveller stopping the A Bao A Qu from self-actualising.
Spoiler: I’ve never known a tentacle plot-twist like it.
First published in The New Yorker, October 4th, 1969. Collected in Manual de zoología fantástica, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni into English in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Dutton, 1969
A Personal Anthology 