The New Madrid Horror
by Aaron Hollingsworth
Eightfold Wrath Books
©CopyrightAaronHollingsworth2019
All Rights Reserved
This story was first published in the short story collection, Folded Steel: More Tales of the Weird and Woeful.
Ill-conceived was the city of New Madrid. Ill-conceived was the nearby river island where I and my twin brother dwelt. Ill-conceived were we.
Our parents had been brother and sister, twin siblings hailing from a country loathsome in the hearts of more prevalent stocks of humanity. They had grown and dwelt together, orphans in this once Spanish territory. They had no particular skills to offer the budding civilization. Townsfolk wanted no help from them to settle the land that would someday be named for the canoeing natives that paddled the many creeks feeding that monstrous and muddy river.
Other settlers shunned our parents for their strange and secretive ways. This imposed exile perpetuated the incestuous practice that led to my and my brother's abominable conception.
My brother and I bore not only the ethnic distinctions of our parents’ homeland, but their retro-miscegenation seemed to sharpen those distinctions to monstrous effect. It was more than mere deformity; it was as though the inbreeding were returning our bloodline to a more complete state. After a singularly harsh winter that claimed the lives of our immediate progenitors, my brother and I dined on the withered flesh of our starved parents’ remains, and we underwent a metamorphosis which I can only describe as structurally contemptible and expressively vile. Our distinctions sharpened razor keen, as did our awareness, and all who beheld and heard us felt as though their eyes were gouged and ears cut, although the pain was purely psychological.
We dwelt in a ramshackle hut encompassed by a shady copse of trees on an eye-shaped island in the Mississippi, just north of New Madrid. The Snake’s Eye, we called it. That sliver of forested tract was our provincial hideout, isolate but not desolate. It was from this forested observatory we spied the copious, roughly fabricated river rafts, modest vessels stuffed with goods and wares bound for trade in the southern settlements along that immense waterway. The raftsmen delivering their northern abundances feared storms, vagrant Chickasaw, crocodiles, river serpents, and jutting rocks hidden by the muddy flow. Had they known the intentions of the twin recluses sidling through the nigh foliage, they would have feared myself and my brother, moreover.
It took years to perfect our methods. Our juvenile murders had been careless, shambolic struggles with little spoils to show. We would carve up a lone settler, or sometimes a small family, and bear their belongings to the New Madrid trading posts in exchange for supplies we needed. Eventually it became burdensome and hazardous, for there was always the looming possibility that our spoils might be recognized as the property of some known person dwelling not too far off in those vast woodlands. Such scenes of reckless slaughter, which I and my brother would invariably leave behind, could only be blamed on Chickasaw, or some other tribe, for so long. We feared no arm of law as much as personal revenge. In those rustic days, each man was his own justice and assassin.
River piracy was our best route to prosperity. The ones we slew no local would miss. The spoils we took were all utterly new to the region. Wisely and considerately, we chose our prey. My brother and I swam as swift and unnoticed as writhing water moccasins, with sharp knives in our mouths in place of fangs. Employing stealth, cunning, ruthless efficiency, and a preternatural strength we credited to our singular pedigree, we overtook the meager crews of these boats. With our knives we cut off their screams and lifeblood. We would then skin and dismember the corpses, tossing out the portions as playful offerings to the watery denizens of that river, but always keeping the finer cuts for ourselves. After unloading the loot, we would break up the raft and let the fragments spread about to the wide, murky flow, beyond the irksome notice of mankind. What goods we could not put to use we traded in the midst the scowling expressions we always encountered in New Madrid. What cared we for their scorn, so long as they accepted our trade?
New Madrid was the first town in Missouri, an embryonic city stillborn by false promise and cataclysm. Spain could not cultivate it, neither could Napoleonic France. It fell like an unwanted waif into the hands of the flourishing United States. It had sought to be what St. Louis later became. There were two hundred souls huddled in that cozy collection of box houses, steepled churches, and log cabins.
Though they originated from different cultural backgrounds, they were united in their passive disdain for the malformed twin outsiders who dwelt in a lair undisclosed to them.
To ease our solitude, my brother and I hoarded the personal effects of our victims. Our hut, though a derelict assemblage of canvas, driftwood, and boat fragments, contained a trove of ill-gained brick-a-brac. Knives, guns, jewelry of varying luster, an endless collection of hats and clothing, timepieces, ragdolls, and books. Oh, the books…
The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre, the various plays of Shakespeare, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; tomes such as these gave me such joy! Their pages, though often stained with blood, sated my societal longings. I likened the characters to real beings and drew out abstract friendships with them all. I was ever grateful to my late mother for teaching me to read and write. Aside from her tender flesh, it was the greatest gift a parent could impart.
My brother derived his amusement from books on arithmetic and the philosophical sciences. He would often tell me over our supper fires that numbers were living things, that they could breed with and consume each other, just as we were twins of twins. He said that by our eating those who had made us we had performed an inverse equation, a paradoxical reaction that separated us from not only normal society but from the world itself. We were zeros on the cusp of many mathematical results, and all the problems we caused others were part of a cosmic sum already calculated. Thus, we were free to do as we pleased, because none of it counted. Our accomplishments and failures were naught in the great chaotic scheme of things. While I found these theoretic ravings charming, I did not give them much thought until he acquired a copy of Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica. My brother learned of differential equations, and his mathematical fervor induced nigh constant vocal ponderings. I soon picked up this fervor but let it burn silently in my mind. While he reveled in the mysteries of modern academia, an idea came to me like a mad dream.
What if our bloodline was not yet elevated to its highest point? What if twins breeding twins, who then fed on their parents, was only the beginning in an aberrant evolutionary calculation? I resolved to slay and consume my brother, to find out where that junction of blood would take me. I wanted to feel his might and intellect coupled and conjoined with my own. I needed to understand completion. Had he been my sister, I very well may have chosen a less violent, more carnal path to sharpen the singularities.
But how to perform the murder? My brother was my absolute equal in strength and cunning. Though we differed in preference to certain subjects, we were still alike in understanding. Further, we often perceived the internal energies of each other’s cognitive and emotional states. I planned to cut his throat in mid-winter while he slept. We had consumed our parents during that inclement time of year, and a severed artery was more merciful than the chills and fever which had slain them. But my brother would not be truly dead; his bulk and mind and ambiance would merge with my own in a solemn, cannibalistic debauch. The calculation would be completed, so help my soul.
In preparation for the oncoming winter, we lined the inside of our shanty with dozens of buffalo pelts we had procured from our latest victims. With dozens more to spare, we made what was to be our final trip to New Madrid. In exch
ange for those stiff, woolly hides, we gained the supplies needed for that long, frozen season when few rafts braved the river’s treacherous currents. Of these supplies, my brother got for himself an inordinate amount of paper and ink for his eldritch equations and numerical meanderings.
As the month of November grew taciturn to the needs of living things, my brother whittled away at the mysteries of existence with his pen. Utilizing the celestial patterns of gibbous moons, the extra-dimensional suggestions of non-Euclidean geometry, and the rhythms of the ancient Egyptian calendar, he determined that all matter, living or inanimate, had a number. This number was the object’s true name, its metaphysical essence. To know this number meant one could add to it, subtract from it, divide and multiply it. One could, in theory, create many loaves of bread from a few. Or add extra properties to water to create wine. Recalculate lead into gold. This apparent discovery had both our minds afire, and we engaged in several intercourses of ideas on how to apply this knowledge. These numerical titles had their own vocal components, arcane syllables unutterable by human mouths. But my brother and I had already transcended humanity. Perhaps we had never been human at all. I decided to aid my brother in his machinations and to put off slaying him until we’d found the answer. Together we penned a book’s worth of formulae while subsisting on the salted meats of fish, swine, and man. We shunned the winter in our hermetic squalor, never leaving our shanty unless need arose.
It was not until we combined the science of longitude and latitude with the charting styles of astronomy that he determined the larger an object’s mass, the simpler its true name would be. The whole of the Earth was called Aoteitr-Jalrist. The North American continent, as well as Greenland, was called Feplero-Onoatsb. Because the States and Territories of our land were abstract constructs of man, they had no true names. But the true name of the Ozark Hills was Pirmpuy-Hlunida, and the mighty Mississippi River was Mnuefh-Hexentl. We now knew these names and their precise pronunciations. In them we felt a power that teased our senses, as though our eyes were shut to a great and wondrous light, as though our ears were stopped to a great concert of pipes and fiddles. On our tongues we tasted the flesh of gods, yet we lacked the teeth to bite and chew it. We were, to our dismay and choking misery, too small to call upon these names, to call upon these masses to do our bidding.
Late on the night of December 16th, 1811, I realized what I had to do. I had to slay my twin, drink his blood, and eat his body. Thereby would I gain the cosmic personage necessary to call the names. I would achieve the pinnacle of my family’s evolution and transcend perhaps the flesh itself.
Silently, I arose from my sleeping mat, crawling out from the mess of blankets and furs. With knife in hand, I approached my brother’s sleeping place, only to find the space vacant. I was alone in the shanty.
Why I felt a foul and perilous dread, I did not yet know. In that ebon silence my ears caught wind of his voice, shouting, echoing queer phrases across the river. Clambering from our enclosure, I ran to the sound, slipping through the skeletal trees of our island. I saw my brother standing on the bank, facing the ice-covered river. Above us shone the stars and moon in eerie clarity, their light illuminating the snow-capped land. My brother held out several sheets of paper scrawled with forumlae I did not recognize, and in his vigorous voice, he called out the arcane numbers, Saciado-Genilgl-Vasmeoc-Edneang!
Everything rippled. The frozen river shattered and sloshed. The world shook, cracked, and screamed. Trees fell like men dying of fright. All was tumult and confusion. I fell. Hit the ground. And the ground hit me back again and again. Minutes passed like eons as the din burst my mind with terror. Helpless. The shaking. The shaking. The shaking. It was incredible. For the first time ever, I lost all faculty of mind and body; so great was the earthquake that horrific night.
When it finally stopped, I looked to see a landscape I did not recognize. Every tree had uprooted in the upheaval and now lay in heaps, twisted and broken. All the ground was now loose and soft, naught but pliant and dejected loam. And the river…oh the river! That once docile giant was now a beast breaking free in all directions. The land itself had split open across and through the vast water, creating waterfalls and dry beds and backward insinuations. Then, something emerged from that riven space, as though from under the earth and out from the water. It took form by taking forms from around it, absorbing the fractured elements of the landscape. It converged into a walking bulk that tore screams from my throat and sweat from my skin. This towering dread waded through the colliding waves like a child through a blathering stream. Its head and body were that of a catfish with countless barbels twitching and wriggling from the corners of its repulsive mouth. Its stagnant eyes drank the light of a thousand stars and vomited that same light in vile rays of colors ill-conceived. It shuffled on the long, thin legs of a cadaverous blue heron. Its arms, if one were to call them arms, were two prodigious trees, dead as driftwood, but alive with inexplicable motion. The fanning branches flexed and bent like hundreds of fingers and elbows. The nightmare breathed and screeched a hideous moan that scattered blades of clamor through the air.
Then the behemoth's emanating gaze fell and fixed upon our island, and I surrendered any notion of salvation. As it lumbered in my direction, I buried my face in the discordant earth and quivered with sobs. I heard its spindly legs cut through the upset river.
swwwoooosssshhhh……… swwwoooosssshhhh ……
SWWOOOOSSSSHHHH………SWWWOOOOOSSSHHHH……
Squirming in my panic, I gazed up for what I thought was the last time. It loomed over our island, and I realized just how small and pathetic a thing I was, no more than a twig afloat the great river of Time. This monster, this presence, was more rooted in existential relevance than I could ever dare fathom. It cast those ghastly optical beams downward to a single point on the bank: my brother.
My twin brother stood with arms and face raised in exaltation, his cries of mad jubilation barely audible over the sound of confused rill around us. At his feet, a mass of papers muddy and scattered.
“I called, and you came!” he cried. “I called, and you came! Oh, Countless Hoary Soul of the River! I could not summon you in full, but you arrived as a fractional avatar! Saciado-Genilgl-Vasmeoc-Edneang! The numerals do not lie!”
And as he cackled and screamed and leaped in victorious ecstasy, I saw the Soul of the River stoop down to take up my brother in its writhing mass of barbels. As those slithering marine antennae coiled about and caressed my still-laughing sibling, my brother’s flesh and bones softened into an umbral jelly, then became a pitch black body of smoke. As the towering fiend inhaled the inky cloud into its sickening maw, all fear left me, and I stood screaming with audacious ire.
“Mine! He was mine to eat, you damned devil! Give him back!”
Even as the abominable giant stood back up, even as it walked away in that colossal gait and disappeared back into the fractured stream, I screamed and cursed and implored it to return my other half until my voice and mind cracked beyond repair.
When I awoke the next morning, half frozen and delirious, I found in my frostbitten fists the crumpled papers my brother had left behind. I had no memory of crawling to that spot and snatching them up. The sheets were muddy, disordered, and scrawled with a complex equation I could not identify. Why he had kept it to himself, I did not know. Too weary to shiver, too broken to think, I made my way through a labyrinth of shattered trees only to find our hut missing along with the other half of the island on which it had stood. The river had consumed my family and home.
Was it rage that motivated the totemic beast? Did my brother disturb its eons-long slumber? Was it merely a higher lifeform preying on a lesser animal, no different than a panther eating a field mouse? Or did it absorb my brother on some metaphysical level, adding his numerical value to itself, just as I had planned to do? Was I even capable of understanding the impulses of a being so great and vast and terrible? Even if my mind were not as shattered as the country
about me, even though I am evil by all rules of men, I do not think I could comprehend such dominant malevolence.
Desperate for food and shelter, I made my way to New Madrid. The budding town was in shambles. All the box houses, steepled churches, and log cabins were now splintered mockeries of buildings, and most of the people there crushed within them. The few survivors, recognizing me and seeing I was alone without my twin, took pity on me and counted me in as one of their wretched collective. Together, we sought out survivors, collected food, and assembled makeshift shelters from the fragmented debris of the tumbled edifices. Over the next few days, I watched them mourn by firelight the loss of their loved ones and kin. How could they know my loss? To never achieve that cosmic level of awareness that is beyond the aspirations of priests and medicine men?
Nightly, the Soul of the River interloped my mind and plodded through the pools of my dreams, its stilt-like avian legs supporting that fishy body and head, its tree-arms spread out to scrape the insides of my skull. Those many whisker-like barbels writhing about and licking, tasting my very thoughts. My very thoughts…
Over the subsequent months, I put forth all my mental effort into solving the puzzle of my brother’s calculation. I tried to call forth that sinister god, that it might change me into black smoke and draw me into its malefic frame, to merge with both it and my brother. I do not know what wonders or dreads await such an annexation, but it must be done. I must follow my twin into a new womb…or a very old tomb.
Many years have passed since then. And many more earthquakes have I brought about in secret rites involving the many hidden names of numbers. Yet I fear that my calculations are not the same as my brother’s, for the river god never comes when called. I can call forth only the repeated destruction of this remote river land. Who knows how many thousands have perished from this toil?
I am old now, settled down with a family in a warm cabin overlooking the grand Mississippi. This region must be tamed, after all. I married a plump and robust Hessian lady who bore me a boy and girl, twins, of course. One Christmas night, when the children were old and hungry enough, I slew their mother for a festive consummation of the flesh. I then oversaw their carnal consummation of the flesh, watching them bond as Shamhat had bonded with Enkidu. They are my legacy, and I have instructed them in the arcane arithmetic that my brother and I discovered. Though I may die and my children consume me, though my family tree may branch out over the centuries, we will find the correct equation to call forth that walking horror. We will stand with arms and faces raised, let ourselves be taken up, and follow after our kindred to parts unknown.
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