The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

In any case, this poor bastard had not been as lucky as he.

  There was nothing to be salvaged here. He could do no more than move on, but he felt a little goodwill toward the dead man because he didn’t pose a threat to him, so he gave the burnt pilot a little salute before he slipped past the capsule into the forested depths ahead.

  He was following a hum. He had noticed it a little while ago. Not so much an audible hum, as a deep bass resonance in his chest. It only deepened the further he went on, growing to an almost uncomfortable inner vibration. It reminded him of the vibration he had felt while sheltering in the halved boulder, but more intense.

  The hum led him to a great clearing, larger than anything he had thus far encountered and floored with long, blondish grass. He hung back at its edge, though, hiding himself behind a tree, as he gazed in fear and wonder at the source of the heavy vibration quivering through him. A structure had been built within the field, or maybe this spot of land has originally been cleared of trees to accommodate it.

  It was a pyramid, towering imposingly against the vivid blue sky. It called forth images of a series of famous pyramids in a desert of his home world, but he didn’t know if this one was quite as tall as those, and the angles of its sides seemed more steep. Also, rather than being composed of millions of blocks of limestone, this structure appeared to be carved from one titanic mass of coal-black matter, its surfaces oddly textured, giving the impression of black clay covered in the thumbprints of some giant that had molded it.

  As he stared at the black pyramid, he realized another of those odd paralyzing spells had come over him. He couldn’t will himself to move the hand he had placed on the tree trunk. He wasn’t even sure if he was drawing breath into his lungs. He could not blink, and he was peripherally aware that mitten-shaped fallen leaves were floating up from the ground around him, spiraling upward and reattaching themselves to branches overhead.

  The vibration inside him suddenly spiked to an internalized earthquake, as the pyramid began floating upward off the grass it had crushed flat.

  Beneath it, a slowly writhing tangle of sinuous black appendages – like colossal tentacles – were revealed, rooted to the hovering pyramid’s base. They coiled ponderously as the looming structure rose higher, blotting out much of the beautiful sky like some triangular-shaped heavenly body.

  Higher it rose, higher, until it seemed as far above the world as an airplane. Then, the pyramid moved laterally…until finally it passed beyond his range of sight and was gone, leaving that open circle of blue sky marred only by an innocuous fleet of white clouds.

  As the thing had ascended, the vibration had gradually weakened again, tapering off and then disappearing altogether as the pyramid was lost from sight. When that happened, he was released from his paralysis. He dropped to his knees and vomited.

  The leaves had stopped floating in reverse.

  When he was able to stand again, he turned back toward his camp, and rested in his tent until his organs no longer felt shaken and poisoned by the vibration that had filled him.

  He stayed on at the camp he’d discovered, but he never let down his guard. He found a less plentiful, smaller and white variety of mushroom, and after risking a tentative bite established that it was edible, too. Though he never encountered any higher animals such as squirrels, birds, or even insects, he learned that if he dug down into the black soil he could easily uncover good-sized earthworms. And it rained often enough that water was no longer a concern. He could even spare it to wash himself occasionally.

  He thought to shave by scraping his face with the blade of his multi-tool, but why should he shave? For whom? He became bearded.

  Then one afternoon, after returning from foraging with his helmet full of mushrooms and squirming worms, he discovered two men at his camp. He dropped the helmet and drew his gun from his waistband.

  One man, with long graying hair and a thick beard like a wild man, his closefitting long-sleeved shirt and long johns dark with grime, lay on his back with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, blood streaming thickly down the sides of his face. He lay just outside the tent, having partially fallen across the fire pit, which was currently only full of ashes.

  The other man’s clothing was similar but whiter, his hair short and face clean-shaven. He sat with his legs splayed out and his back propped against a tree trunk. In his hand was the gun with which he had killed the older man. A makeshift spear, formed from a long straight branch with a sharpened tip, had been thrust into the front of his neck, a good foot of it having emerged out the back. Blood had saturated the front of his shirt and pooled in his lap. The young man’s face was almost gray, almost lifeless, and yet he recognized that face. Though he had no mirror in which to see himself, and had never returned to his own capsule where he might find reflective surfaces, he knew that this man possessed the same face he did.

  Though his eyes were going glassy, the young man became aware of him and started to raise his pistol from the ground. He pointed his own gun, which he had not fired up until now, and pulled the trigger once. There was a loud cracking report that rolled off between the trees in all directions. With a bullet through its forehead and the back of its skull gaping, the young man’s head slumped heavily.

  He went over to the older man and stood over him. Despite the long graying hair and wild beard, and the wrinkles and ingrained grime, he saw that this man possessed his face, as well.

  He figured the two men had independently thought to raid or acquire his camp. The old man had actually already stolen all his stored mushrooms and placed them into a crude sack made from parachute material. The only other thing of value belonging to the old man was the spear, and this he tugged out of the young man’s body. The young man had more to offer, though. He wore a backpack full of supplies, the tube of food paste only half empty. And now he had two pistols.

  He made the decision to only eat the young man.

  He had no way of preserving meat, and the young man was, well, younger and cleaner, his flesh more full. So he dragged the old man far enough away into the woods that the decomposition shouldn’t bother him, and awkwardly dug a shallow grave with the spear and his hands. In the process he exposed a bounty of worms.

  He kept the young man’s clothes as a spare set, then hung the nude body upside-down from a tree branch somewhat distant from his camp, using a section of parachute line to bind the ankles. Then he cut the man’s already damaged throat with his multi-tool’s blade to drain out as much blood as he could. He decided not to save and drink the blood.

  When he felt he had emptied a sufficient amount of blood, he cut the body down and sliced thick steaks from the thighs and buttocks. Having taken all he felt he could eat before the meat started to go bad, he dragged the body off into the woods to bury it beside the body of the older version of themselves.

  Now, he knew why the other men who haunted these endless autumnal woods feared and avoided each other.

  Eating the cooked and delicious meat that evening in front of his snapping campfire, he didn’t feel bad for the dead man at all. Had it been someone else he believed he would have, but he had only harmed himself.

  He had never seen one of the titan pyramid creatures set down in the field again, but he sometimes ventured there to have a view of the sky, and he would see one or more of them gliding past, piercing slowly through the clouds. At such a distance their vibrations were bearable. It was his feeling that, either intentionally or accidentally, these creatures were responsible for disrupting time, but of course he knew too little to prove that.

  Then one day, when his hair and beard had grown long, during a visit to the great clearing he saw more than just a pair of distant black pyramids drifting high above.

  As he was gazing up and shielding his eyes against a sun that he now knew to be an alien star, watching the pyramids and feeling their tuning fork murmur inside his heart, the sky flickered as if he had blinked several times, but he hadn’t. For just a moment, he was looking up in
to a night sky, infinitely black and strewn with countless stars glittering like pulverized glass. Then it was day again, but the blue sky was now full of new objects that seemed to have taken the place of the many stars.

  They were brightly white space capsules, hanging from the wide bells of blue parachutes and descending gracefully, none of them having burned in the atmosphere. He had no idea how many. From where he stood he would guess scores of them. Maybe a hundred. Maybe more, out of his range of seeing.

  All of them, he had no doubt, stenciled with the letters that spelled UCSS FETCH.

  The sight made him afraid. If two men had discovered his camp at the same time, others would no doubt be coming soon enough. He would need a more secure shelter, after all, but where could he be truly safe from himself?

  He supposed he shouldn’t be afraid…afraid of himself. If he was killed, he would still live on.

  There would come even more capsules after these – he knew it.

  More and more. Always falling.

  – With thanks to Nick Gucker for his artistic inspiration

  About the Author

  Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown and Ghosts of Punktown, and the novels Deadstock and Blue War. Thomas's other books include the short story collections Worship The Night, Thirteen Specimens, and Unholy Dimensions, and the novels Letters From Hades, Boneland, and Subject 11. His stories have been selected for inclusion in The Year’s Best Horror Stories (Editor, Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction (Editor, Laird Barron). Though his work is often inspired by his travels in Viet Nam, Thomas makes his home in Massachusetts.

  Painting by Nicolas Huck.

  ALSO FROM

  LOVECRAFT EZINE PRESS

  Whispers, by Kristin Dearborn

  Nightmare’s Disciple, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Autumn Cthulhu, edited by Mike Davis

  The Lurking Chronology, by Pete Rawlik

  The Sea of Ash, by Scott Thomas

  The King in Yellow Tales volume I, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Copyright Jeffrey Thomas 2017

  Front Cover by Nick Gucker

  Graphic Design by Steve Santiago and Kenneth W. Cain

  Published by Lovecraft eZine Press

  Formatting by Kenneth W. Cain

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. No part of this ebook may be re-sold, given away, lent, or reproduced to other parties by any means. Reviewers may quote small excerpts for their purposes without expressed permission by the author. If you would like to share this book with others, please consider purchasing or gifting additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not obtain it by legal means, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy for yourself. The author appreciates your effort to support their endeavors.

  Jar of Mist first appeared in The Lovecraft eZine #28, 2013.

  The Dogs first appeared in the anthology The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, April Moon Books, 2014.

  Ghosts in Amber first appeared as a limited edition chapbook of 100 copies from Dim Shores, 2015.

  The Prosthesis first appeared in the anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Miskatonic River Press, 2013.

  The Dark Cell first appeared in the anthology Edge of Sundown, Chaosium, 2015.

  Snake Wine first appeared in the anthology The Children of Old Leech, Word Horde, 2014.

  The Spectators first appeared as an individual story from Darkside Digital, 2010.

  Bad Reception first appeared in the anthology Atomic-Age Cthulhu, Chaosium, 2015.

  Sunset in Megalopolis first appeared in the publication Strange Aeons #13, 2014.

  Portents of Past Futures first appeared in the anthology In Heaven, Everything is Fine, Eraserhead Press, 2013.

  Those Above first appeared in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu, Chaosium, 2014.

  The Individual in Question first appeared in the chapbook The Doom That Came to Providence, LASC Press, 2015.

  The Red Machine first appeared in the chapbook Black Walls, Red Glass, Marietta Publishing, 1997.

  The Endless Fall is original to this collection.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Jar of Mist

  The Dogs

  Ghosts in Amber

  The Prosthesis

  The Dark Cell

  Snake Wine

  The Spectators

  Bad Reception

  Sunset in Megalopolis

  Portents of Past Futures

  Those Above

  The Individual in Question

  The Red Machine

  The Endless Fall