by Joe Hart
Eric lurched into the storm, not bothering to shut the door behind him. He could see George smiling in the gloom through the blowing rain. Eric stumbled halfway to the older man and nearly fell into a large mud puddle, but somehow he remained standing. With a few more shaky steps, he reached the door and stood swaying in the storm’s fury as another lightning flash lit up the yard.
George turned, and with surprising ease for a man his age, threw the overhead door up and stepped inside.
Eric followed him into the garage and heard plastic rustling under his feet as soon as he stepped onto the concrete floor of the building. Dizziness suddenly overtook him and he began to sway.
George seemed to know exactly what Eric needed. He guided him several steps inside the dark structure and sat him down against a plastic-covered wall. “Here you go, my boy, sit down. You need to rest.”
Eric nodded and was about to turn and ask the older man what he needed help with in the garage when he felt a cold snap of steel on his wrist. Eric pulled his arm close to his face and tried to make sense of what he was seeing through the fog of his mind and the darkness of the day.
A bright steel manacle was attached to his wrist as if it had grown there. The steel was highly polished, and a thick chain was connected to one end by what seemed to be amateur welding. The chain led up to his left several feet and was fastened by more welding to a heavy steel bracket that was bolted to the wall.
“Fifty-two years drinking that water. That’s a long time to have things inside you that don’t belong. Long time to have whatever came out of those bodies next door sliding down your throat,” George said, busily smoothing something out on the floor around Eric.
After a few moments, Eric realized it was a heavy-duty plastic tarp, the kind normally seen when a painter covers the floor of an area he doesn’t want paint dropping onto. The plastic was all around Eric, even up the walls, and it stretched thirty feet off into the darkness. A large shape loomed at the front of the garage, and after a few more seconds, he realized it was an old tow truck.
“Turns out we lived here long enough for it to affect us. Margie was scared at first, since she started to change faster than me. She’s smaller, so I suppose it worked on her quicker. But after a while we realized it wasn’t something to be afraid of. We got stronger and had more energy. When you get to be eighty, you shouldn’t have more energy, not the kind we both felt.” George talked as he delicately arranged the plastic, almost as if it was a ritual. Water dripped from the man’s soaked gray hair.
“I realized a few months back that regular food wasn’t going to work. Margie got sick from it, couldn’t hold it down. I tried everything. Cooking meat, not cooking it. Nothing seemed to work. It was an accident that we stumbled upon the answer. I had hired a PCA from Home Solutions to help out around the place since Margie didn’t stay in the house anymore. He came over for a few hours every week. Tom was his name. One day he was helping me clean up the yard after a storm, and all of a sudden Margie was there. She came out of the woods and took him down, and God, it scared me how she ate. She ate him down to the bones right in front of me. My wife of fifty-five years, on the ground snappin’ meat and sinew off of this poor guy in our backyard. He didn’t even have time to make a sound.”
George finally finished arranging the plastic to his liking. He looked out across the rain-swept yard.
“After that, I realized it was the only way to keep her healthy. She thrived after she fed, got stronger and more alive.” He paused and turned to face Eric where he sat on the floor with one hand hanging above shoulder level in the steel manacle. “I don’t think I could live without her. She’s the only woman I ever loved.”
“You killed Julie too, didn’t you?” Eric asked through tears that were beginning to stream down his face. Whatever had been in the coffee was wearing off, and his thoughts had begun to line up correctly.
George sighed and nodded. “Hated to do it too. She was a sweet girl. Worked out okay though. She told me two weeks ago that her boyfriend would be out of town for a bit, so last week she stopped by, and well …” George shrugged his shoulders.
“George, I don’t know what happened to your wife, but we can get you some help. There’s people I work with, people that would be willing to help you and talk to you about all this. Please, unchain me and we can help you.”
George began to unbutton his soaked flannel shirt from the bottom up. Each button he undid with deliberate, careful slowness while he spoke.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Most people wouldn’t. I don’t blame you, son. Normally have to show them, then they believe. As far as I’m concerned, we found a fountain of youth out here. That water in our well is giving both of us life, and that I can’t deny.” With a slight flourish, George opened the faded flannel shirt and turned so that the dim light of the afternoon shone on his chest.
For a moment Eric couldn’t understand what he was seeing. The rational part of his brain clashed with the signals that were sent by his eyes. Radiating out from the center of the other man’s chest was knurled, gray-looking skin that looked utterly dead. There were small folds in the flesh here and there, and the man’s ribs were beginning to stick out, as if the skin was tightening around him. The edges of the dead skin faded into more normal and healthy-looking dermis, but for all Eric could tell, it looked as though George was becoming a corpse from the inside out.
Eric screamed a short cry of revulsion and tried to scramble away, but the chain attached to his wrist held fast. He yanked and strained as hard as he could against the tether, but the bolts in the wall firmly held the base plate.
Exhausted, he slipped back down to a sitting position and stared at the gray-haired man, who was watching him intently.
“You won’t get away with this. I have a mother and father. I have friends. My supervisor knows I’m here. They’ll come looking for me,” Eric said.
“I’m sure you do, son, and they probably will, but that’s what I have my old truck over there for. There’s so many deep swamps off of old logging roads around here, a car or truck like yours can get lost pretty easily out there. And no one’s going to believe a frail, eighty-year-old man could overpower a young healthy guy like yourself.” Thunder punctuated the end of George’s sentence like an exclamation point.
Another sound rose as the thunder faded. It sounded like a man groaning, but then trailed off into a loud hissing that slowly faded in the patter of the rain beating the ground outside.
“Ah, my Margie’s coming,” George said, as he turned and watched the pine trees intently.
Eric scanned the tree line for a moment and then began looking for some way to escape. He frantically searched the immediate area for a tool or anything that would help him. There was nothing. The area around the plastic was bare and clean. He was trying to see if the old man was within striking distance of his feet when movement near the tree line caught his eye.
A dark shadow crept beneath the low boughs of the swaying pines. It flitted from tree to tree as it moved closer and closer to the yard. Eric squinted, attempting to peer through the haze of rain to see what it was, when suddenly it stalked stealthily out into the open.
And he no longer wished to see it.
Margie was still dressed in a ragged housecoat that hung below her bent and misshapen knees. Her dark hair swung in lank tendrils that dripped water in streams to the ground around her. Unnaturally long arms dangled at her sides. Her fingers had also elongated and, to Eric’s horror, ended in razor-sharp tips. Her skin was the same shade of gray as her husband’s chest, except it seemed her entire body was covered with the corpse-like tissue.
But above all, her face was the most horrifying. Her eyes were no longer human, or even remotely so. They were gray, without pupils, and wide like some sort of creature that had spent its entire life at the bottom of an ocean trench, miles from sunlight even on the brightest day. Her nose had sunk and disappeared into a small hole about the size of a dime. The hole sniffe
d and huffed the air as if she was trying to smell him.
And her mouth was what finally made Eric’s bladder release onto the plastic-covered garage floor. It was an open slash of ragged skin. Her teeth protruded obscenely from between the ruined lips, two rows of blunt and sharp alike. She opened her maw to let out the unearthly groan again, and began to travel more quickly toward the open garage door.
She moved with greater agility than Eric would’ve guessed, more like an animal than an eighty-year-old woman. She bent her already-crooked back lower to the ground and suddenly began running on all fours toward Eric, who scrambled back as far as his chain would allow.
“Love does funny things to you, son. You can see that now,” George said, stepping well out of the doorway and allowing his wife to lunge through.
Eric’s final scream began and ended within another blast of thunder, and the storm raged on.
THE UNFAMILIAR
David opened his eyes and stared at the slate-gray ground that his cheek and mouth were pressed into. The ground appeared to be clay, soft and dark. Rain pattered gently on his back and on the ground, splashing up and wetting his face. For a moment he thought he was dreaming. Where was he? Why was he lying in the mud and getting rained on?
He tried to sit up and realized he was very weak. His arms shook and trembled as they strained to lift his head and neck out of the wet clay. For a few harrowing seconds, he thought he would lose the battle and his face would smash back down into the mud. But after a bit of struggling, he got his arms to lock and slid his legs, which were numb and wet, underneath him so that he was in an awkward sitting position.
Instantly, pain pounded the back of his head. His eyes clenched shut from the massive waves of agony that thudded with each beat of his heart. He slowly felt around the back of his head with one hand until he found a lump rising from his scalp. He felt as if he had been hit with a hammer. After a moment of prodding the tender spot, he returned his hand to the ground to steady himself.
His dark hair hung over his forehead, nearly into his eyes, and he noticed chunks of clay clung to it in several places. He smoothed it back from his face, letting the clay act as some sort of organic hair gel. Nausea briefly swirled around his stomach like an oiled eel and then slowly dissipated. His long-sleeve button-down dress shirt was stuck to his skin, and his dark khakis were even darker now that they were soaked and covered in the dank clay.
Where the fuck am I? he thought, as he looked around. His eyes had trouble focusing on anything that was more than a few feet away, but after a moment his vision began to clear.
He was sitting on the edge of a large pond in the middle of a plain. The pond was an almost perfect circle as far as he could tell and nearly fifty yards in diameter. The water was a dark gray near the edges and faded to an inky black toward the middle. Raindrops dimpled the water’s surface as if miniature bombs were being dropped from unseen planes. David looked to his left and gazed at the surrounding area, trying to get a feel for where he was. All of the ground seemed to be made up of the dark gray clay that he was sitting on. A low hill slowly rose in the distance, and what appeared to be a cut straw field began at its base.
As he repositioned his right hand to better support himself, his fingers touched something furry and wet. David yanked his hand back quickly and looked down into the eye of a dead deer that was sprawled out directly behind him.
“Oh fuck!” he yelled, sliding away from the dead animal.
How had he not noticed that thing lying right behind him? The deer’s head was twisted at an odd angle, and one of its ears was missing at the base of its skull. A bloody hole ran straight down into its head. A blackened tongue hung out of its mouth, as if its last thought had been to get a drink from the pond that was nearby.
David’s breathing began to slow as he recovered from the shock of seeing the carcass so close to him. As his mind’s erratic revolutions calmed into manageable thoughts, images bloomed in his aching head. A dark road stretched before him. Yellow lines flashed by the sides of a car. His car. It was raining, and the windshield wipers swished back and forth, flipping the rain to either side only to have more take its place. The memories abruptly ended there. David racked his brain to pull more images into view, but no matter how hard he tried, the memories dissolved like paint under turpentine.
He decided to try to stand so he could see if his legs would hold him up. I have to get out of here, he thought, as he struggled in the slippery mud near the water’s edge. After several seconds he gained his balance and stood. A new rush of pain battered the rear of his skull like a bell being tolled deep within, but then it slowly receded into a more bearable ache. David turned in a circle, surveying his surroundings once again. There wasn’t much to see besides the pond and the dead deer.
A black protrusion caught his eye as he glanced to his right, over the animal’s corpse that lay at his feet. It looked like the top of a tree or building, poking over the rise of the nearest hill which was almost a hundred yards away. After another minute of searching, David decided that the building or tree or whatever it was seemed to be his best bet.
He began to walk toward the hill, his steps unsteady at first, but gradually his strength returned to him. It took him nearly five minutes to walk the short distance up the slight rise to gaze across the barren plains. When he reached the top of the hill, he could see the object no better. It seemed to be some distance away and tucked behind a fairly large mound in the distance. In every direction there was nothing to be seen but gray rolling hills, some speckled with the cut straw patches he had spotted in the other direction.
Well, I have no idea where I am or where I’m going, but anywhere’s better than here, he thought. David carefully made his way down the other side of the slope. The clay that had plastered his face and hair had washed away. His clothes clung to him like a second skin, and still the rain dropped lightly onto the landscape.
For a few minutes after David had vanished on the other side of the hill, everything remained still. Then suddenly the water roiled in the middle of the pond. The surface, which had been calm but for the rain battering it, became a whirlpool of motion. A large black tentacle slithered out of the depths near the shoreline. The tentacle was several inches wide at its tip and nearly a foot in diameter where it disappeared under the small waves. Suckers coated the underside of the tendril every six inches. Each sucker was as wide as a coffee saucer and flexed as though it was tasting the air. The middle of the sucker housed a sharp, bony barb that curled like a hook.
The tentacle twisted and turned in the air as it approached the shoreline. It dipped and dabbed at a few rocks near the edge of the water until it finally touched the snout of the deer carcass. The tendril pulled back a few feet and quickly flicked to and fro. It whipped forward and wrapped the deer up in a quick flipping motion. The barbs dug in, and the tentacle constricted around the deer’s frame. In one motion the tendril retracted and sucked the animal’s body into the middle of the inky pool. Waves lapped up on the shore for several minutes, and then all was calm once again. Nothing moved except the rain.
David walked for some time. The rain didn’t let up. The ground stayed the same consistency, a blend of the gray clay and mud that he had woken in. He kept the black structure in sight as he walked over the small hills. The formation seemed to be situated in a deeper valley, and only its top remained visible in the distance.
David retraced his memories again, trying to sneak up on something that would clue him in to where he was and why he was here. As he searched, an image surfaced in his mind’s eye. Corn. Rows and rows of corn lined the highway he had been traveling. The brown stalks had been twisting and turning in the wind and rain that was raging outside his car. So he was somewhere in the Midwest. He stopped for a moment and looked around. This didn’t look like any part of the Midwest he’d ever seen before.
His vision locked on to something on a nearby hill, and he blinked. For a moment it looked as if there was a figure stand
ing there, silhouetted against the darkened sky. When David looked again, the shape was gone. He rubbed his eyes as a new wave of pain rippled through his skull.
“I gotta get to a doctor,” he said to himself. Water leaked from the legs of his soaked khakis and dripped to the sodden ground around his shoes. He began walking again, but every so often he glanced to his right or left, surveying the nearby hills. A tickling sensation of being watched needled at his brain.
After nearly an hour of walking, he was able to make out the top of the structure he had spotted earlier: it was a tree. He could see the black branches running in different directions. Each limb ended in a point, and judging from the size of the uppermost branches that he could see, the tree looked to be extremely large, possibly over a hundred feet tall if the valley on the other side of the hill was as deep as he thought it was.
David stopped and stared at the hill that ran the side of the valley in front of him. What he had initially thought were stones layered into the gray soil at the base of the hill were beginning to come into focus. Details began to fall into place and after a moment of staring at the stones, David realized what he was looking at.
Skulls lined the steep bank of the hill that ran up in front of him. Their polished bone foreheads stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding gray soil. Rain dripped down through the rows upon rows of skulls and pooled at the base of the hill. The empty eye sockets gaped and glared at David accusingly.
“Holy shit,” he said aloud. The rain dampened his words and washed them away.
There had to be a thousand skulls entrenched in the side of the rise, and just the fronts of them were visible. It was like a psycho’s mosaic. David surveyed the surrounding landscape again, almost expecting the figure to be watching him from somewhere nearby. For a few heartbeats, he just stood there in the rain, a chill running down the length of his spine. Where the hell am I? he thought for the second time since awakening. He felt the urge to run pulling at the middle of his stomach. He looked over the hill at the top of the tree and decided he needed to reach it for some reason. He had come this far, and there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.