He felt the table do terrible things to his lower back, and he almost was knocked unconscious by the plates and utensils that impacted the back of his head. He clawed desperately to regain his feet, and his right hand closed around the handle of a steak knife.
A second's hope brought him to his feet in a tiny act of defiance. He slashed out blindly, and for just a second, he had hope, as he felt the resistance of the knife slashing through human tissue and a roar of pain from Crawford. Just for a second, he had hope until the grip on his collar returned, and the redness and the darkness became a cycle of pain.
It seemed like hours that the pain went on, and it may have been as long as a minute. Oscar resigned himself to the belief that the pain would go on forever when suddenly, there was a lull. It took a moment for him to focus on possible reasons why Crawford had stopped. It came to him as a sense of relief the reason, when from the Living Room, he heard the commotions of several people putting their packages down, and the sardonic sound of Jonny calling out, "Did you miss us? Where are you, Oscar?"
Oscar managed to strangle out "HELP!" Crawford dropped his grip on Oscar, and rushed out of the back door, just as Jonny and Ian came through the Kitchen door. They ran to Oscar's side and tried to assess the situation, while also calling out to the other members of the group.
"What happened, Oscar?" Freya asked.
"Crawford," Oscar replied in the one word answer that explained it all.
"Take care of him," Garret commanded. He dashed through the open back door and started in pursuit of the detective.
Garret glanced around and realized that Crawford must have parked down the street on the front side of the house. He dashed around the house, and quickly entered his car. Garret looked around himself before starting the car and caught a flash of Crawford's Impala turning the corner ahead. He started his car and gunned the engine into a squealing start.
For a moment, Crawford was apparently unaware that Garret was in pursuit. He was driving sedately through the foggy streets, confident that he had made his escape.
Garret decided to not enlighten Crawford that he was found out, and he tailed the detective far enough back that Crawford could not identify him as something other than an innocent driver. While he was tailing the detective, Garret's phone range, and he connected to Freya.
"We checked Oscar out," she said, "and it looks like he does not have life-threatening injuries. He likely has a concussion, and we want to take him to the hospital as soon as we can."
"Okay, wait until I return, and we will take him to the doctors," Garret said. "I don't know what the medical facilities are like now, and I don't want to risk any of you."
"Alright, we will be here when you get back," Freya agreed. They hung up, and Garret returned his attention to the pursuit, not a second too soon.
Crawford suddenly sped up and pulled ahead. He had obviously made Garret on his tail and was attempting to lose him. Garret dropped all pretenses to a clandestine tailing of Crawford, and he tromped the accelerator all the way to the floor.
In seconds, both cars were traveling at speeds that far outstripped the driver's ability to see the route ahead before crashing into whatever obstacles might be present. Miraculously, for a half a minute or so, both cars navigated the road successfully. Crawford led Garret on a wild chase, taking corners with barely enough traction to stay in control, and charging recklessly into the fog. It could not last.
Crawford was in the process of taking a squalling right turn at the corner of Euclid and Elm when a tire blew. His car skidded into a fire hydrant, and then ramped up on a concrete embankment, flipping the car and ending the chase.
Garret drove up close and stopped his car. He got out and slammed the door. He trudged over to the upturned car and kneeled down to peer in through the open driver's side glass. Crawford was inside, crumpled up in obvious pain, sitting on the upside down roof of the car.
Garret reached in and grabbed Crawford by the hair. He backed up, extracting the detective from the car by the hair, none too gently. The man he pulled out of the car was not in very good shape, but he appeared to be laughing. Just because he wanted to, Garret smashed the man's nose with his elbow.
Crawford cradled his nose with his right hand, the only hand that seemed still to be working normally. "You're not upset, are you?" Crawford asked.
Garret kicked him very much the way one would kick a football, in the only part of him that looked like said football, his head. Crawford fell back, his other minor pains forgotten.
"Do you have anything useful to say before I kill you for hurting my friend?" Garret asked. "Like for instance, who else is in on this plan you seem to be carrying out?"
Crawford laughed, and spit out some blood. "Who isn't in on the plan?" Crawford replied. "Everybody on Earth is changing, and soon they will all welcome the coming of the god. You will be all alone, for the brief time before the god steps on you."
"So where can I find some of the other people that are in on this plan?" Garret prompted. "I want to learn more about what is going to happen."
"You could always go to church," suggested Crawford. "When you want to know the plan of God, isn't church where you go?"
Garret thought about the comment about the church and realized that Crawford was taunting him. He believed that there was nothing that Garret could do to stop the Coming.
Garret suspected that Crawford was teasing him with a real location. Some of the Cultists must be at the church. There were only two churches in town so they would be easy to find.
"Don't worry," Crawford taunted. "It won't be a long wait before he comes."
Garret pulled his handgun from its holster and flicked off the safety. He pointed it at Crawford's head and pulled the trigger.
Garret was carrying a 45 caliber, so when he pulled the trigger, Crawford's eyes and most of his grin disappeared. He thought briefly about calling somebody, but then he realized that there was nobody left to call, and Crawford deserved to be left out to rot.
Garret re-holstered his gun and climbed back into his car. He carefully backed up and turned around. The agent made one quick stop, where he broke into a nearby hardware store to find a replacement front door for the house. After that, he drove sedately back to the house.
15 the hospital
Sunday 14, 2019@ 10:34 PM
Garret, Ian, and Freya were getting tired of hanging out at the hospital. They had brought Oscar in to get him checked out earlier in the day. In the Emergency Room, they had verified that he had a concussion, a diagnosis which has a prognosis of varying trauma levels.
Strangely enough, Jonny had volunteered to hang the new door in the front entrance of the house while they took Oscar to the hospital. He assured them that he was up to the task and that he would keep his handgun on him at all times until their return.
After almost three hours of the nursing staff ignoring Oscar, he finally merited a transfer to an urgent care bed from the emergency room. He suffered the hilarious but demeaning trip through the hospital elevator and floors to his assigned bed. Garret, Ian, and Freya stayed with him all the way.
In the emergency room, Garret had time on his hands, so he told the three of them about his resolution of the Crawford problem. Oscar had a good headache, but he still managed to muster a sense of satisfaction that Crawford was no longer in the picture.
Everything was going slower than usual at the hospital because well over half of their staff was no longer showing up for work. They were simply missing, and only a handful of them had bothered to call to explain why they would be absent. Garret suspected that many of them would no longer be in a fit shape to work if they had been touched by whatever this thing was that was in the town.
There was one period of excitement during their stay in the ER. A deer, with a full stag rack of antlers, walked through the emergency room automatic doors. Once in the ER, the deer became spooked and began wildly running back and forth, trying to find a way out, and causing plenty of damag
e.
After a couple of minutes of hysterically dashing about, seeking a way out, the deer saw the glint of headlights coming through the glass emergency doors, and it charged the doors frantically. The doors had only just detected the deer's forward movement, and began to open, when the deer crashed into and through the glass doors, shattering the thick glass. The collision of deer and door also left glass shards splattered around the doorway and a frightened and bloody deer just outside of the automatic doors. The deer staggered to its feet and ran out of sight with a sort of limping trot.
The nursing staff had assured the trio of watchers that they would only need to monitor Oscar overnight, in order to verify that Oscar was not going to descend into shock or seizures. In the morning, he would be free to go home, assuming that no negative symptoms manifested.
"It has been a long time since breakfast," Freya complained. "Is there any place to get food here?"
"I was here a couple of years ago," Ian replied, "and I remember that the cafeteria is in the basement. They should have pudding and other dessert-type things available."
"I need to take a walk, anyway," Garret decided. "I will go down there and pick us up some food. You guys stay here and watch Oscar. I don't trust this place that much."
After receiving acceptance nods from the other two, Garret stood up and took the short walk to the elevators. Pressing the big 'B' button, he descended into the depths of the hospital, and in a moment, he was at the basement level and only feet from the cafeteria.
When he walked into the room, it struck him how expressionless the faces of the three serving staff were, and he noticed that they appeared to almost move in lock step to each other. In the middle of taking the order from the person ahead of him in line, the person receiving the order abruptly walked off and back into the kitchen area, and another staff member took the first one's place. With no hesitation at all, the second staff member resumed filling the order, acting on information that she could not have known. The second staffer knew things that were only communicated to the first staffer.
Garret concluded that something very strange was going on here. The staff was acting as if they shared a single mind, a hive mind if you will. Given how inhuman they were acting, he strongly suspected that the food would be as untrustworthy as the humanity of the staff, and might contain poisons, or perhaps diseases or unsanitary organisms such as worms or insects. He declined to be served and walked out of the cafeteria.
He thought that he had better get back to the others. It would be safer to watch Oscar at home than it would be to trust the hospital staff. It was time to go.
The cafeteria was a small room, just big enough to house the kitchen and the cash register in, and the tables for eating the food were located in three small rooms surrounding the cafeteria. In order to go anywhere except the elevators, you would have to go through one of these rooms.
Garret did not have to go through one of the dining rooms, but he was curious and did so anyway. There were two people in the room into which he walked. He was unsure if they fit that definition anymore.
Both of them were slumped over open containers of pudding. The nearest body used to be a girl, and some tendrils stretched from the open dessert into her mouth. Garret was confident that he was looking at pudding doctored with the now familiar fungus, and it had activated when the two of them had taken bites of the pudding.
It was an insidious way to spread the plague of changes into the local population. Spike the food with the mutagenic fungus, and what choice do the people have? If they don't eat, they die, and if they do eat, they change.
Garret could see that the two were not exactly dead. There were tiny tremors taking place in their muscles, as the fungus infiltrated them. In a few hours, they would probably wake up as changed creatures, doing whatever the architects of this nightmare had planned for them.
He thought about backtracking and getting on the elevator, but decided that this was much the same situation as does fire. Elevators might freeze between floors, because of power or manipulation issues, and one was vulnerable when entering or leaving the devices. Better to take the stairs.
Oscar's bed was located on the fourth floor. Garret could be there in about one minute so it would not be long before he would be able to suggest to the others that it was time to check out of this deathtrap.
When he got to the second floor and was just about to pass the entry door onto that floor, he heard a scream from within the hospital, and his instincts took over. He pushed open the door and went onto the floor to investigate.
From the door, he could see the nurse's station, and he noticed that the nurses were clustered around one of the doors on the A wing. He instantly recognized this floor as serving as a nursery and child-birthing floor, due to the decor that labeled the floor as being infant friendly. In addition, as he approached the door that was the focus of attention, he saw that there was a row of windows streaming down the corridor for a short distance, in that format that most nurseries are constructed in.
When he got to the door, it was so crowded with hysterical nurses that he did not immediately attempt to push his way into the middle of it. Instead, he pressed his head up against the glass window and peered inside the nursery.
Inside, he saw another nurse, who was perhaps changing a baby's diaper, or some such task. However, why did her mouth appear covered with a dark substance? Why did Garret's instincts scream that this was all wrong?
Garret shoved his way through the doorway and approached the woman hunched over the baby. A couple of the more courageous of the nurses trailed him into the room, but they did not look as though they were going to make it beyond about five feet into the room.
Garret could now see what the nurse had been doing. She was hunched over half of a baby, with its belly ripped open, and its right arm detached from the torso, and lying, partially gnawed, to the side of the child. The woman was enthusiastically chewing on a bit of the child that looked like a high-fat content piece of tissue.
The world had taught Garret in recent days that compassion was best to reserve for the sane. As far as he could tell, those who changed due to whatever was doing this were beyond help, and if they could be helped, no one would put out the effort required to do so.
There was only one certain way to fix this problem. Garret drew his 45 caliber, aimed at the woman, carefully avoiding a path that would hit any other humans, and fired. This time he had aimed at her heart, and his aim was good. She was driven back by the impact, and she collapsed to the floor.
Without stopping for explanation or interaction, he pushed past the nurses at the door and resumed his journey to the fourth floor. In a few seconds, he had sprinted up the remaining floors, and onto Oscar's floor
Entering the room, he immediately said, "Time to go. Wake him up and get him clothed. We can watch him at home."
Freya and Ian looked slightly perplexed, but they knew that Garret did not do anything without a good reason. If he thought that they should go, then they should leave. Besides, it was getting annoying to sit in the room in the dark. Going home sounded much better.
Garret made short work of the nurse's objection to moving their patient out of the hospital, showing that he was both adamant and armed, and in a few minutes, the nurse delivered the paperwork. Another few minutes transpired as a wheelchair was located, and then the four of them made their escape.
A short jaunt through the fog-filled and rain-swamped streets found them returned to the house. After a brief question and answer session to explain the events of the last few hours, everyone decided that they should not waste the night in non-sleep related activities.
16 future past
Monday, April 15, 2019@ 5:30 AM
I see the eons spinning by, from future to past to future again. The meager thousands of years of Man's history slip by at a sedate clip, with only the occasional visitation to shake the foundations of existence.
From the time of the coming of the star gods,
the human existence has progressed from primate forebears to agriculture, to cities of stone, to wars never ending, and on to the present days of attempting to follow the gods to the stars.
The days of darkness are bookends on the days of planet Earth. The black world that comes is the primary source of the echo that ranges down through the past ages to the time before animals arose from that which is not animal.
That which is to come will change all things, and it will end the world of Man, and the very universe will mutate and spiral into madness. There is no separation between the hours of the past, and those of the future. Time happens all at once, all of the time.
When a great event shakes the future, the echoes of its shaking creates a shadow of that event in the past. The greater the event, the further back in time the shadow grows, and the greater the shadow becomes.
It is truly the worm Ouroboros, time swallowing its own tail. That which comes is not a demon, nor is it a god. It is something other, an entity so alien that the human mind cannot begin to conceive of it. It is to Man as Man is to bacteria, unconcerned with whether the small creatures live or die.
Although that which comes does not seek our destruction, it is our destruction incarnate, for the world that it brings is a world that is not for mankind. Even this shadow of Chaos cannot destroy all universes everywhere, but it can make the branch of the worlds wither and die, screaming in madness brought by chaos.
The Shadow is in the future, but no mortal can say if it is in our future, or the future of another world. It is a closed loop in time that will create a Plenum of Chaos if that serpent closes on its own tail. Est circulus.
Ian awoke, a nightshirt of sweat beading his body. He remembered the dream just dreamed as an overlay of the dream that came every night to every person in this town. It is a strange sensation to have layered dreams. What was that phrase in the dream? Est circulus? He needed to remember to ask Oscar what it means.
Beyond The Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror Page 9