We know, or at least strongly suspect that the fungus has something to do with the process of changing the bodies of these things. I think that the fungus is just a sort of catalyst, which has appeared because the entity that they are trying to bring to Earth is close to arriving.
I think that the catalyst could take many different forms. It works almost like a placebo, or like the ritual in magic practices. It is there to convince the people involved that the power, event, or condition are real, and the belief is what really makes things happen."
"So you are telling us that the fungus isn't real?" a confused Oscar asked. "Because I have examined it, and it looks very real to me."
"It is real, and it is dangerous," Ian explained. "But it is just an excuse for reality to change around us that explains the reason for things to change in a way that we can accept. This makes us believe, and that powers the arrival of the entity, and the changing of the world around us.
The fact is that the entity changes all of the laws of reality, the laws of physics, simply by being near. If it actually enters our universe, all of the rules will go out of the window. It will change all the laws of physics. As the people that change evolve, they start to have the ability to change reality around them as well."
"I cannot deny that there is some real shit happening that is not natural," Garret admitted, "but it is far beyond my ability to accept or understand. I think that I am going to go drive around and see if anything is happening around town that we need to know about. I will see you in a little while."
Garret got up from his chair and went to his room to gather his weapons and some other potentially useful materials. As soon as he was done, he said his goodbyes and walked out to the car. Cranking the engine, he backed out of the driveway, and slowly drove off into the fog.
The remaining four transferred themselves into the living room and considered themselves lucky that some of the programming on the television was still being serviced by the stations. A pert young brunette was acting as a news anchor for a national news broadcast, and she was reporting on the worldwide state of emergency connected to strange events that the group knew to be due to the imminent arrival of the entity.
The group was interested in learning that the world at large had just clued into the fact that people and other organisms were mutating. The changes were apparently taking place all around the world. The various world governments were simplistically trying to treat the problem as some sort of epidemic of infectious disease. They would try to quarantine and control the mutating people, which was probably the best thing they could do. Unfortunately, it was a poorly understood situation, and the disaster was bound to get out of hand eventually.
Tuesday 16, 2019@ 10:34 PM
Garret's Reconnaissance
Garret checked the area around the still-smoldering church, and the remaining Methodist church, with no evidence of any unusual activity. From there, he eased down the street and checked on the closed Dairy Diner and the closed Starlight's End. Both establishments appeared to be remarkably untouched. He grinned as he considered the fact that the two businesses probably owed their continued pristine conditions to the fact that the townsfolk were no longer acting on entirely normal human appetites.
The grade and high schools were located about a mile outside of the town limits on the East side of the town. It was a strange place to put a school, in Garret's opinion, but they were worth a look.
Given the perpetual fog and rain, Garret did not exceed about 15 miles per hour on his journey to check out the schools, but he still arrived in their vicinity in less than five minutes. The Grade School was deserted, and he drove slowly toward the nearby High School.
Unlike the Grade School, there was activity around the High School. The pattern and type of activity there was almost identical to that activity around the church that they had raided earlier. He was just there to get the lay of the land, so he turned the vehicle around and began the trip back into town.
He took a slightly different route than he had on the trip to the schools, down a different road that would terminate in a straight shot to the house, which was his ultimate destination. It was fortuitous that he chose a different route.
About a quarter of the way home, he came across an extraordinary sight. There was a field on the right side of the road, which was just discernible through the fog, which was thinner there than it was anywhere else that Garret had seen lately. He could see into that field for a couple of hundred feet.
What he saw was not easy to comprehend. In the middle of the clearing, there were people, and animals, seemingly alive and entangled in some sort of tendrils that sprouted from the ground all around the victims. The tendrils seemed to be growing into the victims, attached to their torsos or their heads, or some other area of their bodies in a manner that suggested that the connection randomly decided.
He had a spotlight in the car, and he used it to try to establish the extent of the spreading feeding ground. Using the spotlight to track the spread, he drove slowly back the way he had come to see how far the feeding ground went. It turned out that it extended almost half of the distance to the High School, and from the relative expansion of the field, it looked as though the phenomena was growing in the direction of the center of town, and the house.
Garret tried to do a little mental math, and he came up with a guesstimate that the thing would reach their new headquarters in about three more days. They had better be long gone before it got that far.
It was time to go home. He turned back around and headed in his original direction. He unconsciously sped up slightly when going past the feeding ground, and in another four minutes, he had completed his surveillance.
19 the rebel yell
Wednesday 17, 2019@ 9:30 AM
Garret jerked awake. His bed was wet with his sweat. Last night's dream was more intense than ever before, and it repeated itself several times during the night. It had moved beyond imagery, and it had moved beyond symbology. It was now an unbearable knowing of a Truth that cannot be faced, a Truth of evil and chaos.
Even now, his body was pumping adrenaline, and the sweat still ran in cold rivers down his back. He had awoken after each time he had dreamed the dream last night, and each time, the dream was stronger and more intense. He felt like there was a limit to how many times the dream could be dreamed before, at last, it would change your essence at a fundamental level. You would pay the price with your soul if you were to dream it too many times.
Well, if you cannot sleep, you might as well get up. That was a motto he lived by, and that motto, along with endless cups of coffee and donuts, is what kept him going all of these years, ever since he left Chicago to become a cop down in Houston. He got up and began putting his clothes on for the day.
When he got downstairs, he found the rest of the group clustered around the television. A short verbal exchange informed him that they had all been awakened by the dream, and they had decided that it was better to get out of bed.
The national news was just about the only thing on the television these days, except for some old reruns of Sponge Bob Squarepants, for some reason. The News Anchor was informing the viewers that the world had gone to shit. In all of the places that the world wasn't taking an active role in eliminating the population, it would appear that the citizenry had decided to lend a hand.
There were currently nation-wide riots in most major cities, each one protesting or supporting a fundamental idea that was almost divorced from the reality that surrounded the people. In this case, the big riot in Dallas was about Civil War Monuments, and whether they should be allowed to exist.
Garret did not really care, one way, or another, what they did with monuments, but most of the others had definite opinions on the matter. Since the others were all Southerners, they were on the side of keeping the monuments intact.
"This anti-confederate thing is insane," Freya protested. "I don't know what they are trying to accomplish. Tearing down a bunch of statues wo
n't make anything better."
"That is because these people have no idea about their own country's history," Oscar added. "They think that the Civil War was fought over slavery, instead of States Rights."
"What do you mean?" Garret asked. "I thought that it was all about ending slavery."
"Oh, what do they teach in school these days?" Oscar ventured. "For your information, the south fought the war because they wanted to secede from the union, just like it was allowed for in the founding documents. The North was in economic competition with the South, and they were using their higher population, and the industrial power they wielded to force the Southern states to concede to some unreasonable demands.
Half of the way through the war, Lincoln was pressured into the Emancipation Proclamation, because the Powers That Be thought that ending slavery would make the Southern States collapse. What they did not know is that slavery was on its way out and would have been gone in twenty more years, anyway.
After the war, the carpetbaggers took advantage of the South in many ways, and were, in essence, a punishment of the South by the North. The Yankees have never understood what the battle flag and the memory of the Civil War means to a Southerner.
The closest I can describe a Southern reaction to the war is to say that it was all about Pride and Sorrow. There was the sorrow that so many fellow citizens died in those battles and the pride that comes from not yielding a just cause to a stronger victor. The Civil War was the Southern version of The Trail of Tears."
"I don't know if a Northern-born can understand the way we think," Oscar accused. "For over 150 years, we have never been able to make them understand."
"I think that I get it," Garret conceded, "but we are living in a darker time right now, and I should tell you some new shit. I need to tell you what I found last night."
Garret told them about the new enemy activity around the High School, and then he told them about the Feeding Grounds.
"By my estimation, the Feeding ground will grow its way here within the next three days. If we find ourselves in the middle of it, there is no chance that we survive. We will have to either destroy the Feeding Ground or leave before it gets here."
"So, what is it, and how do we kill it?" Freya asked.
"If I had to guess, I would say that it is the grown-up version of the fungus," Garret explained. "As for killing it, I am not sure, but fire is our best bet."
They discussed both the activity and the field and made a few decisions. There was no real alternative to attacking the High School if they wanted to win this war, and they decided that they would try to burn out the Feeding Ground. If that did not work, they planned to abandon the house, and probably the town, two days from now.
They set the time to attack the school for 2:30 PM today. This time, they would only investigate to assay the extent of the opposition, and then, they planned to burn the school to the ground.
"Jonny won't be going on the raid with us," Freya said, with a worried look on her face. "He isn't doing very well. I checked on him an hour ago, and I think that he was having some problems breathing. I had better go check on him again."
Freya got up and climbed the stairs toward Jonny's room. She entered, and for a second there was silence. The silence was broken by a shrill scream from Freya.
Everyone bounded up the stairs and into Jonny's bedroom. Freya stood close to the bed, with her open hands in front of her face. She looked at the others when she became aware of their presence.
"He is much worse," she said. "It looks like he is running an even higher temperature, and he has some sort of filaments growing out of his face."
They all looked at Jonny, to see for themselves what she had seen. Oscar pushed everyone back, away from the bed.
"Those are hyphae on his face," Oscar warned. "The fungus is doing this. Somehow, he became infected by it, and it is growing in him. We have to start using some sort of quarantine procedures, or we run the risk of getting infected by the fungus ourselves."
"Okay, from now on, everyone without business in this room stays away," Garret said. "Anybody with business in here needs to wear gloves and a face mask, and scrub down when they leave here."
A very chastened group returned to the living room. The conversations resumed, but they were a much more subdued affair than they were before. They still had a couple of hours to kill before the attack, so they attempted to lose themselves in conversation and television as they waited.
20 attack the school
Wednesday 17, 2019@ 2:00 PM
It was time to travel to the High School, to destroy those worshipers of the entity that threatened to bring chaos into the world. Everyone felt that cold lump in the pit of their stomachs that never seemed to go away these days, but not acting was not an option.
Garret had never totally accepted the idea that the thing was real, and that the world was under dire threat. Even so, He could not escape the fear that the whole world was threatened by something connected to what they would do or not do here.
He had started out not believing in this demon god stuff. At an early stage, he had grown to believe that he should pretend that it was true, to get into the heads of the culprits that was using the concept. Now, he had a growing fear that doing nothing would unleash destruction, even if he did not believe.
The group all piled into Oscar's and Garret's cars and began the trip to the High School. There, they planned to assault the creatures that had once been human, kill them, and assure that they could do nothing to bring the world closer to the brink of destruction.
It was less than a five-minute trip, even in the dense fog that perpetually covered the town. They found an excellent vantage point from which to survey the school, parked atop a small rise that could not truly be called a hill, just north of the main school entrance.
Everyone clustered in a group beside Garret's vehicle, and he brought out the binoculars to check out the activities around the school grounds. If there had been a turnstile door down there, it would have been revolving like a carousel. They had indeed come to the right place.
Everyone verified that they had their weapons of choice. Garret was again carrying the flamethrower, and Oscar had several Molotov cocktails in a knapsack, which he started to distribute amongst the other members of the band.
It was 2:30 PM, the time to begin the assault. The fog was dense, cold, and wet, and there was not one of them who would not have preferred to be anywhere else this gloomy day.
Garret gave the signal, and the group began to make their way down the prominence and toward the main entrance to the school. When they reached the entrance door, Garret unlimbered the flamethrower, and Wilber and Oscar stood ready to pull open the two doors into the school, while Ian and Freya stood at Garret's shoulders, prepared with gun and blade to defend the group.
With a nod from Garret, they began their entrance into the main hallway. From the beginning, there was resistance from the things. By ones and by threes they attacked, and Garret's flames struck them down. The guns and blades of the others made short work of those who came close.
At the end of the hallway was the main Lecture hall or auditorium. Along the hallway corridor to the lecture hall were various classrooms. Everything was going smoothly on the journey down the hallway until they had gone about a half of the way down the hall, beside the doors to the science classrooms. It was there that they were attacked.
The doors burst open from both sides of the hallway, and creatures came out to attack them from the biology and the chemistry classrooms. There were at least twenty of them, and they were almost upon the group.
Garret's flame came to full life, and Wilber's and Oscar's shotguns deafened them all, as the blades of Ian and Freya hacked into the flesh of the creatures as though they were firewood to the ax. The sheer volume of the enemy pushed the group backward, and the creatures closed on Oscar as Garret hesitated to flame the enemy, afraid that he would burn his friends at the same time.
Three of
the beasts began to restrain Oscar, attempting to take him out of the fight. Freya and Ian leaped into action, hacking and slashing the creatures until they let go of the man, and then driving them back far enough that Garret had a clear shot. After that, they stank as they burned.
Wilber and Oscar each took a door and looked into the rooms to verify that they contained no more of the enemy. Satisfying themselves to that point, the group made their way on down the hallway to the main lecture hall at the end.
Preparing themselves outside of those doors in the same manner that they did at the main entrance, they flung open the lecture hall doors and prepared for whatever battle they were to find. Inside, they found the closest thing to hell that they had yet seen.
At the center of the auditorium, they saw several of the creatures such as the tentacled monstrosities that they had found at the church, but they were different in some dark way that shouted that reality was changing around them.
These creatures gave the visual sensation that they possessed tentacles, and strange limbs and features that did not belong to any earthly creature, but the eyes saw other layers of a dark reality. Where the muscular limbs waved in the air, they could also see that they were formed not of flesh, but of shadows incarnate, of a darkness that was beyond all absence of light.
Around the creatures of shadowed darkness, the half-human creatures formed a defensive line around their masters. It struck all of the humans that to be touched by the darkness was to be lost forever, so there was no desire to close with any of the creatures.
"Light 'em up," said Garret, as he thumbed the flamethrower to life.
The others all agreed, and each took their Molotov cocktails in hand and lit the cloth that served as fuses. Once lit, they threw the homemade bombs into the center of the room. When the center was engulfed in flame, they retreated to outside the room and closed and barred the doors from their side, trapping the creatures within.
Beyond The Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror Page 11