Dark Aeons

by Z. M. Wilmot

  The Horror in the Woods

  I

  Harney had always said that there was something in those woods – those dark, twisted woods just past old man Jenkins’ cottage, across the stream, and through the ditch. We had played there as children, dubbing the ditch “Dead Man’s Gully.” It was rumored that a dead man had once been found there. We played at being murderers and thugs every weekend, when our parents let us off our leashes. I usually played the dead man.

  When I was in the seventh grade, one of my erstwhile playmates, Ernesto Valdez, vanished without a trace. I was home ill that day, but the story was that Erich had dared him to go bring back a colored stone he had thrown into the thickest thicket. The woods themselves were very thick, and that thicket was nigh impenetrable. It wasn’t too deep into the woods, but it was far enough in to be almost out of sight, right at the spot where the trees grew closer together and became taller and gloomier. An aura of dread always hung over that place, and to this day I wonder what courageous folly prompted Valdez to make that ill-fated journey. He walked through a parting of the trees into the thicket, but never came out. Adults later turned the woods inside and out, but they never found a trace of poor Ernesto. After that day, we stopped playing near the forest.

  But some of us just couldn’t leave it alone. Tragedy again befell our community during my last year of high school. My former friend, Tommy Whitman, now the star player of the football team, dared George Pickman, a year our junior, to spend a night out in the woods in order to be admitted to his top-secret jock club. Pickman was eager to please and leapt at the opportunity, leaving that very same night, sneaking out of his house with his sleeping bag under his arm. Pickman had always been overly rational; he always had said that there was nothing to be afraid of in the woods.

  But something in there got him that night.

  His skull was found the next morning in his sleeping bag. It had been picked perfectly clean, without a trace of flesh on it. There were no bite marks on any surface of it, or any sign of trauma. It was just a skull, and the dental records and skull structure showed it to be his. The rest of him was never found.

  Since then, only the bravest dared venture into those woods…

  II

  I moved away from my childhood home after I acquired a B.A. in Psychology, and decided to pursue my studies and work towards a PsyD. I always had wanted to help people, and I thought that this would be the best way to do so. My studies took me far from Arkheim in Maine, sending me to the distinguished halls of Harvard University in Cambridge. After I began working on my M.A. in Psychotherapy there, I stopped visiting my parents back in Arkheim, preferring instead the many attractions of nearby Boston and its nightlife. I became quite the wild man – I couldn’t keep my hands off women, and alcohol and drugs couldn’t keep their hands off me – LSD, THC, MDMA, Psilocybin, Desoxyn, Vicodin – you name it, I could have gotten it. I knew every dealer in the city, and they all knew me. Rarely did a moment pass that I was not on something.

  Gradually I began losing sight of my goal, and only a year into my Master’s I was told I had one chance left, and would have to repeat the whole year due to abysmal grades across the board. Of course I promised I would try my best after that, but that didn’t work out, and I was expelled the next semester.

  To make matters worse, only two days after my expulsion, I was evicted and my parents both died. The funeral was scheduled for the following week, and I was named the executor of their will.

  Having no home and a funeral to attend, I immediately made the journey back to Arkheim by bus. I moved back into my parents’ house, and it was about that time that the alcoholic haze and drugged stupor wore off, and the full impact of my parents’ deaths hit me. I was delivered the will of my parents, but it wasn’t until the day before the funeral that I emerged from my coma of despair and withdrawal – for I had no access to any form of drug whatsoever in the middle of nowhere.

  The will was very straightforward, and left almost everything to me. Only the porcelain set and a lamp went to two of my parents’ close friends – in fact, their only two close friends.

  It also was not until that day that the manner of my parents’ deaths was revealed to me. They had last been seen alive entering their abode after a walk through the town, and were found the next morning at the edge of the woods – or at least their bloodless and pockmarked heads were. The rest of their bodies had not been found, and a combing of the woods by armed police officers and firemen revealed nothing more.

  I forced myself to deliver the specified items to the proper friends and exchange the proper condolences with them, and then I turned the will over to the lawyers. Once everything was signed and done, I consigned myself to sleep and slept terribly, half-formed monsters and vampires stalking through my addled brain.

  The next morning – the day of the funeral – I donned my only nice clothing, which thankfully were the least stained by unsavory liquids, and set off. I gave, as was proper, an impromptu speech at the relatively small funeral, and their two caskets – containing, I presumed, merely their deathly-white heads – were lowered into the ground and buried, side by side. I laid roses and a wreath down upon their grave, and stood in silence, watching their final place of rest, until everyone else had left.

  When I was finally alone, I knelt down and cried among the ruins of my life. I was indisposed for a good half hour or so before I regained my composure and stood up again. As I began to walk away, I thought back many years in the past, to my days as a child growing up, and the unexplained deaths of my two friends. Someone was out there, in those woods. I imagined that I felt his eyes on my back as I made the long walk home.

  III

  I began to rebuild my life, rising up from the ashes. I quickly forgot my misgivings about the woods and took work as a store clerk down at Davidson’s General Grocery. As a side job I offered unofficial psychiatric advice – unofficial because I had failed to obtain an M.A., let alone a PsyD – to those in need. I become somewhat of a lowly celebrity in the little town of Arkheim, counseling couples and talking people out of depression. I was just another hard-working homeboy.

  I was closing up the store one day when Harney came up to me. Other than the decrepit hermit Old Man Jenkins – who had reportedly died the same year I was told I needed to repeat a year of university – Harney was the man who lived closest to the woods. When I was a child, he had always told us not to go in there, because something evil lurked there – he said he could hear it snuffling about and scraping in the dark. Even before the first death, that of poor Ernesto, he had told us that. It was a wonder that no one was ever suspicious of him.

  Harney was old when I was young, and now that I was grown – or was pretending to be – he was ancient. Even so, he scarcely looked a day older than when I had first seen him.

  “Hey, you kids – best not go any further!” the old man called down to us. He was up on the sides of Dead Man’s Gully, and we were in the ditch itself. He carried with him a fishing pole, a bucket full of fish, and a tackle box.

  Erich Dornet, always the leader of our group, shouted back up at him. “And why not? ‘s a free country!”

  “Not as far as your parents are concerned.”

  Us children all made disapproving noises and carried on our way. “And the freedom of a country don’t matter much if you ain’t got no lives,” he half-muttered back at us as we left. I may have been the only one to hear.

  Harney had appeared a few more times as we played in the woods or the ditch. Once he had walked out of the woods just as Erich, pretending at being the infamous “clipper” serial killer, was about to snip my head off with his invisible pair of garden clippers.

  “I’ve got you – don’t try to resist.” Erich breathed down at me, his hands widening as the clippers opened. I did my best to pretend that they were there, and for a moment I saw them flash before my eyes. I struggled – in vain, of course, for no one escaped the clipper killer – as the tips of the terr
ible blades were placed on either side of my neck, and Erich threw back his head and laughed as he prepared to squeeze them shut on me.

  “That ain’t how the clipper killer laughed,” came a voice from deeper in the woods. Erich yelped and fell back on his behind and glared at the figure emerging from behind a tree.

  “And how’d you know, Mr. Rogers?” he said, getting to his feet. “Did you meet him?”

  Harney winked and hefted a black bag with an odd shape over his shoulder. “You could say that.”

  Then there had been the time when Ernesto had gotten his leg stuck between two roots and was crying because he couldn’t get it out. None of us could, either.

  “I’m gonna die and rot away here because no one will be able to save me or find me!” Ernesto wailed, the tears streaming down his face. “Why me?”

  “Shut up, you ninny,” Erich said, he who had gotten Ernesto into the situation in the first place. “You won’t die here.”

  “He will if he doesn’t escape,” Harney said, appearing out of nowhere. He knelt down and gently moved the root out of the way – none of us even considered to ask why he had been able to move that thick root when we could not. “There you go.” He stood, odd bulges in his pockets catching our eyes. “Now, let’s get home before dark comes. You don’t want to be caught out here then.”

  And here he was, before me. He waited in silence for a few moments. “Can I help you?” I asked politely.

  Harney shook his head. “I think not, son – it’s me who can help you.”

  A chill crept down my back. All I could manage was a weak “Oh?”

  He leaned in close to me and I could smell what seemed to be suspiciously like alcohol on his breath. “You’re not safe there.”

  I blinked. “Where?”

  “In the house, kid. It got your parents there.”

  I pushed back an upwelling of anger. “They must have gone out when no one else had seen them – my house is nowhere near the woods!” It was true – the woods themselves came to the town center proper nearest to Harney’s house, and he lived on the opposite side of town – it would have been difficult for me to get much further away.

  “It can roam freely now. It stalks the town at night.”

  “What is this ‘it’ you’re talking about?” I wanted to redirect this conversation. Badly.

  “The killer in the woods. It got Valdez – that young Hispanic kid you hung out with a decade or so ago. And then that other kid, what was his name – Pickman, aye? Him too. It got him. And then it got Teddy. Poor man.”

  “Who’s Teddy?”

  “Eh? Teddy Jenkins? Ol’ Theodore?”

  “Ah. Old Man Jenkins. I thought he died in his sleep?”

  Harney laughed harshly, and his laughter soon devolved into a fit of coughing. “That’s what the press told ye, yeah. Can’t trust ‘em farther than y’can throw ‘em. Truth is, I saw the body afore they ever got near it – the blood’d been sucked clean out of him, just like with the other victims. He was left intact though, for whatever reason’r’other. I pumped him back up full o’blood afore anyone else saw him.”

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked him, continuing to clean and close up to keep my emotions under control.

  “Don’t want no suspicious questions a’comin’ my way, or at anythin’ in those woods. Nothin’ good can come of it.” He nodded decisively and turned around. “But it’s a-roamin’ at night, kid – it got yer old folks, and it’ll get you too. Watch out – I’d move.”

  And then old Harney Rogers exited the store. I put what he had said out of my head and finished closing up.

  IV

  I didn’t see Harney again for another three months, and when I did see him, he didn’t make me any happier than he had the last time.

  Exactly a week prior to my next encounter with the old man, there was another death. Two, actually. Valerie Morkowski and Dylan Kenkowitz were both seniors at Celaise-Arkheim High, and apparently had been dating for the whole span of a year and a half – some sort of record there. They had decided on that late May night, just before they graduated, to consummate their relationship. In the middle of the woods. In the dead of night. In the area where four people – five if Harney was to be believed – had been killed and had their blood drained from their bodies.

  The gene pool certainly wouldn’t miss the pair of them, but quite a fair number of people did. The two of them hadn’t even been separated when they were found – their corpses were locked in the coital act, lying across two sturdy branches on the edge of the woods. Harney had discovered them and reported them to the police.

  Their heads were both gone, as were Valerie’s breasts. They were both completely naked and drained of blood. Police determined that they had been killed somewhere else, as no blood was found on the scene. Not even the tiniest drop.

  Police and armed volunteers combed the area, but as always came up with nothing. It was only then that the force admitted that they had a serial killer on their hands, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in.

  They stayed in the town for about a month – there were six of them – asking questions of everyone and combing the woods themselves. They didn’t ask me anything useful – or anything that I could really answer. In the end, they had to give up. The leader of them, a man the others called only “Joey,” told the mayor that “we’re gonna have to wait for another death, with more evidence, if we’re ever gonna solve this. We’ll be watching.” Then they left, leaving us back where we started.

  My next encounter with Harney occurred the day before the federal agents arrived. I was taking the day off, and was sitting in Hoverman’s coffee shop, reading the local newspaper – which took a sickening delight in the carnage, the staff doubtlessly overjoyed to have something larger than a downed birdhouse to report on – when he sat down across from me at my table. I did my best to ignore his presence, but when he physically lowered my newspaper, I was forced to look him in the eye.

  I spoke before he could. “They wandered into the woods on their own. Their friends said so.”

  He chuckled. “Mighty stupid of ‘em, that was. Mighty stupid. You might be next, though – I’d watch out.”

  I sighed and got up, snatching the newspaper out of his hands and folding it. “And how do you know?” I said, not bothering to lower my voice. “Are you the serial killer? I should go tell the police you covered up the evidence!” It occurred to me at that moment that the fact that he had, indeed, done what I was accusing him of, made him the prime suspect.

  The other diners looked at us with interest as I stormed out. Harney said nothing to me.

  I learned the next day through the owner of the shop that Harney had been taken into custody by the police and that the feds had been summoned. I felt a pang of guilt for a moment as I realized that I had probably been the one to cause him this trouble; likely one of the other customers in the coffee shop had heard my brief tirade and reported him. I figured that if he was guilty he would be found so, and if he was innocent he would be released, so I didn't worry too much.

  The federal agent arrived two days later, and the very same day Harney was transferred to a prison in Celaise, Arkheim’s larger sister city, where all of the important local functions were held. Celaise proper was only about a half-hour drive away, but most of those who chose to dwell in Arkheim liked the small-town atmosphere and didn’t bother making the journey.

  Rumors began to spread like wildfire as soon as word got out that Harney had been imprisoned. Accusations of murder began to fly at him, and the whole town was in an uproar within hours, the rage in the air almost palpable. It didn’t help that Harney had always been unpopular, which made him an easy scapegoat.

  The trial was relatively swift, and Harney was sentenced to death four months later. There were no killings in that time span, and everyone believed that the serial killer – who had now earned the epithet “the Woodsman” – was done for. There were celebrations, which to me seemed more l
ike ancient pagan blood rituals, and a strange contentment mixed with a latent anger.

  No one ever knew who reported him in – it was always assumed that Jean-Pierre LaMont, the chief investigator at the time, had come to the conclusion on his own. I was relieved at this – perhaps it hadn’t been my fault after all. But then again, it was leaked out that Harney had pumped blood back into Jenkins’ body, and that originally the man had been bloodless – indeed, analysis of the blood showed it to be that of a pig. Harney truly looked guilty. It disturbed me greatly, and doubtless the rest of the town, too, that a serial killer had been living among us.

  The execution was slow to come, however, and was scheduled for five months from the day and hour of his sentencing. Everyone waited those five months with anticipation.

  But that much-awaited date never came, for the Woodsman killed again.

  V

  It was, this time, an older man by the name of Walter Kreevy. Like my parents, he had been nowhere near the woods when he died – he had last been seen walking home from a grocery store after having purchased a cucumber and two zucchinis.

  From me.

  I was, naturally, brought in for lots of questioning, but I really couldn't tell them anything. He had disappeared into the dark, heading towards his house – which was only five houses away from my own – about half an hour before the town’s curfew. I hadn’t seen him since, but someone else apparently had.

  He had been found in five pieces – or rather, five pieces of him had been found – of pale alabaster white, with no associated clothing or blood at all. His right arm was missing, and his other limbs were scattered all about the edge of the woods, covering a distance of almost a kilometer. His torso, left leg, both arms, and head were all found – but not a drop of his blood was seen anywhere.

  I was released from custody quickly, as I was clearly innocent, and then the combing began. Their fatal mistake was beginning the combing in the evening, as darkness was beginning to settle. Five officers and twenty armed volunteers set out, divided into five groups of five, each headed by an officer. Somehow, as the town’s curfew approached and everyone began heading in, Jack Millinger – a volunteer – became separated from his group for a few moments.

  Apparently that was all that was needed.

  According to the papers, Millinger vanished in a matter of seconds, for that was how long he had passed out of sight. Despite frantic attempts to locate the missing man, no one could find anything that night.

  The next afternoon he was, of course, found drained of his blood and missing an arm, lying in the middle of Dead Man’s Gully.

  VI

  They never combed at night again. Sweeps were made daily from that point on, and two federal agents were stationed in the town. It wasn’t until a week and a half had passed that we discovered the ruins.

  About four kilometers into the woods, the massive trees had overgrown the foundations of what was probably once a village of some sort – they couldn’t at the moment date it. What they found there was disturbing beyond belief.

  The village consisted of twenty-four buildings, ranging from lodgehouses to cottages, with rotting wood planks and crumbling stone foundations. Everything appeared to be empty; the builders had left nothing behind, almost as if everyone had abandoned the village at the exact same time.

  A dozen men - including myself this time, as a volunteer - combed the whole place and found nothing inside it. However, just outside the ruins of what may have been a tall fence, one of the federal agents found a veritable graveyard.

  There were bodies – or what remained of them – hidden in a small cave under the ground, the entrance of which was between the roots of a great tree. A police officer and the agent ventured inside, peering in with their flashlights, and found body parts laid out before them. A larger team was called in and a thorough inventory was taken: among the decaying bodies were Ernesto Valdez, most of George Pickman, my parents’ headless bodies, Valerie’s Morkowski’s breasts, Dylan Kenkowitz’s head, Walter Kreevy’s leg, and Jack Millinger’s left arm.

  The truly disturbing part of this – even more so than discovering remnants of bodies – was that there were far more body parts, in various states of decay, found there than could be accounted for with recent murders. There were, in the end, the remains of one hundred and fifty-seven different bodies in that cavern, dating over the span of two hundred years.

  After that point, the entire town was swamped with feds. They took over the inns – both of them – and turned Arkheim into what amounted to an archaeological dig site. It began to grate on us locals after about three days.

  Harney was, of course, released following the killing, and returned to Arkheim, back into his own house. No one spoke a word to him for almost a week, until I decided to pay him a visit.

  I walked up to his house that day, which was rather chilly for the middle of summer, and knocked upon his rotting door. The house was rather small; it looked to be a three or four room, single-storey affair with boarded-up windows and partially rotted planks. Doubtless the building no longer conformed to required structural standards.

  Harney answered the door about two minutes later, creaking it open a hair. “Aha, it’s you. Finally come ‘round to see that I’ve been warning you? Come in, then.” He opened the door all of the way and gestured me inside, locking the door behind me. His friendly demeanor threw me off; I had expected the man to be more upset with me, as I had likely been the one who had nearly had him killed.

  The interior of his house didn’t look much better than the exterior, and he sat me down on a padded chair that was falling apart while he himself sat in an old rocking chair. “So what have you come to ask me, eh?” There was a faint glimmer in his eyes that made me uncomfortable, causing me to wonder what game he was playing.

  I swallowed. “What do you know about the Woodsman?”

  He laughed. “That name's ridiculous –‘s not a woodsman at all. In fact, it ain’t even a man. ‘Tis a beast.”

  I sighed. “Don’t be ridiculous. It has to be a man – or rather, several of them. Perhaps a cult, or an intergenerational series of serial killers, with each one training a successor. It’s the only way they could have killed for two centuries.”

  “Or ‘tis not human ‘tall, and’s actually an unnatural beast.”

  I rested my head on my folded hands. “Like a vampire?”

  He laughed shortly. “Don’t listen to those tales, son. Vampires aren’t real.”

  “Then what is this beast you speak of?” I asked, irritated. The man was proving obstinate. I thought perhaps it would be best if I left.

  “It has no name. It has lived on many different worlds, in many different times, and just now lives with us in the Arkheim Woods. It is a terrible thing to behold; no earthly creature has ever looked like it does.” There was a shift in the language and speech that Harney was using; his slang was dropping away and his words getting longer.

  “It needs the blood of its victims – or rather, the life-force contained therein – to sustain its own. The life-force contained in you human-types is strong, and the more of you it feasts upon the stronger it becomes. It is no longer merely sustaining its life-force; it is increasing it.”

  I sighed. I had read my own share of horror stories. “And then it will use its enhanced life-force to take over the world and slay all of its inhabitants.” I stood up. “It’s about time I left, I think – I have business to attend to. I thought you might be more helpful. Clearly I was wrong.”

  Harney laughed. “This is reality, my friend, not a cheap horror story. It has no desire to destroy this world; that would be a waste of its time and effort. It has larger plans.”

  I held back a sigh. “And how is it that you have come to learn all of this?”

  He smiled knowingly. “I have spoken to it.”

  VII

  Whether or not I believed Harney’s story was irrelevant. He knew more about the killer than anyone else – or at least clai
med he did – so I guessed that I should at least humor him and see what he really knew. Perhaps he was right, and an alien monster was stalking us from the woods. Somehow I doubted it.

  So we went into the woods together. Not at night, of course – that would have been stupidity of the highest degree. We left at noon.

  “You promised me you’d tell me how you met it,” I reminded him as we tramped forward through the woods. Even in the daylight they had an eerie feel to them.

  “Huh? Oh, right. I was out fishing one night when it snuck up behind me.”

  “And it didn’t kill you?”

  Harney laughed. “Nope. Would’ve, but I jumped into the lake. The thing doesn’t like water, apparently.”

  “Is that so?”

  “‘Tis so. It didn’t follow me in at any rate. Seems to cry out a fear of water to me.” I supposed it did.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence. I was still very skeptical, but I felt it was my duty to try to find out what I could – even if it meant sneaking behind police crime scene tape.

  We arrived at his destination after about an hour of walking: a place very far away from Arkheim, in the center of the woods. “I tracked the beast once in the day and it ended up here.” We had stopped, and he was pointing ahead, at the largest tree I had ever seen. It appeared to be some sort of willow, with thick strands of leaves hanging down, almost obscuring the trunk from view.

  “You tracked it?” I asked. “But none of the police could.”

  “They’re officers of the law, not trackers,” he responded. Harney didn’t seem like the tracking type to me, either, but I didn't bring that up.

  We waited in silence for a few moments. “So… it lives in there, does it?” This was all rather anticlimactic.

  Harney nodded. “I believe so – I’m not sure of it myself.”

  “So then… what do we do now? How does this help us?”

  “Well, you can show the police now!” Harney said brightly.

  “And why couldn’t you do it yourself?”

  “You really think they’d believe me?” He had a point. “You’re at least respectable.” He paused for a moment. “Do you want to take a look inside?”

  I really didn’t, and I said as much. Harney shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He walked in between the drooping leaves of the willow, vanishing from sight.

  As eerie as Harney was, I didn’t particularly relish being left alone in the woods. “Wait!” I called out, and followed him.

  It was dark inside the willow’s embrace, and whatever beams of sunlight came through seemed to be almost ethereal. Harney was making his way toward the trunk, which was split almost in two, a massive crack running from the base up until where the branches began to come out. The interior of the tree was pitch black.

  I hurried forward, hardly noticing the dead grass and leaves I was trampling underfoot. “Where are we going?”

  He just pointed straight ahead, at the trunk. I swallowed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Shouldn’t we be avoiding this thing?”

  He stopped as I slowed down. Turning around, he grabbed my wrist in a vise-like grip. He smiled rather disturbingly back at me. “I don’t think it’s home.” He began to walk forward again. I tried to dig my feet in and walk backwards, but he dragged me on relentlessly forward.

  Inside the tree itself, there were a series of roughly hewn stone steps headed downwards. Harney began to drag me down them. I fought to pull backwards as hard as I could, but the old man was much stronger than I would have ever guessed. The stairs were far larger than any human would ever use, and I was forced to walk forward just to keep from falling over.

  When we reached the bottom, we found a pool of water. It looked very deep. Harney thrust me forward, still holding my arm tightly. A moment later, he released it, and I nursed my sore arm. I turned to look at him. “Why would the monster have a pool of water if it was afraid of it?” I began to relax – Harney’s story was utterly ridiculous! When had I begun taking it so seriously? I looked around the underground cavern now with interest rather than fear. I was surrounded on all sides by stone, and into the stone were carved what looked like intricate runes of no civilization I knew. “What are those?” I whispered.

  I saw Harney shrug behind me. “Who knows?”

  I knelt down at the waterside. The pool was very, very deep; I couldn’t even begin to see the bottom. “I wonder how this got here…” I thought out loud, and then stood up. I turned around to ask Harney another question. “Do you think it’s a-”

  He struck me. His leg shot out first, tripping me, causing me to fall down flat on my back. A few well placed stomps ensured that I wouldn’t be getting up again anytime soon. I coughed up blood.

  “So you’re the killer!” I hissed at him. “Somehow… you killed even when… you were locked up!” He just laughed at me.

  “No – no human has the power to drain every ounce of blood out of another human’s body.” His grin became wider. “I told you the truth about the beast – it does exist, exactly as I told you.” He kicked me while I was down, and I rolled into the water. I lay in the shallow end, my head above the surface and my back resting on the steep incline of the pool’s edge.

  It was my turn to laugh, weakly, through the terrible pain. “And you said… water… it doesn’t… like. Well, I found water!”

  Harney nodded agreeably. “So you did. Sorry. I lied.”

  “About what?” I asked, my breaths becoming shorter.

  “Telling you that the beast was exactly as I described it. It actually doesn’t care about the water.”

  I felt like a rock suddenly appeared in my stomach. Harney laughed again. “And then I suppose you wonder how it was I survived? It certainly wasn’t by jumping in the water. No, it wasn’t. It chose me, son – it chose me to help it perform its work, so that it may become stronger and recover from its wounds, finally leaving this world and returning to its own, where it shall reign supreme!

  “And it chose you, as well – for you will be the last victim it consumes on this world before shooting back up into the stars, with me in tow, destroying this world with a mere blink of its eye.” His grin was now deranged. “We can’t have any loose ends hanging around, now can we?”

  I couldn’t speak any longer; I was in too much pain. I was becoming dizzy, and couldn’t see straight.

  And then the monologue ended. “Come, my Lord – feast upon the life-force of this strong man! He waits for you even now. Consume and devour, master – he is yours!” He kicked me – gently, this time – out into the center of the pool, where I floated helplessly, paralyzed with pain.

  Blackness began to take over my vision, and in a few moments, I could no longer see, but I could still feel – I felt its countless slimy tentacles coming from the water below me, slithering all over my body, their tiny teeth digging into me…

  And then I screamed. It had begun to feed.

  VIII

  When I awoke, everything was dark and everything hurt. I didn't stay awake for long, and soon returned to the realm of silence.

  When I woke again, faint light filtered in through the trees. I groaned and tried to sit up, but my entire body gave way under me, and I collapsed to the ground, blacking out for what I thought were a few moments. I had no memory of anything after I had felt the thing start feeding on me.

  That memory caused me to lose consciousness yet again.

  I stumbled through the dark forest, my throat parched and cracking, my eyes raw and sore. My skin was ghostly pale and my clothing was in tatters. Raw, red marks scored my entire body, punctuated by literal holes in my skin, many of them scabbed over.

  By all rights I should not have been alive, yet I was still somehow bleeding, leaving a damp red trail in the dust as I tottered forward. My pale skin told me that I had almost no blood, and yet I still bled and I still walked. It seemed as if everything I had learned in my biology classes had been turned on its head, academics perverted by reality.

&
nbsp; I told myself again and again that it was all just a dream, that it couldn't possibly have happened. I confronted the memory again, recalling the slippery tentacles as they wrapped around my body, the feeling of the barbed hooks as they dug into me, siphoning out the blood from my body.

  It had killed everyone else it had attacked. Why not me? Why had I survived? The memory made me feel faint, yet I stayed upright, pausing only for a moment to lean against a sapling. The sapling bent under my weight, and the creaking sound it made prompted me to hurry on.

  I don't know how long I walked through the woods, stumbling from tree to tree, stopping every few dozen steps to rest and calm the dizzy sensations in my head, but I was able to stay awake and on my feet using the techniques I had learned in my psychiatric studies. I compartmentalized my mind, just as I had learned to advise my patients to do, and ignored the troubling thought of the tentacled horror in the lake. I eventually reached the edge of the forest and saw the houses of my own small town within sight. I half-walked and half-crawled down the street to my house, glad that darkness had once again descended upon the earth, my path lit only by the moon. I crawled up the stairs to my door, gently pushed it open, and somehow made my way to the kitchen. I pulled myself to my feet using the counter and poured myself a glass of water.

  The liquid tasted so good going down my throat that I ignored my better judgment and poured myself another and another, until I had downed at least a dozen glasses. My body was unable to handle all of that water, and I vomited most of it back up again, falling into my own mess and shaking on the floor.

  I got to my feet again when the sun crept over the horizon, and I allowed myself a little more water. I was feeling a little bit better, and my mind was clearing up. I walked over to my bed and lay down, trying to determine how much time had passed. It had been at least a day, maybe more. My troubling reaction to the water I had consumed the night before told me that it had probably been several days.

  It was another few hours before I could eat anything, and by that point I was feeling only very sick, no longer on the verge of death. No one had come to visit me, which I found odd; not even my employer had come to check up on me. God knew how many shifts I had missed.

  It was only after I had finished my pathetic and tiny meal that I thought to check my computer for the date. That showed how well my mind was working. I staggered to my computer and tried to turn it on, but found that it wouldn't. Puzzled, I checked the power cables and discovered that everything was in working order.

  The power wasn't out, I knew, because I had used the lights to see in the kitchen when I had returned late the night before - hadn't I?

  I flicked on the light switch to my makeshift computer room, but there was no effect. The only light in the room came through the window above the computer.

  I made my way slowly to the kitchen, where I was greeted by the smell of rancid meat. My refrigerator and freezer had stopped working, it seemed, and I had been gone long enough for everything in it to go bad. Gagging, I retreated to the living room, and again found that I had no power.

  I collapsed back onto my bed after returning to my bedroom, and tried to make sense of what had happened. I had visited an old man - it hurt to recall his name, as thinking about him caused my head to feel as if it was splitting open - and he had taken me to the woods, to an old willow tree. Beneath the willow tree there had been steps leading to a pool, and the old man had pushed me in, and then...

  I forced my mind to decompartmentalize in order to come to terms with what had happened, and almost lost it. Once the dizzy spell had faded, I skimmed over that part of my memory. I had woken up in darkness, and then again in light. I had been outside. I had been moved. But to where, by whom, and for what reason?

  I thought back to my memories of that place, and I recalled now the faint outlines of buildings I had not noticed with my conscious mind. I dove into my subconscious, remembering things that my active mind had not.

  The buildings seemed somehow familiar. I took a deep breath and focused on them, using techniques I had learned so long ago in college classes to drudge up my subconscious memories. I had never thought I would have to use those techniques on myself.

  The shapes slowly came back to me, and I recognized them, silhouetted against the deep blue sky of twilight. The ruins. I woke up in the ruins.

  Glimpses of pale and bloodless flesh flashed through my mind, and I remembered wading through the lifeless, alabaster limbs of the dead as I staggered out of the forest, my mind refusing to acknowledge the horror surrounding me. I saw dead people.

  But when I had been to the ruins the first time, as part of the volunteer effort, the bodies had been confined to a cave beneath the roots of a tree. My memory showed bodies all around me, surrounding me... there were more of them. Twice as many, thrice as many, I don't know how many more - all drained of blood, pockmarked from the feeding tentacles of that horrible thing in the water, that horror in the woods.

  The memories caused me to lose my hold on reality once more, and I slipped into darkness.

  I woke up again on the ground. Bright sunlight shown in through the trees, and I slowly got to my feet. The staggering illness, the severe dehydration, the terrible traumas - all were gone, replaced instead by a mild headache. I walked forward slowly, and found myself able to walk steadily and without problems.

  It didn't take me long to realize where I was: the ruins. I was back at those cursed ruins. I stood a few meters away from the half-crumbled stone archway that marked the entrance to the ancient town. The wind blew gently through the trees, causing them to rustle as I stood where I was for a few minutes, before turning myself around and walking back into the ruins. I had brought myself to the ruins for a reason. But what had made me black out again?

  I had no memory of making the journey to the ruins. I tried for a few minutes to open my subconscious, but I remembered nothing. As I stepped through the arch I noticed that the ground was remarkably lacking in bloodless flesh. I blinked and the ground was suddenly muddy. I knelt down and saw deep marks in the mud, as if things had been dragged across it in the recent past. I followed the drag marks to their end, and found that they lead to a large tree at the far end of the town. It was an old maple, twisted and gnarled in its age, with a small opening between two raised roots leading to a cavern beneath the ground.

  I knew what lay down there. Death. All of the drag marks across the town led to the base of that old tree. I turned to look behind me, and saw that the marks ended - or rather, began - at the stone archway.

  The thing lived beneath a willow tree, set up just like the maple before me. The old man had led me there. I wondered what had happened to him. I wondered if this tree, where the thing stored the dismembered parts of its victims, was linked somehow to the willow.

  I turned away from the tree, unwilling to face the death I knew lurked there, looking again at the ground. I saw bootmarks in the mud, next to the dragmarks. My face paled as I realized that a human had dragged the bodies there. My mind immediately leapt to the old man - Harney was his name. He had been working with the thing. That must have been why the marks only began at the village entrance: because the thing, whatever it was, had taken the bodies there, and then Harney had dragged them. Or whatever remained of them after the thing was done feeding.

  I idly stepped onto the bootmark, and marveled at how closely my foot-size matched his.

  I remember what happened next. I turned around and felt the voice call to me, resonating within my subconscious, only briefly surfacing into my conscious thoughts, in the form of a single word: feed.

  IX

  The next thing I remember is this hospital, where I even now am writing down what I am sure will be my last words. I found myself in a white bed, covered with linens and filled with down, hooked up to all manner of odd machinery. I immediately sat up in my bed, causing all of the readings to go haywire, and was quickly swamped by a swarm of nurses and doctors. Once I was feeling well enough to un
derstand their words, I realized that five years had passed since the last date in my memory, if the doctors were to be believed.

  Five years of memory, all lost.

  I remembered everything when silence descended upon my world again, at night when the nurses left, and I was left to myself again. I discovered that I had compartmentalized my mind in order to cope with the stress, and as I reached into my memory, I saw what my mind was hiding from me.

  The corpse of Harney Rogers.

  The tentacles surrounding me and letting me go.

  The voice in my mind, compelling me to lure and kill.

  The daily drudgery of my day job at the store.

  The terror of my nightly activities, luring the innocent to their dooms in the woods.

  The dragging of the dismembered bodies to its shrine in the woods, to the ancient village where it had first descended.

  The town of Arkheim slowly dwindling in population over the years as the terror that had descended from the sky ruled my mind, absorbing their life energies.

  The memories running through my head fleeing from my conscious mind to protect my precious sanity.

  The moments of clarity, interspersed throughout five years, when I remembered who I was and what had happened.

  The death of the last human being in Arkheim.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I could not see the thing itself.

  I was no longer human. It controlled me, somehow, just as it had controlled Harney and compelled him to serve its will. I had lured so many to their deaths, my conscious mind numb and blind to what was going on, save in those brief moments when I woke up, disoriented, sick, and unsure of what was happening. The townsfolk had hardly noticed, hardly cared, as I drew further and further away from them. No one had cared enough to help, to free me from the horror in the woods, whose tentacles had sunk deep into my mind, until it moved me like a marionette of flesh and blood. Like Harney said, it grows stronger every day. It had never controlled Harney as much as it controls me. The day isn't far off now, when it consumes the earth and moves on to greener pastures, to reclaim its rightful place in the galaxy.

  I won't last much longer. I have served it well, and I can already feel it tugging, prodding, caressing my mind, sending its