The Festering Ones

by S H Cooper

  “Of course. We’re everywhere, especially in this town. The White Crow Mountain Gathered didn’t die out that day, the chosen survivors just scattered. How else would Gorrorum make sure that there are still people out there spreading his word so close to where he wants to make his grand entrance?”

  “Do you know any of them? Can you give me their names?”

  Charlie pursed his lips into a thin line and inhaled slowly through his nose. “Sorry, kid, I’m not going to do that to you. Whatever you think you’re gonna find, it’s not worth it.”

  “Please.” I reached across the table and grabbed his wrist as he turned to go. One of the orderlies by the door turned towards us and was keeping a close eye on the interaction, so I released Charlie almost immediately. “If what you’re saying is true, then I’m already on their list or whatever, I’m already having the dreams. I can’t go back now.”

  He sighed and kept his back to me. “Marcus Shepard. He still writes to me from time to time. I think he’s a librarian at the middle school. He’s a member, keeps records or something for them. Nice guy, if you ignore the fact that he worships Gorrorum.”

  “Thank you,” I called after him as he started to cross the room.

  He stiffened, half turned without stopping, and said, “Trust me, there’s nothing to thank me for.”

  The Truth Hurts

  After Charlie had gone, I rose and walked slowly through the halls towards what I thought was reception, all the while mulling over Charlie’s words, his warning that I had been found and what it meant.

  Go crazy or convert, he’d said.

  He hadn’t given me a third option, but I decided then and there that I was going to make one myself, whether Charlie, Gorrorum, or anyone else, for that matter, liked it: I was going to find a way to burn down every bridge, no matter how small, that The Gathered had managed to build between Earth and Ibsilyth.

  It felt like such a childish declaration even in my own head; the would-be hero’s promise of defeat to all the monsters under the bed right before ducking down under the covers at the tiniest gust of wind at the window. It also felt equally laughable. Aside from questioning my sanity when it came to how easily I was buying into all of this, I didn’t have the first clue as to how I might close doorways that may or may not even be there. I was relying on the research of an expert who thought it was a load of bull and the word of a mental patient.

  Not exactly stellar sources.

  In the middle of my musing, I realized I’d been walking for quite some time, far longer than the trip to the rec room had taken. When I paused and looked around to get an idea of where I was, I found myself standing in the hallway outside of some activity rooms. Though they were currently unused and their windows dark, I could make out some instruments in one of them, a piano and stands for music sheets, and in the next, easels and painting supplies.

  My gaze traveled absently over the paintings lined up along the far wall of the art room, mostly amateur landscapes features hills and woodlands and, in one instance, some kind of creature sitting beside a river. Even as I stared at it, its shape seemed to change, never quite defined, never quite decipherable. Perhaps it might have been someone’s take on an amphibian, but then it looked vaguely fish-like, and then like neither of those things at all.

  I pressed my face against the window, my hands cupped around my eyes, and I watched with a prickling sense of disbelief mixed with slow growing fear as the creature moved across the painting. Its eyes, sometimes atop what I thought was its head, sometimes on the sides of it, sometimes elsewhere altogether, shined like tiny yellow beacons against the darkness.

  As they turned towards the door, towards me, I instinctively ducked out of view, one hand pressed over my thudding heart, the other covering my mouth to hold back the scream that that almost escaped.

  I’m going crazy, I thought, and I knew anyone who might see me crouched like that against the art room door would agree.

  They might even mistake me for a patient.

  They might not have been wrong. Sane people didn’t see things moving about in paintings, did they? Sane people didn’t worry about the Fingers of Ibsilyth reaching through time and space to get inside their head, either.

  I was really starting to envy them.

  I scuttled away from the door, staying low to the ground until I was far enough away that I couldn’t be seen from the window, and then I was almost running down the hall, following signs to the nearest exit. I burst out a side door into a garden already half turned to orange and gold in the first breaths of autumn. The flower beds still had some color left, but the bushes were already dropping their leaves, giving them a bleak, skeletal appearance. There were a few residents and their carers walking along the pathways and I startled a few with my sudden exit from the building.

  Sheepishly, I bobbed my head in apology towards them before continuing around the building towards the parking lot.

  My car had just come into sight when my phone rang from my purse. I dug it out with a still shaking hand. The number wasn’t one I recognized, but I answered anyway in case it was Dr. Boltson or Janice calling.

  “Faith?” a man said.

  “Yes?” I replied slowly, suspiciously.

  “Oh, good,” he replied cheerfully. “This is Marcus Shepard; I believe you’re looking for me.”

  My breath hitched painfully in my chest when he introduced himself. “How did you get my number?”

  “The Father provides,” he said with a chuckle. “There were whispers that you’d been speaking to Charlie.”

  Of course they’d have people watching over him! I’d been an idiot to think that The Gathered wouldn’t monitor someone like Charlie, one of the few to have escaped them.

  “That thing told you, didn’t it?” I demanded coldly.

  “Thing?”

  “In the painting upstairs. I saw it looking for me.”

  “Thing in the painting,” he murmured thoughtfully, and then I heard the “aha!” moment creep into his voice. “You must mean one of the shapeless.”

  I had imagined that Marcus would be a dark robed, sinister individual, but he instead sounded like a pleasant middle-aged man who probably wore sweater vests and drank tea on Sunday mornings with his pet cat in his lap. That didn’t stop me from being snippy with him.

  “If that’s what you call them.”

  “It would seem you’re quite open to the Father’s call, Faith, you’re already seeing the cracks.”

  “What?” I asked irritably, my free hand raking through my purse for my car keys.

  “Reality isn’t quite so solid as most would believe; you’re learning that quickly. Usually it takes a little more time in Ibsilyth before you start really seeing it, but you’re very...accepting. The shapeless ones exist in ideas of reality, like the painting you mentioned. They’re everywhere and nowhere, unable to truly enter any realm, and harmless, like flies. The fact that you’ve already seen one means the Father already has a foothold within you. Wonderful!”

  He said it like I should be happy about it, but all I could think of was one of those Fingers dripping putrid pieces of itself into my ear, infecting me, and it made my skin crawl.

  “Why are you calling?” I snapped, irritated with his friendly demeanor, as if we were just two old pals playing catch up.

  “You were going to call me, weren’t you? Charlie did give you my name, after all. I thought I’d just beat you to it.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Poor Charlie,” Marcus sighed, “he thinks that because he doesn’t dream, The Father doesn’t speak to him anymore. It must be such a lonely feeling. I’ve wanted to reassure him that he is not forgotten, that he simply doesn’t consciously remember the messages given to him, but that is not for me to tell. The Father does work in mysterious ways.”

  “So...you’re saying he was meant to tell me about you?”

  I slid into my car and slammed the door shut, hoping to ward off some of the chill
that had snuck up on me. It didn’t help much.

  “Oh yes, just like he told your mother. She was such a strong woman; I’m sorry to hear of her passing.”

  “How did you know my mom?” And why hadn’t she mentioned him in her notes? Why hadn’t she mentioned meeting Charlie?

  “We all did, and we had such high hopes that she would eventually change her mind and join us. She held out though, twenty years! Longer than anyone. I was truly saddened when I heard she was gone; especially with how it happened. That she felt that was the better alternative…”

  “She didn’t choose to have cancer, asshole.”

  “Oh...oh dear…” Marcus trailed off into a troubled silence.

  “What?”

  “Cancer didn’t kill your mother, Faith; she took her own life.”

  “No,” I said sharply, “she had breast cancer.”

  Marcus inhaled deeply, the sound of someone about to deliver Bad News, and I cut him off with more arguments and denial that gradually became more pleading, like I was waiting for him to tell me I was right after all. He let me rant for a time, patient and quiet, and when I was finally done, he cleared his throat.

  “She’d come looking for answers and Gorrorum tried to provide them, the same he does for any who enter into his realm. She fought him for so long, even after seeing all of his glory and truth, but in the end, I’m afraid it overwhelmed her.”

  “Y-you people killed my mother,” I whispered.

  “No, Faith, she killed herself. Razor blades down the wrist. Nasty way to go.”

  I tried to recall if I’d seen my mother’s arms the day of her funeral, but all I had been able to focus on was her face, so thin and drawn. I had thought it was from the cancer. Tears stung my eyes and I blinked them angrily away.

  “You people killed my parents.”

  “Faith —“

  “Change of plans, Marcus; I don’t need to speak to you anymore.”

  “Wait!”

  I ended the call without another word.

  I’d been chasing leads and going down the same paths Mom had, trying to use her research to figure out what she’d known. Apparently she hadn’t been quite as meticulous as I had thought, and what she hadn’t written down, she’d taken with her to the grave. There was one place, though, she had never talked directly about, either in person or in her research, and now I was beginning to think it was the only place where I would truly find answers.

  If I wanted to know why The Gathered were so drawn to the mountain, why those monsters, the Woken Daughters, were up there, why both of my parents had died, I knew where I needed to go.

  My car kicked into life with the turn of my key and I sped from the hospital’s parking lot in a kick-up of dirt and gravel.

  I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, nine-year-old me cried over and over again in my head, but I forced her away, back into silence behind a wall, however flimsy, of determination.

  I didn’t know what I was going to find up on White Crow, but I knew that the time had come. There was no more running away. There was no more hiding from the past. Gorrorum knew I was looking and he was going to keep sending his Fingers until I went crazy or converted. I had to try and end things before that happened.

  It was time.

  I had to return to the mountain.

  The Return

  I made it halfway back to Conroy before it occurred to me that I had no supplies. No boots, no backpack, nothing to defend myself with, not even a map to help find my way back to the old cabin. Knowing what might be waiting for me, I couldn’t go in so unprepared, so stupidly.

  I turned into the first superstore I came across and went straight to the outdoor section.

  Hiking boots for better footing, a waterproof jacket to keep me warm and dry, bug spray to ward off any lingering mosquitoes, a knapsack for the water bottles and jerky I tossed in my cart on a whim, a tarp and a sleeping bag in case I managed to get myself lost and needed makeshift shelter, a map and compass. Everything that would make a trek through the woods bearable.

  All that was left was something to defend myself with.

  It had to be immediately available, something that wouldn’t draw too much attention, something I could carry. I strolled past the customer service desk, where hunting bows and shotguns were locked in secure cases, and considered a large knife in the glass top display before wandering slowly up and down the aisles. I found what I was looking for in the form of a red, 12-gauge flare gun.

  When I pushed my cart through checkout, the cashier slid each item through with bored disinterest. He barely even glanced at what he was bagging. It was a little disappointing, really; I’d made up a whole cover story about accompanying a fictitious husband on an overnight fishing trip out at the lakes and how it was my first time and I was just being overly cautious to help ease my nerves, but I never got a chance to use it. He just told me my total, took my payment, and moved on to the next customer.

  How nice would it have been to really have a husband and fishing trip to look forward to.

  The flare gun had an instruction manual with it and I studied it once I was back in the car, careful to load it exactly as shown. With the six flares in place, I took a moment to load up the backpack and switch out my sneakers for the boots before I was off again.

  The closer I got to the mountain, the faster my heart started to beat. Countless nightmares I’d had over the years of this place and the things living upon it rushed forward at once and again I saw my father’s face, so twisted in fear in his final moments, and I saw that thing, that Woken Daughter’s pale, milky eyes staring at me as she dragged him away. I was a child again, terrified, lost, alone, and by the time I pulled over at the foot of White Crow Mountain, I was shaking.

  Twenty years had passed since I last visited that place and I was amazed by how little had actually changed. There was the same sun bleached sign ahead pointing me towards the dirt roadway that would take me up to the cabin, the same wooden fence, albeit more weathered and beaten, curving alongside it to keep people from going off trail, the same looming trees, except now they seemed ominous instead of whimsical and welcoming.

  I was different, though, I reminded myself sternly. I was not that same terrified little girl. I had a better idea of what I was up against now, the Daughter’s element of surprise had been lost, and I was going to burn down the entire fucking mountain if it meant killing her.

  When I glanced in my side mirror to check if it was safe to get back on the road, I was greeted by a tiny, indistinct shape, sometimes rodent like, sometimes not, sitting in the reflection. It seemed relaxed, unconcerned with being spotted, and stayed put in the middle of the pavement. A quick look over my shoulder revealed an empty road, but, when I looked back, the shapeless was still in the mirror.

  That was what Marcus called them; shapeless, beings that lived in ideas of reality, like reflections. He’d said they were harmless, but seeing two in one day seemed a dark omen to me. I didn’t want to see the cracks in reality or be open to anything Gorrorum had to offer. I just had to hope that whatever answers I found would include a way to shut the door his nasty little Fingers had opened.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the shapeless shift between colors and features, never solidly one thing or another, never quite realized. I wished I could run it over.

  With the steering wheel squeezed in both hands, I stomped on the gas and sent my rental lurching up the mountainside. There were places where the roadway branched, parts that had been closed off either by design or by nature’s will, and I had to retrace my route a few times before I felt certain I was heading towards the old cabin. It had been sold out of the family long before, too painful a reminder, and so I didn’t know what to expect when I finally found it.

  Like everything else, though, it seemed unchanged except by time.

  It was immediately clear it had been uninhabited for many years. Moss stretched up one side, the front window was broken, an
d the door half-hung off its hinges. The inside was dark. Using my phone as a flashlight, I stepped tentatively forward and nudged it open to look within. Whoever bought it had cleared the place out, probably with plans to redecorate, but for whatever reason, it had never happened. Maybe they’d had a brush with a spider armed lady before they’d had a chance.

  Before the nostalgia and pain became too much, I shut the door again as best I could and turned back towards the woods. White Crow was huge, the Daughters could have been anywhere, and it was already turning towards the late afternoon. If I wanted to find one of them, I’d have to get started. I steeled myself with a deep breath, grabbed my backpack and gear from the car, and set off along the same trail my dad and I had taken the last time I’d been up there. I made sure to make a lot of noise, singing and stomping on twigs, anything I could do so my passing couldn’t go unnoticed.

  As the first hour passed, so, too, did my “enthusiasm” for the task at hand. The last mosquitoes of the season attacked viciously even after I’d used the bug spray, the boots turned out to be cheaply made and uncomfortable, and I quickly discovered that using a map wasn’t quite as simple as picking it up and knowing how to read it. The mountain stretched endlessly on all sides, dark woods hiding darker secrets, and, despite my conscious attempts to walk in a straight line so I could get back to my car easily, I was pretty sure I’d veered at some point.

  Still, I trudged on, shouting now for the damned Daughters to show themselves. I didn’t know if they spoke English or any other language and I was sure if anyone else heard me, they’d think I was a bit unhinged, but so be it. I’d made it this far, I was going to make it count.

  The bend in the path took on a familiar quality, I must have found my way back to the original trail again, and a flurry of flashbacks mingled with the present. I remembered running along that very curve, I remembered my dad yelling for me to wait for him. I remembered rounding it completely to find that arm lying just off the path, buried up beyond the elbow in brush. I almost expected it to be there now, waiting for me then just as it had been before.