18
As they reached the camp’s clearing, Xavier slammed on the brakes, and the truck slid in the mud before coming to a stop. The car shuddered, suddenly stalled. Xavier did not restart it.
Phil still hoped he simply needed to wake up and everything would be back to normal. But he could not even imagine where reality had ended and the nightmare had begun. When had his life not been a nightmare? He had driven a knife into his own eye. Agreed to find someone named El Diablo. He had taken a photo of Tyler Z instead of saving him. Had left for Kabul instead of staying with Samantha. Chosen to be a witness instead of a savior, photograph after photograph, for as long as he could remember.
There was nothing to wake up from. He was deep in La Plata, in the lair of a madman, and the membrane between this world and a nightmare had been ripped open. Either that or he had gone completely mad. Even so, he still held out hope that his trajectory in life might change. Phil kept his remaining eye closed as they drove back to the camp, hiding in the darkness in his head. He hoped when he opened his eye again that Xavier would have decided that returning was a bad idea and they would turn the truck towards the capital.
Instead, Phil found himself back in the middle of the drug lord’s camp, his mind broken, a shard of pain in his skull, defeated.
Phil stared; Halley was no longer bound to the tree. He was gone. Barbed wire still encircled the trunk. Phil could make out blood on the bark in the shape of a man. The image made him think that Halley had been pulled straight through the wires.
“He’s gone,” said Phil. “They killed him. Let’s turn back.”
“He’s alive. I know it and we can’t leave him behind.” Xavier climbed out of the pick-up truck. He grabbed a machete. He tongued the cigarillo from one side of his mouth to the other. “They must’ve taken him down to the beach. To El Diablo.”
Phil gazed down the narrow trail that led to the beach. Dark clouds rose above the trees, swirling, tumbling, roiling. He could see the monster forming in the sky. Wisps gathering, the shadows of the tentacles. It was there. It waited for them. Eyes began to take shape, narrowing, focusing on him.
He shivered in terror. His skin was drenched in sweat and his shirt stuck to his chest. He sucked in short, sharp breaths between his bared teeth. He clenched his fists so hard his arms trembled. He wanted to scream but he didn’t want it to hear him. If it heard him it would come slithering across the sea.
“We can’t go back,” he whispered. “That thing is there. Coming. We need to get away. We need to get out of here as fast as possible. Please!”
“Phil, stay in the car.” Xavier spoke calmly, and Phil imagined it was the voice he used with his children. It was meant to be reassuring. “I’ll find him. You saved me, and I can’t ask anything more of you. It’s okay. It’s my turn to play hero. Wait here for me. We’ll get back home.”
“We can’t stay,” Phil hissed. He shrunk against the seat, trying to hide behind the dashboard. “It’ll find me! It’s seen me. It’s in my fucking head! We just need to go. We never should have come back.”
“I’ll be back with Halley.”
Phil looked again at the shape in blood on the tree. “He doesn’t exist anymore. You won’t find him. Don’t you understand?”
Xavier turned and headed towards the trail that led to the sea. Phil closed his eye. He tried to imagine himself somewhere different. It was an exercise in futility. He opened his eye, to the jungle, the empty clearing. Xavier hadn’t returned. Waves crashed relentlessly. He wasn’t sure how long Xavier had been gone. The dark mud, the shadows shifting in the trees, the clouds swirling – it all looked the same as before. He had no sense of the passing of time.
Rain had begun falling, sheeting rain, the hood of the car clanging with the hard drops, and abruptly the rain lessened and then stopped entirely.
Xavier had been gone too long.
He should have found Halley by now and brought him back to the truck. Phil stared at the keys in the ignition. It would be so easy to slide across the seat and start the car. He could be on the highway on his way back to the capital. He could be racing ahead of that thing.
But we make the world by what we do, he thought. Just like the doctor at the refugee camp had said. We shape the world by our actions. And the world he had created by his cowardice and selfish was an ugly one. A world of unspeakable monsters. If he saved Xavier, maybe the world would be a less horrific place. Maybe Phil could erase the horror and madness on the horizon and find peace.
He had saved Xavier once. He couldn’t leave him behind now. He needed to rescue him. He needed to unmake the horror. Even if it meant risking his life.
He picked up the machete from the floor, shoved the door open with his shoulder, climbed out of the truck, and began walking back towards the beach.
19
Halfway down the trail, before the foliage parted enough to reveal the sea, Phil found his camera. It hung by its strap on a tree limb. As if someone had placed it there knowing that he would be coming.
He stopped. His head throbbed as if the knife were still remained planted there. Half his vision was swallowed from the loss of his eye. He reached out, probing into his blind spot to make sure something unseen was not there waiting.
The sky blossomed dark, black threads swirling out of gray clouds. The camera glinted where it hung. He glanced up. The sun was hidden behind the roiling mass of clouds.
Phil hesitated. He did not want to touch his camera. The temptation to peer through the lens was too great. What would he see when he looked through the lens? Would his remaining eye be corrupted and the image of horror forever embedded in his sight?
He looked up and down the narrow, muddy trail. Mosquitos hovered around him, as if drawn to the old blood on his skin, wet again with the rain, but they did not land as if repulsed, as if they smelled a deeper rot seeping from within him. He remembered the haunting image of El Diablo captured in his photo viewfinder, skin burnt back to peeling, the centipedes in his eyes, the roaches dancing in gangrenous flesh.
Phil felt as if worms wriggled beneath his skin. But it wasn’t worms. His cowardice, his betrayals, his wasted life - those were what writhed and twisted beneath his skin. In his soul.
Phil grabbed the camera, slung it over his shoulder, and turned towards the pounding sea.
Within a few moments, he arrived where the trees had parted to reveal the dark sea. The trail bled into pale sand, and when he stepped onto the beach, he shuddered, overcome with the feeling that his feet had sunk into bones ground to dust. As if a million lives had been worn down, now meaningless. The wind hissed through the palm fronds, and it sounded like laughter.
He could not yet see around the corner of the concrete building where El Diablo had sat. But he knew the man waited there. Phil tightened his grip on the machete, but it felt heavy, loose in his hand, as if he had no strength in his fingers or wrist. He couldn’t imagine lifting it to his shoulder, much less swinging it with any force.
He was almost at the corner of the building when he saw a stain on the ground and stopped. The sand was soaked red, in the shape of a man. A small cigarillo chewed wet at one end lay in the stain. Phil tried to swallow but could not. The air seemed trapped in his lungs.
Xavier had died in some horrible way and disintegrated or dissipated.
The waves beat against the shore. Pounding, hissing, the pulse of the planet.
Phil looked out over the leaden waters, beyond the troughs, where the edge of the sea and the horizon should have met, only there was no border, no distinction as if the churning sea was one with the swirling clouds. And he could see it there, shapeless but forming, an ancient, unnamable entity consuming the sky.
Xavier had succumbed to its presence. Undone by it.
Phil waited for it to draw into him, but he went unnoticed, unimportant, like a speck of ash in a world consumed by flame.
He drew in several deep breaths. He needed to push on. For Xavier. For Samantha. For himself.<
br />
He skirted around the stain and reached the concrete building.
Its walls had turned yellow and purple with a carpet of mold that also recently spread across the sand. He smelled the sea, the salt, the sour bite of rotting vegetables. His mouth suddenly filled with saliva and he choked back the urge to throw up.
El Diablo lay on the ground, tangled in his chair, his legs swollen, elephantine in size, his skin gray and thick like that of a seal. The table lay on its side, the knife still plunged in the top, and a few feet away, Halley’s pistol lay discarded on a drift of sand.
“It’s too late,” said El Diablo. “It was always too late though, wasn’t it? What we never imagined was only sleeping. Our whole existence passing behind the blinking of its eyes.”
Phil hobbled over to the gun. His back exploded in pain as he bent to pick it up. It was heavy, like an iron weight. He pointed it at El Diablo.
“You came here to kill me.”
“You were already dead.” Phil squeezed the trigger, and it seemed a lifetime passed before the gun cracked against the dark sky.
A muffled buzz swallowed Phil. As if the movement of time had stopped, but the waves rolled. Relentless. Eating the shore.
A black hole formed above El Diablo’s left eye and for a single moment, Phil could see through him, see the world behind him, the dark swirling skies, the fires dancing across the seas, the tentacled creature gathering itself - a silhouette becoming solid.
Phil dropped the gun, focused his camera, and shot.
20
Three months later Phil slouched on the bench in front of the Los Angeles restaurant where his descent into hell with Xavier had begun.
“No, I don’t want that,” he said. He clutched a cell phone to his ear and stared out over the sea. He looked for it, but saw nothing. Nothing. The white breakers over the sand. The buckling crest and trough. The horizon melting into the sea.
Leaving La Plata, he had thought he would return to a world removed from the horror but that is not what he found. A virus pandemic had seized the world. Fires from drought and lightning charred the hills. Fear burned through everyone. It was as if the hell he had witnessed bled out of La Plata.
Justine was talking on the other end of the call, her voice crackling, the words half-consumed, as if she spoke a language Phil did not understand. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t really listening.
He was more focused on the sea, peering with his remaining eye - an unreliable orb that had witnessed an impossible nightmare; a part of him that had deceived him.
A scream rippled from across the road. He turned towards the sound. A child ran from a lumbering woman along the beach; she was waving a mask. A couple with matching teal bandanas across their faces argued about which way was north, how to get home. Phil smelled burnt meat, the exhaust from cars on the frontage road, and the stifling salt of the sea.
Everything seemed the same, but the lens through which he saw the world had shattered.
“Can you repeat that?” said Justine. “You’re breaking up. Is that the ocean in the background? It’s smothering everything.”
“I don’t want the assignment,” said Phil.
“We can make sure you have all the PPE you want. State of the art mask. Full body suit. They want you. The White House wants the guy who caught the death shot of El Diablo to take the photo of the President on the ventilator. This is it, Phil. Everything you wanted. This is your chance.”
Phil hung up, and when Justine called again, he pocketed his phone.
He tried to remember Samantha, the shape of her face, the color of her eyes, the smell of her hair, how her skin felt beneath his fingers. But nothing came. He dug his fingernails into the bench. He stared at the sidewalk. A wet footprint shrunk on the hot cement, the impression evaporating into nothing.
It was Saturday morning. He had waited in his car until he had seen Xavier’s wife and kids hurrying from the parking lot to the restaurant. He had followed them as far as the sidewalk and then slumped onto the bench. Even with Xavier gone, they persisted. Kept up the ritual of breakfast. As if life could just go on.
Phil knew what he should do. He should get up, dust himself off, go into the restaurant, and stand at the foot of that table. He should tell her what a hero her husband was, how Xavier went back selflessly to save Halley, how he had shot El Diablo and ended the horror of his reign. With his lies, he would give them hope against despair.
Phil wanted to do this. But he couldn’t. He could not embed himself in the lie anymore.
He thought of rising from the bench and turning around to peer through the window. But he trembled, frozen in unspeakable fear.
In order to see them he would need to look through the glass, and he knew what he would see, reflected in the window over his shoulder: the storm-churned sea, bleeding skies, distant fires on the horizon, and the beast waking from its slumber. The monster he could not escape.
Free Book Offer
Want to read the first book in my Hounds of the North dark fantasy series for free?
Join my email list at www.peterfugazzotto.com and get started on this action-packed dark fantasy series with The Witch of the Sands.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife and daughter and dog for tolerating me typing too loudly on my laptop. The birds, on the other hand, were no help at all.
Thank you to early readers Joel Fugazzotto and Christine Harvey who see what I cannot.
A big thanks to Dave De Burgh whose editing notes almost broke me. Hire him.
About the Author
Peter Fugazzotto is a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Grim Dark Magazine, and Far Fetched Fables.
In addition to his writing, he earned a Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, once spent a summer vaccinating against yellow fever in the Amazon, and on his honeymoon stumbled upon a corpse flower in the jungles of Indonesia.
He lives in Northern California with his wife and daughter and an assortment of animals.
www.peterfugazzotto.com
Blurred Page 8