by Joe Hart
I ran with all the grace of a wounded animal, until I was at the boundary of the trees. I turned and sat, ready to scramble up if anything moved below. The amputated piece of tentacle wriggled a few times, and even turned in the direction of the river, before falling still. I could still smell the foul odor of its blood, and upon looking down there were a few white globs stuck to my pants. Disgusted, I wiped them away before rising to my feet.
Studying the woods I almost expected something to rush out from the darkness to devour me. But the only sound was the wind shifting branches against one another, clacking wind chimes without tune. I moved closer to the trees, shivering with each step, my legs threatening collapse. Glancing down the bank to my right, I hoped I would see the familiar outlines of Fellow, Ellius, and Kotis. Only the gray knobs of stone and emptiness of the beach met my eyes.
My feet crunched across dead leaves and sticks. Finally, my legs gave out. I fell to my knees and then sat on my ass, bracing with my hands to keep me from falling straight to my back. It felt very good to sit, to rest. My mind drifted in a haze of nothing. There was only flaming cold that felt like heat. I tried to wiggle my toes, but couldn’t tell if they moved within my shoes. Stories of hypothermia replayed through my mind, how survivors described the urge to lie down and fall asleep, how the concern of death became dull and lost its menace. I contemplated it—death. My wife and children were probably dead; I didn’t know how long they’d been gone. Without the rest of my group, I wouldn’t find them anyway. I would wander the wasteland at the heart of evil forever, until I succumbed to death anyway, by force or by their crippling absence, which would eventually crush me into madness.
I didn’t feel my left arm give away, and only realized that I’d fallen onto my side when something poked into my chest and ribs. I grunted, no longer wanting to stay awake. The desire to float away, unbridled and unchained by the life that pulled me down was almost undeniable. I shifted, and the object prodded me again. Something in my pocket, something hard and unyielding.
My eyes shot open.
Managing to get an elbow beneath me, I shoved myself into a half-sitting position, enough to balance, to reach around and fumble with the pocket on my jacket. I looked down and guided my hand by sight, rather than touch, until I was sure I must be holding something. I drew my clenched fist out and opened it, looking at what lay in my palm.
The Zippo was covered in white goo, and for a moment I thought some of the tentacle blood had gotten into the pocket. Then I saw the faded letters on a few pieces of the paste, and knew the Chesterfields were no more. I brushed away some of the cigarette wrapper and managed to flip open the lighter. Several drops of moisture flew out from inside the cap. I turned it upside down and waited for water to dribble out and extinguish my hope. None did.
With more energy than I thought I possessed, I rose to my knees and piled the nearby dead leaves. Each stick or twig I found I added, and soon I had a mound of dry fuel that was knee-high. I stared at the lighter in my hand. It wavered, or maybe I did as I placed my thumb against the little wheel. I prayed against the voice in my head that said the flame wouldn’t appear, and flicked my thumb.
The Zippo lit instantly.
A flame nearly two inches high bloomed from the wick. I laughed and held the flame under the edge of a leaf at the bottom of my pile. It smoked for a few seconds and then caught, the fire smiling beneath the leaves and sticks with a widening grin.
I shut the lighter and leaned over the heat. It felt blessed. Careful to not put my hands too close to the flames, I rubbed them over the growing fire. The leaves wrinkled and curled almost as soon as the fire touched them, and soon the sticks on top were burning. Shuddering, I gathered more and more twigs until the blaze talked and snapped. Soon the ground was clear of any leaves and sticks around the blaze, and I stumbled to the edge of the forest and found larger pieces of wood. I carefully fed them to the flames. A humming vibrated within the centers of my hands, not true feeling but close. I imagined my fingers smoking and curling like the leaves, and at that moment it would have been okay.
After one more trip to the trees, I sat down and placed a large, gnarled chunk of hardwood on top of the pyre before pulling off my shoes. They still dripped water as I set them aside, and peeled off my socks to dry. Next I unbuttoned the coat, and although I dreaded taking off its protection, I pulled the heavy garment away and draped it over me as I lay down only a few feet from the edge of the fire.
Exhaustion sank its roots deep into my bones and tugged my eyelids down. Still shaking, I curled an arm beneath my head and closed my eyes to the ache in the tips of my fingers.
I awoke to a fluttering sound and something hitting the ground nearby. I sat up, choking on dread with thoughts of a slithering tentacle meandering its way toward me.
Scrim sat a few feet away, his head cocked to one side.
“Scrim!” I yelled and jumped to my feet. My legs wobbled and my head felt two sizes too large. The bird squawked once and leapt from the ground, only to hover before me, his long wings beating the air. It was a few seconds before I figured out what he wanted, then I extended my forearm. With surprising grace he landed on the perch I provided, with a gentleness I didn’t expect. His long beak clicked several times, and a whirring sound came from the back of his skull.
“Where are they?” I asked, feeling better by the second. I turned and strode to the top of the bank. There was no one on the strewn rocks in either direction. I listened, waiting for a branch to break in the woods or the sound of stones shifting. I heard nothing.
I lifted Scrim to eye level. “Where are they?” The bird clicked a few more times and blinked. I thought I saw a hint of something in the golden rings of his eyes—a warning? Then he jumped from my arm and soared up the shore before coasting back.
“You want me to follow?” I asked. He replied with a long tittering that sounded like a red squirrel ferreting an acorn. “Let me get my shoes,” I said, heading back to the fire.
The flames were low but not entirely out. My socks were fairly dry, but I realized they wouldn’t stay that way as I placed my shoes over them. The inserts inside the sneakers were two sponges filled with cold moisture, and I tore them out. When I wiggled my toes they were chilled, but the feeling was back in the form of nettling pain whenever I put weight on them. The wool jacket was almost completely dry, and it felt reassuring as I pulled over my shoulders. My fingers were the most concerning. They were mostly thawed, but the tips remained white, with only slight sensation as I buttoned the coat. Scrim swooped low, past the trees, and called out again. With nothing else to carry, I set off after him, in the direction of the bridge.
A light mist hung a few feet off the ground, as if suspended from the bridge pillars, when I approached the structure. I assumed that the others searched for me and went back to the bridge to regroup when they didn’t find me, so the elation I felt when I crested the hill soured at their absence. Scrim flew into the mist and vanished, only to reappear in a gliding arc as he skimmed the walkway of the bridge.
I stopped a few yards from the stone pillars and turned in a circle. “Ellius!” I yelled, letting the name echo off the line of trees and into the canyon behind me. “Fellow! Kotis!” My voice was lonely, the last sound in the world.
Scrim flew from behind me and landed on the ground several paces away. He walked with the movement of a large chicken, his wings folded back and his head bobbing forward. I followed him, hoping to see a trail of smoke drifting up from a campfire.
We made our way up the bank and stopped at the top. There was a gap in the woods ahead and the terrain changed drastically from dead scrub grass to packed earth to gray stone. Scrim called from down the bank, and after two steps my foot crunched on something and I stopped.
A thick layer of sickly orange flakes lay strewn in an oval shape on the ground. I stepped back and knelt to examine it. The flakes were deep amber and brown in spots, with curled edges. All the pieces were two or more inches in dia
meter. Cautiously I nudged one. It moved enough for me to see black tar that soaked the ground beneath the pieces.
“Rust,” I said, poking at the chunks of decay again. I picked one of the pieces up to get a closer look. Fine, red hairs grew from the scale and swayed in the breeze.
I dropped the scale in disgust and wiped my hand on my jeans, as if I’d touched a pile of noxious waste. To my right sat another mound almost identical to the first. This time there was a smattering of blood that continued in a line toward the trees. The grass was bent and broken in several places, and the entire area I stood in looked as though a herd of buffalo had stampeded through. There were deep depressions in many places along with the familiar tread of bare feet, much larger than a human. “Kotis,” I said.
Next to the tracks were a set of dents that could only have been Fellow’s. Fear wiggled a finger in the bottom of my stomach, and I crouched to stare at the forest ahead. I waited. Nothing moved, and since I was pretty much in plain sight, I assumed whoever or whatever took my friends was gone. For they had been taken, that much was certain. I could see the footprints of their attackers leading from the depths of the woods, their tracks long and clawed.
I walked down the bank and traced the battle that must have happened just moments after I’d fallen. There was another pile of rust, and this time I saw what looked like deflated facial features at one end. Two spots that could have been eyes gazed up at me, their sockets filled with the same black tar, and a mouth still held a round expression of surprise. Where the dead grass transitioned into dirt, I saw scuff marks raked in wide swaths. It looked like someone had made a snow angel in the earth. Two deep channels continued on from that point, and ended as the ground became solid stone.
“They dragged them away,” I said, as Scrim walked to me from the edge of the woods. “Something took them.” Scrim dipped his long beak once and clicked. I faced ahead and stared at distant shapes that looked like narrow spires shooting up from the ground. The drag marks led in a straight line to the pointed towers.
I let out a shaky breath and walked to the woods to look for some sort of weapon. All the sticks were either too short or too brittle, and after a few minutes I gave up. “Of course there’s nothing,” I said. Scrim hopped toward me, his head tipping back and forth. “Yeah, let’s do this,” I said, and we walked through the break in the trees, toward the shapes in the distance.
The stone spires shot straight up and towered over us, the tallest of them being at least two hundred feet from base to tip. They were conical in shape, but withered near their tops, and looked like jagged, broken fingers of the dead. I stopped at the border of the formations and gazed into a passage that wound away into the city of rock.
The trail left, undoubtedly, by Kotis’s dragging heels, led into the city. The sun sat to my right and threw long, ungainly shadows across the path. Every so often a sharp crack would echo deep within the towers, making the back of my neck prickle.
I bent down and picked up a rock smaller than a baseball. It wasn’t the best protection, but I remembered how the jagged stone cut through the tentacle wrapped around my leg and decided that it was better than nothing.
“You fly high and check things out. Come back to me if you see something wrong,” I said to Scrim. He let out a short screech and leapt into the air. In a few seconds he was a dark spot against the clouds, and then nothing at all.
I was alone again. The curved bases of the towers were immense and stretched like crumbling tree trunks into the ground. The darkness between them played tricks on my eyes; shifting, moving, dancing with forms that almost took definitive shape and then melted away. Part of me wanted to turn away and run in the direction I thought my family must be, away from the shadows that spoke of death. But I couldn’t forsake them. My friends. I moved out of the feeble light and into the forest of stone.
The air immediately became cooler, and I buttoned my jacket as much as I could. My fingertips were still numb, and the chilly air nipped at them, causing a dull throb beneath my fingernails. I studied the rock formations as I passed them, my heart beating harder each time I saw what resembled movement between the monoliths. The rock was cracked and striated, but otherwise smooth. It was light brown with stains of yellow and pocks of black in different places. A smell permeated the air, organic and pungent, with hints of salt, like the ocean at low tide.
The path was unbroken and level because of the tread of many feet. It had the feel of an abandoned highway, the centerline worn away with time. The sharp cracking came again, and I froze, waiting for one of the stalagmites to topple. When nothing approached or fell, I continued on. The trail dipped and then ran up, creating a rise before another, deeper, drop. I hesitated on the crest, listening for what I thought I heard: a yell on the wind that wound its way through the spires. It came again, this time there was no mistaking the deep bellow of Kotis’s voice.
I ran. The massive trunks hurtled by, and the trail narrowed. I gripped the rock in my right hand, my muscles thrumming and ready to heave the stone at the first sign of danger. The path threaded hard to the left, and suddenly an opening appeared. I skidded to a halt and ducked down behind a nearby outcrop. Tentatively I peeked over the rock I hid behind.
The clearing was the size of a football stadium. The rock upthrusts ran in a curved ring, making up its boundaries. The center resembled a flattened lava field of unblemished, rolling stone. A rough channel ran around the circumference of the clearing, and a short bridge made of cobblestones ran across the nearest gap.
In the center of the opening, naked and chained to the ground, lay Kotis and Fellow. It looked as though Kotis bled from a wound on his head and Fellow was unconscious, his face turned to the side, away from me, unmoving. Around them stood dozens of hunched figures, all skeleton thin and deep orange. Their heads were small and their arms long, some scraping the ground with their fingertips. I could make out fine, red hairs growing on the closest ones, along with scabrous breaks in their orange skin—rust.
“You know where he is,” a deep, velvet voice said. A man stood a few yards in front of Kotis—or what I at first thought was a man. When it turned in my direction, I saw that it was anything but. A long shock of deep-black hair swept back from a flattened forehead. Its skin was a sulfurous yellow, the color of a diseased tooth. Elongated eyes hugged the sides of its head in reptilian fashion, and its body was rail thin, matching its compatriots in stature. It wore a dirty black dress shirt that dangled from its lean shoulders and a pair of brown pants, which at one time might have been white. When it opened its mouth to speak, I saw rows of pointed, interlocking teeth.
“He’s hidden somewhere, and you’re going to tell me,” the creature said.
Kotis raised his head, hawked with a scraping sound, and spit a mass of blood and phlegm at his captor. The lugi landed on the thing’s shirt and drooled down the front. Before the spit could drip, the creature swiped it up and, without hesitating, licked it off its hand.
“Delightful,” it said after chewing for a moment. “Now where were we?”
Kotis coughed. “I was tellin’ you to get fucked, and you were about to oblige.”
“Hmm, no, that’s not right. I think you were about to say—”
It leapt forward with speed that made my neck muscles jerk in an attempt to follow it. There was a resounding crack as it struck Kotis on the side of the head with a pointed foot, and I knew where the sound that I heard in the passage earlier came from. Kotis’s head snapped to the side, and blood flew in a shiny spray from the raw wound on his temple. The giant clenched his jaw and the muscles rippled beneath his dark gray skin. The chains rattled as he strained against them, but then he relaxed, his breath puffing out in another, smaller, mist of blood.
“Piss in the wind,” Kotis managed after catching his breath.
“I’ll piss your blood,” the creature hissed, and slid to one knee, grabbing Kotis by the throat as he did. “Tell me where he is! They saw him with you across the river!”<
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“He fell, he’s dead,” Kotis croaked.
“You lie!” the thing yelled, and pounded on Kotis’s face with a fury of fists. Another set of arms sprouted from the thing’s sides. The new arms were long and segmented, with sharp points at their ends. They unfurled and rose into the air above Kotis and Fellow, and hung there ready to stab downward.
“No,” I yelled, and leapt from behind the rock.
Dozens of heads swiveled in my direction. The creature’s spear-like appendages froze in mid-strike. I stood in the open, with no protection other than the stone in my hand, which felt silly now. After a moment I let it drop to the ground beside my foot. “Don’t hurt them anymore. I’m right here,” I said.
The creature hovered over Kotis for another second and then stood, its secret arms retracting out of sight. Now that it faced me fully, I could see its eyes were black with red centers, which looked like small fires as it blinked, and rows of teeth gleamed dully in the fall light when it smiled.
“So gracious of you to join us ...?” The question hung in the silence.
“Michael,” I replied, glancing down at Kotis, who shook his head and jerked it in the direction I’d come from.
“Ah, Michael. Such a human name,” the creature purred. Its voice carried effortlessly across the distance between us. It sounded hollow and bottomless, as if it spoke from a cave within itself. “Michael, why don’t you join us and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”
I started to reply, but movement caught my eye to the right of the creature. Something zipped through the air, a streamlined bullet of gray and brown. Scrim dove sharply, his eyes trained on the creature with deadly awareness. At the last second he released his wings from his sides, their bladed edges flashing.