Incarnata

by Brandon Faircloth

  As though sensing my gaze, he stopped and turned to look at me with a ghastly smile. A strip of skin hung down his cheek like old wallpaper, and as he looked at me, he idly scratched at the wound. I realized absently that I could see his face because of the ever-shifting electric glow of dozens of fake candles that filled the room and trailed down into the cellar below. Meeting my eyes, his smile grew wider as he spoke.

  “Sorry for the bump on the head, kid. But things were getting out of hand, right? And we’ve still got to check out the cellar.”

  “Wha…why…” Oscar cut me off with a slight shake of his head as he began pulling me toward the cellar door again.

  “Shh. Save your strength, Jack. I’ll help you get down there. But you just have to see this tunnel. It’s really something.”

  Part Four

  My name is Jeff Spires. I’m recording this on my phone after waking up in the trunk of what appears to be my own car. I’ve tried to find a way out, but unfortunately, my neurotic need to keep my car clean recently extended to the trunk, and the only tool in here is the tire iron underneath the floor, and I don’t have enough clearance to move the floor or break through it.

  Similarly, between my limited range of motion and the unfortunately sturdy design of my car, my attempts at kicking out the back seats only met unyielding metal. I’m sweaty and scared, but I’m not giving up. I’ll get out of this if I can.

  But if I don’t, maybe this recording will. Oscar took my gear from me, but he didn’t think about the cell phone, and hopefully he won’t later on. I’ve tried to make calls since waking up, but just like when I found Aunt Jenny, my phone doesn’t act right. I was able to call Jack earlier, but calls to 911 or anyone else wouldn’t go through. At the time I thought I needed to warn him more than I needed to find a police station, but now I’m wondering if I made the wrong choice. Oscar came out of nowhere and decked him, and then he threw me down like it was nothing. I don’t know how he can be that fast and strong.

  Either way, it doesn’t matter. I did what I did, and since I don’t have any other options to get out of here just yet, I’m going to tell whoever listens to this about what has been happening for the last couple of weeks. Just…whoever hears this, please know that I’m not crazy. This is not a joke. And I’m taking time away from trying to figure out a way to get out of this stupid trunk because…well, I know more people will die if it isn’t stopped. So really listen to what I have to say.

  ****

  My uncle is Oscar Sanderson. He is not a bad man, or he never was in the over twenty years that I’ve known him. He never liked me that much, but I always understood that. I’m not that easy to like. The main thing was that he was good to my Aunt Jenny and seemed to make her happy.

  And he was never ugly to me, either. Even helped me get this security job…which in hindsight probably wasn’t the best thing for me, but at the time I was really excited. I’d had a hard time when I left the Marines, and this kind of job, with its quiet and structure…well, it felt like a real blessing. I tried to work hard at it, and although I wasn’t excited about babysitting an old, abandoned subdivision like Whispering Oaks, I was happy for the work. I figured if I was diligent and worked hard, it could be the start of a good career with the company.

  That’s part of why I tried to ignore stuff at first. You learn in the military to wear blinders when you need to. To not rock the boat. There are always people above you, and most of them are not your friend. You keep your head down, get your shit done, and learn who you can trust.

  When I first got here, I thought I could trust Oscar and his buddy Jack Downing. Jack was an ex-cop, and while he wasn’t exactly breaking his back with the job he did, he was responsible and smart. You could tell he cared about the job, and if he was always a bit stand-offish with me, he was also always polite. So was Oscar for that matter. I realized some of that distance between me and them was my fault. They had their way of doing things and I was the new kid coming in making suggestions, being critical. So I started working on toning that down, and I kind of figured in time I could win them over a bit more.

  But then a couple of weeks ago, the weird stuff started happening.

  The first thing was one night a couple of weeks ago. It was a Sunday, and I was working with Jack. We usually swap off patrols when we’re together, and he had gone out to check Zone Three. Zone Three is usually a thirty minute clear, so when he wasn’t back in forty-five, I started trying to raise him on the radio or phone. No response.

  I go out to the Zone, and after a few minutes of riding around I find his vehicle and then Jack himself. He’s kneeling in the bottom of one of the empty outdoor pools over there. Just kneeling on the busted concrete and staring up at the sky. My grandmother grew up in a church that was big on religious trances and tongues, and I remember seeing members of her congregation do something similar the few times I stayed with them as a kid. It was like he wasn’t even there. I had to shake him hard, and finally after about a minute he came out of it. Looked around a bit confused and then murmured something incoherent to me.

  I was worried he had a brain injury or something, and I wanted him to go get checked out, but by the time we were back to the ATVs, he was acting like himself again. He seemed embarrassed, but was making jokes and excuses. When we got back to the clubhouse, he tried to play it off as a practical joke, but I didn’t really believe it. Still, he seemed fine, and by the end of that shift he was acting like it never happened.

  The next time I saw Jack, he was coming off the Thursday day shift as I was going on. He seemed like something was wrong. Not staring or anything like in the pool, just…off. He said he wasn’t feeling too well and was going to head on home. I brought up what had happened on Sunday and told him he should go get checked by a doctor if he was still feeling weird like that.

  He had no idea what I was talking about.

  He wasn’t lying or joking. I swear he wasn’t. I could have been talking about that trip to the moon we took last week and he couldn’t have looked more confused. He had no memory of me getting him out of that pool or us talking about it later that night.

  Looking back, I should have pressed the issue more then. But he was leaving, he didn’t seem interested in talking about it anymore, and I was trying to stop sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. I actually felt a bit of relief when I heard the next day that he had come down with a stomach bug, as that sounded a lot more manageable than something being fucked up in his head.

  Still, I kept coming back to what he had said as I had helped him to his feet that night in the abandoned pool.

  ”The Rot is rising, and we will all be blessed to drown in It.”

  ****

  I stopped recording a moment ago both to gather my thoughts and to listen out for any noises. I know what I’m telling is important, but I don’t want to get caught off-guard either. My best chance of getting free, unless my phone starts making calls again or I think of a new way to escape the trunk, is to attack Oscar when he opens the lid. He is way faster and stronger than I gave him credit for, but hopefully I can take him by surprise.

  The funny thing is, even after all that he’s done, even after I saw what he did to Jenny, I don’t know if I can kill him. Despite his mild distaste for me, I always respected him. Wanted to get him to like me more.

  But I have to set my old ideas of him aside. I’ve known for days that he was acting strangely and...I’ve got to stop rambling. This isn’t a diary. I need to tell what I know, not what I feel. Sorry. This is all kind of stressful.

  After Jack got sick, I offered to help cover Friday and Saturday night with Oscar, but he said he had it handled. That seemed a bit odd to me. I knew that Oscar preferred partnering with Jack instead of me, but I didn’t think he’d rather work a shift alone than have someone, even me, to help out. Still, it was his call and I let it go.

  But then when I worked on Monday night, I found the couple in the Grey House. I always do a quick interior of all the houses
every shift, but this mainly consists of just checking the front door and front hallway unless there’s a sign of something being wrong. That night, I was standing in the foyer of the Grey House when I heard a girl crying.

  It was faint—so faint, in fact, at first I thought it might be my imagination. But as I moved deeper into the house, I could hear it more clearly. The sound was coming from down one of the large side halls, and as I got closer to it, I realized it was actually echoing down a stairwell that led up to a cluster of second floor rooms at the end of that wing. Even now, given the distance and barriers between us, I’m not sure how I ever heard that girl at all.

  The room was like so many in those houses—large, blank, and largely nondescript aside from some bookshelves built into one wall. What caught my eye immediately, however, was the naked couple huddled on the floor together. When I stepped into the room, the girl looked up immediately, her face red and puffy from crying. I saw bruises on her face and arms as well, and my initial idea of having walked in on a couple looking for adventurous sex began to turn to some sort of crime. Was she being held against her will? Had the man assaulted or raped her?

  But she clearly was afraid of me, not him, and for his part, he was lying on his back in a kind of stupor as he stared blankly into the ceiling. Were they both victims here then? The door hadn’t been locked when I came in, had it? If not, why didn’t they just leave? All these questions in just a handful of seconds, but I knew I needed to say something to calm the girl down.

  “Miss, I’m not here to hurt you. Are you all right? Is he?”

  She began to cry again, her face strangely contorted as she bared her teeth at me. “We know you’re with him. Don’t let him hurt us again. You leave me and my Tommy alone.”

  The way she was acting, the way they were both acting, I started thinking more and more they were on something. It didn’t mean they didn’t need help, but I needed to be careful.

  “Miss, I’m not going to hurt you or Tommy. I want to help. Who hurt you? Who did this?”

  She squinted at me and let out a little terrified laugh. “You know. Oh, you know.” She turned and shoved Tommy, who slowly began to rouse, looking around with an expression that reminded me of Jack a few days earlier. I felt my control of the situation slipping, and so I went ahead and took out my phone, started to call 911. I only took my eyes off of them for a second, but when I looked back up they were charging toward me, knocking me down.

  I immediately began to roll away, grabbing for my stun gun as I struggled to get on my knees. But she was on the back of my legs, and suddenly Tommy had me in a bearhug from behind. The girl slid off my legs and walked on all fours around to face me, her face now tight with an angry, insane smile.

  “It’ll get you too, you know. I can already smell it on you. You’ll slide down with us all.” With that, she ran her tongue up my face and crawled away out of sight. A moment later, Tommy had pushed me back down on the floor and they were gone.

  When the police arrived, I just told them I had found a young couple in the house naked and that they had been acting strangely. That they had run off before the cops got there, and I didn’t know where they went. All of that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I kept parts of it to myself for the same reason I didn’t tell Jack more when he started questioning me a couple of days ago about if I’d seen anything strange.

  I didn’t know who to trust, including myself. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m pretty sure I’m really locked in this trunk and that I found what was left of poor Jenny’s body tonight, I’d lay even odds that I’m just going crazy. And maybe I am, but if I am, I think the world is coming along with me.

  Either way, I…

  Wait. I just heard something. The latch just popped. Someone opened the trunk.

  ****

  I’ve listened to my recordings again to transcribe them, and what I’m writing now is the beginning of my account of what followed my time in the trunk. As with all of this, it is not perfect, but it is my best effort in remembering and telling so many impossible, but true, things. And we’ll start with something very true and very impossible: What I saw when I opened the trunk.

  There were four small creatures, two of them raised up on their hind feet, waiting for me on the asphalt of the dark street. In the glow of the overhead moon, I could make out their silhouettes and some finer detail, but what I saw made little sense. They looked like large rats but…different. Fake, somehow. I shined the dim light of my phone’s screen toward them and let out a small gasp. They were all wearing some kind of armor or clothing to look like rats. Ornate and glittering, it would have been amazing if it weren’t so horrifying.

  Worse was what lay beneath the armor. Pulsating hairless skin of pink shot through with a deep black that glistened in the meager light. And then there was the one without its helmet. Its head was bare, revealing a smooth oval lump punctuated with twin sets of black eyes on each side and a narrow nose that flared out into a mouth not unlike pictures I’ve seen of lampreys. I was trying to hold my terror in check long enough to find the best way to clear the trunk and the monsters—hopefully without them touching me with their jeweled claws or the fleshy tendrils that likely lay underneath—when the one with the bare head spoke, gnashing that terrible mouth together to somehow produce a soft but intelligent voice.

  “There’s nowhere to run, boy. There’s Rot in you already. But there is also slim hope. If you will stand fast and listen to what we have to offer.”

  Part Five

  “The thing that has twisted Oscar and has Jack, the thing that has infected you with its myriad corruptions…and though I see you want to deny it, we assure you it is true, you are tainted…that thing, among other names, is called the Rot. It is a force of decay and chaos and entropy older than this world.”

  This was the start of my conversation with a group of small monsters dressed in rat armor outside of the Red House, and for whatever reason, most likely shock or my mind finally coming free from whatever moorings it had left, I wasn’t bothered by the fact. I was so far into the dark of this terrible night that the twin lights of what was normal and what was sane were little more than faintly glowing ghostmarks in the distant, hollow black. Instead, I was only concerned with understanding. If I was going to help anyone, I needed to know what exactly in the fuck was going on.

  “So it’s like an alien?”

  The spokesman shook its fleshy head in a vaguely human fashion. “No, not alien. It is from this Realm of Creation and has always been here since the stars first flared to life and began to die. In many ways, it is far more natural to this place than we are.” Its voice was rough but delicate, with nuances of thought and emotion woven through every word and phrase. Listening to it reminded me faintly of the way some music can provoke deep feelings, though its voice wasn’t very melodic. Still, when it spoke next, tiny figure or not, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny thrill of fear and awe. These creatures were small, but they were powerful. Important. And the anger and contempt in the leader’s voice was not to be taken lightly.

  “But just because it is natural does not make it good. To the contrary, it is one of the most destructive forces in the infinity of your universe.”

  I frowned. “Why? How? What is it? Just rotting? Everything rots, right? How is that fucking up these guys?” Swallowing I added, “How is it tainting me?”

  The tiny creature folded its armored claws together in front of it with solemnity. “It is not the normal decay of matter or energy we are dealing with, Jeff. This is an entity. A being of great power and an implacably malign will. In many ways, it could be thought of as a lesser god, though it has few that worship it for one simple reason. It does not rely on belief for its power and it takes what it wants by force.”

  “The Rot, despite its perennial and ubiquitous nature, always hungers for more, and while its existence may be natural, its tainted touch is not. At its core, it is a defiler. It spreads its influence here, and on the infinite
other versions of here, through the cracks that it finds. Places and people and things that are lost or abandoned. Forgotten and forlorn. It gets into their hearts and twists them into something far different and far worse—into slaves that serve whatever purposes such an old and wretched thing might have.

  The small monster put a clawed hand to its chest. “We are not from here, but many of us have made these worlds our homes and seek to protect them as we are able.”

  I raised my hand and when it nodded, I asked. “What are you? A good alien or something?”

  Its shoulders shook as it chortled slightly. “We are not from another planet, no. We are from another Realm of existence that is commonly called Incarnata. Those you see before you are just one of a multitude of various kinds that inhabit that place. Some good, some evil, though with the implied understanding that these are frequently arbitrary terms of limited subjective value. As for our own…moral alignment…I can put it like this.”

  It pointed a fur-covered glove toward the Red House. “We oppose the Rot and the harm it would do to this world and those that live in it. Since time out of mind we have fought to stem the tide of its growth and corruption. And rest assured of one thing, Mr. Spires. Whatever we are or may be, there is no sane and accurate definition of the Rot that does not describe it as truly and objectively evil.”

  ****

  “I’m not a bad guy, Jack. Really, I’m not. Am I the best person in the world?” Oscar shook his head, beads of sweat slinging off of him as he moved. “No, can’t say I am. Am I the best husband?” He let out a small and nasty laugh as he cut his eyes toward me. “Well, I guess that’s a matter of perspective, but I know there’s an argument that eating Jenny like a cantaloupe was in bad taste at the very least.”

  He paused, fixing me with his eyes again as he sat down on an outcropping of packed earth nearby. “Not that Jenny tasted bad, mind you. She was damned delicious, if you don’t mind me bragging on her a bit. Hell, if I had known what kind of good eating I was missing out on, I might have done it well before I got taken to this place for the first time.”