I had to humor him.
So before he could scream again, I reached over the seat and pushed open the back door. It opened a crack, letting in more of the restless night air. The door didn't move. I figured that now Drew would realize no one was out there.
But then the wind shifted and the door swung wide open.
Nothing happened. No one entered the car, of course, because no one was there. We waited, night spilling in through the open door. Everything was motionless, in limbo.
I looked at Drew for answers. I dared not speak. I dared not move. Drew ignored my presence, and instead smiled politely toward the backseat, as if we had a new passenger sitting comfortably behind me.
BAM!
The wind shifted and the open door swung shut. It rattled me.
The car felt colder now. I couldn't see my breath, but my fingertips were growing numb.
Drew continued driving. I looked down at my watch, but it was too dark to make out the time. And I didn't want to turn on the overhead light. That would distract him.
So instead, I stared at the dark road ahead, at the twisted branches that formed the edges around us. My neck hairs prickled. I knew there wasn't anyone behind me, but I couldn't help myself. I felt watched. I felt as if that man, that nonexistent man, was smiling in the backseat and admiring my hair.
"That's a nice hat," Drew said. With horror, I realized that he wasn't talking to me. He was complimenting the passenger. "It seems a bit old fashioned. I like that. You don't see that kind of hat anymore."
Drew paused. Then he laughed and said "Of course. Thank you."
He was having a conversation with that man. And from the look on his face, it was a pleasant conversation.
"Five years now," Drew said.
That was how long we'd been married.
"So where are you headed?" he asked. "I can take you as far as ... Oh, okay. That's perfectly fine."
I tried desperately to tune out his voice. If I could just pretend that I couldn't hear him ...
"I know," he continued. "It's a difficult situation."
It was no use. No matter what I did, I couldn't block Drew's voice from my ears. Have you ever heard just one half of a conversation? It's hard to follow along sometimes, but you can always tell when the conversation turns awkward.
It was turning awkward.
Drew's voice got louder. He didn't seem angry, but he did seem upset, off his game. His eyes glanced in my direction, but only for a second. He said something about the woods, about how safe the woods were at night.
I still don't know what he meant by that.
We drove on, and Drew laughed nervously at some unheard joke. Then he stopped talking. He waited. It was like a switch had been turned off.
A long moment later, he turned toward me. "Well?" he asked.
"Um ... what's going on?" I said.
"Aren't you going to answer him?" Drew asked.
Apparently, the passenger had asked me a question. I knew I couldn't bluff my way out of this one, because he would know right away that I had no idea what was happening. So I slowly reached out and placed my hand on his knee. "Honey," I said. "There's no one there."
He pushed my hand away. I expected him to say something now, to start arguing with me, but he didn't. He didn't even look at me. He just stared at the road with a blankness in his eyes that could've meant a million different things.
In this new silence, my sense of uneasiness grew tenfold. Even though I knew it was irrational, I felt eyes looking at me from the backseat. Then--and please don't judge me for what I'm about to say--I felt a gentle pressure on my shoulder. My left shoulder. It felt, for all the world, like a hand pressing down.
I even looked at my shoulder, expecting to see a hand-shaped imprint on my loose-fitting shirt ... But of course I saw nothing. I simply felt the grip. It was definite and cold.
"Sorry about my wife," Drew said. He continued talking with the man, laughing and pausing and talking in a steady rhythm. He asked the man questions. He talked about our trip to Arkham. He didn't mention the sanitarium, of course. I was grateful for that.
And then he stopped. I caught his eyes in the rear view mirror, and they were staring in horror at the man in the backseat.
I cannot describe to you the look of terror on Drew's face. It was more than just a reaction to something that the passenger had said. No matter how off-color or threatening, no human words could illicit such a reaction from Drew. No. He was reacting to something else entirely.
It was as if some great, horrible thing was changing before his eyes. As if the passenger himself had stripped off whatever appearance he once had and revealed something underneath. It was ... I thank God now that I did not see what my husband saw.
That was when he started screaming. At first, it started as a scream of horror, one that rang throughout the car and seemed to explode out of his throat. One, uninterrupted scream. And then it changed. He regained some of his composure and began to form words. "Out!" he screamed. "Get out! Stay away from her!"
He was screaming about me. He was protecting me.
Drew once again fell silent, allowing the passenger to respond. I got the feeling, and I don't know why, that the passenger was bargaining with Drew. It was as if he was offering Drew some deal, some ungodly deal.
"Never!" my husband screamed.
He flinched. The passenger must've shushed him with a finger. If he even had fingers. For the next moment, Drew leaned toward the passenger and nodded, trying to keep his composure and listen rationally.
At that moment, I realized that the car was parked on the side of the road. I'm not sure when Drew stopped driving, but I must not have noticed.
"Yes, I understand," Drew said.
"Honey," I whispered. I needed this to stop. I couldn't allow my husband to just sit there and talk like that. It was ... wrong.
Drew dove toward the passenger.
My husband is a large man. I was not expecting to see him maneuver his entire body over the car seat and fling himself into the back.
He balled up his fist and punched at the passenger. Then he reeled backwards, as if the passenger had punched him back.
They fought. Wildly. Fiercely. It was almost comical, seeing my dear husband thrash about like that. He grunted. I'm not positive, but I believe his shoulder popped out of place. There was a snap.
In the struggle--while the car rocked back and forth, while I screamed Drew's name over and over--the door swung open. A blast of night air shot inside. Drew has long hair, and his hair went wild. I couldn't see his face, but I could tell it was bloodied and bruised.
Drew thrashed around, faster and faster, as if something was holding him down and tearing him open. His arm swung around and accidentally bashed against my face.
I blinked, just for a second. And in that moment, he broke free of whatever was holding him down. He dove out the car door.
He stood at the edge of the woods, screaming nonsense. "It's me you want!" he screamed. "Stay away from her!" This was when I finally saw his face, and it was much worse than I'd thought. One eye had already swollen shut. A solid line of blood ran from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. His nose looked broken. Of course, all these wounds could've been self-inflicted. You didn't see how wildly he thrashed about in the backseat. I wouldn't have been surprised if he broke his own nose in the struggle. But then again ...
"Come and get me!" he screamed, but he couldn't even finish the sentence before he toppled backward onto the gravel. It was as if the passenger dove at him with such strength. Such ungodly strength.
Drew punched and kicked at the air above him. He scrambled to his feet and disappeared into the night.
I waited such a long time, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe. I heard Drew scream once more. He was deep in the forest now, and his voice seemed weak, but I understood the word, and I knew that it was directed toward me. "Go!" he screamed. And with that single word, his voice cracked.
So I slid across the front seat and drove away. I turned around, because I remembered passing this station as we drove through Arkham. It was probably closer to just go straight, but ... I don't know. I came here instead.
And that's why I'm here now talking to you. I know I sound crazy, but ... please find him. I'm so very worried right now.
It's just ... I know he's out there in the woods. I just don't know if he's alone.
* * *
Rebecca Browning (née Harrison) is a housewife from Baltimore. She briefly attended McDaniel College, before meeting her future husband Drew Browning in a physics class. The couple has no children. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of her husband, please contact the Arkham Police Department.
* * *
Evan Purcell is a writer and teacher. He loves to travel the world, and is currently living and working in central China. Wherever he goes, he tries to collect as many stories as he can. For information on his writing and travels, you can visit EvanPurcell.blogspot.com.
* * *
The Hill
An account by Paul C. Bowen, as provided by Damir Salkovic
* * *
"But you must have some idea of where they come from." The young man in the suit sitting across from me smiled, but the smile failed to register in his eyes. "A theory, or an educated guess at the very least."
"I'm no biologist," I said, arranging the pens so that they touched the corners of the notepad, forming obtuse angles with the sides. It's a recent compulsion I've picked up--the strangest thing, but sharp angles and certain surfaces evoke funny images in my mind. The kind of funny that makes you laugh all the way into a rubber room and a jacket that ties in the back. "But I've seen the pictures and read the reports. Whatever these things are, they defy all categorization. They conform to no known taxonomy."
"In what sense?"
"In every sense." A man passed in front of the glass door, glancing in with exaggerated indifference. The circus show goes on--the resident nutcase interviewed by yet another faceless government suit. "The best scientific minds in the nation have tried to make sense of them and failed. Part of this failure--a big part, if you ask me--is the staunch refusal to accept that this may be a form of life evolved under conditions utterly different from those prevalent on Earth." How else to explain the impossible coupling of crustacean and fungoid features, the sacs and chambers and brightly colored glands, the ciliated head-like organ slung on the end of a long, rubber-fleshed neck, the large, leathery wings whose structure suggests a purpose other than flight? But to propose such a theory--to merely hint at it, even as a joke--is to commit instant career suicide.
"Aliens." There was disappointment under his sarcasm. Every suit hopes to extract some crucial missing piece that all the others have overlooked, something that'll help them unravel the unsolvable mystery. "You think they landed here from another planet."
"Not quite." I took a deep breath. This was the hardest part: I wasn't sure what I believed myself. "There was no spaceship, or little green men. Their arrival here could have been an accident--a rift, or a hole in reality, made by something else ..."
But the suit was rapidly losing interest. He picked up the pens and notepad and brought the conversation to a polite close. I didn't offer to escort him to the elevators. There's a sculpture in the center of the landing--a piece of modernist junk, if you care for my humble opinion--with a few too many sharp angles for my taste.
#
It was a bunch of kids in Arkham who found the first of the things, bobbing in the murky water of the River Street canal. They'd broken into one of the abandoned warehouses to smoke dope or scrawl obscenities on the rotting walls or grope and mess around in the dark, empty corners. Scared the hell out of them--seen from a dusty window above, raw and pink in the last rays of the sun, the thing looked like the naked head and torso of a drowning victim. I'd never have the guts to do what they did, hook it out of the water with a length of rusty pipe, but kids these days are something else. Then the researchers from Miskatonic University's environmental center got their hands on it and contacted the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The good folks at MassDEP took one look at the contamination reports and lost no time in dialing our number.
By the time this specimen, safely encased in a biohazard box, arrived at the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., four others had been discovered: one in the town of Bolton, in a small brook tributary to the Still River, and three by fishermen off the coast of Kingsport--but these three so decayed that they couldn't be dissected or analyzed. All save the one near Bolton had floated down the Miskatonic, and that one could have crawled up one of the drainage ditches that fed into the river. I wasn't present at any of the autopsies--if you can call them that--but we were shown images and a heavily edited video. I tried to put them out of my mind. You couldn't let yourself think about them too much. That way lay insanity.
But the profoundly alien anatomy of the thing found in Arkham was the least of our concerns at the time. Some thought it to be a rare mutation, others dismissed it as an elaborate hoax. The real problem--the one that rang the alarm bells in the DEP and EPA offices in Boston and got Headquarters involved--was something unseen and deadly, but all too familiar: the tests had revealed high levels of chemical and organic contamination in the tissues of the specimen. The findings were puzzling at first, but it didn't take us long to identify a probable source.
For over three centuries, the Miskatonic Valley had been a wild, dreary place defined by the brooding river, which powered the pulp and textile mills and irrigated the farms along its banks. Over the past century, the demise of local industries and a steady trickling away of old families had spelled a slow, lingering death for the valley. Tracts of ancient forest and abandoned farmland west of the river could be bought for next to nothing. Throughout the eighties and nineties, soaring land prices and the expansion of cities had made this bleak wilderness attractive to big agriculture; stockyards, feedlots, and meat processing plants now dotted the gloomy landscape.
The revival had come too late to breathe life into the ghost towns along the river, old ramshackle places with rustic names--Dunwich, Aylesbury, Arkham--and interstate highway development had cut the valley off from urban centers like Boston and Lowell. But the environmental spillover was another matter. Tissue analyses from the Arkham specimen pointed to the illegal dumping of large quantities of organic and chemical waste into the ground waters that fed the Miskatonic. The poisoned waters of the river posed a threat to the inhabitants and ecosystems of the valley and the fishing communities near its estuary. There was no predicting the full impact of the disaster; the contamination could spread toward the south and east, into the endless network of underground waterways, leaking into the water supply of millions.
The EPA decided there was no time to waste and dispatched a team to collect water samples along the river. There were four of us: Bentham, Nielsen, and I from the Washington, D.C., office and Yeung from Boston. Our job was to determine the sources and extent of the contamination and come up with a stabilization plan for the affected area. It wouldn't stop there; the Agency was out for blood, and already there were rumors of criminal charges for noncompliance and neglect.
Of the four who left, I'm the only one who made it back alive--if you can call this living. Sleep brings nightmares of howling winds and dim, mountainous shapes treading the chasms between the stars. Reality feels thin and worn, a frayed fabric through which terrible sights can be glimpsed; the whisper in my mind grows louder, taunting me with oblivion. My mind feels infected. Madness stalks the shadows, and the drugs keep it at bay for now--antipsychotics, barbiturates, a bunch of other pills with names I can't pronounce. A dubious haven at best; once that's gone, I know what to do. Better to die than to gaze upon the visage of that horror again.
When the time comes, I'll be ready.
#
The plan was to spend two days collecting samples and analyzing them in the mobile
laboratory in the rear of the van. If our assumptions were correct, we'd be able to trace contaminant movement patterns back to the source of the Miskatonic, located in the hills near the town of Dunwich. On the other side of the hills lay the gray wasteland of slaughterhouses and meat packing plants from which the contamination was thought to originate. If the data checked out, the rest would be in the hands of the Agency's Office of General Counsel.
We set off for New England in the early hours of a cold spring day, the bleak dawn sky heavy with promises of freezing rain. The deluge let up by the time we turned off the highway near Lawrence and ventured into a labyrinth of winding country lanes. A silence fell upon us as our surroundings emerged from the rainy haze. Gone was the flat, drab expanse of the highway; around us rose a forest of tall white pines and oak that seemed to swallow the cracked road. In the shadows past the first line of trees, the fallen leaves and deadfall arranged and rearranged themselves into eerie shapes with each flicker of transient light. Farther into the woods, the tangled shrubs grew taller than a man and warped trees stood by the roadside, their roots sticking out of the earth like claws. It was as if we'd crossed some invisible border into a weird, unfamiliar world.
The ominous foliage gradually thinned out to reveal a wavy horizon of low hills and the banks of a river wreathed in white mist. Far ahead, the hills gradually gave way to a range of mountains, looming blue mirages over a boundless expanse of forest and marshland. A sense of vague unease stirred in me as we drove along the wide, silent river, the hills towering above us like dark sentinels at the entrance to the valley. But any doubts and fears I had were quickly forgotten in work. We found rooms in a small but clean motor inn near the quiet old town of Arkham and spent the first two days driving out to the sampling sites and analyzing the water, looking for changes in contaminant concentration. The initial findings confirmed the Agency's suspicions; all we needed now were samples from the source of the river, and the lawyers in gray suits could take it from there.
That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Page 7
