From the Belly of the Goat

by Donald Armfield

“Doesn't its face look different though?” Kimsworth looks into the room with a puzzled stare. “Its nose seems a little big for a baby and look at the shell shape of its eye sockets.

  “We probably just need rest. C'mon let's get some rest.” Stroke pats Kimsworth on the back and heads toward the entrance.

  Sheriff Strokes begins to adjust his coat and head gear and heads for the exit. Kimsworth takes one more look at the baby and could swear a tail came out from under the blanket. He shakes it off, thinking to himself, “I'm probably just seeing things.” He catches up to Strokes and they exit the hospital together.

  From the Belly

  of the Goat

  “your destiny reserves such honors for you: both parties shall be hungry to devour you, but the grass will not be growing where the goat is.”

  -Dante Alighieri – Canto XV

  “I refused, but my crew ate the head of a goat, marinating in its own dug-out stomach cavity. The tribe said the head of the goat would cleanse our spirits against the sickness coming from the bellies of the goats. After the meal, we were told to leave first thing in the morning because the sickness would spread by noon.”

  “Hold on, Gavin. Let's start a little bit from the beginning, ease into this so you don't get all worked up again.”

  “Doc, we don't have time for this,” Gavin jumps up from his seat, heading in the direction of the entrance. “Eleven years, I found the pattern and it will come back for me. Us.”

  “Gavin please have a seat. We can try and recall what happened. You said we have a week let's try and put this together for wit sake.”

  Gavin hangs his head and drags his feet back to the chair. Doc nods at him and crosses his legs, positioning his pad of paper over the crook of his knee. “Gavin I'm going to read this opening passage you have written in this journal of yours. I want you to close your eyes and relax, hear the water around you. There is nothing here that will get you. It's just you and me behind a locked door. Relax.” ...

  “Summer, 1989 the small populated town in Northern Ireland was our destination. The town rested in the center of a rocky border, running along the coastlines. Including the livestock of goats, a rather lively market square; that held annual and weekly events, where all the townsfolk attended, as well as a few citizens of surrounding towns. The homes of the townsfolk looked like huts on a secluded island, almost. It was such a lovely looking town.

  I sent out the SOS signal out from my fishing boat at high noon, far west from the town out on the North Channel. My crew of five men were showing signs of an unknown sickness. Their skin was deteriorating and drooping from their bones, skeletons. They looked like melting candles, with aggressive coughing fits, spitting out thick wards of black phlegm. I showed no signs of their sickness and stayed clear from my crew. I told the officials of the tribe, made up of men and women living in the forest outskirts of the small town.”

  Gavin drifts off into a hypnotized state, listening to Dr. Wilson's voice; reading the notes he had taken from Gavin’s account.

  While in the market at early sunrise, we collected a few things for our trip back home, but we were too late. The goats came rushing through the town like “The Running of the Bulls.” The goats froze in their rushing approach then began staggering just to walk and looked deathly. A few of the goats regurgitated something awful and spit it out in the center of the market. Other goats keeled over dead and the same awful something crawled out of their mouths and eye sockets.

  The grounds were drenched in the sludge that poured out of the unfortunate goats. Something scurried along the cobblestone grounds, many of them, like the horde from a shattered spider's egg, but it wasn't spiders I was looking at. Shining in the early morning sun, moving in all directions was piles of what looked like newts. I jumped up and grabbed onto a flag post that stuck out of the wall of a small hardware store. I used the rocky structure of the building to climb to its top and watched.

  Those newt creatures were about three inches long from head to tail. They moved fast and clung to whatever stood in their way. There were so many of them. As I watched, it felt like my eyes would jolt out of their sockets from darting them back and forth. Some of the townsfolk were quickly covered in newts. The newts climbed up their pant legs, moving quickly to their shoulders and then into their mouths. The two-dozen, or so, townsfolk that were present at that time, began to twitch. Their bodies bent with a snap at strange angles, their heads slammed back and with dead eyes that stared off into the cloudless sky.

  When all the townsfolk collapsed and looked to be dead. I looked over at my crew and noticed some of the creatures had begun to find their way over to them. I yelled to my men and told them to run. They reached down and batted some of 'em off their boots. My men ran along the cobblestones while jumping, trying to dodge the ugly creatures. Some of the little creatures squished under their feet. Blood splattered out of the newt's bodies and splashed my men in the face. I heard them spitting and cussing as they followed me, jumping along the rooftops of the small buildings

  “Gavin, I'm going to snap my fingers and when I do, I want you to wake up.”

  Gavin opens his eyes and looks over at Dr. Wilson.

  “I have a few questions about this tribe you mentioned.”

  “C'mon Doc. You have all my research; you've read it right?”

  “Yes, I have Gavin, but I really think your crew was poisoned by something they ate in town...”

  “And not by the goat heads,” Gavin cuts in. “I saw this ghostly tribe with my own eyes. I'm telling you they made me some kind of beacon and our time is running out.”

  “I'm going to read this report that came from a recorded telephone communication, after they brought your ship and your crew back to the town. They needed to quarantine your crew and the town itself.

  “Yeah, they forced us into these...”

  “Gavin calm down. I just want you to hear what they had to say about the incident. Maybe it will help spark something, like what your crew actually ate.”

  Gavin rolls his eyes.

  “We immediately had the captain of the boat anchor his ship and hold his position. The bio-tech team arrived twenty minutes later by helicopter. The helicopter landed on the water by the side of the ship and quickly began to take control. The bio-techs covered the entire crew in their own cylinder holding capsules, made out of a thick transparent plastic. After securing the holding capsules the bio-techs ushered the infected crew members to the hull of the ship. The captain seemed to be the only energetic one the rest of his crew had sluggish movements and fell to their hands and knees inside their holding capsules when they got to the hull of the ship.

  The bio-technicians took control of the ship, setting its back on course towards the small coastal town. The captain had to be sedated due to his yelling and banging around inside his holding capsule.

  An hour later the techs had the entire town quarantined, with the occupants of the ship set up by the shore line inside their holding capsules.

  By the time the evening settled in over the small coastal town. The town was swamped with bio-techs and military backup. Securing the entire area from anyone leaving or entering the town. On the first and only run through the small town, the backup team brought back three survivors. Two of them looked worse than the crew members of the ship. Their faces showed signs of deterioration and strange black puss pockets covered their bodies. The survivor who seemed to be a little less sluggish than the others kept on yelling from inside his confinement, “The goats will infect us all.”

  “I remember those people they dragged to the shore with the rest of us. That man yelling, I was hoping I could have a few words with him. Maybe he saw the same tribe my crew and I saw that night.” Gavin adjusts his sitting position and lies back on the long chair.

  “What happen next, Gavin?”

  “The scientist team was called in, I mean at the time I assumed they were scientists, with all their well-organized briefcases.”

  “And you wer
e able to hear all this information these scientists spoke of, even though you were locked inside a holding capsule?

  “No, I told you I stole some of their documents before I escaped.”

  “Right. These documents about the tapeworm,” Dr. Wilson reaches over and grabs two pages from his desk. He clears his throat and reads the supposedly stolen document from the scientists.

  “Alp-luachra. The parasite mainly infects livestock who graze on grass. Upon ingesting the small larvae, the animal will have a strong urge to keep eating. The Alp-luachra grows inside its belly while feasting on the large quality of grass the animal eats. The animal eventually becomes sick. The tapeworm somehow controls its host, making it embark from its feeding grounds until it perceives a new host. Upon sensing its new host, the tapeworm implodes inside its host, multiplying itself into hundreds, pouring out blindly until it finds an entrance into a new live host. A full-grown Alp-luachra looks a lot like a newt.”

  Dr. Wilson looks up from the page and stares at Gavin.

  “What,” Gavin yells.

  “Gavin this just looks like something copied from a text book.”

  “There was more to the manila folder I swiped. I remember. A picture of a man wearing glasses and a long white overcoat. He was holding a cylinder-shaped glass container that housed a small larvae creature. There was another picture, an old picture of a tribe laminated with this poem written in old script below the picture of the tribe. I remembered it word for word.” Gavin brushes his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “And this is the poem you have written on this additional page,” Dr. Wilson holds the piece of paper up and begins to read it,

  “When dusk brushes over the land

  by the shore, one should not sleep.

  From the sea it comes, scouring

  for a feast of exquisiteness.

  Mixing its viral sickness

  with one's pure living life.”

  “I've dug up some research on the tribe too,” Gavin points at the second manila folder he brought with him.

  Doctor Wilson reaches over for the folder. While holding the folder open in his hand, he begins to thumb through the hand written pages and copied text from books that Gavin had collected.

  ORIGINS: Of the thirteenth century

  The tribe and their fluctuation patterns throughout different parts of the globe.

  The tribe's ghostly presence haunted battlefields for many years.

  Their cacophony of high-pitched screams belting through the air of the night and the strong spiritual connection to nature a beacon to bloodshed.

  They ask, “Why must thee taint the landscapes with foolishness.”

  A battle in the thirteenth century called forth at high noon. The tribe came to the field to try to rekindle a liking between the two fighting sides. The tribe spoke of wealth to be shared, crops and even the women, but the two battling sides did nothing but laugh and slaughtered the tribe, all together. Then recalled their battle for a later autumn day. The tribe was mentioned further in history as a joke.

  BUT WHY HAS THE TRIBE RETURNED?

  Throughout history small pieces turn up, mentioning of the tribe;

  small populated towns falling ill, death---to an unexplained sickness.

  The towns crops bleeding from their roots before sinking into the dirt, disappearing into a void.

  Livestock showing deathly sickness.

  THIERE IS SOMETHING IN THEIR BELLIES!

  “Gavin this hand written research, I presume you wrote yourself. Is rather hard to believe.” Doctor Wilson roughly thumbs through the pages in the folder again, stopping at one of the pictures.

  “Like this picture of a goat with its insides hanging out. I mean the grotesqueness and brutal display of this animal could have been done from anything. And you want people to believe it's...

  “Doc. Why must we go back and forth here? Do you believe me or not?”

  “Gavin, I want to believe. I just want your research to make sense, this does not help. You have no physical proof of this tribe and the sickness they spread. The authorities want you to rot for life behind bars for this massacre.”

  Gavin drops his head into the nook of his elbows resting on his lap and hides his face. His breathing spikes into a loud hissing noise.

  “Why did the tribe give you and your crew fair warning to leave the town by noon?” Doctor Wilson asks

  “My crew dinned with them, and they wanted them to survive long enough to spread the sickness. Return to our land, where my crew would keel over dead and those ugly newts would find their new hosts.”

  Doctor Wilson scratched his head and opened the folder again, “You have a dark circle around a phrase here. They inhabit the forest until it's necessary to come out and spread their sickness. Is the tribe hiding right now as we speak? Are they still using you as their beacon?”

  “Doc, you're just gonna die like the rest of them.”

  “I'm not making fun of the matter, Gavin. So, there is no need for threats. How about we go back to when the tribe attacked on the shoreline?”

  “And then what, you go and scribble some notes and a make a mockery outta me when you leave the room?”

  “Can we try, Gavin. Let's see what happened.”

  Gavin gets comfortable in the chair and waves his hand at Doctor Wilson, as if saying let's get on with it.

  “Gavin, I want you to relax. We are going back to the night when the tribe attacked and you somehow escaped. I'm slowly counting to ten, and when I say ten, we will be standing on the shoreline. We will solve this together Gavin... TEN!

  A howling screech echoes off through the sky, like counting the seconds before the lightning strikes... THE TRIBE IS COMING!!

  The bio-technicians and two scientists are looking around frantically, trying to pin point the direction of the screech. One of the scientists begins raising up on his toes and waving his finger in the direction of the mountains. The military lines up on command, and huddles into attack mode.

  There I am!

  Climbing out of my capsule, under all the focused commotion aimed at the screech. I recognize a small paddle boat from my ship. One of the men from the military, or someone must've decided they were going steal it from me. Seeing how it was off my ship and hiding off to the side by my ship.

  I duck down by the boat. I'm waiting for the right minute, to jump in and start paddling.

  Ghostly looking tribesmen are coming down the mountain now, a stampeding triangular formation. A tale end of fog rushes up from behind them, heightening their ominous presence.

  One of the scientists is running around with his hands in the air. I can't make out what he is saying. I run out into the water pushing the boat out in front and quickly jump in. I can see the tribe circling the frantic scientist, still running around and yelling shit.

  The tribe moves like the wind blows, like teleportation making a circle around the yelling scientist. The tribe snaps their heads back. I think they are going to make that screeching noise again?

  Wait what is that?

  Some-kind of substance black as soot is spiraling out the tribe's mouths. It's swirling in the air, fumes of smoke-like, heading to a vent. The substance is coating the scientist, he fell to his knees.

  He must be in pain. I'm far away but I can see his skin melt, deteriorate off his face, exposing his skull.

  Now the fog is dense and hovers over the entire quarantined convening area.

  “What the fuck?”

  The fog has vanished, there is small things scurrying in all directions.

  I paddle harder and faster. And somehow, I'm still hovering over the quarantined area, watching the newt-like creatures blanket the entire area. Military men are getting covered from head-to-toe, batting at the creatures, some are firing off rounds from their firearms to no avail. The bio-technicians are shaking in their suits. Some are pulling the head pieces off to their suits and falling to the ground.

  Wow! Their skin rots right off the bo
ne, just like that.

  This his horrific...

  I can see myself in the boat, but part of me is still stuck on the coastline hovering over the rotting corpses. I'm scared

  What if I'm not really floating? Or even worse not getting away.

  Piles of bodies just rotting to the bone, I need to get out of here.

  I paddle harder, faster.

  HELP! Nothing is happening

  “Gavin I'm going to snap my fingers and when I do, you'll be back here. Safe Gavin, you'll be safe when I snap my fingers.”

  The tribe is making that screeching noise again and the newt-like creatures react and are turning back toward the tribe. The newts have disappeared, like they just morphed into the tribe's eerie presence. The dense fog thickens once again.

  The tribe... they look like they are looking at me. I'm paddling harder.

  I'm stiff

  SNAP!

  “Gavin relax, take small breaths.” Doctor Wilson rushes to Gavin's side and places his hand on his forehead in a comforting manner.

  WWW

  Gavin eventually calmed down and Doctor Wilson told him to go home for the day, and to call if he needed anything. Doctor Wilson sits in his chair pondering in worry over the journal entry filed away in Gavin's research. Also, at the last words Gavin said before he came out of his trance “I'm Stiff”

  That was the summer of 1989. I escaped without being infected by that sickness. The sickness that came from the bellies of the goats. I'm not sure at this moment If I escaped the tribe?