Torn Realities

by Post Mortem Press

  When she was done explaining I told her that it seemed we didn’t have much choice but to go out there ourselves and look for Brian. The idea struck her as an outlandish one, as if she’d not yet even considered such a thing. I reasoned with her for a bit, explaining that I hadn’t come all the way out here just to turn back for home. Not only that, but I wasn’t going to just leave if there was even the remotest chance that my old friend was in trouble.

  Her eyes were fixed on mine, and I could feel her attempting to read my soul and my intentions, and then she nodded, accepting. A few minutes later, we were in my truck on our way to Mossy Rock, Tracy explaining the directions to the best of her ability as I drove.

  *****

  Tracy had been right about Mossy Rock’s seclusion, and the primitive road of crumbled asphalt that snaked treacherously through the mountains helped me understand why the townsfolk of Rural Park, despite being so close, tended to not make the journey. I was also grateful that I’d taken my pickup truck for the trip rather than my sedan.

  Finally, I drove up and around one final bend, and the small town came into view. The town didn’t differ much from the forest itself. The trees grew all between the rustic buildings, pressing their gnarled branches past eaves so densely that they formed a canopy of leaves that left the town covered in shadow.

  I crept my truck slowly along the road as above a thick mist collected to block out what little sky I could see. Tracy remained silent, watching, as I did, observing each building as we progressed. By the look of the few strange, seedy townsfolk that skulked like lepers alongside the street, I was most amazed to see a bookshop off to my right, still in operation with a dim light revealing the dusty interior, and a man, perhaps the shop owner, staring at us from behind the storefront window. I wondered for a moment, what kind of books did these people prefer to read?

  Then something caught my eye as we neared a new intersection where a narrow road, lined by shabby homes, snaked to both sides into the thick foliage.

  Past the edge of a dark cluster of trees, near the third house down to the right on the far side of the street, I noticed movement. As still and gravely quiet as this town was, it wasn’t the mere fact that I saw movement that caught my eye. It was the unhealthy nature of the action, because in that brief instant I’d taken in the details as two young women, both wearing white dresses, carried a large object through the house’s side door. The floppy bundle was wrapped in what looked like burlap.

  "Stop!" Tracy yelled, and I jammed my foot on the brake pedal, jerking the truck from its crawl, stopping just inches from the jaywalking woman. The way my truck’s body was lifted, I could only see the old woman from the shoulders up as she continued to walk at a snail’s pace toward the right side of the road, in the direction of the home in which I’d seen the two young women entering with their bundle.

  "You’ve gotta be kidding me," I snarled, putting my truck in reverse and parking alongside the road in front of a crumbling apartment building. I turned off my engine, swung open my door and leapt to the ground, throwing it shut with fire in my veins and my teeth gnashing as I made my way toward the old woman. I was angrier when I saw that she was pushing a baby stroller. At the low speed I’d been driving, most people might have only gotten a rude bump and some bruises if they’d met with the nose of my truck, but an elderly woman and a baby would be a much different story.

  "There must be some kind of virus that makes people stupid in this hole," I muttered to Tracy as she jogged up alongside me, urging me to relax. "Brian must’ve come out here and caught that virus, and now he’s inside one of these boxes watching talk shows."

  The old woman’s head was wrapped in a bonnet. Her arms were frail like white sticks and laced with ugly veins that wove beneath her withered skin.

  "Hey!" I half-shouted, already feeling guilty for the verbal thrashing I was about to give this elderly woman, but the fact that I’d just come close to racking up a vehicular manslaughter charge encouraged me to keep on. "Lady, are you completely stupid or what?" She kept walking with her back to me, the rusty wheels of the stroller squeaking.

  I cursed and jogged up and around the stroller so I could face her, and my jaw dropped, letting a gasp of revulsion spill from my lips as they were stricken slack.

  Her eyes were pure white as if she was blind, though I suspected she could see me just fine. But it wasn’t just her eyes that pushed this new, unspeakable dread into my heart; it was the skin of her face, just as white and dead as her eyes. Her face was flat and emotionless, and for its unearthly, ungodly image, I felt sure for a moment that this woman must be wearing a mask, but then she smiled.

  Her lips curled up revealing crooked brown teeth set ruggedly in black, oily gums that were slick with viscous spittle. Her eyelids peeled back over those white orbs and when her jaw fell open and that snake’s hiss slithered out with her lolling black tongue I could do nothing to hold in my whimper of fear as I stumbled backward. I tried to take my eyes off of that face that I knew had already planted seeds that would grow into a thousand nightmares, but the vision held me, and when I finally broke away my gaze, my sight fell upon the contents of the old baby stroller. This time I didn’t whimper, but groaned.

  The baby was just like the woman; dead white skin, dead white eyes and its sudden cry of alarm, or hunger, was likewise rasped out as a snake’s hiss.

  "Ralph!" I heard the voice of my old friend call from the distance.

  I turned to face its source. Brian’s presence in this place was one thing that might offer sobriety to the madness I felt sure was the blood that filled the veins of this demonic town.

  There he was, standing on the porch of the same house I’d seen the two women hauling the body into--for surely, though my mind had previously refused the possibility, its contours had suggested the shape of a human body. Beneath the eave and with the small light of the darkening sky, he was nearly silhouetted, but for what little I could see I noticed that he was wearing some sort of strange, bulbous mask.

  "Brian!" I called out, forgetting the bizarre woman and baby, aware of Tracy staying a couple paces beside me, wondering why she wasn’t screaming or noticeably alarmed. "What are you doing there?"

  He began to wave his arms, motioning me to turn back. "Leave!" he yelled. "You’ve been shepherded here for their blessing!"

  "What?" I yelled as my trot became a run.

  "No! Don’t come in here! It’s what they want! I had to tell’em that I was expecting you at my home today!" His face appeared to work behind his mask. "They made me! Go away!"

  "What?" I shouted again. It was all my mouth could mutter--too much was happening too fast and all of it was lunacy. My brain couldn't keep up.

  God, I should have put it together in my head as Brian retreated back through the front door of the house, not willing to see me up close. As I ran up the steps, onto the porch, I should have focused on the simple clues and taken up guard, even as I rattled the locked handle with one hand, rapping loudly on the door with the other.

  But I didn’t think. I turned around to see how far back Tracy was, because of course she and I could plan a course of action. She was right behind me, hardly a foot away from where I stood. She remained eerily calm and quiet as a wind stirred the trees around us, bringing an unnatural chill that whistled through the branches with a deep groan from the forests’ depths, like a chorus of risen cadavers calling out for food.

  "Tracy?" I asked, confused by her cold and collected manner. Then I looked down to where her hand held a shiny, black and rectangular object that had an arched head and two metallic studs that looked like fangs. She pressed the fangs against my belly, and it registered in my mind that this was a stun gun just a fraction of a second before I heard the clicking, crackling noise and felt the jolt of numbing pain.

  I fell to the boards of the porch so hard that I thought I could hear the aged wood crack beneath me. Then I heard the sounds of the door unlocking and opening, Brian’s voice in the background de
manding that I be left alone. His demands were soon drowned out by the rasping of many other ill voices.

  The last thing I saw were bony white hands hovering over my head, one holding a dripping gray cloth that was pressed over my mouth and nose. I held my breath until I couldn’t hold it any longer, and then involuntarily sucked in the thick chemical vapors. All became a blur for a moment as consciousness faded, and then all was black.

  *****

  I awoke lying on a bed in a dark room that was furnished with the minimalist accessories of an era that passed long before I was born. The window to my right offered a dim, greenish shaft of light from the murky and fog-ridden atmosphere outside. I didn’t immediately remember the moments before I’d been put out, but I could remember the face of the old woman that pushed the stroller, which I passed off as the echo of a bad dream. Looking to my side, in the direction opposite of the window, I saw that a woman sat on the edge of the bed with her back turned toward me. My vision was blurry from deep sleep, and the low, murky light didn’t help. But when the woman spoke, though it was slurred and wet, I knew that it was Tracy.

  "We committed one of ours to the hospital, to send back someone that would be proper to convert," she said. "He found your friend Brian, and the connection was made. This was a sign that Brian might be a proper candidate to share a link with our god."

  Still groggy, I wasn’t alarmed by the strangeness of her words. As dazed as I felt, even words of sanity wouldn’t have made sense to me then.

  "When he told us he had a friend coming to visit, we thought maybe there would be another to bless with our blood. If you aren’t the sort of man that can be one of us, then you’ll just be more food for the feast."

  "What?" I finally asked, my mind awakening to the strangeness of her words. She answered by turning around where she sat, her eyes meeting mine. But beside her eyes, there was nothing of her pretty face left to see.

  "Show me if you want to be with us, or if we should eat you," she hissed as her skinless face came into the murky shaft of light, her eyes fully white and gleaming, with thick strings of blood dangling from the unveiled flesh. Something like black oil dribbled from her lipless mouth, then its descent slowed in midair above my face, and swirled mistily like ink drops diluted in water.

  Her essence.

  I screamed, my instinct for survival uninhibited by the terror that racked my being. I shoved Tracy away from me and leapt from the bed.

  Tracy fell the floor, laughing madly as I dashed through the bedroom door and into the arms of the waiting ghouls. Hideous faces flashed through my vision, their hisses threatening to dissolve my will to escape with their unworldly tones. I fought back an impending spell of dementia, and continued to struggle, kick and thrash my arms that were bound by their grips as they pulled me through the hall of the old house and out the back door, into the backyard where more of the congregation faced the dark forest that stretched like a huge black mouth opening to swallow the lot.

  From the depths of the woods came the moaning that was not the wind, and now I could see into the forest where stood a stone structure, like a mausoleum with no front wall, but only a black hollow from where some of those inhuman voices rang.

  The ghouls released me, and I fell to the grassy earth, from where I could see the bloodied carcasses of other humans scattered about the backyard. The gathered half-humans eagerly clasped their hands, as from the stone structure and from the dark forest itself there emerged the shapes of others.

  "Oh my god," I said breathlessly.

  It must have been heard by those of the gathering, because there followed a collective, wicked laughter.

  I turned around when I heard Tracy’s voice, impaired by her lack of lips. "Your blessing is upon you, Ralph," she said, and made her way to where I was sprawled on the ground. She knelt down and stared into my soul as she asked, "When He is here, will you give yourself to His blessing? Or will you turn away His blessing and be food?"

  He? I turned my sight from her skinless face where new, unholy flesh was forming, and looked into the black forest as those shambling shapes crept closer. Some had forms that were almost human, though I know that there was nothing of humanity that crept from that cursed forest. In the foreground I was aware of the ghouls and freakish, transformed humans using knives to rip away the garments from the carcasses, as from the mouth of the stone structure I sensed an emergence of something that plumed transparent vapors strong enough to bend and wilt the branches that obstructed its outward path.

  It was as though my eyes could not register its presence, as if it was pushing through from somewhere beyond. Its very existence, I knew, was responsible for the infection that had taken this town and its inhabitants. Seeping up from the soil below, where the membrane that held back all of the horrors of whatever vile world had birthed it had at some point, maybe millennia ago, ruptured.

  Suddenly, eyes flashed red from the vaporous, amorphous mass. Many eyes, and their glow pulsed so deeply into my being that I was able, as with the others of this ill congregation, to see.

  In that moment that the entity’s physical shape took form, it opened my eyes to the plane from which it pushed through. The world was a churning vortex of red and black, set over a stony plane, where in the distance I saw twisted black towers stretch before a great crimson ocean, and these beings that accompanied their master were likewise pushing through from this place.

  The shared vision passed once I’d ripped my eyes away, and again there was the veil that held feeble remnants of the world I called home. Tears streaked my face as I looked up to the sky that now bled streaks of red, and then a familiar, though corrupted, face came into view.

  Brian’s flesh had been infected, stricken with a vile pallor, and a hideous growth like a swarming tumor took up the better part of his face. From the tumor blinked open new eyes that were red like those of his new master, but far from possessing any similar strength. All the same, my friend was gone. Infected by this world that now meant to swallow me, whether I was to be a servant or another corpse on which these monsters would feed.

  When my gaze fell down to the knife he held, I knew I was about to die by my old friend’s hand, and as I looked at what he’d become in order to be "blessed" by this abomination, I was more than ready to die, if only to escape the alternative.

  But when he knelt down, he didn’t slash my throat, but collected me into his free arm, swinging my weakened body over his shoulder.

  "You have me," Brian growled at the congregation, "but I can’t let you take my friend." He pressed savagely through the vile crowd, swinging the blade at the arms that grasped and clawed, slashing and severing some.

  There followed a blind rush, and I saw the world around me heave, pulsate, melt, lose form and reform, breathing, as he sprinted toward my truck. I heard the sound of my driver’s side door being swung open, and then I was hurled inside.

  "Go!" was the last thing I ever heard Brian say as I, by some miracle, found enough stability to retrieve my keys from my pocket, start the engine, circle around to face the one direction that would take me away from Mossy Rock forever, and stomp on the gas pedal.

  *****

  There’s no escaping what I experienced, but I keep on going because it’s the only choice I have that makes any sense to me.

  Weaker men might throw it all away, give in to the demons of those memories and end their lives. I might have swallowed my pride and sought psychiatric help by now if only to help me cope with the memories and the visions of my dreams, but I know it wouldn’t do any good to talk to anybody who hasn’t seen or even suspected of what I’ve seen.

  I can remind myself that the spots in this world where this snug reality has fallen victim and been broken away by that outer reality are isolated enough. But really, how long can it be before the infection spreads? These weak spots, and there must be more, how long will it take before their fissures connect, and the entire veil finally collapses beneath the weight of that dimension and those
things that must even now be trying to push further through?

  I don’t know. I can just keep living, that’s all I can do for now.

  Sometimes I wonder about my old friend, Brian. I wonder about where he is now, and sometimes I wonder if saving my life, after what I saw, was really such a big favor.

  Δπ (DELTA PI)

  Matt Moore

  I'm terrible at math and science and I don't care--"Delta Pi" scared the hell out of me. Lovecraft was obsessed with geometry run amok and Matt Moore--the Communications Director for ChiZine Publications and Aurora Award nominee with stories in On Spec and Cast Macabre and whose novellette Silverman's Game was published by Damnation Books--takes that idea and throws it at the reader quickly and brutally.

  The digital clock on my desk, synched to the same atomic clock as the facility, reads 11:48:05. One-hundred fifteen seconds left.

  I tell myself it's my true understanding of Künsken that brought—and kept—me here. This once tiny town of Smythers. Where Künsken was born and grew up. Yet I can't discount insanity, either. They say the truly insane aren't aware of their madness. Only a madman would come here if he believed what Künsken predicted in his fifth paper. But for three years I've been told only a madman would believe Künsken's predictions.

  I don't know if I believe, but at least I understand. That's more than I can say for those working at the facility.

  My students don’t notice my momentary distraction. They stare out the windows at the noon-time prairie. A lump of resentment settles in my throat. If I could stand, instead of being stuck in this chair, I might command a bit more respect. I rap on the whiteboard to get their attention. "Who knows what the mathematic constant Pi is?"

  "It's like," a student begins, her eyes still focused outside, "the difference between how far a circle is across and how far it's around."

  "Close." Maybe I should be more impressed by a fourth grader expressing the basic concept of Pi. Considering their parents are research scientists and assistants at the facility built to test the Künsken's Equations, I'm judging on a curve.