Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20

by Tanzer, Molly

  Gaskin watched as the man, seemingly unable to remain still, leaned forwards with his elbows on his knees. He looked across at the far platform again. “Like everything was being poisoned or drained,” he said quietly. “I asked the farmer why he carried on, why he didn’t leave and he just said, ‘I can’t leave Low Hold’. Simple as that. Of course, at the time, I thought he meant because his family had been here for decades, or that he’d never sell his land, given how poor it was. I remember that as he said it, though, he sagged and just for a minute, he looked as twisted and shrivelled as one of his awful vegetables.”

  The breeze turned, zephyrs dancing across Gaskin’s face and with them he caught the edge of a scent, something hot and unwashed and decaying. The old man’s coat flapped open, showing Gaskin a suit that hung in loose folds and that was decorated with old stains and fresh dirt. Above it, the man’s wattle neck sprouted from a shirt collar that was too big for him and was the sour yellow of white cotton gone too far from cleanliness to rescue. As though sensing Gaskin’s scrutiny, the old man turned his head to Gaskin. He looked tired. With a wintry smile, he turned his eyes back down to the floor, at his shoes with their splitting leather and trousers whose turned-up cuffs trailed loose stitches, and then said, “It wasn’t just the farmers.

  “When I looked at the village after my trip out to the farm, everything was the same. Then women were quieter, sadder, more downtrodden, the children puling things that looked as weak as old milk. Even the buildings looked on the verge of collapse, and the worst of it was, no one cared. As long as they were here, in Low Hold, they put up with it all. They didn’t try to leave, they didn’t try to improve things, they just accepted it and sat around like they were all ill or too tired to move. I asked the Q about it, and he said that they’d been like that since the camp was set up. What was worrying was that you’d see it in the men in the camp as well. They’d arrive full of piss and wind, telling jokes or fighting or trying to fuck the local women or moaning about how none of the local women were worth fucking, and within two weeks, they’d have that same expression on their faces, as though they’d not slept for days. I think that, even then, I thought it was just the fear of being sent overseas. Perfectly normal, I thought, a perfectly safe and healthy response to the possibility of being sent to battle and being fucking killed.

  “And then I saw what happened in the waiting room.

  “We’d received orders to send a group of men on. They were given travel warrants, told which trains to get, and then left to get on with it. I was in the camp that day, and I saw one of the men when he should have been on the train; I know, because I had stamped his warrant and made all the arrangements myself, and yet there the bastard was, slouched against the wall in the exercise yard. I went to speak to him, but he just stared at me as I shouted. Eventually, I called the guards and had him placed under arrest, but it was only as I walked away that I suddenly wondered about the fucking others.”

  Gaskin noticed that the man’s language was coarsening, his voice itself roughening, and in its new timbre, he could hear echoes of the soldier that the man had been. There was command there, and solidity and something hard to identify; maleness, or masculinity, or authority. Something unflinching, and for a second Gaskin wondered what would happen if this old man was young again and doing Gaskin’s job. There would be no delays and no staff ignoring his instructions, he was sure, and the realisation made him feel weak and small.

  “I came to the station in time to see the train pull out,” the man continued. “I asked the ticket officer if he’d seen the men board the train, but he was a Low Hold villager and he barely replied to me. He waved in the general direction of the waiting room, though, and I remember becoming not just angry but furious, thinking that the men were still in there. I didn’t run, because I was an officer and I was fucked if I was running to find the men, but I walked fast and I was bubbling like a blocked kettle by the time I got there and looked in the window. They were inside.

  “There were seven of them, and they were asleep. I swore, shouting at them through the window as I walked to the door, but none of them moved. Seven of them, sleeping like babes in that little waiting room as though they were on a Sunday outing rather than going to fight for their country. I was so angry that I kicked open the door and was in the room before I slowed, and that was when I saw it.

  “The men were dissolving.

  “Maybe dissolving isn’t the right word. I don’t know what is, really. They weren’t breaking apart or melting or dripping or anything like that. No, they were fading like old photographs. I thought for a second that it was me, that I’d got so angry that I’d given myself a stroke and that this distorted vision was the beginnings of it, but it wasn’t. I wish it had been.

  “The men were vanishing, fading somehow. The colour was going from them, so that they got paler and paler, past white and into a greyness that was hard to see in all the shadows. Oh, God, the shadows! As I looked, it was as though the shadows around the men were thickening, sucking at them, drinking them, taking their colour, coiling around their necks and arms and legs like those snakes that crush you to death and eat you whole.”

  The old man stopped again, gasping for breath. His whole body was shaking, trembling like the surface of the sea in a rainstorm. He looked at Gaskin and said, “You don’t believe me.”

  Gaskin did not respond. The anger was back in the old man’s eyes and his hands were clenching and unclenching in a way that made Gaskin uneasy. Please come, he wanted to pray to the train, please come and let me escape this old lunatic with his fantasies and hallucinations, because that would be normal, the sensible thing to think, but he found he was more anxious about the idea of the train arriving, of having to climb aboard and surrender to his journey again.Over the old man’s shoulder, the train track remained empty.

  “As I watched, the men faded even more. I saw the shadows tighten around them, squeezing, and then the first man just … went. Gone. For a moment, there was a thicker pool of darkness in his shape and then he was gone and the darkness was gone as well. Then the next man went. I saw the bench he was sitting on through his chest and belly, and then he and his equipment faded away. The others went quickly then, vanishing like steam in warm air. Before the last one went, there was a moment when the room was suddenly filled with countless darker patches, hundreds and hundreds it seemed, all of them in the shape of men. I could see the outlines of helmets and packs and hands holding cigarettes and one holding his tea mug, and then they were gone and there was just me. I realised that I was on the floor, sat against the closed door and that all around me the shadows were capering like mad children. Black tentacles of darkness were coming for me, slithering across the floor without making a sound, appearing from under the benches and from the corners of the room, and the worst of it was, I didn’t move. I wasn’t really frightened, not angry any more, not anything. I wanted to lay back, let the slipping things take hold of me, wrap themselves around me like tongues, and then let myself go. I was tired, so tired, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Just sleep, and I think that was what saved me. I felt sleepy, and even as I wanted to let go and let the shadows hold me, I couldn’t help but remember the poor bastards that had been in the waiting room just a few minutes before. Did they see the shadows move before they fell asleep, or were they gone before they knew anything was wrong? They had friends, family, that would never see them again because of what had happened here. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I’d rather they’d been blown to pieces in some pointless battle; at least then their life might have looked like it served some purpose. How pointless a way to go, to simply be taken from here”

  “Taken?”

  “Taken. I saw the truth of it then, realised something about this place. The poor crops, the attitude of the people, the disappearances, everything. There was something under this town, something that sucked at the life above it. Like a good parasite, it didn’t normally kill, just drew enough energy to live off, but with
the war, there were people in and out all the time. Maybe it got greedy, maybe it felt threatened by the constant change and movement, I don’t know, but it started to eat people, sucking at them ‘till they were nothing instead of stopping short and leaving them stunted and exhausted but alive, and now it was coming for me. I screamed, and kicked and thrashed trying to wake myself up and make those dark things back away, and it must have worked because the next thing I remember I was running as fast as I could back to the camp and to my office.”

  In the distance, Gaskin heard the train. The old man heard it too and started to speak quickly.

  “There’s little more to tell. No one believed me, of course, and no trace of the men was ever found. They were listed as AWOL along with all the other poor sods who must have been taken. I started to see things everywhere in Low Hold. Shadows seemed darker and thicker, and seemed to trail people, hanging on them longer than they should do. Every time I looked around, I saw great pools of darkness near me, darkness where there should have been light. I made sure I never stopped moving, was never alone, but even then I knew I wasn’t safe. Whatever was under this place knew I knew about it, that I was a danger to it, and it needed to be rid of me. I tried to get myself posted away, but was told that I had done too good a job here, that they needed me to stay. Even the food I ate seemed a threat, as though I could swallow some of the terrible thing by accident and be absorbed from the inside out. I was a nervous wreck, jittery and tired and I couldn’t concentrate. I knew I had to do something, but what? And then the Germans came to my rescue.

  “There were more and more air raids happening and the skies above London and other cities were alive with fire and noise. Of course, they never bothered with Low Hold, because it was just an insignificant smear of shit on a map, but they did sometimes fly over it to get to Manchester or Leeds or up to Scotland. So, I committed treason.”

  Gaskin started. “Treason?” he asked, surprised. He had no urge to hear a confession as well as a story, but had no idea how to stop the old fool.

  “Treason. I waited until the next air raid was passing over on its way somewhere important, and I set fires. It only took a couple of burning bales of hay, and that was enough; one by one the German pilots started dropping their bombs early, fooled by the flames, and the town was filled by the brightest, most glorious light I have ever seen. The entire valley was on fire, and even the sound of the planes and the bombs was hot, as though the air itself was burning, and in the centre of the flames, I saw it. Great black tentacles writhed around, reaching out to the sky and across the hills, grasping things that looked like octopus arms one second and pincers the next, but huge and so many, all desperate to escape the heat but there was nowhere for them to go. The more flames there were, the more bombs fell, and the more bombs that fell, the more flames there were and the more the earth was torn apart and the flames burned at the darkness beneath. I killed it, whatever it was, and I watched it die and thrash out its death in the middle of a firestorm that people died in as well and which was my fault and I was glad. Better that they died in fire than allow the thing under the earth a chance to draw another person down to it.”

  The old man stood. “I was a traitor, but no-one ever found out. Low Hold was practically destroyed and no one wanted to rebuild it. People had been released and they moved away, vanished, and the town simply rotted where it fell. The army rebuilt some of the camp, but they didn’t use it for long before it was decommissioned. I was posted to Africa, where the ground was hard and dry and there was nothing under it to feed on us, and despite the danger and the shells and the tanks, I loved it.”

  Gaskin stood as well, his chest tight with the thought of the miserable train and the journey ahead.

  “I killed it,” said the man, “and the town died with it. When the Beeching Axe fell, Low Hold was lucky not to lose both train tracks. It only kept one because there were still quarries near here that used trains to transport the stone. I lived my life knowing that I had betrayed the country that I love, but I was sure that I had done right, that it was worth it.” Gaskin saw that the old man was crying, tears rolling down his stubbled face as he walked to the edge of the platform.

  “I was wrong. It is not dead. I must have injured it badly, because it lost its hold on the town, but just recently things have started being drawn here, growing here. Companies buying land, setting up offices, and the staff almost always move here to live. It’s been pulling at me, wanting me to come over to the waiting room. I think it’s weak, because it’s more like a whine than an order, but it’s stronger every day. I didn’t kill it but I hurt it and it has taken years to recover and now it wants me. It already has you, I can see it in the way you move and the way you sit and the shadows that gather under you.

  “I will not go to it.”

  The man opened his arms wide and, before Gaskin could move, let himself fall back onto the track. The train was still advancing, slow but implacable, and even as the brakes yelped to life the wheels ground across the old man’s chest and hips with a cracking, juddering wail that sent blood across the knotted weeds and Gaskin’s scream into the high summer air.

  Gaskin’s two weeks off work did not help. The first few days he spent alternatively shivering and then crying, and after that he found himself restless, wanting to return. The old man had been mad, clearly; the police had implied as much after they finished interviewing Gaskin. Gaskin hadn’t told the police the story the old man had told him; they hadn’t asked, simply took his name, enquired what happened and sent him home. It was his doctor who told him to take time off work, but it was Gaskin who decided to return even though his doctor wanted him to take longer.

  The first evening Gaskin sat on the platform, it was warm again. He could hear bees in the distance, and birds fluttering in undergrowth on the platform opposite him. It seemed a far remove from the horror of his last time here. The old man’s blood had left rusting stains on the earth around the rails, and although Gaskin was sure it was his imagination, the plants looked thicker where the blood had fallen. Leaning forwards, Gaskin peered under the bench beneath him. Surely the shadows were thicker under him, darker than they should be? He could hardly see the wall of the deserted ticket office, yet it was only a couple of feet away. Maybe the old man was right?

  Nonsense.

  Only it wasn’t, not really. Throughout his time away, he felt an urge to return to Low Hold, a sense of being pulled and called and cajoled and ordered all at the same time that had eventually proved impossible to resist. There were other things as well; Gaskin had spent his first day back looking, really looking, at his fellow workers, and had seen, or thought he saw, what the old man was talking about. They walked as though something below them was pulling down, weighing them with a terrible burden. Looking at himself in the mirror at lunchtime, he had seen the same mark on himself, a deepening of the ridges along the side of his mouth and a rounding of his shoulders that made him look as though he were being yoked and crushed.

  The buildings were as bad; even the newest of houses appeared to be crooked, falling apart. The office, which was comparatively new, felt old and brittle, with pale yellow stains to the glass in the windows and doors that didn’t hang quite true and electrics never worked just they way they should. It was as though something was drawing the energy away, leeching it off and causing decay in even the most solid of structures.

  Total, total nonsense. Bullshit. Wayward dreams and an old man’s nightmares and he was a fool for listening, and a bigger fool for giving them credence.

  And yet, he could not convince himself not to. As he looked at the opposite platform, long abandoned, he saw the shape of the waiting room through its fur of plants and bushes. It was there that the old fool had believed this thing was concentrated, wasn’t it? Where all those men had been taken? Perhaps, though Gaskin, if I look and find nothing, I can put this rubbish behind me. And as simply as that, it was decided.

  He left his bag pushed under the bench and walked
down to the end of the platform. Here, under a sign that read No unauthorised personnel past this point, the concrete apron sloped away to the weed-entangled earth of the track bed. Looking up at the solitary CCTV camera and seeing the rust that streaked across its lens and the fraying wires that slipped from a crack in its skin, Gaskin decided that no one could see him. No one cared. Very carefully, he walked down the slope.

  It was like entering another world. Even though he was only three feet lower, the air felt warmer and more sluggish and the sound of the insects’ buzzing was louder. There was another sound, a metallic tension that he took a moment to identify; the rails, humming with pent-up electric intent. Looking to make sure that the train was nowhere in sight and remembering uncomfortably the terrible grinding of the old man by the wheels, Gaskin took several cautious steps over the rails. He had no idea if one of them was a third rail, or dangerous, but knew that he could be careful and stay safe. One step, two and his heels felt alive with shocks and trembling and then he was over and the other platform beckoned.

  Beyond the rails, the ground became uneven, with sunken ruts where the second set of rails had been and plant roots bucking under the surface of the grass and weeds. There was an increasing smell, of old metal and wet soil and something else, something unhealthy and rich and fizzing with decay. Gaskin pushed on, wincing as the plants left streaks of green and brown moisture across his neat trousers and his shoes started to pick up lumps of dark brown matter that he could only hope was mud. By the time he reached the platform itself, he was sweating with the exertion of forcing his way through the tightly wound plants and he was beginning to wish he had left his jacket with his bag. He debated dropping it on the edge of the platform and leaving it to pick up later, but one look at the grime and liquid glistening there convinced him not to.