by Tobias Wade
“I don’t follow.”
“I just… I was in the cave, an’ it got darker, an’ then, even though I could still feel the walls of the cave—the rocks, the floor, y’know—I started seein’ other stuff. Like layered on top of it, like another dimension. Can’t explain it any more than the words, but that’s the feelin’ I got. Like I was in the cave, but part of me was somewhere else.”
“What did this… new place look like?”
“Like a hallway. Smooth surfaces. Smooth walls, smooth floor. An’ I know it weren’t part of the cave cause if there’s one thing you learn spendin’ your life outdoors it’s that nature don’t make right angles, you know? An’ if by some act of God it does, it sure as hell don’t make multiple ones all right next to each other. No, this place? This place was man-built. Or somethin’ built.” After a drag on his cigarette he adds, nonchalantly and as if it were a minor detail, ”An’ there were pictures on the walls.”
“Really?”
“Yessir.”
“Of…?”
He sets the cigarette in his teeth and he says, “It was the cuneiform from before, but—”
“Hieroglyphs.”
“Hieroglyphs, whatever—but they were alive. Moving. Writhing. Squirming. I felt like somehow they had depth to ‘em. An’ I realized that, you know—wherever I was, this new plane, this new dimension—it was a much realer existence than the one we’re in now. Everything was so much deeper, so much more real. Everything here, y’know—” He picks up his empty glass and turns it over in his hands without purpose, “It’s like it was just a thin summary of that place. Somehow I’d stumbled right on through, I guess you’d call it the Veil—an’ I was in the real world. The one behind the illusion. I don’t know.”
“Did this... more real version of the hieroglyphs provide you any insight into their nature? Any deeper understanding beyond an emotional response?”
“Sure. Sure, they did. That dread started gettin’ its own context, a little bit. Somethin’ that’s still alien, y’know, but it started feelin’ more focused. An’ the further down the hallway I went, the more focused it got.”
He put the glass down and stared at it for a bit, lost in thought and his own wordless musings. Then he said, “Anyway. Finally got to the end of the hallway. Words were behind me; guess they’d served their purpose, or whatever. An’ at the end there was a staircase. Massive, mighty flight o’ stairs, stretched off to the left an’ right as far as I could see. Stretched down so far there wasn’t nothin’ but blackness there. Don’t know what was at the bottom. Don’t know if anything was at the bottom, really. But I saw what was in the middle of that place.”
After an extended pause, in which he assembles the words, during which the tap-tap-tapping of his foot gets faster, he says, “It was… a creature. A demon, or something. Maybe worse. An’—oh, God. God, it was—it was this mighty, massive thing, size of a planet, it felt like—just watching me from the mist; from the shadows. An’ I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t turn around. No matter where in the cave I went. Every single fuckin’ step I took brought me closer to it. Realized, y’know, that I was still in the cave, an’ no matter where I ran in that place it had no effect on where I was in this—this real world. Like some kind of uh, like a computer game character, you know? You can move around in that fake world all you want. But you ain’t never gonna leave the living room.”
“What did it look like? The creature, I mean?”
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap…
“Didn’t look like anything that’s ever been alive here, I’ll tell you that much. It was—God, it was almost like a reptile, y’know? Maybe just a little bit; just a vaguely reptilian-thing, vaguely deer-like too, an’ shaped like a jellyfish, almost, since it didn’t have, y’know—a head or arms or anything you’d recognize as a body part. It was just this hideous mass, bigger than the moon, an’ covered in rot and what looked like tree bark, and bones. I thought I saw old, like, rock formations dangling from it, too.” He gestures to his chin and to his arms as if something is hanging from them. ”Stalactites an’ stalagmites, all the stuff you heard of in school—dangling pillars of rock—were a part of this thing, or an extension of it, I don’t know. But it was old. Ancient; an’ not like, Roman ancient but truly otherworldly, before-time-itself kind of ancient.” He pauses for a bit to collect himself. Then he says, “Then it, uh—it spoke to me, Bill.”
“The... demon spoke to you?”
He puts his head in his hands and rocks back and forth and trembles; this time his whole body joins in it. And he nods. “It spoke the same language as the words. An’ I couldn’t translate it for you if I tried. Human language, I don’t know—it ain’t better or worse, it’s just different. We explain this world. The fake world. You know? Like we got a word for cup. Beer. TV.” He nods at his television. “But that language explains, I don’t know—the essence. The Deep. The true, naked reality behind the Veil. An’ somehow I just knew what it meant when it spoke.”
“What did it mean?”
A tear rolled down his cheek and he groaned pitifully.
“It was… it was calling me, Bill. It wasn’t sayin’ my name, y’know, but it was callin’ me. The me behind the skin; the me behind the flesh, behind the bones. Oh, God. God, God. It was like a thousand dead voices at once, just singin’ in this rolling, echoing, gravelly fuckin’ dead language. An’—an’ then I was just… I was with it. Next to it. Part of it. I looked behind me an’ I saw the stairs way, way off, you know—like as far away as the sun is from earth. Don’t know how long it took me to get there. Don’t know if time or space even had any meaning in that place at all. I was just gettin’ closer to it, an’ somehow—for some reason—I didn’t care. I wasn’t scared. Weren’t upset, or happy, or anything. I was me, y’know, but without the flesh or emotions. Everything was stripped away; I was just a floating, naked soul.”
“What happened when you reached it?”
“I started comin’ back a bit, weirdly. Started gettin’ feelings like, you know, this ain’t right, somethin’s wrong, this ain’t real, it can’t be. Yadda yadda. Started as just a little trickle of normal thoughts, y’know, like I was still in there somewhere, fightin’ to get out. An’ I start to resist, an’ it pulls me in closer, an’ I fight some more.”
By now Robert is staring off at nowhere in particular at all; he is every inch as thoroughly wrapped in the tale as I am.
“Then it—it says somethin’ like… blood. Or, or sacrifice, or somethin’—that’s the closest English word for what it meant. Maybe it was all the same thing in that language, I don’t know. But I got the impression I could only escape if I gave it life.”
“If you gave it life? Like allowed it to kill you, or…?”
“That, or some other life.” There is a brief pause before he adds, “An’ I realized that, y’know—that’s what this thing was. This place wasn’t the reality behind the illusion at all, but the opposite of reality. An’ this thing is the opposite of life. That’s the only way I can describe it. The opposite of life. The thing on the Other Side. An’ only after realizin’ that, an’ fightin’ like hell, did it start to lose its grip on me. An’ the cave started to come back, and the light, an’—an’, oh, God.” He breaks down but manages, “I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t—I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Oh, God, no, no, no.”
I sit up straight. “What? Do what?”
After a moment he holds up his trembling hands as if he hasn’t washed the stains of blood from them in all these years. “It was John,” he says. “It was… he’d been calling me an’ I couldn’t, I didn’t know, I didn’t—”
“John… was the demon?”
He shakes his head. “No, no—when I came outta that damned place I was back up by the pond, an’ John was—he was dead. Beaten into the ground, dead. Broken nose, bloody, bruised. Disemboweled. An’ my hands hurt, an’ I knew—I just knew—that it had
n’t been hours or days or weeks or however long. We hadn’t even fallen over the edge like I thought. It’d been no time at all. John had been saying, ’No, no, don’t drink that! Don’t drink the water here, you don’t know what’s in it!’ An’ he grabbed my arm, an’ I just—I beat him to death, Bill. I killed him.”
Robert begins weeping again, tearlessly and heavily; he drops the cigarette and grabs his head and bunches up his hair between his fingers and rocks back and forth. “No, no, no, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
Only after a long time has passed does he sigh loudly and sit back. Then he wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and grabs the pack and dumps the last cigarette from it into the palm of his hand. This comforts him to a small degree. He lights it.
I say, “I’m sorry, Robert.”
“Yeah, well. What’s done is done, right?” His voice is shaking. But he takes a long drag and produces a cloud that fills the air above his head and lifts away. Then he pats the ash into the bowl. “Took John’s keys after that,” he says. “Brought a rock down on his head, tossed him over the edge. Found my way out eventually, you know. Drove to a gas station, got a pack, drove home, called the police an’ smoked the whole damn thing while I waited for ‘em. Thought I was goin’ to prison, you know? But when they got there I told ‘em John died in a caving accident. Tripped an’ fell right over the edge; weren’t nothin’ I could do. An’ they saw I wasn’t in no shape to be a killer, y’know? So they let me be. Left me there to stew in my fuckin’ filth an’ in my misery.” He looks at the floor. “I don’t know. Dunno if they ever did find him down there. Spent, God—better part of a year, maybe more—worryin’ someone would find my handprints on his neck an’ I’d be gettin’ a knock on the door. But I never did get that knock. An’ by the time I was able to sleep normally again—live well enough with the nightmares—all the stress had produced this here foot-jitter.” He nods down. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “An’ it ain’t ever left me since; that was some twenty years back this May.”
I consider all this for a time, and finish my beer while we sit in silence. Then I say, “So… do you think it was the pond water that did it? Put you in a hallucination, made you attack John?”
He snorts. “Thought about that,” he says. “But how’d I get the broken ribs?”
“So it wasn’t an illusion at all, then.”
“Maybe not.”
“I do have to ask, though—I get the impression you’ve bottled this up for a while. While tell me now?”
“Because I’m almost out of time,” he says. “Like you said earlier. The march of time. Thought I’d get it off my chest before I went to the Deep.”
I blink. “You think you’re going back to that place?”
“Hell, Bill. Been seein’ the place real vivid like in my dreams lately, y’know?” He pats the last of the ash into the bowl, and laces together his fingers and places his hands across his stomach. “Fact of the matter is, it’s where we all go at the end. To join our bones with the Pit.”
H.G. Gravy
Isolation Cabin
It wouldn’t be difficult to list who was standing out there among the trees in the middle of the blizzard. Their names and blood types were etched into my brain forever like a hall of shame. They scratch against the wood and windows of the cabin and pound against the door. I dare not allow them inside. Their horrible accusations moaned through the crackled and dried lips of the dead.
I tell myself over and over again:
They’re dead. They can’t be here. They’re dead. They can’t be here.
It’s a desperate cling to the sanity and logic of the real world. Out there in the forest, rationality, logic, and reality were self-deceiving words devoid of any meaning. There was only madness in denying the truth of what I heard out there.
“Why did you let me die? I was only nine. You should have saved me…”
Emma Brighton. O Positive.
Attempting to avoid a collision with a drunk driver, Emma’s father swerved their family’s vehicle into the breakdown lane and then lost control of it. Her mother and father were killed on impact when the car wrapped itself around a tree. Emergency services required the use of hydraulic tools to remove Emma from the wreckage. Losing precious time in the process of getting Emma to the hospital, there was nothing I could do to save her life despite all my years of experience and training. I tried to keep her heart pumping for as long as I could, but there was just too much damage to her little body.
She never regained consciousness. I’d never heard her speak, cry, or laugh. Her final moments were nothing but memories of chaos, pain, and fear. I remember wishing I could have comforted her while she passed. No one should ever leave this world so violently.
Tonight, I hear her voice taunting me outside the cabin.
“Why did you let me die? I was only nine. You should have saved me.”
Emma’s voice is the loudest among the other dozens I heard. Many I recognized. Others, like dark magic, I could see pictures in my mind’s eye of their faces and remember them.
Donald Slater. A Positive.
“You can’t save anyone, can you? Just give it up!”
The first person to die on me. Heart attack.
Lindsay Gravat. O Negative.
Gunshot wound to the chest.
“My husband tried to kill me, but it looks like you finished the job for him. What did I ever do to you?”
The cabin rumbled with the hammering of ghostly fists upon its outside. The chorus of the dead moaned louder in their deafening voices. There was no escape from the onslaught. They continued crawling out from behind trees and through the snow-covered path up the driveway. The blizzard would not halt their progress.
Mary Grant. B Positive.
Blood clot.
“I’ll never get to know my daughter because of you.”
I pleaded for little Emma to forgive me. I told her I tried my best. There was nothing anyone could have done to save her life or anyone else’s. I begged the dead to realize I’m only human. I asked forgiveness for my failures.
My apologies and justifications meant nothing to them. The dead have no room for forgiveness. They care nothing for the anguish or sorrow of the living.
With the last ounce of strength inside me, I shouted for them to stop and took the pistol from the dinner table into my hand. The voices stopped. There was silence again for the first time since I’d arrived at the cabin.
The voices of the dead then whispered to each other and then in unison they chanted: “You failed us. Do it. You failed us. Do it.”
There was something seductive in their chanting. It was an invitation with open arms. It was atonement and forgiveness. I raised the gun from my side and placed the barrel into my mouth. My lips wrapped around the cold metal. It touched the back of my throat, and I gagged.
The taunts intensified in their fury. The voices came from everywhere all at once. Men, women, and children. I could feel their icy whispers in my ears and down the side of my neck. My finger trembled on the trigger.
One pull is all I needed, and the warmth of divine peace would forever be mine.
The chanting stopped, but I could still feel them surrounding me. The pounding against the cabin ceased. The wind muted too. All the world went silent and lied in wait. The pistol had warmed in my mouth. My finger danced on the trigger. I was terrified of killing myself, yet I wanted nothing more than to free myself of the guilt and the faces of the damned which haunted all my waking moments.
I didn’t want to disappoint the dead again. I lost them in life and wanted to please them with my death. They wanted my soul to join them in their eternal damnation.
My finger stopped dancing on the trigger. I held it steady now. The gun felt warm in my mouth now. Its metallic taste reminded me of blood. I wondered if I’d eternally have the taste of blood and bullets in my mouth when I joined those outside the cabin in the afterlife. The i
dea of it gave me pause once more, and without a second thought, I pulled the gun from my mouth and set it on the dinner table like I’d done each of the previous nights.
If the dead wanted me to die, they were going to have to do it themselves. I charged to the front door and pulled it wide open to find the blizzard had placed several feet of snow there. Jumping through the soft powder and landing at the bottom of the steps, I readied my pistol and aimed it in both directions searching for those who haunted me.
Once again, there was no one there in the pitch-black darkness.
The chill of winter burned my face with its wind. The light from inside the cabin only stretched a few feet, and all I could see is the thick snow which continued to fall from the sky. Fearing for my life, I returned to the warmth of the cabin and shut the door behind me.
I leant against the door and fell to the ground, releasing the pistol from my hand and letting it drop to the floor.
“They’re dead. They can’t be here,” I told myself. “They’re dead. They can’t be here.”
The doorknob rattled and the scratching against the door and windows began again.
“You should have saved me! You let me die!”
“You failed us! Join us!”
Tobias Wade
World's Oldest Tree
“Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you can feel them when they’re close,” I said. “The goosebumps on your skin even though it’s not cold. The way the air tastes, and the dry lump in your throat. That’s how they let you know they’re about to strike.”
“How do you get away?”
“No one ever has. You get about ten minutes after you notice them before they force themselves inside you. Then it’s all over. Wait—did you feel something? Clara look at your arms! You’ve already got the goosebumps!”
