Onyx Neon Shorts: Horror Collection 2016

by Brit Jones

  That image of our first sight of the wilderness will always stay with me; the driver left us on what must have been a plateau. We had seen nothing but trees for miles, and suddenly we found ourselves on this bare stretch of what could almost have been a cold desert; grey-green, dry and littered with rocks. The mountains are much higher and craggier here than in Bergen, but we seem to be above the peaks. You can imagine people living amongst the highlands here for years and never knowing what’s in the next valley. In the distance, the peaks are snow-capped. We begin our trek by heading northwards and down, in the direction of the flowing water, back into the tree cover.

  The first leg of the hike was through the forested valley on the north side of the plateau, and then up over the low ridge of the next mountain in front of us. I didn’t mind the steep climb down and back up. It was such a good feeling to finally be there. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been champing at the bit to be let loose here until I finally felt the first slither of earth under my boots. The scramble on the slopes was fun. The winding paths and the way in which the rain (Per tells me it has rained a lot so far this spring) had obviously changed the shape of the hillside by washing away the soil from the rock, made the hike seem a little bit more adventurous. There are slabs of bare stone jutting out of the undergrowth, and great deposits of black earth around the roots of trees.

  Per is still quiet, and we walked in relative silence, but then that’s not altogether unusual. The woods are the focus, here. For Per it’s the challenge, all that Ray Mears survival stuff. For me, it’s about creativity, and letting my imagination flow.

  Even so, I imagine he must be thinking about his son. I try not to feel awkward. I’ve told myself the worst thing I can do is feel awkward, to treat Per any differently than I normally would. He doesn’t need that.

  The climb was, I think, steeper than Per had imagined when he planned the route, and in places the slope became a little precarious. We had to switch between the narrow paths on a few occasions, where rock slides or fallen trees or rain had made them impassable, and we had to pick our way through the undergrowth to the next strip of empty ground with enough little rocks to use as footholds. Still, this is real woodland, not a park. There is no reason why the path should have been maintained for walking use. I prefer it this way. I like to imagine we are the first people to have climbed here for years. Between the paths, the undergrowth has grown so high it nearly smothers you. I have nettle stings on my neck.

  We reached the peak after about five hours (I can’t see the point of keeping an exact track of time, although Per no doubt does) and have sat down now on some boulders for a break. From a clearing on the summit looking south I can faintly see the plateau of the mountain where we were dropped off, and the dim line of the road. North, I can see the forest and more mountains and the endless, marbled veins of bright water stretching away until they merged with the sky in a blue-green haze. The trees are like a green ocean, stretching away to the horizon. Just past this peak is a wide, sweeping valley and another ridge, higher than this one and broken twice in the middle so that it looks like three enormous vertebrae on a gnarled old spine. Beyond this ridge is the fjord that we are going to, although it is still out of sight

  Directly beneath me, as I look forward and down the steep slope, great thick walls of undergrowth rise towards me like surging waves. Fallen trees flounder in a sea of nettles and long, white-tipped grass, their branches arching over the undergrowth like they’re waving for help, all under a canopy that taints the colour of the light, like bottle glass.

  Per tried to focus my attention on the path we would be taking, on the slope directly in front of us, but I felt my gaze drawn incessantly outwards, north, towards the endless wilderness. Then suddenly, I looked downwards past my feet and I imagined myself falling. The bottom of the valley must be miles down. I could feel the rush of cold air, and imagine the touch of every one of a hundred thousand leaves and branches as I plummeted down the mountainside.

  I am sat at the peak, writing. We’ve only allowed ourselves an hour’s respite to see the view and I’m conscious that we need to press on again. The time doesn’t matter so much, it never really gets dark here, but we need to reach a place to camp while we still have enough energy left to pitch the tent. Looking out again, the feeling of size, space and vertigo is so intoxicating that I feel almost sick. Per is complaining about the amount of water that we’ve brought, but I am finding it hard to focus on what he is saying.

  Overhead, not out over the valley, but directly above the peak, directly above us, a bird of prey is circling. It is beautiful, although I can only see its silhouette. It wheels in a circle, catches wind, changes direction suddenly and then continues its slow arc above us, apparently endlessly.

  ...hollow, lush and damp

  Dylan’s Journal: 09/05/2011, Nighttime

  It’s nighttime now, although still light. We made camp in the valley. I’m exhausted. Rather than climb straight down the mountain we had to work our way along the ridge in search of a safe path, which, I must admit, I found a little frustrating, especially after we had sat there for so long doing nothing. By the time we made camp I’d almost stopped taking in my surroundings at all and was having to focus instead on walking, putting one foot in front of the other. The difficult paths became harder to navigate as the day went on and I grew wearier.

  It was stinking hot in the woods. I’ve never seen the forest this green before—the deciduous trees seemed to sag under the weight of their own foliage. I remember the green spilling forward, great, heavy tendrils hanging from every branch, so much of it that it almost hurts your eyes to look at.

  The tree cover absorbed the heat, but deflected the drying rays of the sun itself. The woods were not only hot but damp, too, from the water in the trees and on the undergrowth. I could almost imagine the water in the trunks steaming away, turning the woods into some kind of primordial sauna. I couldn’t take off my jacket because of the straps in my backpack. I was sweating so much I dropped my water bottle. I remember I couldn’t tell which of the lumps sticking to my sweaty skin were insects crawling on me and which were solid matter from my own pores. It stank, too. The smell of the undergrowth is sharp, like ammonia.

  The sun is beginning to set, at last. I can feel the cold night air on my face as if I could drink it in through my skin—although, of course, the sun won’t actually set. The light streaks through the canopy as if through stained glass. The pools of sunshine on the rotten floor are bright, deep orange like fire. Occasionally a streak of light will break through and dazzle an entire section of the path, and then, momentarily, it is like the woods are ablaze.

  Something really strange happened this evening too. We were nearing the spot that Per had chosen to camp in; it’s an old logging clearing, apparently, but the track has long since grown over. As we drew closer, I began to hear a buzzing noise that sounded almost mechanical. It got louder and louder, not one sound but hundreds like distant traffic, except I had seen the view of the place from the ridge and I knew there were no roads for miles around.

  When I broke through the tree cover and into the clearing, the ground was black and just for a moment I felt something stick in my throat. The forest floor was alive, coated with little, furry black bodies of these enormous, fat flies. I could see them, mounds of moving bodies climbing over one another, a writhing mass, until Per stepped forward and the carpet of flies suddenly rose into the sky like some huge, black mushroom cloud. I remember Per staggering back, covering his eyes and mouth, as the cloud briefly engulfed him and then flew up, and past, and dispersed into the sky.

  It’s a truly bizarre phenomenon. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think perhaps the flies need the direct sunlight in the clearing for warmth, or to feed, or something, so they gather there, but to see so many at once was quite a surprise. The clearing itself is about thirty feet across, flat, and a little boggy under foot. There is tall, brownish grass and nettles roughly to the height of our rib
s, which we have flattened and hacked out in order to pitch the tent and make enough space around for us to sit, cook, and eat. Beneath the grass and nettles are deposits of sand, as well as the soil, which I think must have been to do with the logging once upon a time. The ground is drier on the sand than the soil.

  I’m sat on a log, scratching away at this journal while Per silently reads the GPS on his phone. I keep spitting midges out of my mouth.

  * * *

  He seem’d a dismal, murky stamp

  I miss my son. It shouldn’t be so hard to say, but it is. He was so unbelievably... quiet. I remember we’d hear music coming from his bedroom and see his shoes by the stairs, but other than that we wouldn’t know if he was in the house or not for days at a time.

  I remember walking into his bedroom once when he was eleven years old. He was sat on his bed, staring at the backs of his own hands and apparently doing nothing. When he saw me he screamed, and told me to fuck off. I was so shocked I didn’t even punish him. I didn’t know what to do. It became a joke, eventually. Leave Yngve alone. At home, the bedroom door is still closed. Greta won’t go to the top floor of the house because it means walking past that big, silent, empty door and thinking that he’s still there on the other side, locked in like he always was, ready to scream if we open the door. One day, I would like to go and kick that fucking door right down.

  I never should have been a parent. I remember when Greta was pregnant, and I came home from work and there was no food in the house, and I made her dinner and she refused to eat it and told me it was horrible, and then she cried. I imagined ten years down the line, a kitchen table with Greta and four children all refusing to eat, and me so tired that I could barely speak, and I remember thinking I don’t want to have any children. I don’t want them to end up like you. How terrible a thought that is.

  But I was an appalling parent, too. One day in the park some older children threw water balloons at Yngve. I picked him up and we left the park. He never mentioned it again and I never brought it up because I felt too ashamed of myself for not confronting the kids. He was so disappointed in me he wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. I could never set an example for him to follow. I could never be anything for him to aspire to.

  I was never... I was negative, and indecisive. Greta stood and screamed at me about three weeks before our wedding, because I didn’t seem excited, and I turned around and said to her ‘well, you’re the one who wants to get married.’ Yngve never had a chance, being born into that kind of family.

  Yngve came home from school every day for a week with a thick purple smear on his cheek where some kids had got handfuls of blackberries and rubbed them on his face. I tried to ask him about it and he threw a glass at the wall and went to his room. He sat in his room in the evenings until late. He wouldn’t wash the purple juice on his face. He would come downstairs in the morning and it would have dried into a blue-black crust and he went to school with it still on his face, like…

  I don’t know what like. Like he wanted the kids to think he didn’t care, maybe? Or to see what they’d done? Or maybe just to upset us?

  Another time a boy from Yngve’s school spat on him in the street.

  One time we had to go out in the evening on a week day to the late night shopping mall to buy him a new backpack because someone had put his old backpack in the toilet. I tried to make the trip fun, being out late on a weekday, all of that, and Yngve looked at me like he’d begun to hate me right then and there. That’s what I remember as the turning point. That, to me, was the start of Yngve’s sickness.

  I know Yngve was difficult, but it was complicated. Trying to talk to him, to bring him out of himself, was this delicate and difficult art that Greta and I had been working on for years. We were nearly there. There were times when he was OK, for a year or so. He’d talk to us about stuff sometimes—we were fixing him, slowly, we thought, it just needed time. I can’t help feeling like the kids in his school who used to bully him just did it for no reason at all. They pissed all over everything good we had, and killed my son and wrecked my life, for no reason.

  * * *

  His charnelhouse-grate...

  I had a nightmare that there were things in the woods. I woke up and they still seemed to be there. I heard them last night. I tried to wake Dylan, but he wouldn’t wake up. I could hear them—these bizarre, lifeless growls and the shuffles and thuds of legs that sounded crippled. Then I heard a gunshot, right above the tent. So close it sounded like it was coming from inside my skull, loud like something beating down on my head. I heard this gurgling sound like a bleeding throat outside and I felt my own jaw shudder as if it’d been ripped off.

  When I woke up the outside of the tent was alive with black flies crawling over each other and trying to get in. Scores of them were inside already, thickening the air and beginning to cover Dylan and myself while we slept. I screamed, and they flew away. I can still feel them touching me.

  * * *

  With coffin-black, he barr’d the green

  Dear mum and dad,

  You’ll be wondering why I did this. To be honest, I’m sorry to disappoint you, it was mainly about music. That and blood. Black Metal and Racial Pride are the only things that I really care about. This world is increasingly devoid of either and I don’t want to be part of it anymore.

  You need to understand. Black Metal music is synonymous with European racial identity but, like all Aryan culture, it’s a culture that is quickly being diluted and lost. Black metal music was never supposed to be for a mass market. People say it’s elitist; well, yes it is. It’s not for anyone to just go and buy a record.

  I want to die because I hate Death Metal. I don’t want to hear another Death Metal song. Death Metal is the watered down, commercialized form of Black metal. All I hear these days is Death Metal and I can’t cope with it any more. I have to die. There’s no other way.

  Why do I hate Death Metal so much? That brings be onto my next point: Blood. I find it tragically ironic now that so many white, Scandinavian, supposedly ‘Black Metal’ bands have gone to Death Metal and have signed to Jewish-owned record labels in the process. The whole metal scene has allowed itself to fall under this kind of pervasive, Judeo-Liberal numbness that European culture has found itself being sucked into. Major record labels are just another ideological weapon to perpetuate this Judeo-Christian, Diet Cola, democratic dollar-cage, and blood is being diluted in the process.

  I saw a kid today on the train wearing a t-shirt of the band Thorns. God, I wish I could have murdered that fucking poser. I hate this world where the rich fucking Jews can buy what isn’t theirs, what is white by blood, that is nothing to do with them or with Jewry, and sell it to Americans and Africans and make money out of it, and no-one is prepared to stop them. I saw a poster for a tour rap music artists from Germany that was called the ‘Midgard’ tour. Why is it acceptable for non-Europeans to use European heritage as if it were their own culture? I would not expect a white band like Satanic Warmaster to name an album after Haile Selassie, or to hear Muslims talk about the Earl Mohammed or hear stories of the exploits of Samurai Svantevit, so why do these blacks and Jews think it’s OK to take what’s not theirs? Why do the liberal government let them get away with it? It’s trivialising, and insulting. This is not a world that I want to live in.

  I feel that the kind of democratic, commerce-based ideologies like Liberalism and Socialism, to which Mum and Dad subscribe, have allowed for our race to destroy its ancient culture and adulterate it’s blood into something diluted, something more palatable and marketable to the mongrel masses. Weak humans are poisoning our race. Most of humanity is intellectually inferior to true Aryans anyway; most people I meet are reactionary, acting like a group of monkeys flinging its faeces at the wall every time its Liberal ideology is challenged. These lesser mind forms have pooled together and created a sort of ‘lowest common denominator’ which can be exploited by Judeo-Capitalist or Christian manipulators for the destr
uction of Norse, Gnostic, Pagan or Aryan language, culture and genetics. Black Metal was supposed to be the antithesis of this, a form of musical protest to accompany the kind of armed resistance that some of its brighter stars have perpetuated, but now it’s more Happy Meal shit.

  Anyway, what’s my point? I want to die. Sorry if you thought this letter would be somehow deeper, would have more about you in it, Mum and Dad, but I don’t actually give a fuck about you. You’re probably thinking you failed as parents. You did, but that’s not the point. I wanted to die

  a martyr.

  Sorry about the mess. I know a shotgun is a fucking coward’s way to die, and I dread to think what the pieces of my head are going to do the bedroom walls. I did try to cut my throat, but the knife was too blunt, and after that there was too much blood on my hands to hold it steady and make a proper incision on my wrists, so the gun was the only option. I’ve been practising with the shotgun in the woods anyway, shooting at people carved into trees. I think it’s important for the white race to keep up its links to its warrior heritage by staying proficient with weaponry. After all, the Zog government won’t defend us. And besides, I like the feeling of recoil.

  So, Mum and Dad, you probably know more about me now than you ever have done. Be sure to bury me deep, and face down, lest I rise from my own fucking grave.

  Blood and Honour.

  Goodbye,

  Yngve

  * * *

  “Death”, said I, “What do you here?”

  Dylan’s Journal: 10/05/2011, Morning, leaving the camp site

  It’s morning. I didn’t get a lot of sleep and I’m tired as a result, which is frustrating because we have a lot of ground to cover today. I wanted to be able to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy myself on the walk, whereas now I feel like it will be more of a test of endurance than anything else.