Side-Write: Seaside Visitor

Happy Halloween! I debated a lot on what to do with this year's most haunted side-write, and at first I thought I'd try something a little more goofy than previous years-- maybe embrace more of the kiddy side of halloween with traditional "spooky" stuff, or maybe try and play out my own version of a cheesy slasher flick in the PWO world. In the end, though, nothing that came to mind felt all that fun to write?

Eventually I landed on the idea that I've always been mildly curious about how I'd do my own spin on a sort of Lovecraftian creature: something that cannot be accurately perceived or described, something maddening just to encounter. That sounded like a fun challenge! I don't know if I nailed it here, but I did have some fun playing with the idea.

As always, this isn't officially something that happens in the world of Project Wild One, so much as a speculation on what might happen out of sight. I hope you enjoy a disturbing read for the spooky season!

~~~

The job's simple enough. Traders visited one of those little towns tucked out of the way on a cliff by the coast. Found nothing but bodies, got spooked and left. Now, it's your job to go check it out. Was it some disease? One of the nastier monsters? Did everyone just go crazy and pull a big suicide pact? You've seen a lot of crazy stuff out there, and you're used to sniffing out the truth when things get weird. So when the people in charge want to know if it's safe to send people to this town, if it needs to be barred to outsiders, or if the whole thing needs to be burned to the ground, they turn to you.

It looks peaceful enough from a distance as you ride up the cliffside path. Beautiful view, lots of fishing boats moored at the docks. Just... nothing moving. Nothing alive. Some laundry is strung up, fluttering between squat buildings of rough stone and wood. The trees sway in the breeze off the ocean, the forest curled tight around one side of the town like a hand caressing the town, holding it snug against the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. It's midday, this place should be bustling, but sure enough... nothing.

At first, all you smell is old fish, but new sour notes come in slowly as you near the first buildings. You rein in your horse suddenly, next to an old well. A body is curled up behind it.

Covering your mouth, you dismount. Casting a few cautious looks around, you still don't see anyone else, so you approach the body. A young woman, huddled in on herself, feline. Paws covering her face. You find a stick and carefully try to nudge her arms until you can see what she's hiding.

Claw marks. Her own. All up and down her face, and... her eyes are gone. Your stomach twists. What would drive a woman to do such a thing...? What anguish must she have known, for her face to still bear a faint, twisted grimace? You swallow, and move on quickly to see what else you can find.

There are others like her in the town, but many more are... something else. You find a man twisted and crushed, like... like some giant had just grabbed him in one hand and squeezed until bits of him seeped out between each finger. Literally. His body, what's left of it, is clearly shaped under what had to have been three or four long, encircling bands. Like if you had crushed a fistful of wet sand, and dropped a sculpture of your grip on the floor of this shop. He had to have been killed, but what could have been large enough to do such a thing to him, and still fit through the door to get him? And if he was killed, why hasn't he come back?

Some have been clearly been eaten, their bodies pocked with the craters of bite marks, or the long, parallel scores of fangs. Others were squished in other nonsensical ways, and none of them have... If they were killed, their bodies should have disappeared long ago, and they should have come back! What has happened in this town...? Others mutilated themselves in other ways, too, carving out their ears, or even their noses or tongues. Not all of them should have died from their self-inflicted wounds, but it's clear they suffered something you don't understand now. All of them lie screaming silently of the anguish of their last moments.

You check house after house for some kind of explanation, and the sun is lost behind the treetops when you finally make it to the town hall, a broad, squat building at the center of town. The sky is a blaze of red, casting a sanguine light across the desperate barricades barring the building's every window... and the spray of scrap that is what remains of the front door and everything they'd piled over it. This hadn't happened all at once. Someone survived long enough to know things were going wrong, and they tried to band together and protect themselves from... something.

And they'd failed. The reception room inside is carpeted with bodies, mutilated by their own hands or something impossible. You suppose you knew that for the town to be in such a state now, there couldn't have been any survivors. But... whatever did this, whatever they tried to keep out... Is it still here?

You can't go back without an answer, some kind of answer. What did this? Is it safe? You try to understand what's happened to the bodies, but they must be two weeks old by now, and who knows how many details, how much information is already lost to you. Did they leave anything? Any clue...?

Something rustles, and you freeze. You listen, holding your breath. Another rustle. You turn slowly. Down that hallway... It's hard to make anything out in the gloom, lit only by the last of the sunlight filtering through gaps in the boards and barricades over the windows. The noise was so soft, it could just be something stirring in the breeze off the sea, but...

You rise slowly, carefully setting down a sheaf of papers, your eyes locked on the gloom at the end of the hallway. You move slowly, placing your feet carefully, testing each board you step on lest it creak and betray your approach. You leave behind the relative brightness of the main chamber to descend into the shadowed hall, willing your eyes to adjust faster, to pick out every shadow and gleam. Doorways line either side, but the noise is coming from further down. You pause every few steps to make sure, though the rustle doesn't always answer your patience and you just have to keep moving, picking your way past the occasional corpse.

In the space of a few seconds, everything changes. You move to step past a doorway when your body... drains. You lose the strength to move, to keep going, and it's all you can do to keep yourself upright. Something is... there. In the corner of your eye. Inside the room to your side. You can feel it, and you can... almost see it? Without thinking, you turn your head. What is it? What's here?

A boarded window lies on the far side of the room, slicing the dusk light into dots and thin wedges of blazing red. Something is between you and that window, blotting out the light, some kind of shape swimming in along the edge of your vision as your head turns. Your stomach twists, your mouth dry, and you hand fumbles at the doorway for support. You're trying to drag in air, your own rasping breath loud in your ears, and yet you feel as though you're drowning as your vision drags across the walls to touch that window, and then...

A hand. You see... hands. Your hands, your lover's, your father's, strangers' hands, you see them, you feel them. You feel a palm caressing your cheek, and you feel it caressing your entire body, too impossibly large. You feel fingers tangling with your own, checking your wrist for a pulse, searching up your arms, curling under and around them, spreading across your chest, gripping at your throat. You taste dirty fingers, feeling around in your mouth, surging down your throat. You gag.

Eyes watering, you jerk to one side, but you don't understand what's happening. You look again.

Hot breath mists across your cheek. You see... mouths. Lips kiss the soles of your feet. Fangs tease along the tendons behind your heel, ready to hamstring you. Your entire leg is seized in a mouth too large to be real, molars bigger than your fists testing the give of your flesh as your bones creak. Teeth, tongues, lips surge across your vision, mouths unfolding into mouths with tongues that unfold into mouths with teeth that laugh and lick their lips hungrily. You try to speak, to scream, but someone is kissing you, muffling the sound.

Your eyes jerk away, and for a second everything melts, the darkness of the town hall returns. If you had the time to think, to try to understand what has happened in the last two seconds, you might be able to escape. But you're too damn curious. You've sniffed out the truth everywhere you went, and you still... you don't understand what's happening. What's in front of you. Your eyes move before the reasoning part of your brain can recover from the shock. You've got to know.

And you see yourself... in the reflection, of a thousand eyes. A mass, a wall, a world, an enveloping sky of nothing but eyes, jammed together in a writhing mass, staring, blinking fitfully, crammed tighter and tighter together as still more eyes open between them. You bathe in them, a fetid bath of eyeballs, mashing like jelly around you, inspecting every follicle on your body, under your clothes, inside you. And at the same time, you hang over a terrible abyss, a bottomless chasm of absolute black, perfectly circular, rimmed with dusk red quivering in anticipation. Will you fall in, sublimated into pure knowledge, or will the eye's lid fall shut and crush you first?

Your own eyes snap shut as you choke out a sob. And suddenly, it's gone. It's all gone. Except... a low rasp grates up your spine as you tremble, leaning into the doorframe, knees wobbling. You hear... breathing. You barely noticed it before, but it was there always, rasping over your hide, air like sandpaper dragging your body away in the tiniest pieces possible. Every tiny gasp pulls at you, constricting around your flesh, wringing you down to fit through some infinitesimal hole, and each faint sigh sets you drifting apart in a hundred directions as though every bone, every muscle in your body might simply slip loose and wander away into the cosmos on its own.

You slap your hands over your ears, muffling the sound, panting desperately. You're reeling, you've been pummeled with it all until you can't even think, only writhe in terror of anything else happening. You can... smell something, and you can feel it twisting through you, spreading through your body, making every organ retch and wrench one at a time as all of reality seems to... twist, like you and all the air around you is a toy to be turned and flexed until something pops...!

Your legs kick out frantically, ramming your head and shoulders into walls, but you feel the instant you lose line of sight with... whatever is... happening in that room. You hurtle back up the hallway, still covering your head, struggling to hold it together in one piece as you ram into walls and trip headlong over bodies. You launch yourself up again and just tear out of there all the same, treading on corpses when it's where your feet land. You don't dare to open your eyes, to do anything but blunder in the divine direction that is Away.

Finally, you smell crisp sea air, only slightly tainted with death, and you drag in a deep breath you didn't realize you were holding. You fall to the ground, and for a few moments you just lie there, trying to... exist. Trying to pull together a single thought at a time.

Bad. That was... bad. You're... not far enough away.

You crack your eyes open reluctantly, and the world looks strangely normal in front of you. Lines stay still, they meet in ways that make sense. Your hands don't move on their own, not much. You feel nauseous, inspecting a world that's so damned... normal. It feels... alien, like something from your childhood, a place you know you no longer belong. You push your feet under you, and when the world doesn't wrench out from under you, you stumble and struggle to keep moving.

Out of the town. You've got to get out. You barely notice the bodies now, littering the streets or glimpsed through doorways. They're boring in their mundanity. Your eyes search desperately, and you feel part of you grow confused at your... disappointment, when nothing seeps through the edges of shadows to crawl up your arm and feast on your soft parts, or burrow inside you.

And... there's your horse. It doesn't even look like it despises you. Is it real? Is this the illusion? Are you still in that doorway? Crying softly, you crawl into the saddle and wrench your mount around to flee further still. You kick your heels in and flap at the reins despite the growing darkness. The horse squeals its protest as you push it harder, and harder, gritting your teeth. Yes. That's right. Scream. It soothes something inside you. Scream more.

You're not surprised when the horse finally trips over something. For one moment, flying through the air, you relax. Finally. You watch the rough, stony path rush up to meet you with a smile.

Gurgling softly, you watch the stars spiral overhead. They don't look enough like eyes, but it's almost good enough when your vision blurs with tears and your shaking makes them dance. Your body doesn't really do anything useful now, but you keep trying, driving faint, whining noises from your throat as you hear the snap and grind of protesting pieces echo up your spine to bloom in your skull. At least you can keep doing this, for a while yet.

But you still don't... understand. What was it? What stood in that room? Was it just a person? A monster? You think... it had a hand. A mouth. An eye. Maybe even more than one of each. You wish... you could have seen more. Even what little you saw was too much for you to contain. You understand that much, now. Perhaps it was a God. A True God, something far greater than the paltry beings people worship today. Maybe...

A hand. A mouth. An eye. A... hand. And... and...!

You feel it. The slithering rasp, the spread of moisture across the ground... across your dying horse... across your broken flesh. A tongue. You shake. You don't see it, but you... feel it. Your breathing changes, growing desperate, rapturous.

You remember. You remember the feel of its teeth, and you feel them now, rolling your flesh between broad molars, raking over it with the fine points of fangs. You turn to bury your face in the warm, wet embrace of a tongue, and now there are more, many little sets of fangs nibbling over you, tugging at the loose bits of you. They can take their time with you.

And they do. You break slowly, piece by piece, crushed and slurped and parceled out a thousand ways, one mouthful at a time. You're laughing, as your own lips are kissed a little too roughly and come apart. It didn't even follow you. You brought it with you.