Another chirp
drifted into the room from outside. The window was open again. It hadn't been
ten minutes since Jacob had slammed it closed. He stared at it, into the front
yard beyond where the grass had become an ugly orange-brown, and thought of how
exposed he was. Anything could get in once the latch and been swiveled open. The
thought made his bones tighten. Sniffling and hacking, he got up from his chair
to close it again. He was getting sick.
It was the tail end of Fall, and all
of the leaves that had been in the trees were on the ground; golden and
deceased. In the mornings, frost had started to form on the roofs and hoods of
cars and the grass had become brittle. It crunched underfoot at every step; the
only sound Jacob focused on as he tramped across his back yard, checking for
signs of the intruder.
But he hadn't been outside to check
in three days. For him, it was no longer safe to do so.
Two weeks earlier, he had been a
normal high school kid. He did everything one would expect of a lively senior:
weekend boozing, class skipping, and the occasional after-school slice at Yucca
Steve's Pizza Palace. Everything seemed to be just as it should have been on a
perfectly sunny Wednesday morning.
That day, Jacob had slept through
his alarm and lay in bed as his parents engaged in their usual coffee ritual in
the kitchen. They poured it, steaming and black, into their enamel mugs and
grimaced as they took it in. Shrugging on their coats, they roared off in their
respective vehicles, leaving the boy alone in the house.
They worked in the city, and
wouldn't be home until late, so when he finally woke up and found that it was
past noon, he decided to shirk school and take his time getting ready to cruise
out to the strip mall.
He slipped out of bed and walked
over the cold wood floor to his bathroom where he brushed his teeth for nearly
ten minutes. As he did so, he stared at his eyes. They looked vapid, like a
twin set of opaque swamps with swirling bog bubbles at their centers. He spat a
bloody soup of toothpaste and plaque into the sink and dried his mouth with a
towel.
There were no clean shirts in his
closet, so he plunged a hand into a mountain of worn clothes next to the
footboard of his bed and retrieved a shirt and his favorite pair of jeans. Once
dressed, he proceeded through the hallway and the living room into the kitchen
and whipped the freezer door open.
Raspberry tarts were his favorite,
and he was in luck. There were five, so he took them all out and stood in front
of the toaster, heating them in cycles until they were in a steaming stack on
his plate. He filled a glass of milk to compliment them and brought his bounty,
teetering, to the coffee table in the living room. With a latent finger, he
pressed the power button on a remote sitting on the table. The television
crackled to life, howling sports. He was disheartened to learn that his
favorite football team had lost.
It was a very important thing to
him. Like most sports fans, he didn’t realize that he was volunteering his heart
to be torn in two with each ignoble defeat his idols encountered.
Jacob sneered, flipped to the music
channel, and wolfed down his tarts. If he had been more aware, he might have
heard the tap that occurred at each window in the room, one after the other,
every two seconds. And the chirp.
Thirty minutes later, his stomach
was full. He slipped into his shoes, grabbed his board, and left through the
front door, kicking it closed behind him. It was only two-fifteen, but it
seemed unusually dark. The few shredded-cotton-ball clouds didn’t account for
the deepness of it.
He jogged out into his front yard
and almost threw his board down to roll away, but some dark crouching thing at
the far end of the street caught his eye as he neared the curb. It was standing
behind a sycamore in the Jamesons' yard. It looked like
pure shadow, head indeterminable. A light wind was ruffling a row of hedges
just behind it, which appeared to agitate the figure. When it wasn’t looking
over its shoulders or back down its side of the street, it seemed to be focused
on Jacob.
"Hey!", he said.
The shadow didn't react, but he
thought he could hear a chattering rasp coming from somewhere deep in the
thing's throat. He didn’t like the sound one bit.
"The fuck're you looking
at?"
His question went unanswered. The dark
creature started moving back and forth as if it were the native inhabitant of
some far flung island, doing a dance to invoke its gods. Jacob could feel sweat
slick on his temples and the hollow throb of his heart. He was getting the
jim-jams in a serious way. Suddenly, he wanted to beat it. To kill it before it
could do something horrible to him. He took a few quick steps off of the curb
and started yelling.
“Answer me, you little bastard, or I
swear to god I’ll—“
But suddenly, the shadow was gone.
It was like it had melted into the grass. Spilled like a towering column of
India ink.
Utterly perplexed, Jacob could think
of nothing else to do but jump onto his skateboard and light off down the
street, leaving the shadow behind, odd and unexplained. He'd always thought
better of following the whims of curiosity. He had seen too many scenes in
horror movies end badly because of such indulgences.
The wind blew his hair back into a
rippling raven flag. He kick-flipped up onto a stairway railing on his way
through the neighborhood park and grinded down into a manual at the bottom,
screeching to a stop after landing it and yanking his fist down to his chest in
celebration. A nearby kid whose face had been invaded by a spore-like
smattering acne gave him a thumbs-up. He returned it graciously, beaming, and
sped off down another hill.
The whole time he rode through the
streets, he consistently peered over his shoulder, just in case there was some
black gaping nightmare sprinting at his heels. He had the distinct sensation of
being followed. The feeling was leaching the joy from his bones.
Fifteen minutes later, he arrived at
the strip mall. Leaves were drifting around lazily in the parking lot, skidding
against the concrete, rasping out a symphony. The air had grown slightly
colder, and there was no one to be seen mulling about the storefronts or cars.
In fact, every store appeared deserted. Jake felt uneasy, and approached his
final destination: Ceekiante Arcade.
Dropping his skateboard by the door,
he shielded his eyes to counteract the obscuring reflection of the parking lot
and peered in through the glass. He couldn’t see any of his friends tapping
furiously at plastic keys or yanking on joysticks. There was no cashier at the
counter. All that he saw was an inky dimness and a few specks of complacent
dust that hung immobile in the air. Something was wrong. The arcade was always
bustling with activity.
He tried the handle. At first it
wouldn’t budge, but on his fifth tug, Jake wrenched it open with unexpected
ease. It swung past him and smacked into the adjacent wall. He stepped inside,
peering cautiously down aisles of game cabinets and growing all the more
anxious as he worked his way toward the back. He figured he might at least find
Mid-day Fred, the day janitor. He was always in the back, afternoons, chewing
on his dirty beard as he toiled betwixt slimy, desperate teens.
But to Jake’s surprise, there was
not a single sweep of a broom or rustle of a garbage bag when he neared the
rear corner. Even after pushing on the lever to the maintenance room door, he
encountered nothing but a continuation of solitude. He was utterly alone and
each step he took became louder than its prior as the seconds of realization
passed. It was unnatural for it to be that quiet at the strip mall, where
everyone came to skip school and enjoy the days of their youth to the last
drop.
In a panic, he called out, “Hello?!
Is anyone here? At all?” But silence was his only answer.
He felt the sudden urge to leave. To
go straight back home, to his warm room. His safe, comfortable bed, thronged
with comic books and stiff socks. He started back toward the front door at a
quickened pace, but after passing the restrooms halfway to the exit, he heard a
squeaking and stopped, supposing that he had stepped in water. The noise continued,
though. It wasn’t quite a squeak.
It was fundamentally different, but
recognizable to him. Images were conjured in his mind of childhood, chasing
butterflies through a park.
Chirp.
“Blue jays? Definitely not in here”,
he said to the darkness. “Where do I recognize that sound from?”
Chirp…
Dread was coiling up in the pit of his stomach like a
lead boa constrictor. He knew, suddenly, that something had been stalking him
from the moment he’d walked in. Whatever it was, it continued to emit the queer
chirp, just a row over from where he stood.
“That’s fuckin’ it”, he said, and
sprinted for the door.
He refused to
look back, but he could hear the sound of hard, narrow feet beating against the
threadbare carpet, mere feet behind him. Broomsticks on ceramic tile. His
stalker’s chirp had turned into a low whirring whistle that might have sounded
like a cat purring after having eaten one of those small, plastic Casio pianos
he used to play with when he was younger. The thing, whatever it was, was
closing the distance between them. He could feel something like whiskers or
antennae lightly grazing his shirt.
When he
reached the door handle, he jammed it forward, burst out into the open parking
lot, and continued to run for several yards. He could no longer hear the
thing’s horrifying tone at his back, so he slowed to a jog and then walked in
circles for a few moments. He stopped and doubled over, panting. It had gotten
even darker outside and great viscous clouds, pregnant with rain and winking
lightning had come rolling in from the South.
He didn’t see
any cars in the road. The parking lot was still bereft of any sign of life. He
scanned the broad, black street from end to end, rubbing his neck and sniffing
snot back into his nostrils. It had grown quite cold. Freezing specks of rain began
to stipple his scalp. He turned around to face the buildings.
Horrified,
Jake remembered that his skateboard was still on the sidewalk. He’d have to go
back and retrieve it before he could leave (and
sure as shit, I’m getting the fuck out of here, he thought to himself), but
the cost of such a feat caused his heart to quicken. He wasn’t sure he could
make himself do it.
Keeping low,
he slinked toward a nearby car and stared over its hood at the arcade.
Everything seemed lethally still. It was a trap, waiting just for him. He
stayed frozen, observing the prospect of returning for nearly fifteen minutes
before deciding that he just couldn’t do it. Sighing deeply, he turned his back
on his board and left. His lips were trembling.
Hardly able to
take a step without surveying his entire panorama, he traversed the streets
back to his house, but avoided the park. It seemed to him that passing through
there was a death wish; that it was the perfect place to become prey. He didn’t
allow himself to blink until he stepped foot on the wilted grass of his lawn.
Once inside, he locked every window and bolted every door. He didn’t grasp
the entire gravity of his situation then and there, but that would be the last
time he left the boundaries of his home.
The following
weeks were a nightmare. The horror wasn’t caused by being constantly under
siege, but because nothing happened though the threat remained palpable. He could
feel aerated poison sinking into his lungs.
The furthest
he would travel from his refuge was the curb at the street and the boundaries
of his yard. His parents never came home. Even though he rarely saw his
neighbors to begin with, they were most definitely out of the picture after the
chirping had started. He wanted desperately to know what was happening to him,
but the simple fact was, if he left in search of answers, he would surely die.
Sometimes,
just as he was falling asleep, one of his favorite CDs playing silently through
the stereo by his bed, he would hear a rising chorus of chirps in the distance.
The din wasn’t loud enough to bring him out of his hypnagogic state, but his
skin grew lousy with goose bumps. It sounded like a continuous, muffled shriek.
Like a beautiful by-product of mass torture.
Then, one day,
it came for him.
He woke up,
and the window was ajar. Cold wind was funneled into his room and rushing
across his body. It was six in the morning, during that strange interim between
night and day where the entire world is a flat wash of gray and, if a person
hasn’t slept, horribly alien thoughts come to mind.
Chirp…
Jacob heard it
unmistakably, just outside of his room under the window sill. Something was
there and all that kept them apart was half a foot of sheetrock, wood, and
vinyl siding. He couldn’t breathe. The follicles of his scalp were tightening. It
seemed like the external world was being sucked away through the hole in his
wall.
Getting up
slowly, he slid his legs across the sheets and placed them carefully on the
floor. He rose and, every three seconds, stepped closer to the noise. There was
no retreating into the hallway or the bathroom. He knew that to turn his back
on the thing outside was to perish without knowing.
The gusts of
wind that spewed in at him as he drew closer caused his nipples to harden and
shrink. He held himself tightly in his bare arms, his teeth chattering, and
squinted against the cold. It took him five minutes to reach the window.
The suspense
was pulling his skin taut over his bones as if it were a civil war drum hide.
He stuck his head out and there was nothing there.
Ducking back
inside, he whirled around to make sure nothing was standing at his back and slammed
the window closed. With the whisper of the lock sliding back on its groove into
the clasp, the portal was closed.
He had a coughing fit. He was in a tomb.
Jacob stormed
into the living room, lashing the walls of the hallway with the belt of his
robe as he went. The chirp was becoming more frequent. He couldn’t escape it
and the fact was beginning to eat away at him.
He walked into
the kitchen and opened the fridge. It was nearly empty. He had expended the
last of the sandwich supplies two days before. Staring at the barren, chilled
shelves, he wished that his parents had gone to the grocery store before
blinking out of existence. He would have liked a couple of tasty snacks before
facing his doom.
He settled for
a meal of six frozen “Nuggie Kids” chicken nuggets.
And he knew
that it was only a matter of time before his end came to him. Whatever was
outside had started to follow him around the house, no matter where he went. It
would chirp sometimes in the midst of absolute silence, just to make him jump. He
hadn’t taken a shower in a week for fear that the stalker might take such an
opportunity to waltz inside and get a peek at him before sinking its teeth into
his supple flesh and making a meal of him.
The dining
room table was gleaming from the overhead chandelier as Jacob sat at its head
and stared at a dated newspaper from the morning of The Sixteenth. There was a
tap on the window. Just behind him. He turned dubiously in the chair, rolling
his eyes and shifting his body so that he could see what had made the noise. As
soon as the wooden frame entered his peripheral vision, however, there was an
implosion of glass shards. The thing was upon him.
It had Jacob
pinned onto the table. He stared into its crystalline black eyes. They were
lidless orbs set deep into a doughy white head, if a head it could even be
considered. More like a malformed sculpture from a kindergarten art class. A
scripture, direct from Hell. It had seven appendages: six of them seemed to be
its legs. The seventh extruded from its back through a crop of fungal air sacs
(they inflated and deflated intermittently to no obvious rhythm). It was tipped
with a terrifically sharp barb that seemed to be leaking a dark purple liquid
down its shaft.
The creature
had a ragged maw, just below its eyes. It imposed its putrid breath all over
his face. He tried to speak to it, but before his words could amount to much
more than a weak rattle in his throat, a shrill chirp blasted out of it and
slammed his skull down onto the wood. Its legs began to rattle in their joints.
The barb jutting out of its back was curling around its neck and arching. The
creature was deciding whether or not to impale him with it.
Jacob tilted
his head to look around for something to beat it off of him. Just inches from
his head was a fallen jag of crystal from the chandelier that had hung above
the table minutes before. The thing was leaning in close for some sort of death
kiss when Jacob snatched the glimmering fragment and sank it deep into the nape
of its neck.
It belched a
screech that made Jacob’s head feel smaller, as if it had begun fold in on
itself like possessed origami. He was close to passing out, but the survivalist
in him realized the momentary reprieve for what it was: a chance to wriggle
free and fortify himself in his bedroom. He had a solid pine Louisville slugger
propped in the corner just to the left of his door. He was imagining just how
good it would be for pulverizing the gooey bastard’s skull.
He slid out
from beneath the trilling horror and rolled off the side of the table. Even as
he slammed against the dining room hardwood, he could sense a tension at his
rear. The thing was regaining its poise and reacquainting itself with its
target. Jacob pawed at the floor while pushing himself forward with a few
clumsy lunges. He was deafened with the buzzing din of insect wings. The
creature was already at his heels.
Within a few
horribly distorted seconds (the million threads of each second forming a weave
which pulsated and churned back and forth), Jacob crossed the threshold of his
bedroom. He swiveled on his heels and rammed the door into its jamb with his
shoulder. Shortly after, he could hear a solid, violent impact on the other
side. The thing had flown headlong into a sudden dead end and was likely dazed.
Taking a chance on it, Jacob grabbed the baseball bat and whipped the door
open.
The creature’s
legs had given out and splayed at its sides. The shrill tones it had been
emitting were replaced by a confused whirring coming from deep inside of its
body. It was a writhing black mass of twitches, its white play-dough head
bobbing merrily. Jacob took no time to study its ghastly form, however. He
simply brought the bat down onto it. Repeatedly.
Fifty swings
later, there wasn’t much of the thing left for him to observe. He released the
bat and knelt, panting. Immediately, the smell of the thing’s fluids assaulted
his nostrils and made him fall dumbly back into his room on his ass. He
scrambled up onto his feet, enraged, and skirted the abomination to make his
way to the kitchen.
Digging around under the sink, he found a box of scouring powder. He
rejoined the deceased creature and dumped a crystalline white mountain on top
of it, then edged his way back into his room and collapsed onto his bed,
letting out a shuddering, horrified sigh.
Exhausted, drained, Jacob prayed in garbled whispers, anointing the ceiling
with wasted breath. The air draped the scent of extraterrestrial decay over
every surface. Sleep found him.
It was hours
later when he awoke. The world beyond his window had become orange with the
cant of the sun. He noticed with disquieted clarity that he could no longer
hear the blue jays singing as he had only a week before. When he sat up, he
heard a sickly squelch and, looking down, observed lengthening tendrils of
clear slime oozing off of his back.
Panicked, he
leapt up and ran into his bathroom. At the mirror, he beheld the worst image of
his short, miserable life. There were colonies of pustules expanding and
collapsing rhythmically on his cheeks and forehead. He opened his mouth to
scream, but the moment his lips parted, a green, chunky mess delivered itself
from the captor cavity into the porcelain. With a dawning delirium, Jacob
recognized the fetid gruel as his tongue, disintegrated and sedimentary in his
head. It had rotted while he slept.
Instead of a
screaming himself hoarse, he had a sneezing fit, but with each violent “ah-CHOO”,
a bold crimson jet misted the porcelain bowl. The blood that hadn’t evacuated
itself was running down his throat and when vomited it out, most of his teeth
wrenched free in the downpour. They were floating in the piss-smelling water of
the toilet among chunks of the chicken nuggets that he had nuked and eaten that
very morning.
“Oh god!” he screamed. “Why?! What made me sick?”
Five hours
later, Jacob was cringing like a shrimp on the floor of his parents’ bedroom.
His skin was a gruesome shade of green, glinting with ichor as some inner slime
pushed its way through his pores. He was rotting, alive.
He had
staggered around the house during those hours, searching for medicine. There
was nothing that he thought might help him, but even so, he swallowed six
different kinds of vitamins and every cold & flu capsule he could find.
After the doom
settled in, he contented himself with moaning and beating his fists on the
walls. The skin on the sides of his hands had been flayed, revealing the
hamburger meat gristle beneath.
Entering one
room, his eyes flickered over the furniture with gut-wrenching familiarity.
He’d run a circuit of the place at least twenty times before stumbling his
parents’ room and collapsing. The muscle fibers in his legs had beginning to liquefy.
There were
jagged puddles of dark green and orange fluids crowded around his laboring
form, soaked into the carpet. His body had been squirting them out of various
newly formed holes in his chest and back. His mental faculties were beginning
to slip away when the door to the hallway opened.
A dark
humanoid midget stepped in. Dark, actually, wasn’t quite precise. It was beyond
darkness. It was like a howling body-shaped hole in mid-air that was sucking
light into it; a walking singularity. It chattered to itself, taking
infinitesimal steps toward Jacob as he stared up at it.
A vague
thought rose to the top of his brain like a bubble in a glass of water. That was the thing hiding behind the
sycamore in the Jamesons’ yard the day this all started. Ever so slightly
his eyes began to widen. He tried to wrench his body across the carpet, to
create distance between himself and the whistling
anomaly from beyond, but the moment he squirmed he could feel his spinal
cord separate from itself like a saturated strand of toilet paper. He screamed,
and literally coughed up part of his lung.
The dark being
approached him and crouched, tilting its head in an almost loving way, as if it
cared. Then Jacob saw one of the last and most horrifying sights of his life:
multiple tentacles leered out of its back and began to form balloon-like
spheres at their tips. The spheres then began morphing into recognizable faces
– all of his friends, his parents. They gaped down at him and moved their
mouths open and closed, but produced no words.
Tears were
spilling down his cheeks as he looked on. The thing bent over him, planted its
hands on Jacob’s head and pulled him closer. He could feel the skin on his face
loosening itself from his skull and fluttering away in sail-like flaps.
Suddenly, words filled the room, but they weren’t quite being spoken. The thing
was injecting them directly into Jacob’s mind.
I’M SORRY!
He didn’t
understand, but he thought back at the thing with what was left of him in his
sickly, dissolving gray matter.
Sorry for what? Why is… this?
The sucking,
bipedal thing shook him in its grasp.
I JUST COULDN’T HOLD IT ANYMORE!
The thing’s thought-words were so loud that the skin on
Jacob’s scalp was splitting, and the bone beneath was criss-crossed with jaunty
scribbling cracks as it ruptured from the force. He was all but gone. A goofy
smile crossed his face. He began to slobber, but tears still welled in his
lower eyelids.
I WAS ZOOMING THROUGH SPACE AND I REALLY HAD TO GO! I
SWOOPED DOWN ONTO THIS PLANET AND TOOK THE HUGEST, MOST MERCIFUL POO OF MY
LIIIIFE. BUT I NEVER COULD HAVE KNOWN THAT THERE WAS LIFE HERE… AND NOW…. AUGH!
And now what? Jacob thought, giving the grieving thing a humorous wink. When he reopened
his eye, it burst, and its insides sluiced out of the socket onto his
collarbone.
WELL… NOW I HAVE TO CLEAN UP MY MESS.
With that, the
being embraced Jacob and sucked his skeleton clean with its vacuum skin.
Moments later, his face visage sprouted out of its back on another one of its
black, writhing stalks. It had a wan but jubilant expression as it bobbed.
The Jacob simulation’s eyes gazed out of a window on the west wall and
watched as the sun disappeared below the horizon, leaving the sky with a
shimmer of bloody dusk-shine.
Hundreds of
miles to the South, an enormous burgundy mountain, swarming with otherworldly
insects, sat where skyscrapers once soared in downtown Atlanta. It was pulsing
with veins of ethereal red light and emitted a brown shimmering fume which was
accumulating above it in a shit-colored nimbus.
It was the
epicenter of a waking nightmare. For hundreds of miles around it, the ground
had been decimated. Mulched up mounds of rock and dirt had been overrun with a
bright red fungal carpet. The air was pierced with a never-ending chorus of
chirps as leagues of winged creatures with bulging sacs and whipping stingers
pranced across a completely new topography of hillocks and valleys.
Lurching
pillars of green sludge that once were the city’s fine citizens were rooted to
the ground. Very faintly, under multiple layers of cosmic defecation and
growth, their moans could still be heard.
As the sun
rounded the planet and abandoned the demolished façade of the urban skyline,
the stars opened their eyes. They were brighter than they had ever been,
looking down on the end.
Flush.
