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damaskrose345 · 1 year ago

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"We Will Be Warm"

If you find this letter, I am dead, and our God and Devil turned out to be one and the same.

I lost count of the prayers and pleas we had amassed for the Lord. So much wasted breath employed in begging a deaf deity for deliverance, so much finite vitality spent beseeching God to pass us away from that darkness and into the light— that of the grave or rescue, it mattered not to our frost-addled souls. We only wanted warmth, and if that warmth could only be found under pilings of soil, then let it be. All of our energy, that precious ambrosia that, once lost, can never be recovered, was blasted away in barren begging. We knew no heroes would break through the ice like Christ resurrected. As we starved and shivered, huddled tight in flocks of wind-worn leather, blistered flesh, and vacant voids of hopeless eyes, we knew this place was far beyond God’s reach.

Sun dogs refracted above our frames, washing us in sunlight devoid of true heat. It bore down like the eye of a cruel beholder, some verily depraved spectre who saw us rotting upon the floes of ice and took amusement in the scene, showering us with false warmness so that we could delude ourselves into feeling its kiss upon our skin, only to glance down through frosted lashes at where such a kiss was placed, and see a patchwork of stony flesh numb to all sense. Skin so mangled by the cold that it mocks you, unfeeling as iron and the color of pitch, of the coals that haunted our frigid dreams. We dreamt so viciously of heat that it became a part of our bodies, even as our souls glaciated.

A small boy, having not even graced his thirteenth year, lay beside me one night on the tundra. The others were scattered about the site. Some were dead, some, one could not tell. But all was silent, save for the savage howl and snarl of wind and the laborious breathing of our cadaverous camp. The boy was pressed to my side. I could feel him shiver. I could feel every shaking breath he took. I could practically feel the life seeping out of him as the endless night marched on, forging ever onward across the wasteland, the moon the only lantern to be found.

The silence broke. The boy’s voice creaked past his rocklike lips.

“Is heaven this cold?” he whispered. The wind nearly stole his words from me, but I heard him well.

I hardly possessed the spirit to answer. “No,” was all I could reply.

Another lapse of iron silence. I awaited the boy’s next question. I knew he had one. All children are curious; even the frozen reaper could not change that.

After an age, he spoke once again. “Will God warm us when we die?” he asked.

My eyes were fixed on the sweep of stars above. They glimmered freely, for no cloud was there to bury them. One vastness above, one below. I knew no warmth existed in the open wild of space, yet I did not believe any wildness could be more desolate than the tundra.

My tongue blotted at my lips vainly, trying to wet them so that my words did not share our fate. “Yes,” I told the boy softly, weakly. “The stars. They are warm. God puts us among them like….” Exhaustion leadened my mind, but I battled. “A hearth. We will be warm.”

Frost clung to my lashes. I would have wept, but my tears had been hardened to stones within my face. I watched the stars dance and scamper like children across the inky sky. Then, an interloping figure broke into my vision. It rose slowly, ever so slowly, and swayed in the same manner as a tree in a storm. The small branches of the tree emerged, curled and trembling. The trunk was wrapped in old leather and wool frayed by exposure, and with a sick wrenching of my gut, I realized whose arm I gazed at.

The boy reached up to the stars. Against the backdrop of the heavens, I was reminded of just how delicate his frame was. How young. How moribund.

His fingers did not grasp at the sight in the way an infant might do so for its mother. He could not, for such a meager action would cause his fingers to snap clean off. No, he could not. He kept his arm raised high with his little hand edged in black.

I know not when, but I eventually drifted into sleep.

In the morning, when I awoke like a corpse recalled to life, the first thing my eyes beheld was the arm of the boy, remaining in its stretch towards the sky. His hand was virginal white and pallid blue, his fingertips the color of onyx. I looked at the boy’s face and saw only a youthful face leached of all life and hue. His eyes were closed, tucked into slumber behind his frosted lashes. He was dead.

Myself and a handful of the surviving men spent the following day burying the child. Had we possessed our usual strength, the affair would have been done in less than an hour, but death loomed over us all, and thus one child’s burial cost us one full day. The grave was shallow, and as we laid the boy into the hardened earth, an obstacle appeared before us.

The boy’s arm.

It remained upright as it had been when he died and was all but cemented that way by the elements. The grave, I recall, was not deep enough to cover the child without all of him lying completely flat. The arm had to be lowered to entirely bury him. We had to either snap the arm to settle it or bury what we could and embark further on toward the mainland.

I reached towards the corpse, clasping my own frostbitten fingers around the arm. It was so thin, I remember, so fragile like the wing of a songbird. I imagined the splintering crack breaking it would create, a sound that would echo in my mind for all my days remaining. I could not do it. I released the boy from my grasp, affirmed my fellow undertakers, and covered the small boy with snow and gravel.

God forgive me. God forgive my cowardice and my cruelty. We left the boy as he died, arm eternally reaching up towards the high heavens and the God who was not here. There was no marker upon his grave, only a frail arm sprouting from the snow like a lily.

The arm watched us as we turned and staggered across the wasteland, and each time I turned back to cast another look, it kept shrinking until, at last, when I turned, it had vanished entirely into the white nothingness of the tundra.

My heart is heavy as I write this. My mind is forever preyed upon by the image of the child’s dead hand and the horrific sound of the mercy I could have shown had I simply snapped it. But mercy does not exist in this place. As I write this, I know my time on this earth is swiftly coming to an end, and I hope only that my final words to that boy ring true.

I pray God will put us among the stars when we finally pass.

I pray God will warm us.

I pray we will be warm.

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janvangouden · 4 years ago

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THE BALLAD OF HYPOTHERMIA

short story. written by jan van gouden. arctic horror.

“It’s so lonely in the winter, & I get so cold,” I whisper to you, clutching your hands between mine. You sit on my lap, so warm. So tender and so soft. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you left.” It had been so long ago, but now it feels like yesterday… your shining eyes. Your silky brown hair. I sniff you deeply & let out a sigh of relief. “Mine again.”

“I love you,” you tell me, and I laugh. Your voice is music to my ears. I can’t imagine going back to life without you. Life was nothing without you. I rest my head on your shoulder. “Tell me again why you came back to me,” I ask you. “Tell me again why you braved the arctic cold and raging winds, just for little old me.”

“Because I love you,” you say. “Nothing can take me away from you.” I kiss you on the cheek. Oh, you’re so warm! You feel like chocolate lavender melting in vanilla pools… like moose shedding their pelts and dropping them on molting lizards, basking in the sun. I suddenly shriek, & draw back. You’re burning me!

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Your eyes are cold and hard, and my eyes are warm and soft. I am a heap of whale blubber, and I am in front of you, weeping, bubbling over the top, clinging to your ankles. You try to kick me off but I only latch on harder. It’s so cold in this damn cave. It’s so damn cold. “You can’t leave me here like this,” I sobbed, placing kisses on your boot, hoping you’d take pity and pick me up, save me. I should’ve remembered from my books and movies that the sobbing woman always gets fucked in the end.

No, take away sobbing. The woman always gets fucked in the end, and not at all pleasantly. Especially the loving woman. The has-so-much-to-give woman. It seems the more a woman loves a man, genuinely loves him, & tries to express it to him, the colder he grows towards her. I always thought you weren’t like those other men. I thought you were kinder. Softer. Never would I in my wildest dreams have imagined things would end like this. You have a new woman; you got her while you were with me still, officially at least. We never broke up, but the part of your heart that was attached to mine has shattered officially, cutting my flesh as I try desperately to pick up the pieces.

A woman’s cries don’t seem to garner pity unless the pity is advantageous to the man witnessing them. Rather the opposite, a woman’s tears seem to only make her more pathetic to the man… even when she is in genuine pain, in genuine agony. Her pain eventually becomes one of two things to the Him: an annoyance, or a pleasure. Neither case is at all desirable as either case spells out her doom.

“I don’t hate her, darling,” I cry, looking up at you. Your face was once so beautiful & full of love, compassion. You’ve become ugly. I promptly avert my gaze. I cannot stand to look at you. “I don’t hate you, either… please, darling, let me go & I’ll forget this ever happened… I’ll be off to my own business, & I might find myself another man…”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” You scoff, speaking to me like I’m a demon. “Find yourself another man. That’s all you women ever want… it’s a wonder I ever kept you around. You hardly ever satisfied me, either, nor was your food very good.” I cannot help but to lash out at you now, refusing to be accused. My heart is so heavy with your scorn. “You’re the one who cheated!” I caterwauled. “Was my love not enough for you?”

“Men don’t cheat,” you reply so nonchalantly, raising a hand. You seem disgusted. Do women disgust you? I am woman. I love pink, and I love diamonds, and pearls, and lipstick, and champagne… I am the definition of the stereotypical femme, indulging myself entirely in the expectancies of my gender, and enjoying it. Despite pushing such ideologies onto us from birth, men rather seem not to fancy a woman’s way of life, & attempt to shame her for it. Perhaps that was what invited your scorn. I let you paint every room beige, but when I dared buy a pink couch, I was met by your hand… a little girl, was what you called me, deducing my taste to childishness. You always seemed to think I was so immature, despite being one year your senior. Your new lover is a mere nineteen, ten years younger than you.

“You’re very sick,” I reply. “You’re very sick and young, beautiful women will not cure you from the such… they are only a drug that you will abuse, and chew up, and throw away. I don’t hate her, no, I don’t hate her one bit. She knows not of me, and she knows not of your insatiable appetite.”

“And she won’t know you!” You spit, pulling on the chain to which you have affixed me by the wrists and ankles. “Look at you,” I murmur, tracing my knee with a finger. “You’re acting like a stereotypical movie villain… like the mobster, like the serial killer, like the whoever-else-gets-his-nuts-off-to-violence.”

“You watch too many movies,” you hiss, but I can tell by the edge to your voice that you know my words are true. I don’t believe every part of our relationship was insincere. I just believe there were one too many rusting cogs in the machine, & you couldn’t grease them, so you let them break. Now the machine’s gone off the wire.

It was such a lovely dinner, too. I’m one of the types who always swore they’d never be a victim, & now here I am, shackled to chains deep-frozen metres upon metres into the ice, as my ex-lover openly berates me. Thank god for the absence of a crowd; people love to throw fingers and laugh at the woman scorned.

You’d made me rice and chicken, and poured an excellent Chardonnay… you were never a chef & you always had a questionable palate, but you claimed the dinner was in celebration of our anniversary, so I rejoiced. It had been a rough patch in our relationship, but your having prepared me such a delightful meal with such a big smile on your face told me everything would be alright.

Little did I know the big smile was for my demise. You waited until I was well out of my wit to load me onto your ice truck and drive me into the abandoned, iced-over quarry, where you chained me to the walls inside one of the old mines, & ranted to me about how pathetic you found me, & all I could do was cry. I don’t have a hateful bone in my body; I believe I was born incapable of the emotion, but if I had it in me, I’d hate you so much right now.

I’m too nice and I love too much, I think. It gets me in trouble, I think.

You kick me off and start to walk away; the haunting reality settles in… you plan to leave me here, to die a slow, and cold, & painful death. “You’ll come back, won’t you darling?” I cry out after you, clawing at the air. Your coat is long & it is black, & it flows slightly in the nippy wind. You don’t respond. I am woman and I have committed only one crime: love man. My punishment is to freeze to death in an abandoned quarry.

We have been together for 11 years; we were high school sweethearts. We never married and we never had children since I was infertile, and you didn’t want any, anyways. I felt you growing cold towards me in the last two years, but I always ignored it, wanting to preserve what I believed was our love… I should have run away the second I got that feeling. Woman’s greatest fault is not trusting her instinct.

My life won’t flash before my eyes, because half of it’s leaving with you, & I can hardly remember life without you.

“You can’t leave me here like this!!” I sob, my weeping growing louder by the second. “You can’t leave me here like this!” My pleas finally are heard; you turn around with a mean look in your eye, snarling. “You’re right, honey, I can’t. & I won’t.”

You pull a pistol from your coat & shoot me, once in the head, twice in the chest. I fall to the ground, dead.

I am a part of you, darling… I see you enjoying dinners with your new sweetheart, & I see the vulgar things you say about her to your friends. You marry her and your jokes only become even worse, morphing from the topic of her hot body to what a pain in the ass and a nag a wife is. You two have a baby eventually but you’re far too busy to help her take care of it, seeing women in bars none the wiser to the kind of man you really are, and not caring anyways, as sweet, beautiful words fall from your lips.

I only ever get to see you in the snow… I’m glad we live in a fairly cold state, because every time the snow falls, I am a part of it, and I get to watch you. I’m not watching you because I love you anymore, oh, no. I’m watching you because I am in love with the concept of you… the man I believed you to be, the man who was once my idol. & I will get him back, my darling, oh yes… I will get him back. You were a fool to have killed me in that cave… my life was only started anew, as I discovered following my demise the secret that had been buried in that quarry: resuscitation, the life after life.

The persons who had owned the mine abandoned it shortly after finding a worker who had died on the job there the next day, a jagged rock still lodged in the back of his head, as he played solitaire. The quarry was abandoned entirely, believed to be haunted… but it wasn’t haunted at all, my darling; quite the opposite. Mother Nature always creates life from the deceased: corpses become fertiliser, become flowers, and so on. In the case of the quarry, Mother Nature was too tired and sick of the cold reaping her life, so rather than create a whole new life in such unlivable conditions, she simply brought back old life as it was… I have not yet presented myself to you in my full form, as traveling as snowflakes is far more efficient, but I promise you: you will see me, whether you are dead or alive!

& you will be your old self again, as beautiful as ever you were before, hopefully as kind, as well… I cannot wait, my darling; I cannot wait to have you back in my embrace!

Your wife isn’t so quiet as was I… she doesn’t tolerate your abuse, and fights back, delivering punches where you deliver slaps, screams where you deliver yells. My heart swells with pride albeit I never knew her personally; it’s so good to see you berated. Your ego doesn’t allow for it, however, and I see you yearning at night, your hand in your pants as you contemplate how you’ll kill her. I know you regret shooting me in that cave. You’ve lost your humanity, so you don’t regret having had killed me, oh no. You regret not having had let me suffer first.

But I was not designed to suffer. My nails are long and shiny, and my hair is permed and pink, and my lashes are soft and lush… well, they used to be; one side of my face is partially blown off by your shot, and the other is frosted over from the cold, my lashes thick and white and clumpy, sparkling from ice and snow. My skin was once cream and supple, now blue and cracked, but my beauty is undying, for I will never allow myself to lose my soul as did you. I was meant to live in cauliflower skies and persimmon fields and laugh and frolic with the lolligaggers and the laughers, and swing from candy rope swings and gummy rubber tires, mocking your memory all the long.

Weeks wear into months, and you’ve had it with your dear wife. You lack originality, for you prepare for her the same dish you did me that fatal night. Unlike me, she takes offense to your having had cooked; you retort that she ought to be grateful, spitting out a string of scum your unborn baby is lucky not to have to hear. You load her as you loaded me…. Oh, terribly predictable, & so certain you won’t be caught, that no one will miss her. I ran away from you with another man, you told anyone who asked, tears running down your face & eyedrops in your breast pocket. People believed you, of course they did. You’re so well renowned. You don’t care that she’s pregnant.

In fact, for you, this little affair’s probably two birds, one stone.

I’m waiting for you, darling… I hear your footsteps approaching where I sit in the cave. You want to show her my dearly deceased body, make a good show out of what happens to women who remotely annoy you that enter your life. When you see me, you stagger back in fear and drop your lovely wife, who jolts awake from the fall. She runs like the racehorses and before you can even realise you’ve fumbled your bag, I grab you around the waist and I smolder you… I feel like I’m melting. You’re so warm. You’re so warm, after four months of freezing in the cold. “You’re supposed to be dead,” you rasp, scared stiff, unable to move. Just as I want you.

“But I’m alive, darling, I’m fantastically alive, & my soul is well intact…” I didn’t know my own strength up until now, as I plunge my hand into your chest and wrap it around your still-beating heart. “You’re so warm, my lover; you’re like a comfortable pillow on a rainy spring day.”

“Unhand me,” you hoarsely demand, as though you have any authority over me. I am the undead! I do not listen to the living! My embrace hardens. “I’ll make you beautiful again in due time, darling, in due time… in due time you will be beautiful, and you will love me, and we will be beautiful!”

“You’ll do no such thing!” you scoff. I laugh. “We’re not talking about me buying furniture, darling; we’re speaking of the inevitable… I do not bow to your command, and I will not listen to your voice. Right now, you are nothing more to me than a body and a face, a beautiful body and a face… a beautiful body and face to whom I will restore the beautiful mind and soul… no, I will not restore. I will create.”

“You’re not God!” you scream. I’m reminded of my insistent pleas to you before you killed me. “I am not God,” I repeat after you. “But you will wish I were a being so merciful once I am through with you.” I attach you to the chains you once bound me with and simply sit there… as a reborn person I require no nutrient, no nourishment, as my body is quite dead, my “Self” existing well beyond the physical realm. I watch you for days, fascinated in the deterioration of the man… to watch you die is like to watch roses wilt, to watch deer decompose, to watch corpses push daisies out from under the dirt.

Your suffering is poetic to me… I relish every sob, every tear, and I wipe your face the whole time, reminding you that now, I am all you have, all you ever will have… for as long as I live, for as long as we live, reborn in the throne of ice. Eventually, you give up the struggle, and your eyes go blank, your body goes slack. Your lips are blue and your skin is dry, your tears frost on your face.

#shortstory #theballadofhypothermia #hypothermia #arctichorror #horror

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