#marge puts a letter out to john the next morning | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

goblinpage · 7 years ago

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back country (cthulhu mythos short story)

The stumbling footsteps in the upstairs fell in a sharp way against your ears, resounding down the empty hall to be muffled into nothing by the ugly shag carpet in the tv room. The sound of the struggle was impressive, like a man fighting some great, ancient beast with nothing but his hands. You knew, though, that it wasn’t anything like that. You hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and the rolling of a bottle, too. Muffled swearing, another loud thump, and the deafening whir of vacuum is finally shut off.

With all the work Marge had put in, you knew it wouldn’t do much about the smell. The worst of it had been hauling out the gelatinous slabs of flesh, which had been quite a bit larger than your couch and quite a bit heavier than a cow. It had taken roughly a week to remove the tentacle, and the smell had gotten so bad that even the birds would not fly over the house anymore. You and Marge hadn’t really known what to do with it, so you had hauled some of it into the lake, and the smaller bits into the cattle truck to be dumped into a different lake, and the smallest bits to be buried in a hole on the farthest corner of the plot from the house. You wondered if you would ever grow to appreciate the deep purple and green stains which had repainted most of the walls in the house, which had previously been a cheerful dry-grass yellow. You knew the answer was probably not.

It had all started almost exactly a year ago, with a letter you had received in the mail. The hurried scrawl of the handwriting and the mysterious stains at the bottom of the page and the urging ‘you are the only person I can trust’ all seemed a bit out of character for the young man, son of George-who-lives-down-the-road. You hadn’t really ever spoken to him, just given him a firm nod on your way into town if you saw him working the fields. You hadn’t known his name until now. The letter informed that it was probably Morton Barnes, son of George-who-lives-down-the-road Barnes.

The contents of the following letter were a lot more fruitful than the first. Morton explained that he felt like he could not discern waking from dreaming and was constantly filled with a type of empty sensation that one only gets when one has lost absolutely all that one has. The third simply said, ‘Death is coming for me, and he does not have hands.’ It continued on like this for quite some time, but about four months and seven letters in, you found yourself just curious enough to go and find out what exactly Morton was on about. It was early December, the trees were bare, and the fields were drowned from the sleet and the overnight freezing respectively. You found the setting more disheartening than you liked to admit, and with all that was going on, frustration and unease were without a doubt on the rise. You pulled on your boots and coats slowly, trying to keep your spirit up all the while before clambering into the ancient shredded leather seat of your pick-up truck. For Marge, from the window of the kitchen, the shrinking red form of the truck created an unnecessarily dramatic image against the grey and yellow land and skyscapes.

The radio gave up its quiet static for the voice of a host who warned that there was, in fact, a snow storm on the way, accompanied by high winds and extreme low temperatures in the night. The skin on your poorly aged knuckles had already split from the hot water and the cold, and you knew Marge would tut-tut and attempt to rub some sort of diaper rash cream on them, left over from when Thomas had been born nearly thirty years before. You gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter, leaning into the pot holes and wet stones in the dirt road leading to George’s.

You hadn’t noticed how much the ancient heater in the car had been helping you until you slammed the peeling red door behind you, cramming your keys into your pocket, and then your worn hands, too. The screen door creaked as it swung easily open, clattering against the railing of the porch as George stared you down from the doorway.

“You’re a bit out of your way, aren’t you, John?” said George. “You tell that to your troublemaker son, George. Where is he?” George paused, a nervous smile cracking across his wrinkled face. “I guess Marge is getting to be a bit worn down, being your only audience and all. Very funny, John. Really.” Now it was your turn to look taken aback. You didn’t much appreciate him laughing at you, especially if it was in defense of his ne’er-do-well of a boy Morton, and you told him so. George was getting angrier now, you could see it in his shoulders and the lines above his brow. “Now you listen here, John. I don’t know what you’re playing at but I don’t know any ‘Mortons’ and he certainly ain’t no son of mine. Now get, or I’ll be making you really wish you hadn’t come.” You grumbled as you backed off, slowly, and returned to your truck. A cold feeling crept into your throat as you drove back down the way, making eye contact with the very much alive and real Morton Barnes as he stood over his dirt rake in the field.

The next few weeks were dreadful. The wind slammed against the storm shutters, little particulates of ice and snow hissing as they were thrown against the glass of the window through the slats in the wood. It kept you up, most nights. Marge would lay beside you with her threadbare sleep mask which she had used frequently when Thomas was a baby. You would leave bed, quietly and gently, and she would grunt and roll the other way while you lit a lamp, sometimes asking you to leave whatever it was and stay put in bed or you weren’t going to be any use in the morning. Occasionally you would oblige, but most nights you spent bent over the letters at the kitchen table, small yellow light in the window being the only illumination in the frozen and violent nightscape for miles. You read them over and over again, and when you slept, you dreamt of the dead, and you dreamt of the sea. One morning, when you could not see through the ice on the window, you wrapped up warmly and stepped out to the mailbox. It had been nearly a month since you had checked, so of course you expected to find a piece or two of junk and perhaps a letter from your son, and perhaps a letter from Morton, too. You stepped on something. Picking it up you found Morton’s wicked scrawl addressing you with urgency yet again. You found seven more along the way, and when you finally reached the mailbox, through the acres of deep snow in the pale grey light, you felt sweat in your palms, and your heart raced.

There must have been near a hundred of them, crammed into the mail box and scattered about. Part of you wanted so badly to leave them to get eaten by the wind again. You knew that with the weather, there must have been more of them at some point, now buried in the layers of cold until the spring came to uncover them. You felt like you were a million miles away as you watched your hands move to pick them up through blurry eyes. You could hardly carry them with you, cramming as much as you could in your pockets and the waist of your pants, into the tops of your snow boots, and held fast in your arms, not caring which ways they bent or folded. You hobbled back like some odd scarecrow, through the edges of the trees and through the thick white ground. Marge’s worried face filled the window of the bedroom upstairs, and you pretended that you hadn’t seen her when she peered down the stairs at you, lips parted with concern, while you struggled to collect the letters onto a small tarp in the entryway. With a moment in between you managed to collect the letters, get the door back open, and began dragging the tarp to the barn. It was hard to get the frozen lock undone, but the little door pulled open eventually, your gloveless hands raw and bloodless and weak to pull the tarp behind you. It was difficult to haul up to the loft, but the heat from the nervous cattle below, no matter how much it smelled like shit, helped ease your joints to more of a flexible wood stage rather than granite stiff. You laid the letters out across the tarp and the hay, your wet clothes collecting dust and strands of grass, your eyes itching in the dark. Using a flashlight, you began to read.

The letters painted an image you could not believe. Morton began with his dreams. He would be standing there, above the water of a raging sea, like he was over a glass floor looking down from several miles up. He wrote he could not discern the tongues of water from the lengths of flesh which writhed and wriggled and made the ocean spit and heave. It was grey, and green, and a deep bruise purple. He dreamt of it every night, and every night he saw a little bit more of the beast. One night, across from him, above the sea, was a figure like a person, if a person had maybe mixed up what a person is meant to look like with what a squid might look like. The next night, Morton did not sleep. He did not sleep the night after that, either. Each letter became more and more illegible, to the point where it really wasn’t worth trying to decipher. You felt sort of sick as you made it back down the ladder. You left the letters behind.

A month or two later, the field was mud. The snow was done for, save the occasional icy lump that couldn’t really be taken for a drift or bank. The snow around the edges of the road was black and slushy and the cattle chewed mournfully at the ground, which had been thinking it might like to become a pasture again and had offered a careful few fresh shoots of grass. You never replied to the letters. You wished that the mail truck would stop coming down the lane.

One day, there wasn’t a letter in the box. The next day was also free of Morton’s sweat and tear stained pages and even the third. You didn’t get a letter for another four months until, in the sweet cusp of summer, while you were taking a break from picking early cherries and making sure the rows stayed free of weeds, you began to hear it. It was like any time you sat down for a moment after working hard, where the silence becomes a sort of aching ring behind your ears. You waited for it to pass. After a few minutes you decided to stand back up and get to work again, because you wouldn’t hear the sound over the shuffle of dirt and the squeak of the leaves ripping. The sound did not subside, however, it stayed in the forefront and dominated the clang of the trowel in the soil and it dominated the sound of Marge’s voice while she spoke to you over dinner and it dominated your thoughts so that you became unable to sleep.

The doctor suggested you put garlic and mullein oil into your ears, just a couple of drops in each, to clear out any infection that may have occurred. It didn’t help. He suggested that you might do better off at the hospital in the city, which was roughly two hours to the east. You said you would think about it. Marge said that you had better go anyways. You didn’t however, and the pressure and the sound continued to rise.

It was fall again. You were bedridden with the constant pain. The hospital had not found anything wrong, and they had kept you for tests for so long that you had forgotten what your bed had felt like. Your back fit the familiar grooves, and it was comfortable for the first few days. It was September, however, and the bed no longer felt good and you no longer wanted to eat. You had begun to develop a fever, long and high and unyielding. When you closed your eyes in the dark you could spot some beast, some writhing mass. You thought that it might be death, and you could see now that he did not in fact have hands.

Then, something odd happened. It was like your ears had popped, the sound was gone and you felt a rushing sensation through your body like a wind. You could hear, and the creak of the house and the bed and your footsteps were all loud, but not loud enough to distort the explosive sound from outside. It was like a mountain had fallen, whatever it was, and it was like that mountain fell over and over again as whatever it was came closer. The ground shook, the birds and rabbits and voles fled, the leaves on the trees hissed with the vibrations deeper than the water in the earth.

It came like a tide. There were no words for it. You thought you knew what tentacles looked like, because you had seen squids in the fish market as a young boy, and they had never made you nervous. This could compare in almost no way. The odor was overwhelming. It was the smell of all of the old fish trimmings in the world, salty and sick. You could not have moved, even if you had tried. It was faster than anything, a wave of mud and beast and bits of timbre and it was like all of the ocean was coming to swallow you at once. You were there, in the dream, then. You were standing and looking through the glass of your window, one minute, and then the next you were in the air, above a seething brown and blue body which crested and wallowed and splashed like any wave could. You were standing over the sea as it lost a tendril to the sizeable hole it had opened in the roof of your house. You were standing over the sea before you fell back down out of your dream and into the blankness of things which you cannot remember, and you awoke only because there was something indescribably foul in your mouth and all around you. You were lying face down in blood of a beast which defied any explanation. You looked up through the hole in the roof, and choked.

Marge came back with the car later that day, and she was too lost to cry or get angry. She wiped your face with a cloth, then helped you to the hose around the back of the barn, and helped the cold water along your slime covered self, pulling the disgusting snot-soaked fabric off of your limp body until you were sitting there, motionless and naked and cold in the mud. She helped you into the barn and sat you in the office chair in the mud room, and gave you a pair of fresh pants you kept to change into before coming back into the house on the days where you’d mucked the cow stalls out. You slept in the hay that night, because there wasn’t anything else to do. The next day was a bit easier, and the day after that was the day you and Marge decided to try and fix the damage done.

You could see the hole in the trees that the beast had left behind. You never found out where it went, or how far, or if it would ever come back, or even if anyone had seen it, but you found a skull in the field beside the house, and some part of you decided that it probably belonged to Morton, wherever he had been dug up from. You resolved happily to never find out for sure.

#fable

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