Enjoy you buggers!
My friend Harold is, or should I say was—I'm not entirely certain anymore— a strange and preoccupied fellow. That’s not to say that he wasn’t an inherently “good” person—he was kind to those who deserved kindness, apathetic to those who didn’t, and more importantly he was a fair hunter: not given to torturing his prey or killing more than absolutely necessary to our survival. No one however, not even Harold, could pinpoint the source of his persistent distress. During our hunts for the white-tail deer that roam like specters in the wooded areas around his home, something would always draw his attention to a dark corner of the forest; he would lower the muzzle of his rifle and mutter strange words under his breath as he searched for the source of an inexplicable and evidently threatening noise. “Rustlings in the dark” he called them, and while I would notice his sudden shift in posture and excited state of mind, I could never hear the noises that, to him, grew more and more discernable as the years went by.
We were the only two children of comparable age in our bucolic town of Pennhurst in north-eastern Pennsylvania, so it was natural and somewhat essential that we became good friends; more like brothers, some said— virtually indistinguishable from each other in both our mutual distaste for the social adventures of the common youth and inexplicable desire for solitude. He taught me how to hunt and live off the meager bounty of his desiccated strip of property. In return, I showed him the false yet enticing beauty of poetry and the addictive escape from reality in literature. We lived in a dream for our entire youth. I counted it a gift.
Our parents had either abandoned us or died in the ever-expanding rot that infected every miner’s lungs, leaving us free from the constraints and limitations of imagination adults normally place on children. Neither of us imagined that such a reality would ever intrude on our utopia.
Pennhurst was once well known for its rich coal-mining facilities that provided the major if not sole source of work for the local population. About a decade ago, the mines went completely dry and those that didn’t abandon the town to its slow decay tried their best to eke out a living from the poisoned land. The past was still writ large upon the land which surrounded the strip-mined hills: most of the streams were so acidic that only a brown layer of malodorous algae could thrive and choke the waterways; acres of forest lay decimated from the searing and frequent acid rain.
Still, there were wide swaths of land yet untouched by the virulence and it was in these forests where Harold and I spend most of our days and nights hunting far from the rusting frame of civilization.
By the time we’d both reached our twenties, there was a noticeable alteration in Harold’s demeanor. He would suffer from intense moods of melancholy and paranoia for no apparent reason; it was as if a great black-winged bird had settled on his shoulder to cast an almost tangible pall of darkness on the very earth around him. During these moods, he’d scowl maliciously at any of the townspeople who dared to cross his path on the rare occasions when we ventured into the community for supplies. Thankfully, I seemed exempt from his hatred. Instead, he paid me no more mind than he might an insect, only speaking to me when it was time to head back to the woods or short tactical orders when we were on the hunt.
Of course, the “rustlings” were always more pronounced during such times. I considered it a small wonder that he managed to keep from howling like a madman since I could plainly see his profound dread and terror that the unknown noise-maker might reveal itself at any moment. It was like a sickness, gnawing at his bones, until they became brittle ivory sticks on the verge of snapping.
His 24th birthday was once such of these days. “The sounds are still there,” he told me as we drank tepid beer around a smoldering fire “but there’s something else. I can almost see them!” His eyes were wild, bloodshot orbs— windows into his diseased and febrile mind. What worried me more, though, was the Colt Python .357 magnum he bought a year ago; “for hunting” he said, but I could tell it was more to assuage his paranoia than anything else. I wasn’t sure where he kept it on his body, but it was certainly close. I hoped that no one was foolish enough to stumble into our campsite on this night.
When the last embers finally burned away, Harold fell into a fitful sleep. What happened next might have been a dream, though I doubt it. I was half awake, half asleep watching Harold toss and mumble in his nightmares when I heard something running along the periphery of the campsite. I rose and hesitantly walked in the direction of the noise. It was no four-legged animal, I could tell that much; no, it sounded like a man running impossibly fast through the woods, approaching Harold and I as if he were being pursued, or pursuing something. The sound halted just a few feet ahead of me where the tree line began. Even though the moon was full, and I had fairly good night vision, my sight still could not pierce the utter blackness of the dense fir canopy that, even on the brightest of days, made it seem like eternal dusk. It had stopped moving, whatever it was, but there was another noise in its place. It reminded me of when I was young and my father’s lungs were irrevocably ruined by the coal dust that hung like a mist in the mines.
What I heard directly in front of me, hidden by the forest, sounded like my father’s breathing on a particularly cold night: a labored, gasping breath that seemed to fight for every molecule of oxygen. I remembered lying awake at night, wishing he would just give up, just stop breathing. I could barely sleep it was so loud. Then, as unreal as it was, the noise just disappeared. I listened for a few minutes, and there was nothing. Not even the sound of the crickets or the wind moving through the trees. I slowly backed up, and retreated into the fragile safety of my sleeping bag where I listened to Harold murmur and cry out—dreaming, no doubt, of rustlings in the dark and pale shapes caught in the corner of his eye.
Months past and I never heard the rustling or that horrid breathing since, even Harold appeared in better spirits than he had been in years. Until that morning, on a cold December weekend, when we were returning after an unsuccessful hunt in one of our favorite spots, Harold and I both spotted a trail that we hadn’t noticed before. Even more unusual, the path seemed well-traveled, though I was sure that it wasn’t there a day ago on our venture out. Harold was seized on the spot by one of his dark moods, and without a word to me, he went off down the forbidding pathway. With a sigh, I followed behind him.
With each step the trail became more rugged and the towering firs I was used to transformed into shriveled, hunched over shells—at times, they looked like caricatures of the human form, with a pair of bent limbs extending from the main trunk that appeared startlingly similar to human arms. If I allowed my imagination to color the surroundings even further, I could detect grotesquely distorted facial features near the midsection of their wrinkled trunks.
Harold stopped abruptly, and pointed ahead. The trail had brought us to one of the many entrances to a long abandoned central mine shaft where both our fathers had worked to their ends. Such entrances dotted the landscape, and were nothing new to Harold and I. Nonetheless, finding one we never knew existed was something of a surprise. More surprising was finding the heavy oaken door slightly ajar, as if it someone forced the lock open to gain entrance.
“Here,” Harold told me as he handed me one of a pair of walkie-talkies he had bought on a whim some time back. “They probably won’t work too far in, so when I start losing you, I’ll come back” and with those words he walked through the gate. It was opened wide enough, I noticed, for a single man of average size to enter so long as he turned sideways and shuffled in. I didn’t argue with Harold. The madness in his eyes told me quite clearly that to do so would be futile and possibly dangerous.
He left his finger depressed on the walkie-talkie, so I could hear his footsteps echo loudly among the shadows along with the same nonsensical phrases he unconsciously mutters under his breath as a sort of mantra to control his tenuous grip on reality. I had a sudden, terrifying thought. What if the door was not forced open from the outside to gain entrance, but was instead broken open from the inside? Yes! Judging from the way the wood bulged outward from the center, it looked like some desperate creature rammed the door until it opened barely wide enough for a single man to pass through. As I contemplated this startling revelation, I realized that I hadn’t been paying attention to Harold. He was trying to relate his experience inside the caverns, but the depths to which he descended distorted all but a few phrases. “It’s…filled” I heard him say quite clearly, until a burst of static filled the airwaves, then “caskets, hundreds of them…piled on top of each other… my God…the cemetery!” Finally, the static became so pervasive that all I could hear was enough of his voice to know that he was still alive, not enough to understand his words though. I shouted into the damn device for him to come back, but he still had his finger depressed on the speaker button, so my words couldn’t reach him no matter how loudly I screamed.
Without thinking of the possible consequences, or what slumbering evil my shouts might wake, I ran to the mine’s entrance and yelled for Harold in the kind of desperation where one knows, no matter how loudly one screams, the outcome is inevitable. I heard Harold’s reply a moment later: six successive shots from his magnum followed by a scream of sheer trepidation and, perhaps more terrifyingly, recognition; as if all the sounds and glimpses pieced together over the years had coalesced into whatever abomination stood before him now. His scream lasted for seconds, until it was cut short.
I stood there, paralyzed and numb, my mind reeling as the rustling I heard that night months ago returned. I refused to believe it at first and called out like a fool to Harold. The paralysis left my body when I heard the noise again, closer than before and I caught a glimpse of cadaverous flesh. Again, I heard my father’s emphysemic breath just inches from my face. I turned, dropped the walkie-talkie to the ground, and ran blindly through the woods, for the trail we followed earlier had once again been swallowed up by the shrunken firs that made mockeries of men’s bodies...
I'll post the rest tommorrow.
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