It not hard to miss, so I wouldn’t blame you for trying. It’s comically out of place, near the bushland just outside of town, jutting out above the short trees. A goliath compared to everything around it.
Do yourself a favour if you are gonna try, give up early. There is little to grab onto on the way up. Unless you’re someone who can hold on by the tips of your index and middle finger, it’s unclimbable. Attempting to scale it is a bit of a tradition among the kids here. Every day you would see them drawn to the thing like locusts, huge groups of them, ten to twenty. There used to be even bigger groups of them, but now this town is a ditch with houses. I always wondered why, maybe you’d get a good look at the Rockies from the top.
A friend of mine, we’ll call him Daniel, came back into town after three years away at university. He is a focused guy, preferring to stay at uni during the semester breaks. Doesn’t help that everybody in Lugo we were friends with has moved; he never really had a reason to come back. Even his parents skipped town. Despite finishing high school three years ago, I stayed in Lugo to work at the local mom-and-pop grocery. The owners are good employers, family friends. I keep telling myself that I’d move the next summer but never do. The furthest I got up that rock was about a third high when I was twelve. That changed a week ago. Daniel decided to come back for a week, for sentimental reasons. In the last year there had been a renovation project on a park we used to spend all our time at when we were in grade school. He wanted to come down for a day to have a look. It was after we had dinner and got buzzed around 8:00 that he remembered the giant rock nobody could climb.
“I heard about one guy who made it almost to the top,” taking a swig, I recalled watching some kid’s dad attempt to scale the thing, “he couldn’t pull himself over the top, not enough foot room”
“I always found its color weird.” He clinked his beer onto my table and screwed his face up.
“It’s a rock dude.”
“No shit it’s a rock but it’s massive,” he raised his brows as if it was of great importance, “and it’s white.”
“Rocks can be white.”
“No you’re not getting- all the boulders around it, and the other big rocks in the bush, those are red.”
“Erosion.” I told him, erroneously inaccurate.
“It’s like limestone white! Erosion doesn’t do that!”
“It’s not as brittle as limestone, though.” Taking another slip, I followed his lead and put my beer on the table, “Limestone flakes easier.”
“I’m not saying it’s limestone. It’s completely white, that’s not how erosion works.”
“And how does erosion work?” I chuckled.
“Wind scrapes the surface away over years, nothing to do with the color, except for if the rock is darker in the centre.”
“Darker in the centre?” I laughed.
“Shut up, I’m not doing geology.” He laughed back, picking up his bottle and chugging down the last third. “We can walk there, right?”
“Yeah it’s only twenty minutes.” I follow his lead, taking my beer and downing the rest.
“C’mon!” Daniel instantly got up, “Let’s go for a walk. Been years since I’ve tried climbing it.”
It was always taller up close. It sort of slopes to the side at the top, adding at least a few more feet.
I looked at the largest boulder surrounding it, off in the bushes, a weathered red rock sitting in the shrubs. “I guess you were right.” I could see what he meant; they were very different colours. Even as the sun was going down, the tall rock had a glistening texture to it that was completely different from the surrounding stones. Its white was almost sterile. From top to bottom, nowhere was darker nor brighter. The only signs of erosion were the occasional pockmarks yellowed by the dirt swept into the few crevices.
My friend tightened his shoes, which caused me to raise an eyebrow. His shoes had thick, padded undersides.
“Meant for climbing?”
“Of course, I left my CrossFit and track kicks back at the house. These are made for mountaineering.” He did look in better shape than that slight pudginess he had in high school. We were both in better shape than senior year.
He took the first easy steps, climbing a smaller boulder lying against it, using it to push himself onto the rock, before flinging himself up slightly. “See- urgh! I’ve given it some thought,” he huffed loudly, “I think part of it is speed!” He climbed quickly, digging his toes deep into whatever tiny crevices he could find. Helplessly, I tried to follow, in my slacks and vans. Unsurprisingly, I could only get up a quarter of the way, pulling my body weight just past where the stone got real smooth.
“I’m not going to be able to- Holy shit.” I was shocked. In such a short time he had crested the top slope, gaining his balance by taking a firm hold on a jutting point that popped up out of where the slope ended.
“I’m not sixteen anymore,” he panted, turning to face the horizon. He steadied himself, cringing as he regained his footing – a puff of sand sent down my way as he exhaled.
His face lit up.
“Woah!” He yelled, eyes widening as he looked off to the hills, over Leroux, “Haha! That’s awesome! That’s so cool!”
“What? What is it?”
“Get up here!” he didn’t pull his eyes away from the horizon, “You must only be able to see it from up…”
He stiffened. Frozen. His grip tightening. Elbow shaking. His eyes remained wide. Stiff and wide.
“Hey…” a pang of concern struck me, he was at least eleven feet off the ground, “What’s up there?”
“Ughhgghgh…” he let out a low, gurgling groan, his whole body beginning to shake. Suddenly, he burst into a frenzy, ripping his eyes away from the horizon. He suddenly looked disorientated, tiny pools gathering in his eyes as he began to frantically scale down the rock. His eyes, still wide and shocked, glued to the rocks surface as he kept his body close to it. I continually consoled him from the ground, instructing him on how to slowly descend, his eyes stayed there, his mouth muttering over and over in a faux upbeat tone. “No, no, nonono. No. No.”
“Hey! Take it easy, what the fuck!” He grazed his leg badly as a foot slipped, a nasty gash down his thigh. It was like he didn’t care. Shaking his head disconcertingly, he wiped away the clear liquid running down his cheeks as his foot hit dirt.
“No.”
“I- I gotta, we gotta go.” He looked up at sky in concern, “nah, I’m- I’m just drunk I- we can’t be here. Let’s go.”
“Woah, is everything good? What did you see up there.” He did not answer; Not then, not on the way home. Our walk was silent, by the time we got back was night.
He gravitated to the bench on the porch, taking a seat immediately.
“You gonna to tell me what you saw?” I looked up at him from a step below, dumbfounded.
“I uh-” he nervously laughed again, “I… there is something on the mountains, I think you can only see it from the top of that rock. That’s it.”
“Bullshit!”
“No, really.”
“You were crying.” I gritted my teeth at his caginess.
“It was just creepy,” he looked down at the ground, “I’m just drunk, I thought it moved.” Speaking quickly, he got up, signalling at me to go inside. “It doesn’t matter.”
The rest of the night was…awkward, to put it nicely. He preferred to either sit and silence, or get progressively drunk and play video games. Any attempt at conversation fell flat. If it did not involve joking around, he didn’t want to hear it. The morning after he was more talkative, to say the least.
“I was drunk!” He reiterated, I barely believed him (I mean, I believed he was drunk but I know that had nothing to do with what happened), “the mountains looked like they were moving, like, they were attached to something and… that’s when I came down.” He turned to me over his cereal, I was frowning. “What? I barely remember, we did get super drunk.”
“I’m gonna climb it,” I got up from the table, motioning over to his bags sitting below the chair, “give me the shoes.”
“I don’t think that-”
“Ever find it weird that it’s a tradition?”
“What? It is not, not really, it’s not like- Christmas or, I dunno-.”
“We have plenty of even bigger hills, it’s an hours’ drive to the Rockies, but every kid wants to climb that rock instead. Why?”
“Because it’s fucking boring here!” He snapped angrily, turning around and spitting the words in my face. His eyes then fell, startled. Wide eyes. He leaned back. His gaze flicked about, from me to the window. It was like he was watching for movement. I turned around to glance outside; Framed in the centre of the window, poking up proudly behind a dead tree was the tall rock, shining. Pale white against the blue sky. I had to squint. The whiteness shone so brightly that it looked empty; a shape where the world stopped. No texture. Like whatever was supposed to be there was ripped out, leaving a blank white space.
“That’s it, I’m climbing the thing.”
“The shoes won’t fit you. My gloves might, but they’ll be too tight.” He said begrudgingly, like it was supposed to dissuade me.
After some struggling, paired with some strained glances from Dan, it was a tight fit, but still a fit. The gloves felt fine. As I stood from tying the laces, he let out a sigh, resigning himself. “I don’t think you should climb that rock, man.” His eyes continued to linger towards the window.
“Why do you keep looking at it?”
“It’s hard not to.” His feet led him backward, attempting to get the rock out of sight. “It’s so…bright.”
“There’s only one way you’re going to know what it was you saw,” I put it bluntly, “do you want to go up there again? No, you won’t. You were fucking crying.” His angry snap set something off in me, my teeth gritting at him as I grabbed my backpack and pushed past him. “I need to see it myself.”
“It’s probably nothing! I was drunk!” He said in visible distress.
“If it’s nothing then you shouldn’t care!” I shouted behind my shoulder. He sighed, behind me I heard his plate clattering onto the sink.
“I’m staying here, call me when you’re done.”
It was only when I dug my hands into the first crevice, that I realised exactly how much of a difference proper equipment made. That does not mean that the climb wasn’t difficult. Especially when the rock began to squelch.
The first time that happened I was taken by surprise. It sounded like my foot went into mud, a distinctive wet slap, but it felt like any other attempt to plunge into what small rough corners I could fit my toes. Instinctually, the sound made me pull back from the rock in surprise. I hung for a second before my other foot slipped, sending a tiny stone falling down the rock, landing with a deft clatter. “Shit!” I swore, realising that without realising it, I had passed my own personal best of a third-up the thing. I made the cardinal mistake of looking down. I began to shiver, my attempts to find leverage with every step slow and nervous. The nervous shaking, how my fingers shook when dug into the tiny holes along the thing, made me think nothing of the unusual wet noises every tenth or so step. When you are that nervous, the world falls away, and your mind has this ringing that blocks everything out; The dangerous, even the bizarre.
I swore at myself as I kept going. As my hands moved along the rock, higher, I couldn’t help notice how smooth this thing was the further I went. All it would take would be one slip and I’d be in the ER with a broken limb at best. This whole thing was stupid, I thought that at the time and I know it now – for different reasons of course. I still was surprised at how well I was faring with the climb. After eight minutes, it was only when I reached a meter from the top that…things began getting very weird. I swear there was someone on the ground shouting at me to get down, screaming it. They sounded like they were watching me from far away, a tiny voice echoing off the rock. They would not shut up, those annoying fucking wails cut right through my nervous concentration.
“Shut UP Daniel!” I made the mistake of looking down again, which sent a nervous shudder through me. I saw no one, only the distance between me and the ground, a gap that I thought would close when I was older. It didn’t. I was about twenty-five feet up. My feet started this terrible shaking as the height dawned on me. My toes remained planted deep in the upper crevices, digging in and holding fast with every step, but my heels quivered. They felt separate from me.
“Don’t!” Daniel yelled, at the bottom. I looked down one final time.
No-one.
“Dan-? FUCK.” The momentary distraction made my dangling foot meet nothing but a slippery stone, missing its mark. Distress pounded through me, I heaved as much of myself as I could to the very top. Too quick. I felt my entire weight shift onto my shaking arm, my other limbs slipping and flailing, unable to find any space to dig until…until my foot made a nook. I still don’t know how, it was like the rock made way for it, changing its texture to malleable plaster and letting out one final sopping moist sound as it moulded to my toes as I pushed in. I barely had enough time to realise; the extra leverage made me force myself upward. My belly hit the top, crowning over the tiny incline at the peak. I rolled over, back against the slope, panting. The surprise that I made it made me lift my head off the rough surface, in the direction of…
It.
It looked like the mountains, until my eyes adjusted to the midday sun. The sunlight hitting the top of their peaks suddenly revealed themselves to be the spiked discs of a spine, one that had broken out from under the rocky skin. Yellow decalcified bone sticking out from something fleshy and dark, the skin leathery and as black as the mountain range. Then it moved. Like a bug disguised as a plant or a piece of bark. The entire mountain range fell apart, before rising, mountains cascading and shifting, veins under the skin throbbing loudly as the bony summits bent over into a decrepit hunch. The dirt roads and the trees at the base sprung into tiny thin appendages, hundreds of them, dark green and furry, like a caterpillar. I was prone on the top of the rock. I could not feel my head. It was like my neck seized up, tense. The rock my body pressed against moved again. Sinking me into it.
Thick dirt had quickly crept over my face, to my eyes. I feel the grains on my eyelids, pressing down. They held my eyes open. Tiny stones and dust particles that had some kind of strength, worked together to keep my lids wide open. That was not enough. They kept going. I began screaming at the pain, forced to feel dirt and sand slip under my lids and behind my eyes. Keeping them forward, pressing on my eyes and keeping them in place, in the direction of the mountains.
Just as the rocky mountains bent over into a hunch, the thing reared its head from the horizon to me. This thing whose spine was the mountains and whose body was the shadow they cast over the plains below it, looked at me. But I saw it now, that was not shadow, it was hair. Not hair like fur or the short coat of an animal, but hair like human hair, covering the entirety of its sagging obsidian torso and neck in a thick spread of spindly black wires that stopped where the flesh split open at the back. His eyes were too human. Light blue irises and a prick pupil. Bloodshot, red veins in the dozens pumping away fast around the blue. He looked at me. Far away, his body sat where the mountains once were, hunched over with his dark hands and overgrown fingernails of stone that sunk into the ground. His eyes rolled back, the skin on his head rippled and recoiled suddenly to reveal its forehead. Of blue pools and lakes that bubbled hot. But they weren’t pool. That wasn’t a lake. His forehead was covered in dark blue boils that had something slithering and moving within them.
His head jerked, as a cracking sound ripped through the sky. A flash of light, like the sun coming down on another icy summit, erupted from his neck. But it was not light, it was not an icy summit. It was bone. It was his neck. Disks split violently into smaller disks, extending his neck in loud thumps that echoed across the horizon like bombs. A leer came from his cracked lips. They opened to a mouth as bright, blinding, and blank as the rock when I looked out the window. That space of nothing, the world stopped between his incisors and molars. An animal impulse took hold of me. I desperately threw my right leg over the side of the rock. The bloodshot eyes narrowed. With what little strength I had, I tried to pull away from the stone, from the squelching and writhing rock. It resisted. I felt the grains of sand attempt to force themselves entirely over my gaze, the dirt moving quickly over my eyes before a splicing pain erupted from my foot. My ankle snapped. I screamed. The rock let go. I threw myself over the edge desperately.
“-not dead. Jeremy?”
I let out a groan and tried to raise my right hand. A curved white shape hovered in a haze in front of me. Two longer, blurrier shapes, appeared in the same direction as a sharp pain that radiated from my ankles. It took me a second to realise that those shapes were my legs, the lower half of both wrapped in a white cast.
“What happened?” A tan oval veered quickly to the right of my vision, which I realised too was Daniel’s face.
“Urgh…Ah…I.” My lip throbbed.
“He’s just woken up, leave him be.” That was the first time I had ever heard my mother speak sternly towards a friend of mine; the surprise roused me.
“My legs hurt.” Was for some reason the first conscious thought I had.
“They’re broken, dear.” A warmness came over my shoulder, my mother’s hand. “You fell off that rock out of town, while drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“No. No, we were drinking.” Daniel spoke over me. “Drinking in the morning, was a stupid idea, I’m sorry Ms. Gail.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking so early in the morning!”
I was about to grunt my disapproval before something caught the back of my throat. A fear, armed and primal, that voicing a single word about what I saw was a bad idea. Not because it would induce danger, but curiosity. I couldn’t wish that on my mother.
I felt them warmly on the back of my head. Windless breath, if that even makes sense. Those bloodshot eyes, massive with furrowed brows, still stared at me. With every numb thump on the side of my head, I feel the straining of his massive eyes and the cracking of his neck as it stretches out to look at me.
Daniel’s eyes burrowed into me. His questioning stopped. He knew. His eyes were as bloodshot as that thing that stood where the mountain was. He felt it too.
I’m writing this still sitting in the hospital, mostly for myself. I need to get this all down somehow. Every single time I try speaking about it I seize up. The hospital did a psych evaluation, I tried to get it out, I tried to tell them, but I cannot. I’m torn, on one hand, I need to tell someone, but on the other, I can’t let anyone try to climb that rock. Even speaking about it feels like admitting to a crime. The back of my head still feels hot, though the concussion has receded. I can’t stop myself from shaking every time I find myself looking out a window, expecting…him to reel his head around and…I don’t know. It is insane, but after what happened, I do not know how I can go back to acting normal. I feel constantly watched. Daniel did not visit me in the two days I spent in the hospital, the plan was for him to leave on the second day, but he probably left as soon as possible. I hope this is not the end of our friendship. Maybe one day I will stop being a pussy and find somewhere online to throw this up anonymously. But before any of that, I am going to follow his lead. The lead of everyone who I used to know.
I am going to get out of here.