Jasmine’s husband had recently recovered from an illness that had left him bedridden for some time, so he’d gone back to work the day following his recuperation. Left with nothing to do – since she’d spent the entirety of his sickness by his side, playing cooperative video games and caring for him – she asked if I’d like to do something. I happily welcomed the invitation and suggested we go hiking, since I’d bought new boots and wanted to properly break them in.
We set out that morning, choosing for our trip a densely packed expanse of woods at the edge of town, though not far from their home. I figured it would prove to be a moderately challenging trek, given our shared inexperience with traversing terrain that hadn’t been carefully cultivated to suit suburban-dwelling citizens. Had I known just how challenging – how starkly terrifying – the trip would be, I would’ve stayed home….or burnt down the whole stretch of vegetation.
A few minutes into the hike I heard a sound from somewhere to my right, off the barely defined path we’d been following. The noise had sounded almost human, like a call from someone deep within a cave; distant and low, a subterranean echo carried through tunnel after murky tunnel.
Without announcing my departure – the thought never even occurred to me – I veered off, trudging through thicket and bush, while Jasmine continued on, oblivious.
Finally, I reached the spot from where the sound had seemed to originate, though there was only a small knoll, or massive boulder overgrown with dark leafage and moss. Strangely, I felt drawn to this seemingly natural object, as if it, somehow, was the source of the still-sounding call.
Just then a breeze blew through the trees, momentarily clearing the umbrage of their boughs, allowing for a small ray of sunlight to shine upon the structure. As if somehow disturbed by the light, the rounded surface shifted, and a few of the curiously dark leaves fell away. I realized then that the structure was neither an elevation in the earth nor a boulder that had come to settle there, but something else entirely. It wasn’t a structure at all – it was a massive, vaguely anthropomorphic skull.
Time-yellowed bone glimmered faintly in the sunlight, at least where it was not armored in moss. Eye sockets, vast and vacant, seemed to reject the sun’s illumination; twin portals of blackness that admitted no light into their depths. Most of the face was over-mossed and lichen, though I knew without a doubt that the visage hadn’t belonged to any race or remote cousin of Man. The physiognomy was too unwholesome, too suggestive of a bestial – if not monstrous - strain of life. The Thing was hideous right down to the bone.
Half of its jaw was buried in the earth, and nature had long ago staked its claim on the unguessably ancient relic. But it hadn’t done so without a certain degree of…corruption. The soil beneath the gargantuan skull was oddly colored, black in certain areas, a sickly green in others. The immediate atmosphere around the skull was inexplicably temperamental. Suitably chilly – given the time of year – one moment, and uncomfortably warm the next. But before I could even begin to guess at how such things could be, I heard my name called once more.
The call – the pull – was magnetic, as if I were being summoned by some higher being whose voice had come from a place far-flung in space, if not wholly extra-dimensional. It tugged at my skeleton, seeking to move the mechanisms of my body even as it sought to bend my mind to its will. I tried to fight it, felt the terror of the moment surge within me like hot bile. And yet the next moment I was walking - quite casually – over to the abominable idol.
Unable to even tremble in fear, I stopped just a few inches from the half-buried mouth, helplessly awaiting the next segment in this nightmarish episode. Though it had no eyes, I nonetheless felt as if I were being scrutinized by some inkling of intelligence, evaluated by an incredibly resilient remnant of a once great mind.
The stench hit me before the miasmal exhalation even appeared. The rancid funk was unlike anything I’d ever smelled before, and when it finally surged from that partially toothed grin, it almost knocked me back despite my immobility. More potent in its putridity than a burning septic tank, the oral expulsion blasted away my thoughts even as it blew back the tiny hairs within my nostrils. Unable to control my legs, still anchored to the spot by that dead thing’s influence, I could only suffer the mind-unhinging foulness.
Until my suffering turned to elation.
As if a switch had been flicked in my brain, the stench suddenly ceased to be so, and from then became a more than agreeable scent. I couldn’t have said what olfactory notes it carried in the moment; but looking back, I’m sure that the newly perceived smell was whisky, bourbon; something I hadn’t had for a while.
I was no longer repulsed by the clouding vapor, and my fear of the undead skull had all but diminished. In its place was quickly arising a sense of awe, of dim-witted wonderment. Some vestigial sub-section of my mind knew that its neighboring parts were being tricked, that this ungodly relic of a corpse had all but commandeered my brain. But I was already transfixed; had in mere seconds succumbed to its outward necromancy.
Inhaling the noxious intoxicant, I found myself relishing the respiratory failure; I prostrated myself before the inimical spray, catching the fat, sallow droplets in my mouth, upon my tongue, as if they were snowflakes - malignant little treats. The vapor stained my face, soaked my hair, seared my skin… and yet I welcomed the acrid erosion of my flesh, as a mountain’s vegetation can do nothing but welcome the molten discharge of its volcanic core.
When most of my nose was gone and my cheeks had all but sloughed away, I opened my eyes to receive the blinding anointing of my ghoulish, gaseous God, and be forever plunged into sightless sublimity.
But before my sight could be taken from me, there was a sudden tug on my collar, and I was pulled from the fulsome cloud.
I was dropped almost two meters from the still-sighing ghoul. Above me, my friend’s face appeared, blotting out the sun. Her eyes were wide, and she was screaming something; but I could only hear that cadaverous voice beckoning, pleading for me to return. My God was crying for me to rejoin him. Rot with me.
A wave of black grief washed over me, with anger riding atop the onrushing tide. I thrashed on the ground, flinging wild blows at Jasmine. She stepped away, her face taut with horror. The god roared in my head. Before I could think to rise - or at least reorient myself and crawl - Jasmine picked up a large stone from the ground, marched over to the half-sentient corpse, and hurled the missile through the miasma.
It struck the eldritch Thing in its forehead, caving in its already fractured brow. I more than heard the subsequent roar of pain, I felt it. It pulsed through my bones. Sent quakes through the lobes of my brain. I’d been linked with that abhorrent mind through my ingestion of its corpse fumes, and its second death nearly brought on my first.
After a few moments of undead agony, the whole thing collapsed upon itself. Bone dust and ashen motes of brain matter burst skyward, the charnel plumes dwarfing the nearby trees.
Jasmine returned to me and, not waiting for me to protest or fight back, hefted me over her shoulder. She carried me out of the woods, meanwhile I sobbed for the unceremonious end of my Lord, who had stoically persisted through untold cycles before our arrival.
But when we’d gone far enough away, my sorrow suddenly ceased, and I felt only a lingering sense of filthiness, of having been violated. A phantom malignancy seemed to remain within my body, even as some insidious element of cancer might linger during remission – mustering itself in feigned defeat, only to spring forth anew, later.
Jasmine let me fall from her shoulder as if I were a sack of laundry. We were in an open field, sunlit and freshly mowed. Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered, as one might shiver after emerging from a cryostatic slumber. I’d been under the spell of a forgotten horror, and had - in just a short time - grown accustomed to a state of chilly thralldom.
She told me to get up, her voice carrying tones of both terror and authority. I knew that she’d strike me down if I so much as stumbled toward her. Carefully, I rose to my feet and brushed myself off. I felt shaky, sick, replete with a kind of nausea I’d never experienced before.
I told her that I was fine, at least compared to before. Understandably, she did not immediately believe me. I tried to assure her that the horror’s influence was gone, that we’d traveled far enough away from it. Risking a punch to the face, I took a slow step toward her. She cringed and backed away, and I then remembered that I’d had most of my face burned away.
As if triggered by the remembrance, the agony of my wounds immediately arose, sending me to my knees. I shrieked madly, and Jasmine’s trepidation at my allegiance swiftly shot away. She rushed to me and wrapped her arms around my waist, and I was again thrown over her shoulder. (Thank the true Lord for our town’s gym). As I lost what little I’d regained of my sanity, Jasmine carried me back to her house.
From there, she drove me to the hospital. My wounds were treated, the reason for them given as accidental exposure to a burst pipe on her property. Even as I drifted in and out of consciousness, I insisted that the issue was already being taken care of, and that they needn’t send any city officials to investigate the dubious rupture.
***
I’m still in the hospital, masked in bandages and more than sufficiently doped up on meds. Jasmine is here with me, staying by my side as I heal. Though lately – as of the last few hours – she’s been staring out the window; vacantly, or with such utter focus that it appears that way. Occasionally, she’ll cock her head to the side, as if hearing something from far off.
I’m just now realizing that the window of my room faces the woods across town. But they’re so far away. Even if it was alive, surely it couldn’t be calling to us, to ….not from so far away….