Within the Woods
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, why ya givin' me such a hard time?
A backwoods road in Tennessee in the middle of October isn't a bad place to be, really. The air is crisp, the Spanish moss is plentiful if you're into that sort of thing, and the fog is lovely. Of course, it's much lovelier if you're safely inside a car or some other form of mobile transport, instead of experiencing all the elements firsthand. And that was what the two young men had been doing, up until a short while ago…
"I'm sorry."
"Shutup."
"I said I'm sorry."
"I said shutup."
"I'm sorry Daniel!"
"Of course you're sorry. You're always sorry."
"I didn't mean for that to happen."
Daniel Cain turned, brows pressed together in quiet fury.
"What the hell did you expect would happen?"
Herbert West shrank back, shoulders hunching defensively.
"I only asked her if she wanted to see what was in the bag, I didn't think she'd overreact-"
"It's hardly overreacting to scream at a severed hand in a jar, Herbert!" Dan kicked a rock to the side and fumed. That had been humiliating, having to come up with a good excuse of why they'd have such a thing in the first place and then getting kicked off the bus. "We're just lucky they didn't call the cops!"
"The police, Dan? From a bus?"
"Shutup." Dan turned and glared in the opposite direction. If he looked at Herbert right now, he might throttle him. Sixteen hours to Nashville, and they had to take the shoelace express. With any luck, they might find another bus stop within a day's walking distance. But Dan's luck hadn't been very good since meeting up with Herbert West, who was a lighting rod for misfortune. He risked a glance at Herbert, who was sulking. Good, let him. He turned away with a humph.
For a long time, there was nothing but the quiet scratch of their feet on the gravel and the croaking of a multitude of frogs. Then-
"Dan, I-"
"If the next words to come out of your mouth are 'I'm sorry', don't even bother."
"I wasn't going to apologize again." Herbert looked irked.
"Well I'm sorry, then." Dan's hackles were up. "God forbid I don't accept your full pardons, oh no. Not Dr. West's-"
"Shhh!" He hissed. "Rake me over the coals later. Dan, I see something!"
He raised his head warily. "Where?"
"Up ahead. A light." Dan squinted. Sure enough, a faint luminescence lay up ahead, barely a speck. He felt his heart beat faster.
"Civilization." He murmured. "Maybe a phone."
"Maybe a car." Herbert whispered. They exchanged looks, then broke into a run.
"No more trudging through the dark! No more stepping on barbed wire!" Dan yelled gleefully.
"Hold your tongue, Dan." Herbert puffed to keep up, but he was back in good spirits. "With our luck, it's probably a house of cannibal hillbillies waiting for some new friends to test out their chainsaws."
"Whoah, Herbert, I thought you didn't watch movies." Dan teased. The prospect of mobile transport had really brightened his mood.
"I said I don't like movies, I never said I didn't watch-" Dan stopped short and Herbert, who had been lagging behind, ploughed into him. They both tumbled to the ground, Herbert swearing and scrabbling for his glasses. He found them and slipped them on.
"What was that-" he began, but Dan shushed him, pointing ahead. He followed Dan's finger to their near destination.
The light that they had followed came from a halogen lamp, mounted to a building that had probably been new when busses still ran to Innsmouth. It could be called a bus depot, if bus depots could really be that small and dangerously rickety. Herbert glanced at Dan, then heaved himself up. He adjusted his glasses, brushed himself off, and strode, businesslike, towards it.
"Sir?" He called. "Or madam? Surely your forgiveness I implore! But the fact is I was-" Dan's hand grabbed his wrist.
"Be quiet Hebert!" Dan snapped. "You're going to wake someone up!"
A bit of the old Herbert showed through, his sneer dripping with contempt. "Really Dan? Did my little Leatherface joke get to you? I assure you-"
"Herbert, have you seen the time?"
He was taken aback. "No."
In fact, his watch had broken in Boston, after that minor scuffle with the basketball player Dan had ended up sorting out. It was stuck at 3:48 until he got it fixed or got a new watch. Dan showed the plastic face of his.
"It's past two. Whoever runs this place, if anyone does, is not going to be expecting passengers this late. Or ever, maybe. That person might be frightened by loud shouting. They might not understand that we're just lost and looking for a bus. They might be armed."
Herbert blinked. "Really, Dan?"
"Yes. Out here in the country, it'd be odd for someone not to carry some form of protection. Let's just go in, make ourselves comfortable, and wait for morning."
"Yes, but what makes you think they'll be any less inclined to shoot us in broad daylight?"
"That's a chance I'm willing to take. Come on."
They trudged to the building. The second Dan turned the knob, it broke off in his hand. The door swung open on its own, revealing a centipede-infested nightmare. The phrase "make themselves comfortable" was going to be hard to put into practice. Dan had been in worse places of course, he was a medical student, but he couldn't remember one that had given him the willies more.
Herbert edged in beside Dan when he showed no signs of stepping further into the decay. He wrinkled his nose and poked a seat cushion, which disintegrated at his touch. Dan recovered enough to move and flicked a light switch. Wires sparked dangerously at once, and he quickly flicked it off again. Surveying the place where they would spend the next few hours, Herbert summed up their situation nicely in one example of biting irony.
"Nice." He said. Dan made a beeline for the bulletin board, mouth moving soundlessly as he read the bus schedules.
"Okayyyy, the next bus comes at around…11:30?" He ground his teeth together. "I guess it'll have to do."
Herbert maneuvered himself next to Dan and squinted at the board.
"Dan, this hasn't been up to date since September 1st …five years ago!"
"Well, then, we'll just have to wait until a bus does come, won't we?"
"But Dan-"
"I don't care, Herbert, I'm not walking down these creepy backwoods roads anymore, not for you." He slapped the bulletin board, sending dust and god-knows-what-else raining down. "Let's just sit down and have a nice nap, shall we?"
The benches weren't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, and Herbert's suggestion to pad them with newspapers didn't really help. The place was bitterly cold and a little damp, but neither could be persuaded to go out for firewood. The fireplace didn't look as if it had been used in a long time, anyway; and by the distinctive squeaking noises Herbert perceived were coming from the chimney itself, there was probably a nest in the flue.
They both stretched out on the benches, pretending to be comfortable. Dan stared into the empty fireplace, wondering not for the first time what life would've been like if he hadn't accepted Herbert's money or his partnership. If he had stayed home and had a nice, cozy life, a small practice of his own, Meg-
"Dan?"
His neck immediately tightened. God, that wheedling tone. It was like traveling with a three-year-old, only you could give them a toy or a book or a juicebox to distract them from their neediness. With Herbert it never stopped. He let it drift into silence for a few moment before deciding it was a little too cruel to leave Herbert dangling like this.
"What, Herbert?"
"Are we friends?"
Oh no. Not this again.
"Why do you ask that?"
"Never mind why, are we friends?"
Christ. Dan could never figure out why someone as devastatingly smart as Herbert needed constant reassurance, perhaps something to do with his starved-for-affection childhood. Funny, but he couldn't picture him as a child in any way, shape, or form.
"Like you always say, Herbert, we are partners, we are associates, we are the fathers of a new medical renaissance." There.
"But…are we friends?" Dan sighed. He could barely envision making it through the next ten minutes with Herbert, let alone the entire night. He decided to be blunt.
"No."
"Why?"
Screw philosophical discourse. "Because I hate you."
"Oh, Dan." Herbert hugged his worn-out jacket to himself, exasperated. "This isn't the time for jokes."
"Who's joking?"
A resentful silence lay between them like thick, bad blood.
Finally, Herbert broke it.
"It's not my fault-"
"-That Meg is dead. Right, right. Doesn't it ever occur to you that we've had the same argument over and over for the past few years? You start out trying to cajole me into liking you, I remind you why I don't like you, you try to guilt me into agreeing, I make an appeal to your better nature, et cetera, et cetera. We can't win an argument like that, neither of us. Does it ever get boring to you? It does to me."
Herbert nursed his hurt. "I didn't know I bored you Dan."
"Oh great, now we're to the next leg of the conversation, you trying to play the victim. 'Oooh, look at me, I'm Herbert West and I have no social skills, wah, wah, wah, wah…"
"I never say that!" West snapped, hands curling into fists. "Anyway, who's' being juvenile here? Not me!"
"I never said you were juvenile, I just meant- oh, forget it! Everything I say, you twist my words to make it seem like I'm the bad guy."
"Funny, I was just about to say the same."
Both sat on the benches, stewing. Dan was angry at being roped into yet another argument, while Herbert was just plain pissed at Dan calling him a child. Just where did he get off calling Herbert-
Dan sighed deeply and stood up. "I'm going."
Herbert's dark mood immediately fell away, the stifling, grasping neediness roaring back. "What?"
Dan zipped up his coat and stuck his hands into his pockets. "I'm leaving West."
Herbert panicked, losing his tongue and then finding it again. "Where? Where can you go, there' nothing for miles-"
Dan sighed again. "I didn't mean like that, I mean I'm going to go for a walk. I'm gonna find the bathroom, maybe scrounge up some food."
Herbert sat, very small and alone on the bench. "Can I come with you?"
Dan shook his head. "No, stay here. In case anything happens to one of us, I want the other one to be okay. Okay?"
Herbert stared at the floor, a tangle of emotions on his face. Dan walked away; not wanting to seem so distant he gave Herbert's shoulder a squeeze before he left.
"I'll be back." He called over his shoulder.
"I hope so." Came Herbert's morose reply. Dan shook his head again, smiling. It was hard to hate him, it really was.
Many miles away, something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark, shadowy swamp… "crawls" isn't such a great description, I guess. "Rose" or "ascended" might be better, but only just. You see, "crawling" implies limbs of some sort. This thing hadn't any. It had a body, sure, a body as big and about as substantial as the wind. It could see, if you call that seeing, and as it recovered from yet another day resting in the mud it saw three things.
The being that had been bothering it much lately. It jogged along at a reasonable pace, burdened by the heavy metal object it carried.
And something else. Two new beings, those strange upright creatures that tended to wander into this place unaware of its presence. Those two it would go after. Leave the other for later. It was fairly close to the others, though. If it wasn't careful, it might be deprived of yet another host. It pulled itself together and crept from the swamp.
Dan shut the screen door firmly behind him, his breath visible. A fire really would be nice, maybe after a pit stop he could look for wood. He made a complete circle around the building before spying a small leaning shack with that unmistakable sickle moon on the door. He crossed his fingers as he opened it. Surprisingly, it was much nicer on the inside than the depot itself. But perhaps that was because this one got more traffic, so to speak.
He sat down, had a flash of insight, and looked for toilet paper. He found a paperback horror book, the kind they sold at airports, with half the pages missing. He put two and two together and sighed, ripping out about three.
The thing picked up speed, ploughing through trees and skipping over puddles.
Herbert huddled on his bench, breath coming in great clouds, feeling very sorry for himself. He hated when the conversation turned to Meg, as it inorexably did, because that immediately meant he was going to lose the argument. No matter what he did, Daniel was never going to let him forget Meg's death. But really, it hadn't been his fault directly! Was Mathiu Orfila to be blamed for all the new and complex poisons people invented to avoid detection by arsenic? Were the Curies for the many deaths by radiation poisoning? True, he had somewhat involved her by reanimating her father, but that didn't mean he was…
What was that noise?
It hurtled over a few hills, ever accelerating. The other being was moving too. In its long internment in this valley, the other had learned to sense it, meaning it could no longer be taken unawares. Usually it stayed in the crude shelter it had devised, waiting for the brute force of the thing crashing against the shelter to subside. It left the shelter every day to forage, sleeping only at dawn and dusk.
The one comfort the thing had was that while it was confined to the valley itself, so was the other. The valley, small enough to be hidden in the great wilderness, was large enough so one could not traverse it within a day. Not on foot.
The other was running now.
Dan sat, reading the torn pages of the novel in his hand by the light coming through the hole in the door. It wasn't too bad, something about an ancestral horror in an ancient New England manse. They always seemed to take place in New England, for some reason he could never fathom. He was just to the paragraph where the heroine was exploring the drafty old house in her filmy nighty, a very descriptive passage, when he heard it. It was too faint to make out clearly, but it sounded…metallic. He tried to finish up quickly and get his ass back indoors.
It was one hillside away, now, the building lay before it. A road, one it had never seen before, lay behind the building. The other's form stood out in sharp relief, anxiety and terror picking out its shape in the air. Apparently it was heading for the building as well. The sight of the building flashed once more before it was lost in the trees, the thing moving again.
Herbert crouched low by the door, head pressed to the wall. It was a sort of knocking sound, along with a definite metallic tang. He could make out more, too, the closer it came to him. The occasional thud as something heavy crashed against a tree. A labored wheeze, cloth scraping together at a very fast rate. It sounded like someone running for their life through the woods.
He rummaged in his black bag and brought out a scalpel, silver and sharp. He carefully rose to a standing position, hand closed tightly around it. If whoever it was came through the back door, he would have a little surprise for them.
It crashed through trees, over rocks, closer, always closer…
The thumping got louder now, the gasping more frequent and pained-sounding. He held his body tense for a moment before realizing that the sound wasn't getting closer, it was going off to the side…
He risked a look out the window. That was how he saw it.
Something, like a giant invisible hand, was crushing its was through the woods, leaving broken trees in its wake. Herbert froze for a moment, his mouth open. The walking dead was one thing, but this-
It was nearly there, nearly there. There was a leathery roar as it tore the air around it, going so fast it could no longer really control itself. Trees crashed to the ground, boulders exploded at its drunken frenzy to get to the shack.
Dan had heard the footfalls trail off as he fumbled in the dark with the catch on his jeans. Now a worse sound, like many voices at once, all shrieking. He had no thoughts anymore, just a burning determination to get back inside before whatever was coming hit. He put his hand on the outhouse latch.
Silence.
It was like turning off a faucet, all the noise suddenly stopped. He paused with his hand on the door, before cautiously turning it and peeking out.
"Hey now," he said, and the world was torn apart.
Herbert was thrown back through the wall of the shack, his scalpel embedding itself harmlessly in the floor. He flew through the air a couple of yards before coming into contact with solid timber with a sick thud. The shack rained down around him and the body he had landed next to.
In its zeal, it had completely obliterated the shack. Perhaps the others were dead. It had no time for this. The thing retreated, pulling its body back the way it came. It saw a light on the other end of the valley and went for that instead, restraining itself…
Later, dawn broke upon the world.
Author's note: yes, that's a cliffhanger, you saw right. This is a crossover, and if it's not readily apparent what I'm crossing over with, it will be soon enough. You may noticed I snitched part of "The Raven" early on, I just can't help making at least one Poe reference per story. I'll try and stop, but I can't promise anything. XD
