Chapter 3
Wilson poked a stick into the fire and tipped over one of the logs he'd thrown in. His base was a filthy squalid mess: rotten vegetables and butchered rabbits littered the site and a nearby carcass spread a particularly unpleasant odour.
He hadn't seen the need to clean them up. The snow covered them well enough in his opinion. Who was here to see him anyway? The pigmen?
No. The pigmen were not real. Even though he could smell them from far away, and see the water vapour in their breaths condense in the cold air, they were not real. They could not be, so they weren't. Easy as that.
Then again, he'd seen see-through monsters, impossible creatures... Even death. He had died.
It was a strange but eerie memory that nearly drove him to burst of nervous laughter, so utterly unusual it had been. He'd been careless and hungry. Starving he had attempted to attack a large buffalo-like creature for its flesh... He hadn't counted on the whole of its pack joining in the fray however.
Their horns hadn't looked so sharp when he first saw them, but they ripped through him easier than he would have initially found possible.
As soon as the herd geared into action he had tried to sprint away from them, only for one of the haughty creatures to bowl him over. The ones following him hadn't slowed their sprint, a full-out stampede marched over him.
The large hooves mashed his legs and back into a fine powder. He'd unleashed a ghoulish sound and the sun had turned dark. Then as soon as it happend he'd found himself flung back to the earth (how had he ascended to begin with?) landing flat on his back in between the impaled pig heads he had found some time earlier.
He just laid there, staring up into the sky, the rays of the sun engraving their image into his retina. He moved his legs, stretched them - nothing wrong there, he could even feel his toes! He repeated the same procedure for his arms, and once he stood up he found his back was alright even more so.
Did that just... happen? He could have sworn his back was broken, he had felt vertebrae penetrate his skin He shivered. He'd lost his winter jacket, and his backpack... What had happened?!
Contemplating the whole thing hadn't helped, so he returned to where he'd found the herd. After half a day of travelling he arrived at the field where he'd met his demise. The herd was gone, but his backpack - stained with blood - was still there, all his items still intact.
He used a different backpack now. The other one he'd flung into the sea.
It had become more and more clear to him, that, no matter how much he thought otherwise; he was irrevesably lost. He'd lost his home, his parents, his mind, God... All that remained was science - as bleak as it sounded.
He could hear his parents speaking sometimes, like they were there with him. They whispered at night, and kept him from sleeping... He hadn't slept for days - or was it weeks? But that was okay. Everything was okay. It was a lot more convenient to adjust his standards of what constituted 'okay' instead of admitting to his despair. He only had food for one more day, consisting mostly of old toasted seeds. That was okay too. He heard his parents talking to him, reenacting entire sections of his life even, and that was... that was not okay yet. But it might be, in time.
He was balancing on the edge of the abyss. If he closed his eyes, he could almost feel the ground stopping right beneath his toes. One last push and he would be gone. It was a waiting game, he felt it. The Devil, the one that brought him here, was driving him to the edge. Not with hands on his back, or a threat, but by simply making the fall seem more appealing than the ground.
His stomach rumbled, and he shivered. The fire was dying out, and he had nothing but rotten food to keep it going. He hadn't dared to leave his camp in days... Lest that...
Something growled in the distance, but the rest of the world's creatures refused to speak out. He needed to get something to eat, wood to keep his fire going, and some warm clothing to get through the winter. And he needed gold, he needed gears, he needed rabbits, he needed raw flesh, beardhair and wood... He had the knowledge. He STILL had the knowlegde! He could do so many things, if only he was still at his home, with gold, tools, money, rats, ink, parchment, lamp oil...
The devil knew his torture well. You'd think someone who listened to his unholy prayers would be rewarded somehow. He'd done God-loathing things in the name of science, he'd done the devil's work! Unwittingly, like the fool he was, but he did it.
God was not forgiving at all, he discovered. He hadn't known, couldn't have known! He was a broken creature, tainted from the beginning! Shouldn't God have seen that he simply wasn't able to tell wrong from right?!
His thoughts quieted, and Wilson dropped half a hand full of dried grass into the fire to keep the night at bay. He was incomplete, and everyone but he had known it. He'd been here long enough to realize at least that much. His parents had kept him inside the house not to keep him safe, but to keep his evil idea's away from the other children.
A wolf howled in the distance, and a dozen more answered its call. Wilson dropped the last of the grass into the fire and stood up, janking his spear out of the soil. Think time was over, now it was the time for disembowling, though not in the way he liked it. The hounds howled louder, sending shivers down his spine, his eyes flickering over to where he'd heard them. Left, right, front, rear...
They never made the same noises when they came close. Up close, they were like overgrown dogs with an appetite for all moving creatures, but right before attacking they sounded different. Sometimes they sounded close, sometimes far off... Sometimes he suspected that it was his own paranoid mind that manufactured those abominable sounds, keeping him on the edge, or that it was the devil again, playing cruel tricks with his mind.
The hounds growled and barked, the rustling bushes signalling their arrival, and three blue hounds burst forth.
Wilson's cold hands clamped firmly around his spear and he struck the most menacing pose he could manage. They charged! One of the blue monsters lunged towards him. Swiftly he leaped sideways, dodging the fell creature. With only the dim light of his meagre fire illuminating his surroundings he wished he'd had stockpiled more wood and beast, trying to re-adjust its legs for another attacks stood still just long enough for Wilson to jam his spear into its head. The hound whined and wailed as Wilson struck it, and it recoiled from the pain.
But the other two were too fast.
Jaws snapped shut around his spear, and in very short game of pulling, it was torn from his grasp.
He could swear the beasts were grinning at him as they advanced, his spear discarded in the snow behind them. The snow crunched beneath their paws, and Wilson had a fleeting vision of hundreds and millions of tiny little bones breaking between their jaws.
The hounds leaped into the air, and Wilson ran - as fast as he could.
His only defensive and offensive capability laid discarded in the snow. More hounds rushed him towards, from all sides they seemed to spawn into existence. While he had learned that Hounds were pack-animals, they now came from all sides in overwhelming numbers, like all the lone wolves in a region suddenly deciding they were up for a group-kill.
It was as if the whole forest had come alive. From every shadow a new monster rose, small black monsters skittering away before his feet, hounds coming from all directions, and a terrible ringing in his ears made thinking impossible. All that he could think of were stupid thoughts, like whether the shades would try to eat him, and if the hounds would let them. He passed his father and mother in his run for survival, shouting at him, but he couldn't hear them over the whispering and yowling in his head.
Great rocks flew by him as he ran, the ground growing hard and dead beneath his feet. He felt hot hound-breaths against his heels, and tried to ignore the burning sensation in his muscles and the cold in his hands. One step after another, running as fast as he could, and all of a sudden there was no more ground to walk on.
He fell into a pit of darkness, terrible yowls and screeches following him into the depths, claws scratching at his face while he fell. Flashes of blue spun past him, rumbling and growling whirling past him, red eyes watching as he fell. He screamed, his spear long lost, and a glowing wall of cyan seemed to rush towards at him. He smashed into it, blue mushrooms snapping off the trunks and showering him in spores, bits and thick fungal sap sticking on his skin.
The ground was an icy cold, as if standing on a frozen lake. And the glowing mushroom tree made it glimmer in an unreal fashion. Outside the neon ring of blue light cast by the tree, there was darkness. A pitch-blackness.
Wilson looked up, gazing at a cloud of spores he had left in his wake, twinkling from the blue light emitted by the mushroom tree. Yet he couldn't see the hole he'd fallen through. Like it had never been there. Like HE had never been there.
A whining yowl far above him had him crouching towards the tree for cover, hiding beneath it's thick gills A hound smacked to its death only a few meters from where Wilson himself had landed. The animal hadn't been lucky enough to land on the soft mushroom padding... Another sickening crack sounded in the dark, and something moist and warm shot up into the air and smeared its way across Wilson's hands and face.
The blood was so warm to touch that it felt like fire to his fingers. He stared into the darkness, where a sizeable source of thermal energy was slowly going to waste. Warm meat, thick winter wolf fur... He didn't move from his spot.
There was no light but the glowing tree he'd fallen on top of. For all he knew, the ground could end right there in the darkness! He looked up, but there was still no daylight to be seen. All the light had gone, except for the glow emitted by that mysterious blue mushroom.
He let out a hicupping laugh. Science, science could do anything, but not without the basic survival needs. No food, no warmth, no home, no water, no companionship.
He pulled at his hair and curled up beneath the glowing mushroom tree. He was disfunctional, demonic, insane, crazy! His hands clutched some strands of hair, and he threw them into the dark. If he couldn't trust his own judgement, what could he trust?! What was a devil's ploy and what was salvation?!
He was broken, one of God's rare mistakes, he couldn't see the difference between good and evil!
"We told you that so many times, tried to save you, warn you.."
Wilson shivelled around to where he'd heard his mother's voice, but there was only darkness, and eerie silence.
Maybe this was another aspect of hell, the uncertainity. Was she here, as an illusion to taunt and punish him, or was he hallucinating?
The tree rocked back and forth almost unnoticably, allowing strange shadows to slide in and out of view. Were there monsters in the shadows, or was the darkness a monster it self?
Someone whispered in his ear, and he swatted at the air. Another voice uttered a hushed laugh that seemed to originate from inside his head.
A warm gust of air stroked his skin, and he dove away, hearing the snap of jaws closing where he had been. He turned his head in panic, finding his surroundings just as tranquil as they had been before. devoid of any living creatures. The shadow licked at his heels, and he staggered back once again.
The whispers became louder, like ghosts gliding closer towards those they haunt. WIlson stared into the darkness and clutched the stem of the mushroom tree. They were closing in on him. He could feel their hands and appengades all over him, slowly tightening their grasp on his limbs and throat. The mushroom tree's light was weakening, bits of dead plant raining on top of him and spores drifting around him like snowflakes in the winter.
The small shadows cast on the ground by the spores slowly ate up the remaining light, making his world of light smaller, smaller and smaller. There was no alternative, no solution.
A shadow monster scuttled into the ring of light, and Wilson flung himself into the darkness. The whispers were lost to him as the floor seemed to melt beneath his feet, and a grinding growl drowned out all sounds. Music played, his next step hit air, and he fell into a thick wall of snow.
He couldn't feel his arms or legs, and his nails were blue. He pushed himself up from the snow, and was blinded by the winter sun. The whispers had gone silent, and the mushroomtree was nowhere to be seen. Spores stuck to his clothes. The shadows, for once, were frozen in their place, and the sun hung from the sky like a mouse nailed to the wall. Dead, empty and still.
A trail of foot steps laid in the snow, leading up to where he sat shivering in the cold. No howling, no barking, no whispers in the dark, no sign of his camp. The trees were bare and slim. He turned around, and followed the track he had left in the snow. Thin clouds drifted before in front of the sun, and snowflakes fell.
Beneath the snow, just a few feet off, a mangled black-purple hound laid hidden.