The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 14, 2016)
16: Hungry
Inside the empty and lifeless—quite literally lifeless now—Skull Fracture, the entity seethed and flowed, room to room, finally sinking down into the space under the bar floor. It felt itself on the verge of something. A new form, a new awareness, new powers, something.
In its eager absorption of human, insect, and rodent flesh, it had gained an ability to manifest in somewhat more solid form than at first. More, it was starting to gain, or perhaps recover, sentience.
The two human victims had not been sterling intellects. Honker was a simple man with a simple mind. He could just about fill out a manifest and nine times out of ten long-haul some cargo for delivery on time, Portland to San Diego, or Spokane to Louisville, whatever. He could read a road map, or follow a GPS app. He could collect his pay and live for the days off.
Typically he drove six or seven and was off for one, except for the ten days of paid vacation that the company grudgingly gave him, usually at the crap times of year when going someplace was out because of bad weather at the destination or at his home base in Oregon. He liked to take five days twice a year, if he could swing it with the front office, and spend those on the road with his biking buds. In fact, the excursion to Gravity Falls had come on the final day of a five-day mini-vacay. Technically, he should have reported for a hauling assignment at midnight.
In fact, the company he hauled for had just put a warning notice in his email. If he did not report with an acceptable excuse for missing the haul within the next three days, he would be terminated. Termination, of course, was no longer a problem for him.
Anyway, in his rare free time, old Honker could put away the brewskis, he was a good poker playing pal (because he was easy for the others to read), and for a biker, he was relatively good-tempered. His IQ wouldn't boil water, but nobody's perfect. His gang, once they sobered up, had realized he was missing. Next time they had some down time, they planned to retrace the route to Gravity Falls to hunt for him and his bike. If they didn't forget. Which they probably would, times being what they were.
The second man, Vetch, had been an unimaginative and incurious fellow, dissatisfied with his life but too lazy to change the comfortable rut he had settled into. A mild, continuing alcoholic buzz, an undemanding job, the ability to sleep through the day and wake up for the night—though it was hell on his social life—satisfied him. As William Jennings Bryan testified about himself in the Scopes trial, Vetch didn't thought about things he didn't think about.
Nor did he have the least sense of wonder. Nothing could have astonished Vetch. He'd seen Manotaurs years back and shrugged them off, mutant bison or some deal, so what? Then they had come out of hiding and visited downtown Gravity Falls. Some people complained about them. He never did.
He wasn't scared of them, worried about them, or curious about them. They were just there, like the trees (he couldn't name any species accurately—they were pines or the other kind) and the flowers (he knew roses, which were red, even if they were really tulips, and aside from that, a flower was a flower was a flower, right, Gertrude Stein?
What we're getting at here is that neither man especially sharpened the entity's wits.
It did not absorb their personalities. The essences of Honker and Vetch had gone away. They had passed on. They were no more. They had ceased to be, expired, and gone to meet their Makers. Honker and Vetch were bereft of life and rested (perhaps) in peace. Metaphorically, they were pushing up the daisies, though the gelid remnants of Honker rested between the walls of the men's room and those of Vetch now resided in a cooler drawer in the morgue, nary a daisy in sight. Their metabolic processes were history. They had expired. They were posthumous people. They had kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, rung down the curtain, snuffed it, and joined the choir invisible—or else the choir infernal. They were ex-humans.
In short, they were, as Honker might have put it in life, d-e-d, dead.
Nothing of their awareness, their personality, their sentience, survived in the entity, but a somewhat more focused general awareness had emerged. The roaches and rats, dim though their tiny bulbs might have shone, had added to this.
No, really. Animals are cleverer than we give them credit for. The roach is no Einstein, but it is cunning and has developed a keen ability to survive. It is suspected that roaches would be among the few survivors of a nuclear Armageddon. Tough and persistent and alert, they added their faint intellects to the brew.
And rats—now, rats are clever little fiends. Lab rats have long ago tamed human experimenters and have taught them to reward the rats for merely strolling through a maze, the suckers. Rats can figure out things.
In 2015, Harvard professor Ben Vermaercke published a study that demonstrated how rats, given a specific mental task to perform, actually beat out human students—they were smarter than the college kids. Granted, the rats did not live on a diet of beer, pizza, and Ramen noodles, but even so, the findings were surprising and caused the Harvard scholarship committee to debate whether merely being a rodent should disqualify one from financial aid.
As laboratory animals in studies of intelligence, rats come in second, just behind monkeys. Mice are right up there with the rats, but in the Skull Fracture mice had established only a minimal presence, while the rats teemed down in the crawl space.
The entity had gained some of the mental acuity of the rodents, along with that of the humans and the insects. Now it felt . . . deprived. It hungered for more, not for flesh and blood, but for the sentience it dimly understood was nearly within its grasp.
And it felt angry. It had emotions, somehow—no body, but certainly the emotions of anger and hatred and—got to tell the truth here—of fear.
It existed bathed in fear. Not being quite over the sentience boundary, it could not formulate a clear idea of what it feared, but whatever, it had feared it for a long, long time now. Maybe it was the hateful light.
It certainly avoided light. Fortunately for it, the Skull Fracture had no lack of dim places. Very little of the bar or the lodge hall got direct sunlight at any time—a little came in through the front door in the mornings, and some streamed through the second-floor window in late afternoons, but other than that, the place stood dim, empty, and cool. However, if worst came to worst, the entity could always become vapor and sink down into the permanently dark crawl space.
But the entity also resented its confinement now. Somehow, its dull awareness sensed that the motorcycle had been disabled. It disliked that. The motorcycle had allowed a part of it, the growing awareness part, to explore beyond its prison in the bar. Now the humans had made the motorbike inoperable. If the humans came back, the entity would absorb them. Teach them a lesson.
Yet its motive was not merely hatred of humanity, or even fear of them, though it felt both. Mostly, it hungered for more food, for more life energy, for the ability to establish a physical form once more.
It was already so close, and with physical form would come more intelligence, even sentience, and an easier way to find more . . . food. In the dark it practiced forming a body. It could not quite grasp a proper shape in its limited mind. What it turned into wavered between roach, rat, and human, or unholy combinations of all three.
Now it could acquire semi-solidity. It wanted more than that, and it had come so close, so close. It continued to practice, forming and then dissolving body after body. None was completely acceptable, but it was coming close.
It yearned for more mind, for the ability to remember what or who it had once been, back when it was mind in a body. A real body. A physical existence.
It had no tongue, of course, but the memory was on the tip of its metaphorical one. If it could remember its old form, it might be able to take it on. If it could, it might walk disguised and unknown among the people of Gravity Falls. That would make finding more victims, more food, easier.
That would make re-creating its ancient form possible, recovering its sentience certain. It needed a sharp image of a physical form, that was all. And it began to intuit that such awareness was as close as memories it could almost touch.
For it had been a physical being, long ago.
It had a mind and a body.
It had a form of some kind.
Perhaps even human.
It avoided light.
In darkness it practiced.