It Hungers
by John Davis
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
When Dean got a phone call from his friend Mark to say he’d found something amazing, his first thought was that it would be some kind of buried artefact. Mark had also sworn him to secrecy, which only served to heighten Dean’s curiosity. Whatever it was, it was clearly a big deal. Mark wasn’t easily excited, so for him to be this wound up about anything was highly unusual.
As Dean drove along Cobden-Stonyford Road towards Mark’s place, the plastic P-plate dangling from the windscreen by one working suction cup, the idea that Mark was staging some elaborate prank crossed his mind, but he quickly dismissed it. Mark enjoyed the odd joke–there was the famous incident of the phone call to the post office in which he’d impersonated a disgruntled fictional billionaire philanthropist by the name of Howard C. Howardson III–but his excitement and nervousness over the phone had been too authentic to be anything other than the genuine article. Talented impersonator though he was, Mark wasn’t that good an actor.
A milk tanker laboured towards him in the oncoming lane and roared by, the accompanying blast of air buffeting his small Holden Commodore. A few kilometres later, he turned into a long dirt driveway that wound through paddocks dotted with grazing sheep and lambs. Gum leaves slapped the windscreen from overhanging branches, and a twig struck the underside of the car.
When he pulled onto the gravel by the house, Mark was already outside, dressed in a cheesy novelty t-shirt sporting the phrase My shirt has words on it.
Even before Dean was out of his car, Mark was yammering away. “Dude, dude,” he said, “you gotta see this. You gotta see this.”
Dean closed his door. “What is it?”
“Can’t explain. Have to show you.” He led the way to the old schoolhouse in one of the paddocks. Paint-peeled and neglected, it stood alone in a corner of a paddock beside a rotting pine tree, and it was more reminiscent of a country chapel than an educational facility. The windows were opaque with dust, and nature was slowly but surely reclaiming it. With a bit of sprucing up, it might’ve looked halfway decent. It was almost sad to see it so wasted away.
The wistfulness of the moment was clearly lost on Mark, however, who bounded through the weeds towards the decrepit building like an explorer who’d discovered El Dorado. “It’s in here,” he said.
“What’s in here?” Dean asked, struggling to keep pace as he warily stepped over blackberry bushes and thistles.
“You’ll see.”
“Where’s Fiona and Greg?” Dean asked, referring to Mark’s parents.
“Warrnambool. Hannah’s doing a dance or something.” Hannah was his little sister, an avid ballerina, a gifted one from what Dean’s parents told him.
“How’d you get out of that one?”
“Told them I had to study for exams.” Mark waded through a patch of ragwort to the door of the school and waited for Dean to catch up. “Before you go in,” he said, a solemn note entering his voice, “I must warn you that what you’re about to see is without a doubt the wildest, craziest thing you’ll ever see, and I need your word that you won’t freak your shit.”
Dean chuckled at his friend’s sincerity. “Bloody hell, Mark. What’s in there, a portal to Narnia?”
Mark frowned at the remark. “Don’t joke, Dean. This is some serious shit here, and I don’t appreciate you making light of it. Not one iota.”
“Alright, okay. No jokes.”
“Promise you won’t freak out on me.”
“I promise.”
During a moment’s stillness, Mark studied Dean’s eyes as if searching for any indication of a lie. Apparently finding none, Mark nodded. “Alright. Here goes.” He opened the door and gestured into the gloomy confines beyond. “After you.”
Dean hesitated to step forward. He peered into what little of the interior the open door revealed, trying to parse out any sign of what was in there, but he glimpsed only the shadowy outlines of desks and chairs and diffuse shafts of meagre sunlight straining through the grimy windows.
“Go on,” Mark urged.
Dean watched the open door, his heart pounding. “What’s in there, Mark?”
“I told you, I can’t explain it. You have to see it.”
“Is it an animal? What if it hurts me?”
“Dean, it’s not going to hurt you. Would I do that to you? You think I’m some kind of asshole or something?”
“Just tell me what’s in there.”
“I can’t tell you what’s in there. I don’t even know what it is. But it’s harmless… I think.”
“You think?”
“Look, it won’t hurt you, okay? Please take a look.”
Deciding that Mark was telling the truth and eager to satisfy his gnawing curiosity and his friend’s excitement, Dean entered the building.
The place stank of rotting wood and dust. He took a step forward and bumped his leg against a school desk, one of the old ones with the wooden lid for putting textbooks in.
“Watch your step,” Mark advised as he followed him inside.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Dean replied dryly as he picked his way through the jumbled chairs and desks, the weak, sullied light through the windows barely illuminating the room. Dust motes floated in the sunlight, and he coughed several times on the musty air. With each passing moment, he grew more frustrated. “Where the hell is―”
Then he stopped.
A noise came from somewhere off to his left. A wet slurping sound. Muscles tense, body rigid, mouth hanging open, Dean moved his eyes in the direction of the sound.
Against the far wall, beneath the chalkboard that ran the length of the room, sat something smooth and dark. At first glance, it looked like a full black garbage bag, but as Dean watched it, he saw it was an amorphous lump of unidentifiable tissue, steadily and slowly swelling and compressing, swelling and compressing, and each change in size came with that hideous, watery slurping noise. It sounded horribly like obstructed breathing.
Fear surged through Dean’s body.
Breathing. It was breathing. Though he could see no orifice through which it could draw or expel breath, the thing was breathing.
Dean felt an urge to run away from it (whatever it was) as fast as he could and never stop. His pulse ticked like a frantic, malfunctioning clock, and cold sweat poured down his arms. Yet he was frozen to the spot. It was as if his body had decided to keep still in the hope that the thing against the wall wouldn’t see him.
Mark’s voice registered through his terror. “Well? What do you think?”
For a moment, Dean couldn’t speak. His throat was too constricted by fear for words to pass through it. He licked his dry lips and trembled out an answer. “Mark? What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know. I found it here.”
Forcing himself to move, Dean turned his head to look at him. “Have you told anyone?”
Mark made a face. “Hell no. You know what’d happen. Calls to scientists or whoever. Someone takes it away. Experiments. Government coverups. You know how it is.”
As he spoke, Dean was always uncomfortably aware of the thing in the room with them, could hear its raspy, wet breath. “What are you saying? You think it’s a… like an…”
“Alien? Maybe. Could be something else. But if anyone finds out about it, that’s it.”
“Mark. We have to tell someone.”
Mark looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Whoa, hold on. No. We’re not doing that.”
“We don’t know what it is. It could be dangerous.”
“It’s not dangerous. look at it.”
“I have to tell someone―”
“Don’t tell anyone. I swear to God, if you tell anyone, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Despite his fear, the words struck Dean with all the force of a slap, and they stung just as much. For years, Mark had been Dean’s only friend. They’d relied on each other through high school, the outcasts, always picked on and teased by the other guys. The losers. Though Dean had managed to come out of his shell and acquire other friends, Mark was still his closest friend, and easily the one he spent the most time with. Above all that, they’d shared those hard times together, and that meant something.
For Mark to talk to him like this now was more painful than he could have ever imagined. He couldn’t recall feeling a pain quite like this.
He realised that, as unnerved as he was by the creature in the building, he was petrified of not being Mark’s friend.
“Okay, okay,” Dean said. “I won’t tell anyone. But… we can’t just leave it here like this. What if it gets out?”
“What are you worried about? It’s not doing anything.”
“Mark―”
“I’ve got this, okay? Leave it to me.”
“You don’t even―”
“Dean. Leave it to me.”
When they walked outside, Dean experienced such overwhelming relief that only immense willpower kept him from dropping on all fours and kissing the ground. He’d never been gladder to leave anywhere than he was to leave that old school.
As they walked back to the house, Mark gave him a look. “So much for not freaking your shit.”
That night, as Dean lay in bed, the night pressing against his window, sleep eluded him. Each time he thought he was dropping off, thoughts of that breathing mass of tissue chased sleep away, making his heart race.
Staring at the ceiling, listening to the desolate barking of a neighbourhood dog and the wind rattling in the evergreen shrub outside his window, Dean knew he had to do something about the creature in the schoolhouse. As much as Mark was loath to part with it, the thing was simply too unknowable, too strange, too potentially dangerous to remain uncontained. Dean didn’t know how it could be dangerous, but he sensed the threat. Seeing it there under the chalkboard had sent off the same alarm bells in his head as if he’d seen a snake.
At the same time, Dean didn’t want to destroy the best friendship he had. The idea of losing his closest friend was too painful to bear thinking about, like contemplating the death of a loved one.
If he was going to do something about this creature, he had to do it in a way that would preserve his friendship. That meant telling anyone was out of the question. Even if Dean made an anonymous tip to the police or some other regulatory body, Mark would know straight away who was responsible because as far as Dean knew, he was the only other person Mark had told about his discovery.
That left one other option–sneak into the schoolhouse and dispose of the thing himself.
As Dean imagined himself going near the creature, revulsion shivered through him. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that thing ever again, but if he wanted to get rid of it, which he did, he had to.
He just hoped he could destroy it in time.
Outside, the dog continued to bark.
Saturday night, a week after first seeing the creature, Dean drove out to Mark’s place. Dean’s parents had left for Skipton half an hour ago to have dinner with friends, so they wouldn’t likely be home before nine p.m.
Dean checked the clock on his dashboard. It read 7:48. He would have liked to leave earlier, but gathering his supplies–garbage bag, hammer, heavy duty gardening gloves, and electric torch–had taken about fifteen minutes. Since the drive back home would take twenty minutes, he had forty minutes to get this task over with.
He pulled onto the shoulder, killed the engine, and switched off the headlights. Total darkness. Not even the moon could offer its meagre light through the winter clouds. The only signs of life were the lights in the windows of distant farmhouses, the faint glow of the town behind him, and a far off pair of headlights drifting through the blackness like the bioluminescent appendage of an angler fish in the deep sea.
Gathering up his supplies, he got out of the car and crossed the road, stooping through the barbed wire fence that edged the paddock containing the schoolhouse. He waded through the weeds towards the looming building, made even more eerie by the dark.
Steeling himself, Dean opened the door and stepped inside.
He clicked on the electric torch and aimed the beam at the wall below the blackboard.
The creature was there. Motionless. Breathing… and markedly changed.
Since Dean had last seen it, the creature had grown to almost twice its size. It was now larger than a man. Even more disturbingly, it had begun to assume a vaguely human shape, with conical head, torso, and limbs, though each lacked definition; the face was a smooth, featureless lump, the torso flat and undifferentiated, the limbs of uniform thicknesses that terminated in rounded stumps. It gave the impression of an amateur sculptor’s initial attempt to imitate the human form.
As Dean marvelled at it with fascinated horror, he noticed that its head wasn’t as entirely featureless as he’d first thought, and he noticed, on the spot where the mouth would be, a beak-like opening that sucked slowly at the air and emitted the horrible gurgling sound.
The sight repulsed him. Forcing himself to move, keeping the beam of the flashlight trained on it, he took one step towards the creature.
An overpowering urge to turn around and leave seized him, but it wasn’t a fear response. Instead, it was as if some force had reached into his mind to convey a message. Not a message of words but of sensations. It was like an invisible hand were tugging at his arm, urging him back towards the door, and Dean found it hard to resist.
Without realising how, he’d retreated to the door. He couldn’t remember moving back towards it. His body seemed to have obeyed the strange, alien compulsion against his will.
Maybe his subconscious was trying to protect him; maybe some deep-seated survival instinct was taking over and removing him from a perceived threat.
But the creature had shown no signs of attacking him. So why had he retreated?
Deciding to press forward, trying to ignore his racing heart, Dean approached the creature again, the flashlight beam quivering as his hand shook uncontrollably.
He got several steps closer than last time.
The sensation reached into his mind again. As he struggled against it, a foggy whiteness descended over his eyes, and he was walking in a land of swirling mist. He felt weightless. He wondered if he was fainting.
From the mist, an intense light hurtled towards him.
A truck horn blared.
The mist evaporated, and Dean was standing in the road, a milk tanker truck barrelling towards him, the scream of its horn filling his ears, engine brakes shrieking.
Dean flung himself out of the way. As he landed on the tarmac, the truck roared past him, throwing up bits of grit and dust. The red brake lights blazed in the night, and the truck began to slow.
Moving quickly, Dean clambered into his car, which was still parked on the shoulder, started the engine, performed a U-turn, tearing up grass, and drove towards home. He didn’t want to have to explain any of what just happened to the truck driver.
It was only when he was halfway home that he realised he’d left his gear behind. He checked the clock. 8:57. He didn’t have much time.
By a stroke of luck, he reached home five minutes before his parents got back.
When his mum asked why he looked like he’d just run a marathon–he was exhausted and more than a little frightened by his ordeal–he explained it away by saying he’d gone on a run and nearly been hit by a car, which, to be fair, wasn’t far from the truth.
After convincing his parents that he was fine, he went to his room and collapsed on the bed, not bothering to change out of his clothes. He didn’t even have the energy to take his shoes off.
The creature had done something to him. He knew that for a certainty. Somehow, it had influenced his behaviour, even managed to make him walk into the road. Had it intended for him to get hit by the truck, too? Dean hoped not, there was a lot he didn’t know about the creature.
It made him wonder… if it had influenced him so strongly, it was probably exerting its influence on Mark.
Suddenly, Mark’s reluctance to reveal the creature to the world made a lot more sense.
The following Saturday afternoon, Dean called around to Mark’s place. If Dean couldn’t confront the creature head-on, he needed to talk to Mark. He had to find a way to bring him around to his way of thinking while salvaging their friendship.
In the living room, Mark turned to him and said, “Someone broke into the schoolhouse.”
Dean raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a convincing look of surprise. “No shit.”
“Yeah. Found a flashlight and some other stuff lying in the grass. Weird. I don’t think they saw… you know.” Mark squinted at him. “You haven’t told anyone about that, have you?”
“Of course I haven’t,” Dean said, trying to sound outraged. “I said I wouldn’t, remember?”
Appearing to relax, Mark settled into his chair. They were watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on his parents’ TV. Dean wasn’t that engaged in it–he’d never been much of a Star Trek fan–and he had too much on his mind anyway.
“What if your parents find out?” Dean asked.
“They won’t.”
“Where are they, anyway? I haven’t seen them around lately.”
Ignoring the question, Mark shushed him and pointed at the TV. “This is the best part.”
It was clear that Mark wasn’t going to be receptive to what he’d come to say. He decided to power ahead anyway. “I want to talk about the… thing in the schoolhouse.”
Mark stared at the screen, moving colours projecting on his face. “Yeah?”
“We need to do something about it.”
“Like what?”
“Hear me out, okay? That thing’s dangerous. I don’t trust it.”
“Dean, we’ve been over this.”
“I know. But… that thing, it has… some sort of power. A psychic influence or something. It’s bad news, Mark. I know you don’t want to, but we need to… you know, tell someone. Soon. It’s the responsible thing.”
Mark looked at him, his eyes darkening. “How do you know that?”
Knowing he’d said too much, Dean tried to deflect. “If we don’t tell people about it, it could hurt someone.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“It was you who broke into the schoolhouse. The flashlight. The hammer. The garbage bag. All that stuff was yours. You were going to hurt it.”
“Mark―”
“Weren’t you? God, I’m right, aren’t I? You went behind my back.”
Dean couldn’t see any point denying the truth anymore. It was all out in the open now. “Okay, yes, it was me. But I’m trying to protect you, Mark―”
Mark stood. “I don’t need your bloody protection. Get out of my house.”
“Mark―”
“Get out!“
Flinching at the ferocity in his voice, Dean got up and walked out of the house. He didn’t look back as he got into his car and drove away, fighting back tears. He pounded the steering wheel and screamed, the sound reverberating.
After a while, he pulled over to get himself together. What was he going to do? Go home and wonder what to do next? He already knew what to do. He was just too scared to do it.
He’d wasted too much time. He’d let his fear of losing his closest friend distract him from making what he knew was the right decision. If protecting his friend came at the cost of destroying their bond, then he would have to live with that.
Putting the car in gear, he drove back to Mark’s place. He sped up the driveway, losing traction and almost spinning out twice. He had to get there before his determination wore off.
Skidding to a stop, he jumped out of the car and ran for the schoolhouse. He had no weapon to use against it except his bare hands. As he ran, he pulled a rusted steel fence post from the soft soil, the top wrapped in barbed wire, and held it before him like a javelin, hoping to skewer the unearthly thing.
He charged through the door.
He stopped cold.
Mark was there. Naked. In the clutches of the creature. It had its wet, tenebrous arms and legs around him, the flesh seeming to writhe and squirm. Mark was rhythmically thrusting his hips into it, the ridges of his spine undulating through the skin of his back, his head thrown back. Little moans and gasps escaped his mouth as he thrust his pelvis, each thrust accompanied by a wet, sucking squelch, like boots stepping in thick mud. Mark’s thrusting became ever more feverish and insistent as his moans graduated to shouts of unparalleled pleasure, his hair damp with sweat.
Finally, his body shuddered with spasms of release, and he slumped forward against the creature, which cradled him tenderly.
Dean took a backwards step.
His foot struck a desk.
Mark’s head snapped in his direction.
He smiled.
“Stay, Dean,” he said. “It’s good. Come have a try.”
Dean turned and fled the schoolhouse, dropping the cumbersome steel post in the grass. He was halfway to his car when he heard something crashing through the weeds behind him.
A backwards glance revealed Mark charging naked after him, eyes wild.
Barbed wire ensnared Dean’s foot and he fell hard on his face. His head struck a submerged stone with a sickening crunch.
A flash of pain and dazzling light.
Then he knew no more.
Dean awoke to dust and a musty smell. He lay on a hard surface surrounded by shadow, and he was naked. His exposed skin prickled with goosebumps. Spears of light descended through grimy windows.
He heard wet, gurgling breath.
When he tried to move, he found his wrists and ankles were bound with wire.
“Please don’t be mad,” Mark said.
Dean managed to turn his head enough to see Mark squatting beside him in the dark, still naked, hands on his knees like some thin, pale gargoyle made flesh. His eyes gleamed in his head like twin points of light.
“It loves me,” Mark continued, “and I love it. No one has ever loved me the way it loves me. A love like that has to be protected.”
Behind Dean, the sucking, gurgling breath proceeded. He couldn’t move his head enough to see the creature, but he knew it was there.
Waiting.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Mark said. “I only hope you can forgive me.”
“Let me go, Mark.”
Mark shook his head. “Can’t do that. I can’t trust you anymore, Dean. Don’t you see? You’ll only hurt it. You’ll only destroy the love I have.”
“I won’t, I promise. Just let me go. I’ll forget about all this.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
“Please.“
Mark stood, grabbed Dean under the arms, and began dragging him across the floor, towards where the creature lurked in the dark, breathing.
“It must feed, Dean,” Mark said, as if by way of apology. “It must feed to live.”
And suddenly, as he was dragged across the cold, dusty floor of the old schoolhouse, Dean knew what had become of Mark’s parents, and how the creature had grown.
“No part of you will go to waste,” Mark said. “I promise.”
As Dean’s head entered the cold, wet, slurping maw, he screamed, the sound muffled by the dark, fleshy chasm into which he was drawn.
| EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to “Family of Four“ | Proceed to the first Gallery Four: Controllers attraction, “Remy de Montfort of Dubcon Palace“ |