Prison Mountain
By Scott Hilkene
Copyright 2013 Scott Hilkene
License Notes
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Many of us resolved the terror we faced as a manifestation of our sins, but willing to die or not, fear eventually caught up with everyone. Some we even called friend, which was so rare especially when life held such contempt for humans, even by other humans. One may think that an evil so dreadful, when dropped onto the Earth without warning, would unite us. Unfortunately, the inescapable truth is, survival will always be egocentric. But in that war, the night belonged to them and we were their quarry. The only offense was escape. The only defense was escape. And for those who stood with me that night, none were prepared for the ferocity in which they came.
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That evening's initial harrowing screams chilled me to the soul. Always had. The autumn mist seeped into the tunnels making the dim incandescent lights blinding. Jolting something within my memory from long ago, I had known that night was no different than any other. I lived and breathed those dark, dreary tunnels for three desperate years, long enough for the earth and sweat to penetrate me completely. All of my senses reminded me with a force what the Earth meant to us all. It was what we fought for and impelled me to action.
A crude map of the tunnels bore the signs of abuse, but was useful enough to address tonight's plans with the other clan leaders. The small cramped caverns under the town where our meager group led our resistance, was large enough for myself and three other clan leaders to meet each night. Fear seeped from them as any sheep before a wolf.
A distant shriek from a woman came muffled through the tunnel. As I regarded the eyes of the other leaders around me, fear took over completely as it always did. Everyone initially scattered through the tunnels in groups according to plan. Then, at some point, all was abandoned. Almost thirty of us were without communication, running like rats in a maze of dark tunnels and occasionally crossing paths with someone. That evil could not penetrate the earth in most places, so our tunnels forced them to search for us. On the surface, it was shooting fish in a barrel and they never left bodies to weep over.
That night, those evil spirits were more aggressive than ever. Instead of the usual tact of separating us from the herd where fear can be instituted more deeply, people were snapped up within the dark and phased back to whatever place they came. That was never seen before. We had always thought our fear somehow fed them, or made us more desirable, but it did not matter that night. The screams we all became accustomed took a new twist. Pleas for help and mercy were gone. Only the cries of raw fright signaled another was about to be taken. Hot fear filled the tunnels making the air too thick to breathe. Familiar sounds of dirt being thrown, rocks hitting rocks roughly or shuffling feet pounding the earth was not there. As I ran with two fistfuls of dirt I found myself running towards whatever sounds I could hear, a compulsive need that filled me to find answers.
Drawn to the place for some unknown reason, I found myself in a system of tunnels near my old home, from which we were never far. That was my first tunnel, the one I used so long ago when we first discovered the secrets of using earth to slow them down. The area was widened to the size of a large room without supports for the ceiling. The noise in several tunnels around the perimeter grew to a thunderous howl in the black as everyone we started with was about to flood into the cavern.
Seconds later, people were flowing out of tunnels, screaming around me, but I could not move. Frozen with awe at the change in our own behavior, shocked into immobility from people actually being herded toward me, the evil jackals stopped phasing and gave chase on foot as my kin began to be picked off one by one. I have seen the abduction before, but there was no show of intimidation or awareness that I watching. Recognizing I had not been touched, it dawned on me I needed to do something.
“Follow me!” I yelled and made a motion for the one tunnel I knew led up to my old house. It was a death trap, but then so were the tunnels.
That moment, everything went strange. The air was suddenly dry and electric. From the flashlights illuminating parts of the tunnel from their new positions on the ground, people were illuminated, showing me how the tall, gray skinned beings phased us out of existence. Then, an immediate silence as though a switch turned off, the only sound was a few flashlights skimming across the dirt floor. Realizing the horrible truth before I could even pull my own flashlight from my pocket, I backed up against a wall of dirt and rock behind me, listening for something that was no longer there. Everyone was gone except a few of the evil spirits, just standing there facing me with the chaos of screaming people still burning in my head.
“Mitchel! Jeremy!”
My hands barely held on to the silver flashlight as I swept the earthen walls and ground fiercely, desperate to find anyone, even a body I could weep over. I was alone. The silence overtook me at the loss of so many people at once, tough people who had lived through many nights without giving into the fear. Something had changed.
Silence still loomed, a dark plague about to swallow me. My mind retracted for a moment, entrenched in a small fantasy that was misplaced and foreign. I knew where I was, but the darkness was gone. My father and brother waited for me in our house as the bright sun and smell of fresh-mowed grass moved me forward. Allowing myself to believe, just for a moment, and I heard the door open as my father's voice called.
Startled awake at the realization of this new horror that turned my spirit black, my mind retreated from the lie so I could move, dismantling a reality that immobilized me, or was it my own mind? Planted to the rock beneath me, I tried to run to the tunnel that led to my house above, but it was slow as a dream. I knew I could make it because each forward movement was difficult, not impossible.
Reaching the mouth of the tunnel, the space only allowed me to crawl up. The garage where the tunnel emerged smelled so familiar and of a different time. The silence was broken by something behind me. Closer it came and damn if my body could not move any faster. Like a child, fear overtook me and I knew this was how they finally took their prey. Fear ridden and helpless, but I have seen all forms of their attacks and this was very different. I could see them behind me, swarming at the opening on the other end with heads of what could have been jackals and sleek, gray bodies like powerful, but upright canines. A shimmering cloth of black draped their shoulders and a long, flowing headpiece of the same material gave them extra height. I made sure to kick dirt down the tunnel.
I finally trudged up to the back door of the garage and out behind the house. Where the backyard had been, there was a high, narrow cliff with a path to walk along the edge of the house, none of which I remember the last time I visited here so long ago. Those earthquakes that started last year were not just our imagination. The night had taken hold on the sky and the air was still. She was there, at the end of the path on the cliff. She was right there.
There was a mass-less entity of darkness and sorrow enthralled in a creature without form. Liquid smoke and shadow, blackness embodied, and demonic hell beyond the point of alien was before me. My legs were planted in place again, but it was not my fear that kept me there. I had never been so out of control and so close with death. If the Grim Reaper had a mother, she would be Snow White compared to her.
Then, very slowly, as her form kept moving and changing, an evil darkness stretching out like streams of airy fabric, I could see beyond the shadowy glimpses of flesh. It could have been my imagination, but a sense of calm started to course through me. There was nothing to be calm about, yet I found some peace within myself. Something was receding away, washing over me like cooling water, cleansing me from fear. In spite of the deadly creature present, it wa
s all okay and I was fine. Everything was meant to be this way. I saw a great mountain, blue sky, and a vast ocean. My breathing was steady.
I could not remember when happiness swept over me in such waves. Nothing was ever this good, not the warmth of another or the promise of a normal life. Any fantasy paled in comparison with how blissful my new reality was. Slowly, everything else did not matter except a small part of me still tried to compare this new feeling to something I had felt before; a compulsiveness to find the answers. Images flowed from the deepest recess of my memories, but something kept me looking over my shoulder, expecting to see what was back there. It almost did not matter. I remembered the reason I was there. My family, father and brother, taken by this evil plague and the Earth, an innocent bystander that was once beautiful were the reasons I fought and the need to keep fighting.
Crashing to the ground at the guilt of forgetting myself, the blissful feeling left me and turned to rage, a searing and vengeful rage that seeped into every crevice of my being. That rage was not only my own and upon opening my eyes again, I was still unable to move my feet from the ground under. Trying to pull free, tears ran down my cheeks as I was filled with dread that nothing could ever stop the dark evil from rising to wipe out the planet of every last person.
A cold, evil hissing came dead-on in front of me. Working its way into slurring as a record playing backwards, then finally into cohesive English, “... spending a lifetime with me be that bad? Imagine anything and you would have it.”
I did not respond. Speaking was not the problem, but it was clear she was the mastermind of this three year invasion. Many things, connections of crazy conspiracies, biblical world ending enormities, even paranoid issues relating to the coffee I had an hour ago crept up and associated this world's fate with this one creature in front of me. She was in my mind permanently. Her evil face with a pale skin, all white eyes, a twisted high smile, and long black windblown hair was a venomous beauty that should not have been allowed.
“It is good that you see. It makes our time so much easier. I pull you out from the dark and all your fear is but a memory. Come to my light and be set free.”
“No!”
Shaking against the forces that held me in place, I was so scared of the end, but welcomed it the same. Anything else including a death twice over would be better and I would resist until whatever end.
“This is not for you to decide alone, none of it is. This is our world now, mine and yours, and I need your help to perfect it.” She bowed her head low as she said this, but this more than her words, infuriated me.
“It was fine before you came.”
“We will not agree. You will come to see the reason we all exist in this universe. Humans shall inherit the soil as spirits and I shall inherit the Earth. What was shall never be again, but I will always be and you are now mine. Join with me and see with new eyes.”
Everything around me moved weirdly, sliding away and blurring my vision. Disorientated, I could see only the dark creature before me fall out of view as I was pushed back through the doorway, through the garage, and down the tunnel again. Then, slamming back first into the wall, my body becoming one with the dirt, I was unable to move. There I stood in the dark waiting, listening for sounds of her next move.
Days passed, or what seemed like days. She spoke with me sometimes and it filled me with sustenance. I needed no food, nor water, only her voice and presence kept me alive. Each time she spoke it filled me with dark, but good feelings. Wrapping me in her arms to keep me, she also gave me a state of consciousness to wonder; my new prison. Persuading and certain in an attempt to show true evil was not about darkness, but what one could accomplish alone against all others.
Eventually, weakness took hold of me, a guilt that I still bleed. When she finally proposed to be as one, I hardly could deny considering my position. Nothing could be found to push me away from these new emotions, an alternate reality where I was a prisoner, alone with my thoughts, but could conjure any material thing. I could have told myself no, that it was all wrong and nothing could make me do what this creature of evil wanted. But it was a lie. Fighting hard one last time, regretful of the nourishment I received, she showed me her intentions over time, a sickening truth she believed with all of herself. And then the creature herself somehow became rock and earth, imprisoning me with demonic twists of reality, tethering me to her will. It was a dream that never ended, taking me to the edge of my mind and diving off, infinitely.
~