What are you?

Wolf-man, man-wolf - does it matter? Not when you can hear them coming.

What are you?

Horror Short

UNEDITED

 

 

            The stone is sterile, silent. I sink my hands into the subtle crevices and haul myself with steadily whitening knuckles towards the zenith of the mountain. It is a bleak spear of sheer stone, colour-leached, night-soaked, grey and stark against the dreaming blue and splotches of bone-coloured cloud. I wonder once again why I am here - clambering doggedly towards a goal offering me little gain save the shivering thing that is my life, and feel my resolve slacken. But the wavering howl of a wolf once again morphs it into steel, and my pace quickens. Death is not an option - yet.

            My vision appears to have receded - contracting until the sprawling humps and slouches of stones have vanished, until all I can see is the pale flesh of my hands and the bones rippling beneath as they scrabble jaggedly, frantically, feverishly. The sky never moves and the rock is unpleasantly similar with each panting metre, seemingly never changing. It depresses me.

            I haul myself over a lip and onto a ledge. Wind screams like a dead/dying man. I glance around for somewhere else to go and hide until the pack baying for my blood slinks away for easier prey. A surge of defiance washes the leaden sensation from my exhausted limbs and my eyes settle upon a strange, incongruous blot of unyielding black lurking against the mountain's flank - I hasten towards it with the odd, shuffling lope of someone who wishes to merely lie down and allow sleep or death to claim them.

            A cave?

            It is! It's a cave!

            I can hear the click as these strange malformed dog-wolf-hound-humans press their wicked claws into nooks and crannies, hear the cracking ripple of their inconstant bodies as they change from naked human to starving animal - desperate to find me, see me, kill me. My initial excitement ebbs as I realise the idiocy of my reaction - how is a cave going to help me in this situation?  I don't know, I don't know, my mind pleads with me to get the hell away from these monsters and their childish whines, their savage screams. I obey and run to the hole.

            I enter the hole.

            "Maybe they won't be able to see me?" I say, involuntarily. My voice is dream-like and false. It doesn't feel like the high-pitched syllables rolling past my teeth are mine because I don't recall making a constant decision to say them. Useless! Useless! These thoughts are useless! I plunge into blackness and the coin of light behind me reluctantly begins to dwindle.

            Like a faulty tape my brain begins to replay the moment I first saw them whilst my feet permeate the silence with harsh slappings.

            It was night - as it always is when hell emerges onto the planes of earth. I was (was. they're all dead now. i'm alone i'm alone) part of a party of mountain-climbers, clustered around a campfire beneath the slowly rotating galaxies and the mocking starlight they spewed. Conversation bubbled and streamed steadily, teasing laughs occasionally colouring the atmosphere in a puny, futile attempt to cover the strange sensation of fear, tightening around guts and coiling around muscles. The laughter borders on hysterical.

            But it was silly, right? To fear nothing? To hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing but the goose-flesh as it marches in fierce lines up your splotchy skin? Nothing was there to fear, all knew - but it was there all the same, like the unwanted thoughts that sulk sullenly beneath happiness, awaiting the time where they can swallow it whole and drench you in misery.

            But there was something there, of course.

            There always is.

            All along, watching with eyes the colour of hot murder, hot blood.

            Red like a freshly hewn wound as it weeps.

           The terrifying thing was, it wasn't a solid foe that made sense of any kind that stood drooling in the darkness. The first lumbering steps they took from their hiding places could tell you that. Transforming the choking, all-swallowing dread in the chests of the climbers into a swelling pond of ice-cold fear they watched - pitiless, craving flesh like zombies only worse because you know a zombie when you see one.

            This wasn't anything specific at all.

            It seemed to be a wolf - which was frightening enough, what with the glittering golden of their eyes as they size you up - a 50/50 chance of whether they lunge for the quivering windpipe in your throat or turn tail and flee. But it also was not a wolf. It was a person. A person with claws and a tail - or a wolf with a face and hands? It was impossible, impossible, impossible to tell. Strange sunken skin with veins like fat worms - mangy fur settling like a mantle? Which is it? What are you?

            After you witness one of them tear the belly of your friend asunder, and scoop the entrails into their vast teeth-jungle of a maw/between their cherry red lips, you stopped caring.

            That image was burned into my retinas as I ducked and weaved between the looming stalagmites and stalactites, a rusty cobalt in the meagre slanting light. Behind me, I could hear the click, click, click. The scream that poured like a river from the mouth of the monsters engulfed me and I screamed myself - a sound that crackled away at the end as it became too much for my heaving lungs and fluttering heart and keening limbs and tattered voice box.

            In a detached way, I figured this would be a great story to tell my husband and children once I got home.

            How morbid.

            Doesn't matter, doesn't matter - keep running!

            I did keep running, but it was never going to be enough, was it?

            Right, left, right left - don't stop to wonder about what is at the other side or what is behind you.

            Two rights! Two lefts! My ankle catches on a shaft of rock lurching drunkenly from beneath my feet. Hot blood gushes but the pain isn't there just yet because the furiously stabbing lance of my terror demands to be heard.

            Teeth snap together behind me with dreadful finality, and I nimbly leap away with a yelp echoing that of the pack flowing behind me. Tails whisper on walls and nails scrape - a horrible, horrifyingly horrendous sound that makes me want to stop running and allow them to kill me. The fear feels like it is going to just overwhelm me, my brain is protesting that it is too far saturated to function anymore and is simply going to shut down very soon anyway.

            My ankle - ever a traitor - catches again and twists. I collapse and my entire body drapes over the uneven, sinking, rising surface that pokes and sometimes breaks my flimsy skin.

            I'm reminded just how flimsy when the wolves come-a-crawling.

            "What are you?" I whisper.

Author's Note

Inspired by the buttload of steven king i have been murdering my eyes with these past few days! this is entirely unedited - just a kind of sprawling mess i did for fun but i hope you enjoy it anyway!!