What are you? (Revised)

Wolfs come a-crawling.

 

 

 

 

            The stone is sterile, silent. Rusty azure mingling with cream. I sink my hands into the subtle crevices of rock and haul myself with whitening knuckles towards the next false zenith of this dreaded mountain. It is a bleak spear of sheer stone: colour-leached, night-soaked, stark against the dreaming blue sky and splotches of bone-coloured cloud. I wonder once again why I am still here, clambering doggedly towards a goal offering me little save the shivering, whimpering, keening thing that is my life.

            From time to time, my resolve slackens. What is the point? Death is inevitable, can only be delayed. Chasing me inexorably with sickly yellow claws and pale sunken skin is what feels like a demon loose from hell - and a demon cannot be refused if he quests for your blood. My pace slows to a heaving crawl.  

            Then the beast will, as though he can sense my despairing thoughts, begin his mournful cant - as though urging me on with a savage glee, wishing to chase me down like the animal I am rather than simply allow me to succumb. My pace will quicken and my hands will once again be scrabbling jaggedly, frantically, feverishly  with bones writhing beneath the icy cracked surface that is my skin. I do not own my body - what has kept natural selection from wheedling out the human race for generations has taken over, and it insists that I cannot die - yet.

            I haul myself over and onto a ledge. All around in a dizzying panorama is the mountain range - humping slouches of stone rising and falling, rising and falling, like a heart-monitor raggedly trying to keep up with the juddering heartbeat of a dying man. Winds screams in anguish. I feel as though I have swallowed a sticky mound of sheared ice. Another surge of defiance borne from the inherent need to live washes the leaden sensation from my limbs and I begin to walk towards what looks like a cave.

            Perhaps this shall lead me through the mountainside and to freedom. My movements are stooped and shuffling - the lope of a man who wishes to merely lie down and allow death to claim them. I duck into the cave and begin to jog, head bowed low to avoid the uneven lurching of the silver-cobalt roof illuminated only meagrely by the slanting daylight.

            I can hear the wicked click as the grotesque monster follows me, claws being inserted into the very same handholds I used seconds before. I can hear the crackling ripple of his flesh as it ripples and changes and mutates. The hastened movements reek of the creature's bloodlust - desperate to find me, tear me apart and leave me steaming. I plunge deeper into the thick blackness - darkness holding no terror for me anymore.

            "Maybe they won't be able to see me," I say involuntarily as I am cocooned in the blessed absence of any light, any sight, anything. My voice is dream-like and false. It doesn't feel like the strangely pitched syllables rolling past my teeth are mine because I don't recall making a conscious decision to say them. I almost laugh. I believe I am going insane. I keep going.

            Like a faulty tape my brain begins to - for the tenth, hundredth, thousandth time - replay the events of hours ago when there was not one but four. I try to stop it but I can't and I know I can't, because I've tried, because I've tried so many times but it just keeps happening again and again and again--

            Night time, as it always is when hell emerges onto the planes of earth. Four sit round the whipping blaze of a campfire beating the night away with smoking tendrils, beneath galaxies that dance a slow dance and stars that spew a cold light. Conversation bubbles, streams. Teasing laughs occasionally colour the atmosphere in a puny attempt to mask the sensation of fear, tightening around guts and coiling around muscles. To a trained ear, it would be clear that the laughter bordered on hysterical.

            But - as we all kept telling ourselves - it's silly, right? To fear... nothing? To hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing and yet the goose-flesh keeps marching in fierce lines up your splotchy skin? There was, surely, nothing around to fear - but the fear was there all the same, like the unwanted thoughts that sulk sullenly beneath your happiness at all times, waiting until they can leap up and swallow it and replace it with drenching cold misery.

            There was something, though.

            Of course.

            There always is.

            All along, watching with eyes the colour of hot murder, hot blood, freshly hewn and weeping.

            Hate incarnate - the beast that lurks in the folds of the mountains, in the clots of shadow, waiting to leap out and feast and feast and feast. The psychological terror in instils within you stews and brews with each passing metre until the time is just right to break all of you into pieces and allow all of it to soak the stony floor.

            The terrifying thing was, it wasn't a solid foe that obeyed the rules of the land that stood, drooling, in the wet patch of blackness just out of reach of the ruddy glow, craving flesh like a zombie (only this monster was worse because you know a zombie when you see one). It was some disturbing merging of man and wolf - not your standard werewolf, oh no - it was like one of those glitches you get in video games, where the image suddenly jerks and twists and fizzle.

            Skins sallow, veins varicose. A human boy, sickle-grin splitting his face. Fur mangy, claws stained. A wolf, smiling with equal vigour. The tortured image writhes and shakes and shivers from wolf to man, man to wolf - endlessly, eternally. I remember staring, wondering at this beast as it first emerged - the curious part of me musing upon what it was - wolf or man, man or wolf? A putrid combination of both?

            Of course, after you witness one of them tear the belly of your friend asunder, you stop caring.

            It's that final image, that freeze-frame, that burns my mind so as I run with a chest so cold with fear it feels as though I may freeze. Click. Click. Click. The monster has entered the cave. Suddenly I keel over and brace my hand against an upthrust of rock, retching up nothing but scorching spittle. But I don't have time to recover because click, click, click, click. That scream, that scream that gushes through the cave behind me like an underground river and envelops me makes me scream as well - a sound that crackles away at the end as it all becomes too much for my heaving lungs, my fluttering heart, my keening limbs, my tattered voice box.

            Morbidly, I figure this will be a great story to tell the wife and kids when I return home.

            Right, left, right left.

            Don't stop to hear that noise of impending doom - the demon as it rushes towards you, hot on your heals.

            Left, left, right, left.

            Don't stop to feel that breath on your legs like a furnace coughing, coughing.

            Right--

            My ankle catches on a shaft of drunkenly sprouting rock - blood drools and spurts, and the monster behind me unhinges its jaw to let out a ghoulish wail. There isn't time to experience the pain because the furiously stabbing lance of my terror demands to be heard.

            Teeth snap behind me - both the succinct click of flat human teeth and the crunch of a wolf's canines. I yelp and leap nimbly away - rocketing down the corridor with inhuman speed. My mind is saturated with terror and my brain is threatening to shut down if it doesn't get a break from all of this, rendering my attempts to survive even more useless.

            But then my ankle - ever a traitor - catches again and twists. I gurgle a scream and collapse. Body draped over the jagged surface like a blanket - a surface so jagged it breaks my flimsy skin.

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

            "What are you?" I whisper.

           

           

           

           

             

            

Author's Note

A revised version of 'What are you?', improved quite a lot. Hope you enjoy! Reviews are always appreciated c: