The Red Men Cometh (Draft I)

An ordinary man wandering through life looking for meaning finds an unexpected answer that leads him down a path that may make or break his existence as well as shattering everything he has ever known

The Red Men Cometh

By Casey Rae Martin

I imagine few people have seen what I have. And even fewer that have retained some sort of mental stability, for the events that have led me up to this point are hardly imaginable. Even now what I am going to tell you will be hard to swallow. Many of those that will hear or read my words will dismiss it simply as the ravings of a purely lunatic mind. I can assure you that there are things that we cannot even begin to understand about the place in which we live, things far beyond any Homo sapien’s mental capacity. Mankind has spent thousands of years trying to solve the secrets of his existence and always came out short. It is because of this that he pushes forward with science, philosophy, and so forth in order to penetrate the core of his being; the very fabric of his ragged and so often wasted mortality. As I lean forward weakly, spasmodically quivering in the half-madness of what I now understand to be true, I gaze down at my cold and blood-smeared gun and contemplate my oblivion or other unbelievable alternative.

It began when I left Kansas with my wife and newborn baby girl about sometime in mid-May. We were all more than glad to leave Kansas, the place is full of brainwashed farmers and bored criminals. Living there for me was like renting an outdoor office in an industrialized and inorganic profit machine painted to look like corn fields. The sunsets and sunrises were my only solace. I’ve been asked before why someone like myself would even choose to live there given that I despised it so much. I always tell them the same thing. “I never chose anything.”

I was born Laurence Xavier L’amour. I grew up in Colorado on the outskirts of Denver. My father always told me that even in existence we cast a shadow and that language is a tool and not a toy or a weapon. My parents divorced when I was young and I was forced to lived self-sufficiently on a farm. I was always fascinated by everything around me; the good and the bad. Later it became the just and the unjust and now I only see wise and unwise. I ended up with a degree double majoring in engineering and horticulture. I married before I moved to Wyoming and had a daughter. Beautiful little pearl, she is as I remember her. I found it difficult to love but felt it necessary to marry. My wife was sweet and beautiful but I never understood marriage or love or . . . people. I hated just about everyone growing up and found I was at my best when I was alone. Too many these days spend their time indulging and wasting; growing fatter and fatter until they resemble pathetic beasts with blubber that works incorrectly making them sweat profusely. Social interaction as far as I was concerned was avoided at all costs. Luckily, I had found someone that shared the same sort of philosophies that I had regarding mankind and our wasteful nature. We often shared discussions on interests and ordinary things but I’m not really sure if we were romantically in love or just simply coexisting peacefully.

We moved to Wyoming where I found a managerial position in a self-proclaimed “Eco-Friendly” coal mine called Black Lantern somewhere between Rawlins and Rock Springs, Wyoming. They were new and small as was their budget so their practices seemed old fashioned with pick-axes and other reusable old mining equipment. My wife, my baby and I moved into a very small town called Whipoorwill about thirty miles southwest of Rawlins and Sinclair. The town was mainly made up of houses providing for the miners; a relatively close commute of thirty-five miles. Whipoorwill was an eerily beautiful place. The scenery was surrounded by rocky crags that were hues of brown, yellow, orange, and red painted by time and untouched by man contrasting my origins growing up in the outskirts of Denver where beautiful landscapes were blocked with a thick polluted haze along with skyscrapers. The people of Wipoorwill were quiet enough and there didn’t seem to be any signs of corporate infestation. My wife and I were finally able to start the life that we spoke of for so long.

I worked in a section named “The Crack”. Aptly named for it was close to a fault line that’s been inactive for thousands of years. My boss, Gordon Foster, had a seismometer put up for safety precautions. “Safety is highest priority!” Gordon says all the time which is a philosophy that I always reiterate to my handful of twenty-three some odd workers. I began my days work in our section some fifty feet or more beneath the Earth’s surface closest to Bernard (an entry level miner) who was just out of sight around a blind corner leaving me to work alone.

I began as I normally do; unloading my necessary tools from our main cart and keeping smaller ones on my belt for quick access. I adjusted my headlamp a bit and began working. Mining is backbreaking work that really takes a toll on the body which is why it is so important to pace oneself. After tediously removing lump after lump of coal, and filling five carts of coal between myself and Bernard, I struck something that nearly made my axe fly from my hands from the anticipation of more coal. It whirred with a long vibration and I felt it throughout my arm as it rang. My arm from wrist to shoulder went stiff as the vibration that was strong enough for rock and metal shook my bones. I winced and regained composure and then went back to work.

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the object that I had recently struck was incredibly solid. I began to carefully chip around it, trying not to be too speculative. When mining it is important to know what other mineral deposits might be in the area. From the look of this thing that I had found it looked like obsidian but was hard enough to be granite of some kind. Unfortunately, I know more about the nature of plants than I do earth. After only a couple of close calls I was able to loosen the thing. It was orb shaped; blacker than any shade I have ever seen and perfectly spherical. It was roughly the size of a cantaloupe. What it was I could not know. I was around fifty feet underground, so if this was a man-made artifact there must have been some devastation to the area which covered it up. I decided then to keep it secret and hastily tossed the thing in the cart and covered it with more coal. I wiped the sweat from my brow and went back to work.

I was anxious to see if I had only tipped the iceberg on my curiosity. I began picking again only to reveal something that looked like blackened petrified wood and a substantial amount of black clods that looked like ordinary black dirt, but were reminiscent of ashes from a campfire. Rapidly, I covered up the miniature landslide with more coal as I had already emptied my previous spoils to cover up my first discovery. Just then, a voice came over our two-way radios from Gordon letting us know that it was quitting time. I wiped sweat from my forehead again and panicked as I tried to figure a way to conceal my findings until the next day when I would return.

“Men!” I announced, “Remember your positions! Tomorrow we will continue in the same spot! That way we stay familiar with our surroundings! Stay with your buddy and don’t forget your escape routes!” On my way back up out of the mine I ran into my boss, Gordon Foster.

“Hey there, Lawrence!” Gordon greeted me while clocking out.

“Oh. Hi, Gordon.” I replied hesitantly; my mind elsewhere.

“How was the dig today?”

I hesitated and then the words came awkwardly, “Were flound coal.”

It may have been from dehydration or malnutrition or even the obvious fact that I was hiding something from my boss but after replying “were flound coal,” I was immediately embarrassed and shook my head and cleared my throat.

“What’s the matter, mah boy? Ya ain’t hidin’ anything from me, are ya? Find any dinosaur bones down there that yer not tellin’ me about?” He hitched up his pants around his round belly and then he paused with an observational and straight faced stare.

I was caught off guard again and hesitated. . .

“Ah! Ha-ha-haaaa!” Gordon bellowed laughing from his gut and then choking behind his long mustache looking like an upset walrus. “I’m only raggin’ yer chain,” he chuckled again. “Git on home, now and eat sumthin’. You look like you were born in these here caves.” 

Gordon turned and began “raggin’” other people’s “chains”. I tightened my lips and swallowed my frustration with a long and heavy sigh and walked anxiously to my car with the thing hidden in the bottom of my work duffel bag.

The ride home was pleasant enough. I made it back to Whipoorwill before the sun set and had a very pleasant dinner with my wife and daughter. Before I reached home, however, I pulled off the interstate to examine more carefully the thing that I had quickly buried in my work bag. I pulled it out after rummaging through what tools and logbooks that were covering it. As I cradled it away from my bag, I noticed its weight and hadn’t realized before now how light it was for such a hard and observably dense object. Upon rotating it, not a single flaw could be seen. It was perfectly spherical and revealed a metallic gloss after wiping away what appeared to be centuries of debris (some of which had to be chiseled away). I could not figure where the thing could have come from and for a moment my mind ventured toward a notion of extraterrestrial origins. I kept all theories in mind and was sure not to make anything of it at the time being. I would find more out about it the following day when I returned to the dig.

I was the first one into the mine ahead of my crew which I still could not remember the exact number of. Most of them remembered where they were working, though it worked out fine because the ones that did not remember were not as far into our section as I was. Nothing had changed since I had been back. I almost expected the black earth that I uncovered to be exposed because it was soft and the pile I left atop of it may have slid around it. I excitedly began digging again.

After around two hours of work I had loosened much of the coal around the top of where I had found the thing. From there, I began to work down on top of the spot. It was another couple of hours before I began to unearth something else even more strange than the first day. I stumbled on the beginning of my obsession that seemed to be mutating beyond my control with every hour. The coal seemed softer than before as I anticipated what was behind it. Instead of digging with the desire of the ordinary black ore, I began to dig past it with a new reward in mind. This time, instead of a sharp pain that reverberated through my bones, I overshot my blow and broke into something hollow, hued in a dull yellow with a tint of brown. It looked as though it could have once been white. What I had found did not appear to be any kind of rock or mineral. It almost looked like it was of organic origin. I had to be careful not to completely destroy this thing so I decided to chisel around whatever it was.

I began to see the new object take shape though I had broken most of it. It was so delicate. From the spot that I had penetrated I was able to uncover some surrounding features. It was definitely a skeleton of some kind. The spot that I had previously struck was rounded and elongated a bit. I noticed that the black earth that I had uncovered the day before had been caked on to the area around the hollow and elongated section. I began to break it away. My heart stopped. Shockingly, I realized that I was staring into the hollowed out sockets of a human skeleton. It may have been primitive but it was definitely human, only it was scaled as almost, (to my approximations), one point five times that of the normal scale of a man. My mind was swimming. It was in that moment that I could not begin to describe the changes that came over me. It was almost as if. . . No. To me in that moment it was true; the thing that came over me. After my eyes met with those hollow sockets, my body stiffened uncontrollably and I was frozen in silent gaze from mortal eyes peering through the stare of the dead. I felt a cloudiness in my mind; a slow swirl of a wickedness and profanity that made that instant almost stop completely and yet last forever. I felt madness coming over me as the piercing horror seemed to plant something ancient, cryptic, and ghastly inside my mind; a disturbing seed most foul. I knew not what it was. I found myself thirsting for devastation and carnage like an unknown withdrawal from a sadistic occult. I inhaled deeply and bit my lip as I gripped my pick-axe and indulged in the vicious curse that had come over me. I began to violently thrash and tear away at the skeleton. With each blow, I lost no strength. I powered through it like a freight train broken free of its cargo, roaring through a gorge at tremendous speeds; blowing its whistle harder and harder as it rushes to its inevitable doom. I stared down at my destructive prize behind harsh, heavy, and wheezing respiration. The bones were indistinguishable now from the rest of the black earth besides some teeth and sinews of fabric from whatever the being was wearing when it died. I reached down and started moving the coal into the cart. Bernard stared at me with silent, puzzled annoyance. I said nothing. I returned to the black earth around the corner from the mine cart and noticed something gleaming amongst the blackness. Strange black orbs about the size of pearls were mixed in with the earth. There must have been twenty-five or so of them. I picked them all up and dropped them into my pocket. They looked to be the same material as the thing that I had found the day before.

“What could they be?”I thought.

I finished the day’s work and went home. From the moment that I had found the large human-like skeleton with elongated head, I was increasingly uneasy to a degree of nausea. I felt like I had eaten something awful while at work and when I clocked out and headed for my car I began severely sweating. While driving I was irrationally nervous and shaky. I could not explain it at the time but now. . . Now I know why. Everything has come together and in doing so has inevitably simultaneously fallen apart. It was all about to be explained.

I arrived home and had a seemingly normal night with my family though I still intense nausea. I climbed into bed after removing my clothes. The small marble-like stones remained in my pocket on the floor. I instantly felt a little better to be in a safe and comfortable place wrapped in warmth and free from work related stress. My eyes were heavy like drawbridges half-dropped. I gave in to slumber and fell into madness.

My nightmare came furious and with ineffable malevolence. Out from a black abyss came a red skinned man; thin and gaunt with fully black eyes. Behind him swirled red and black flames that burned with intense decibel volume. I was trapped and could not awaken. I was shackled to my nightmare by some strange and venomous force and though my eyes were closed I was forced to witness unspeakable horror. The Red Man came forward wearing a long crimson robe that seemed to be dyed and still dripping with blood along with his face. He stepped slowly forward never pausing between steps and slowly began to open his mouth. I could smell it, taste it. The horror! The blood and the earth and the ashes! The resolution of my sight revealed to me new and unspeakable clarity. I was granted access to heightened senses; everything I felt, touched, tasted, smelled, saw, and heard though I could not speak nor move. The Red Man faced me with mouth agape and jaw dropping further like it had been unhinged like a snake. His tongue was split and it hung loose from his mouth and moved as if a separate organism. The Red Man began to speak in a booming voice that would have made my ears bleed had it not been in my head. “YOU!” His voice bellowed like an air horn and rumbled like an earthquake. “You foul narcotic of the cosmos! PARASITE! POISON!” His voice rang between words. The voice came on like multiple voices of various pitches both infinitely high and low in frequency all exploding at once with dexterity and diction. The Red Man raised one cloaked arm and held, in one hand with clawed nails that were filed primitively, the thing. It was the black orb that I had found the first day. His second hand raised and he revealed a handful of the same black marbles. Eyes glowing red now, he turned his gaunt and long head back and piercing light shot from him into the black abyss above. There came a moving picture in view of a meteor with several smaller ones following it and crashing to Earth. I quickly realized that these must be the things. The next series of moving pictures displayed a tribe of men discovering them and worshipping them with sacrifice and blood bathing. One man took up his clothing and dyed them in the blood of one man, then wore them. Behind him in the distance the ground gave open and strange things began to emerge. They were only silhouettes but they resembled spiders with many more legs and had wide and bulging centers. At the bottom of their center appeared to be long loose appendages like tentacles but one could not be sure. They scurried incredibly fast like crabs though they were enormous. It was like to them, our laws of physics did not apply. This scene was replaced by one of the men coming into contact with one of them. The spider thing drove one of its dangling appendages into the man and this scene was replaced.

The new scene depicted vividly the anatomical position of one of the tribesmen; naked with palms outward. He began to transform slowly. The top of his head elongated backwards, his jaw dropped and unhinged like a snake, his tongue grew horrifically longer like one of the spider thing’s appendages, his arms grew longer, He gained multiple joints in his legs, arms, and digits that allowed them all to move in all directions, and he gained a second large rounded mouth on his chest full with rows of jagged teeth. Wings pierced out through his back like a locusts. I wanted to shriek in ineffable horror and bash my brains out to escape from it all but remained fettered to my terror.

I understood it all now. The black stones from above, the horrible blasphemies from below, the telepathic communication, and the transfiguration. There were too many unanswered questions with knowingly malevolent answers. The last thing that I remember about my nightmare was the Red Man standing before me just as he had, only he closed his gaping mouth after retracting his tongue, closed his eyes, and smiled one enormous smile that chilled me to the bone as it stretched literally ear to ear with black and yellow teach that shone like unrefined and ordinary stones.

With a flash I was awake and standing in the hallway outside my bedroom with a gun in my hands; covered in blood. I was trembling horribly, though I felt strong and somehow motivated to walk outside. I refused my strange instinct and examined the house around me. I didn’t want my family to see me with a gun in my hands and the look of shock upon my face. “

Why do I have a gun? I must have sleepwalked?” I then remembered my horrific dream and terror struck me. “Oh no. . . Oh, Jesus, why?” I quickly forgot the irony of God and Jesus in what was going on around me and walked slowly upstairs holding onto the possibility that they just might be sleeping. I slowly shuffled up the stairs, following a blood trail along the wall made by what I assumed to be my own hand. There was a portrait that had fallen outside my room; glass shattered in large chunks. I walked into the room and fumbled for the light switch. It smelled like a deli in a bad neighborhood. Click.

What sort of beast had torn through this room and left such devastation? Furniture reduced to splinters, clothes ripped up and flung around the room, and a portrait of familiar faces lay shredded and drenched in blood on the floor. The sheets of the bed were a mess of mangled flesh, blood, and various organs. It looked like my wife and daughter (Oh the horror!) had been eviscerated brutally by hand. Everything horrifically stained in death. I couldn’t be there anymore amongst the massacred remains of what used to be my wife and child. My sweet, soft little pearl . . . A stream of tears parted the crusted blood on my face as I shuffled awkwardly out with madness bred melancholy and cold sweat. I looked around again shaking with jerks and twitches. I felt myself slowly fading. I could hear the wi-poor-wills singing their song like a multiple part round of laments as I fell to the ground.

I awoke and the sun was high. I rose slowly with eerie strength that I consciously wanted to refuse but could not. I went outside to my car, put my gun down, started the ignition, and drove. To where? I didn’t know. All I knew was that my life was over. I just needed to drive and experience for some time in my life a little freedom. So I drove. And I drove until the sun set again and it became black just like it had always done. That was the only truth anymore. I entered my thoughts cautiously,

“The sun rises and it sets. I know that. I’m driving and I know that too. My family is dead. I’m in Wyoming. I hear the wi-poor-wills. . .” My mind went blank as I drove and I had no sense of time anymore. I looked down at the gun in the passenger’s seat. I knew it to be loaded. I never used it. I pondered whilst gazing over the horizon. . .

The stars and the moon lit up the landscape and it all glowed very gently just as it always did. I studied the landscape with its low jagged rocky formations with radiant and fiery hues cooled by the night sky. My peace was interrupted by a strange sound and then I couldn’t hear the wi-poor-wills anymore. In fact, I couldn’t hear anything anymore until I heard a faint sound. One might compare it to the song of whales however, it sounded like it was coming from underground and it was exponentially stronger like the earth was crying. It made sense to me. I thought of the Red Man and what he said about me being a parasite and poison. Was he referring to mankind?

Just then the baying of the Earth became louder like a plane taking off and I felt it in my whole body.It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another living thing, though I heard the wi-poor-wills, since I fell asleep the night before. I saw nothing but dark glowing landscape. Suddenly I felt the vibration again and just before the horizon, not fifty miles from Black Lantern Mining Company, an enormous thing slowly rising up out of the ground in the distance looking like a hill or a mountain without a peak. Something so huge that it is hard to imagine or comprehend. The earth crumbled and fell around the rising figure. I drove on knowing that stopping or even turning around would be useless. It rose higher and higher until it must have been nearing ten thousand feet. I saw it clear as if it had been day. The horror bayed and cried slowly with ear-splitting, thunderous continuity. It was beginning to rise itself up as now countless long and thick spider-like legs unearthed themselves around the Horror and erected the central part of It. I could now see beneath it the other side of the horizon. Beneath it hung loose around a dozen long appendages that resembled tongues that were split at the end that surrounded an immense vacuous hole that began to operate as such but nothing entered. However, some nearby mining equipment and other man-made scraps and debris had been drawn in. The Horror was covered in various sizes of gaping slits, full of myriad rows of jagged teeth. I felt my ears bleeding as I drove on. Again my sanity was bent when it seized back and forth and hundreds of eyes began to open all over it in different sizes and colors of red, yellow, and green. It seized again. I stopped watching the road all together and wiped the blood from my ears. I looked back at the road to see a very tall hooded figure of a man. I stomped on my breaks screeching to a halt.

I looked around me and saw many of the men standing idle with their hoods covering their head. It was them. The Red Men. They were all standing there about thirty feet apart; a couple dozen of them. I couldn’t see their faces like I had in the dream. The thing still crying behind them; a living horror like a mountain. I heard them inside my head. Talking to me. Telling me the horrors of man, how they have watched and were patient until the time was ripe to purify the world of its parasites and create a peaceful equilibrium. They explained that man’s time here was over and how our species was a mistake; a mutation full of parasitic intentions. The Red Men told me that they were a peaceful tribe thousands of years ago in this area and that they found the black orb I had stumbled upon and how it worked as communication to a cosmic power somewhere far beyond our understanding where we “cannot know”. The marble-like stones were summoning stones that brought the spider-locust-like creatures that they called Ohlms. The Ohlms predated Earth and were here, the Red Men said, when Earth was formed and acted as a Guardian for the planet in case anything disrupted the balance for too long. When the Red Men summoned the Ohlms, they offered the Red Men eternal life. The Ohlms recognized in them a true integrity and honest respect for the planet and its balance. They never found entertainment or game in hunt, the consumption of resources, and they respected and protected every organic and inorganic thing. The Red Men accepted and in doing so would undergo transfigurations and were forced to wear cloaks that they drenched in blood as a sign of their bond to themselves, their fellow living hosts, their planet, and the cosmos. After explaining all of this to me they informed me of their observation of others like themselves living today and that they saw in me something that they saw in themselves. They gave me an offer to become like them and purify the world. They told me that they worked through me to destroy my family and explained that in living eternally, today’s modern family would be a bias against the other guardians and a distraction to my duty as a Guardian and the system well fall in upon itself. They told me of the madness that occurred during their communication with me and understood my shock and did not mean anything disrespectful. They reassured me that man could not be allowed to live any longer in order for the planet to prosper. They said that I could have all the time I needed.

I sat for a long time in my car staring down at my gun and back at them and at the unspeakable giant along the horizon sucking up man’s existence. This was it. This was the moment that I; Laurence Xavier L’amour was forced into the violently vivid realization that man will leave absolutely no trace on anything but sheer memory. The shock was too much to bear that no one but those that remained mindful of not only their own existence but of everything around them would know the secrets of existence, both planetary and cosmic. After ten-thousand years of man’s existence; ten-thousand years existence ignorantly searching, and now the answer. No. The abrupt and seemingly minute clue to the answer that was sought after was going to be the end of mankind. Man had raped the planet of its sanity until it could not forgive any longer. I looked down again at my gun; the last man-made artifact that I may ever see at the end of two options; eternal life as a Guardian of Earth or eternal peace in death. Guns, vehicles, factories, cement, skyscrapers, fast food, television, video games, pornography, internet, computers, prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs, mass production, money, media, fashion, slaughter-houses, man-made and hand-written government, peace treaties, war, nuclear weapons. . . slow planetary murder and all for negative selfishness, overindulgent vanity, and greed. One might argue in favor of love. Love can be for anything and with anyone. I forgive the Red Men for driving me to murder my family. It was necessary and not in vain. I put the gun down, cursed its existence, and stepped outside the car. Love is not worth the circumstances of man’s irresponsible actions. Now I will be able to live amongst those chosen by the Red Men and live forever in freedom for a cosmic purpose. I am proud to be chosen for that. I thought Black Lantern was geared in the right direction but it was just another evil group of monsters that wanted to tear the “Equilibrium” (as the Red Men aptly call it) of this planet apart for a profit that would fuel their own personal comfort.

I walked toward the closest Red Man and he threw off his cloak. I already knew what he was. We would all become Ohlms eventually; the chosen; and we would protect the world together in perfect harmony with the other remaining creatures of Earth. I turned my head and watched my car and hand gun disappear above me into the giant Elder over head as the Red Man Ohlm raised his appendage to impale me and begin my transfiguration.  

Author's Note

This is a first draft. I am doing massive adjustments like changing the main character almost completely into an anthropologist going to investigate caverns discovered by miners in the Pacific Northwest in Idaho.