Draft Pt.1 Night

The thing about our town, or Old Dessert Alice the out-of-towners dubbed it, although geographically we weren’t one, or even in close proximity to one, but we were mostly made up of sand, the light, untouchable kind that shifts and moves all throughout the day, whispering eerie tunes in the wind, but the thing about my hometown Alice, was that we were soaked in shadows. Even in the day, you’d struggle to know the precise hour, thick and heavy clouds forever patched our skies, so that a few meager rays of sun would strike here and there, and for the most part, even outdoors, it was dark.

So when the incident of1946 hit, it was especially eventful for us. Let me give you a backstory first, this was the place I grew up in, and my father and his father before that we had all been men of hands and grit, I operate the only gas station in town, this was dignified job back then, something you didn’t have to be ashamed of, on account of people not being too educated here, it was perfectly normal for someone to be a mechanic, grocer, I guess it was important to cover your own ass, survive anyway you could. We were far apart from everything else, the next nearest town was Athira, roughly half a day south, and we weren’t known for much, just as the in-between place, a place to waste a few hours on, a lot of people eventually left Alice, our gas station their last stop before departing, though a few hundred of us remained loyal, although in retrospect, we should’ve went before things got real rotten.

And in the summer of 1946, I woke up to find my room especially dark, and there was a sound right outside my window, it was breathing on my walls and swallowing up the light, it was something large and monstrous I knew and felt even before I saw it. Then I went up to the window gently, thinking it was the end of the world, and saw this sight on my once pristine street: The entire neighborhood, it had become the air, this massive smoke. It was the color of bright and burning ash, and seemed to be the weight of brick, it wasn’t any normal everyday mist, there was something especially stealthy, strange and terribly insidious about this smoke, as it was gliding down our street, I looked over and saw in blurry glimpses, others peering out their windows, children stunned with eyes alive and curious.

I initially assumed it was a phase, because down in Athira they had months before begun to venture into oil drilling, and once in a while we heard stories of men dying in explosions, massive fires and smoke that mushroomed into space, so I naturally thought it was from there. A bunch of men from our town, lead by my old buddy Chris, the self-elected leader in this situation, who was probably paranoid for his four daughters, one of whom had contracted early asthma and was fatally vulnerable to the smoke.

Chris and his men, they left town with not an ounce of fear, to trace this smoke and hoped to find its roots, have our questions answered, if it was temporary, benign, or if we had to prepare for proper shelter, and for a long time we waited, stayed indoors and slept next to our whimpering children, my own 6-year old Felix almost refused to eat and sat idly all day contemplating in lightlessness. If my wife Marie were there she’d have come up with games, a scheme to distract Felix from her fear, but I was helpless.

It had only been 3 years since Marie died, and I found it difficult to deal with Felix in times like these, I tried to be consoling, but a child, with emotions raw and stormy, I think we were both grieving still for a family cut open, neither of us knew how to mend the wound, but with the arrival of the smoke, we were left without a choice, and in our time trapped in that house I tried my best to be a good protector for my 6-year old, and you have to believe me, when I say that I tried my best to save her.

Chris and his men returned after more than a week, their bodies now looked starved and desolate, face listless with surrender, they came back with no answers. The few of us adults, who had congregated at the local church for this meeting, braving the smoke to bring reassurance to our now withering homes, listened to Chris recall his journey. They had travelled towards where the smoke blew from, head against a cold, bipolar wind that sometimes burned them with sudden streaks of vicious heat, and they had the rashes and burnt skin to show for this. Chris had arms peeling from the inside out, while a few of his men had faces half gleaming red and drooped slightly, their bodies now distorted in small but dangerous bits, as if something had birthed itself deep in the core, and was sprouting out into deformities.

They had travelled for days, and followed the smoke across and over many terrains, at some point having to abandon their trucks and go by foot, and soon found this trail endless, it stretched over a vast and impossible horizon, over a million miles of sand, before leading up into an opening in the sky. They saw all this from a distance of course, before turning back to bring the news. This meant that the smoke, which had grown and become more impenetrable over the course of a fortnight, had come from a faraway place, a place neither mind nor eyes could comprehend, and we had no clue if the smoke would dissipate or leave, and only time would give us clarity.

Now from my home I had observed this smoke, it had broken into large and O-shaped clumps, attached still by a cord of glinting black, as if this thing or creature had begun to mutilate, and we had long put rolled up cloths on the gaps of our doors and windows to prevent our houses spoiled, people had begun to react from their own isolation. Our radio received nothing, humming a still and untelling buzz, so our minds were left to speculate, people had started summoning their own speechless Gods again, we were prepared to accept a savior of any kind, I’m sure some of us were bargaining with the dark Lord even, only for safety from the Smoke. We weren’t sure of many things, of this smoke in particular, of exactly what it had been sent to collect.

And between me and Felix, things had become tense. She had few words to say, and often preferred to be alone in her bedroom. One day, I had finished from a long shower, sure to scrub the filth off my skin, for walking amidst the smoke would produce hard, lumpy goops on my skin, which planted themselves deep, caused a terrible itch that drove me mad and sometimes overcome with sharp, but brief moments of brutal, irrational anger.

I heard a voice from inside Felix’s room, and tiptoed near, the door was slightly ajar, and by this precious slit I peeked inside. She was seated by the edge of her bed, arms straight by the sides and her back stiff and disciplined, looking forward towards the window, her face was frozen but fixated intensely on something ahead, eyes alert as her mouth moved with a slither. It was in a way I had never heard, words mashed with spit and lips curled and twisted as if provoked by a thin, fiery poker.

All of her seemed awake and lucid, and her voice had become an unfamiliar growl, pitching animal sounds. I pushed the door slowly in and now saw her window held up by a bare and reluctant inch, and a long, thin path of smoke had entered, beyond which a dense pool of darkness pressed itself against the glass, peculiar and terrifying as night itself, the tip of its long hand stopped right before Felix and her clear, vanilla face. As if the two were having, I don’t believe myself either when I say this: a conversation.

...

(thank you to the few of you who have been supportive of my writing,I'm trying to see if I can hop around different genres,manage for characters the kind of relationships with intricacies that tell their own,unspoken for stories, and give life to the terror I feel sometimes from the things I don't know.I put draft on near every piece I post,because I feel that its all incomplete,I need to give more meat to the stories,characters and how they unravel over time,but I post them anyway to see how others react,and myself,after a while I come back for a read,a notice a few things that need to be changed,or a different direction from which I can take the story. Anyway,there's some attempted horror for you,let the weekend be full of imagination :)