Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #10) by DeYtH Banger (books to get back into reading txt) 📖

from where Jason had dropped them on the ground. Soon she was back, sitting in the driver’s seat and doing her best to start the engine despite her badly shaking hands. “Which way is the road into town?” She whispered urgently, as if afraid to raise her voice too loudly. “Which way did we come from? Answer me, Vincent!”

“Just go,” was the only response I could muster. “Just get us away from here.” I felt an overwhelming vertigo at that moment, as if my spirit was trying to escape my doomed body, and so I shut my eyes tightly to regain my orientation. After a short while sitting like this, I realized that Clara wasn’t talking to me anymore. In fact, she wasn’t making any sound at all. My head was swimming so badly that I had been certain the car had at least lurched into motion, but when I opened my eyes Clara was sitting placidly in the driver’s seat of a stationary vehicle. She was staring silently through her window. As I followed Clara’s gaze, I saw that the thing was back – perched on its haunches a short distance away. The illuminated orbs in its eye sockets were focused on her. It was drawing her away from me.

I pleaded with Clara not to leave me alone as she removed the keys from the vehicle’s ignition and dropped them casually to the vehicle mat at her feet. She stepped out of the car and towards the creature. I stumbled dizzily from the backseat, and attempted to grab her around the shoulders. In automatic response, she elbowed me viciously in the guts and left me winded. I collapsed against the car, and when I found the strength to raise myself up again, she and the creature were gone.

I struggled desperately to get the car back into motion, but the combination of mescaline and adrenaline in my system made progress difficult. The steps involved in starting the engine, then putting the car into drive escaped me, and the lettering on the manual gearbox felt alien – as if I had forgotten the Roman alphabet completely. It did not help that as I was working to start the car, I could hear Clara’s voice (always so sweet and calm before tonight) now screaming wildly with a throat that sounded choked with gore.

Clara always spoke like music: pleasant, and soft, and wonderful. What tore through the cold desert air now, though, were ragged and wordless gasps of pitiful agony. The silence that eventually followed was worse, though. It told me that I was all alone.

I turned to peer out the driver’s side window from where I sat, still having failed to start the car. I could see that the creature had returned – once again lumbering playfully out from the obscurity of darkness, but this time directly towards me. I felt as if my panic would cause me to faint at that very moment, but mortal fear galvanized me to keep fighting. I finally managed to summon the engine to life, but pressing on the gas only caused the engine to rev in park. I could feel the creature’s eyes on me, and I knew that it was nearly at my window. I turned my back away from the window as deliberately as I could while still pressing the clutch down with one foot, and gripped the stick shift to pull it into a new (but arbitrary) position.

My vision was swimming too heavily to discern precisely what gear I was now in, but I did not care so long as the car would start moving. I faced forward and prepared to step on the gas, but suddenly found myself staring directly into the eyes of the creature. It was perched on the hood of the car now, and watched me through the windshield with those bulb-like, electric eyes. I closed my own eyes tightly, in a final bid to resist the thing’s hypnotic lure.

I was preparing myself to die, but a monstrous shriek and the sound of wild, receding footfalls broke my terrified meditation. It sounded to me as if the creature had suddenly been attacked, and was now fleeing. After remaining motionless for several moments with my eyes shut, I noticed the faint sensation of sunlight on my eyelids.

Sunrise was breaking over the distant mesas. The creature was gone, and it occurred to me that such a horrible thing could only exist in hellish darkness. For the first time since the creature had appeared, I felt as if maybe I could relax. Completely distraught, I drew the deepest comfort I’ve ever known from the warmth of the sunlight on my face. I lost consciousness without realizing how exhausted the night had left me, and slept for a few hours. When I awoke, I found that the peyote had mostly worn off, too. Feeling mostly sober now, I drove straight into town to find help for my missing friends.

I went to the police, and tried to tell them my story in a way that would seem at least halfway believable. I admitted everything that I could, knowing full well that it all sounded like a stereotypical “bad trip”. Skeptical and more than a little annoyed, a pair of officers eventually agreed to follow me out into the desert to investigate the details of Jason and Clara’s disappearance. Together we found the remains of our campfire, and a snarl of erratic tire-tracks in the sand. But there was no sign at all of my companions. Nor did the officers detect any signs that a struggle had occurred anywhere near the site.

The police soon concluded that the disappearance of my two friends was probably a simple matter of Clara and Jason having been surprised by the strength of mescaline. “They thought they were prepared by their previous experiences,” said one of them, already walking back towards the cruiser to drive us into town again. “And so they trusted themselves to wander out into the night alone.”

“Shared delusions are fairly common in these sort of scenarios,” the other officer agreed. “You were lucky it was your first time trying this stuff. You were too overwhelmed to follow them, and so you stayed by the fire instead. That, and the fact that you sat in the car with the engine turned on until sunrise, probably saved you from freezing.” He paused and raised his gaze upward, as if stopping to feel the sun on his face. “We’ll do our best to find your friends out here, but in all honesty I’d be surprised if they survived the night.”

…

I’m home now, safe, and far away from whatever that terrible creature was. Or at least I think I am. But I’ve realized something awful, and more and more the idea is driving me crazy. There’s no way for me to be completely sure that I’m not still out there, hypnotized and being led to my death while the fantasy of escape goes on. Let me try to explain it a little better. Every night since I left Nevada, I keep having the exact same dream. Every. Single. Night. The same terror plays out in my mind in precisely the same way, and it always goes just like this:

I’m driving out of Gloaming. It’s around noon, just after the police have told me, “We’ll do our best to find your friends.” I’m glad to be heading home. I consider calling my mother before I begin driving, but then realize that I don’t know what I would say if she answered. I’m still shocked and exhausted, so I decide simply to make distance between myself and the town.

I press eagerly on the accelerator as I drive, and yet for hours it seems as if I can make no progress. With a creeping sort of anxiety, I realized that there has not been another car in sight for hours. Even the signage on the roadside has dwindled away to nothing. My surroundings are now like an unfinished painting: jarringly without details. This is nothing like the road on which I had originally traveled into town. I don’t recognize anything.

With a suddenness that rends my heart from top to bottom, the steering wheel melts away from beneath my hands. The car, the road, and even the sun above me all dissolve in an instant.

I find myself standing in the undisturbed sands of the desert, teleported back into the almost perfect darkness of that gruesome nighttime. The creature looms and croaks a sound nearby, staring directly into my eyes. I realize that I’ve been looking back into its face for who knows how long. The safety of that morning’s sunrise – the relief of my narrow escape – they were all simply delusions inflicted upon me to occupy my mind as I march myself towards execution. In this dream, my waking life is the fantasy. I am still out there with the creature.

The thing howls at an ear-splitting volume, and I brace my hands against my skull in an attempt to resist the sound. Still, my knees buckle and I fall to the ground. The thing is inches away now, and I can see that it draws oxygen into itself from a number of chitinous vents which dot its chest and neck. Periodically, they suck inward like gasping mouths before relaxing again.

As the thing leans in to consume me, the sounds it makes become quieter and more discrete in tone. It begins to suck air more rhythmically, and releases each breath with a low hiss. “Haaa… Eeeeeth… Haaa… Eeeeeth…” As I feel it finally touch me with its hand-like appendages, it chokes out words. “Eeeeeth… Don’t you… Haaa… Miss your friends?”

With a slobbering, suctioning sort of sound, the flat and featureless jawline of the creature unfolds into a gaping maw. Chevrons of razor-edged teeth present themselves from fleshy folds all along the inside of the thing’s throat (which has now spread open like the distended jaws of a snake.) Now exposed to the air, they shimmer against the blackness of the night like stars.

In this dream, I am still under the effects of the peyote, and so I see ghostly emanations of impossible color snake outwards from the creature’s face and form. Quivering hallucinations pool around the thing, like lesser nightmares gathering to join it. Jeering, ephemeral demons spring through the night air towards me with each eager spasm of the thing’s face. Fractals drip from its lidless eyes, and I can feel that I too am weeping.

…

In this dream I can’t stop having, the sun does finally rise over that expanse of forsaken desert, but I am not alive to greet it.

 

CREDIT: David Feuling

WHEN SCIENCE FOUND GOD

 

I’ve never much cared for religion. I mean, it’s interesting and all; the old parables and philosophic insights from people two millenniums removed from the present. I particularly enjoy the books of the Apocrypha, and the Bible’s magnum opus of Revelation, if for nothing else than the interesting stories. Even some of the tenants, like an emphasis on strong family bonds and moral stature I can resonate with, but in terms of a giant omnipresent entity that created everything yet loves us unconditionally, watching our every move from unseen planes – yeah, I