The following is a submission to the Iron Age Media image prompt above (also please see the link below!).
I’m sorry for the long delay in posts, I’ve been trying to iron out several stories which I hope will in the future become novel-length pieces. Until then, please enjoy this short horror story.
The letter dragged Harold across country to the secretive New Mexican mountains, an invitation almost devoid of information. It came with no name and its only contents a single world-his name-with an obscure return address. It was some deep, fresh construction at the edge of the ponderosa pines, but he had found the spot the letter clued him to. Past a dark mountainous climb, past the multiple laboratory installations, and then into the strange nature of the mountain beneath a sky of eerie dusk colors. At the cusp of his journey and conclusions was the first time he had begun to let the creeping doubt ice his actions.
Harold was certain he knew who the hurried handwriting belonged to. The ‘H,’ or his ‘H,’ was uniquely looped around in Edwardian-like cursive, which elicited pleasant surprise at first. Sarah was the lone person he knew to do that, but the moment passed quickly as he stared longer at the worn letter page. That loop was drawn by a shaking hand with the ink smudged troublesomely over and over. This was an unfinished letter in an unfinished envelope—an unacceptable state when it came to Sarah’s known person. Something deep down was struck by fear inside Harold that day, a fear easily following him to the very bizarre doorstep of the looming home on Pipeline road.
The home’s shape gave him the impression of it grasping towards the sky, with the walls seeming to bend queerly up to an invisible point high above the thirty-foot roof. Its bracken clay exterior matched and yet departed inexplicably from its adobe brethren buildings throughout this stretched desert. Harold’s first concern though came from the clay’s texture, for no modern tool made these ill-formed edges. The surfaces were pot-marked worse than his slow-joining lunar companion, with some divots greater than his fist and others too small for his thumb. And inverse were also crude clumps that played shadow games on his eyes and mind. Too smooth in places and gouged edges in others that no construction worker in his right mind would allow.
With increasing concern and a sudden thrill of fresh terror, Harold became aware how only the most primitive of man’s tools formed whatever coated the outside of Sarah’s assumed abode. Some now unseen pairs of human hands caked the whole of his destination in grotesque mud that steadily threatened to form moaning faces. Cryptic concentric rings not unlike those from ancient human parietal art emerged among those harsh mouth holes. It was too much for Harold and he mentally bullied himself to pace the house’s perimeter for signs of life.
Signs of old activity was found everywhere on the ground around the house. Car parts half disassembled made him trip nearly every other step. It was another mark of a madman, at least to Harold, or maybe a person fully consumed by some substance. There seemed to be no deliberate pattern or connection between the things he knew and saw. Sarah was a scientist of a high caliber, adept at nuclear physics and the many forms of organic chemistry she studied during their time in college together. She had many peculiar interests from what Harold recalled, but none which impeded a straight march to a prestigious New England college and now here in the depths of national experiments. Besides the few leather-bound volumes of natural science or archaeology he’d caught her reading, they otherwise studied mathematics in very organized ways.
Yet here were engine blocks from many dozens of cards now devoid of pistons, belts, and the like. They more than just littered the dried grass bed or even basic disorganization typical of sloth. This looked random to the point of intelligent chaos. Harold didn’t have a strong grasp on automobiles, but didn’t need to in order to internalize these scrap groups and ensembles made no sense. More unknowable, however, was Harold found no grease or fluids of any kind.
The distraction lasted until he realized night completely fell. Harold hesitated then as he spied his car from one side of the obelisk home. He could leave now. His most invasive action was stepping through the dangerous yard of questionable sanity. It would save himself the embarrassment of having intruded on somebody’s outskirt location, and perhaps also allow him the opportunity to retreat to a safer spot until the next day. It was then, walking slowly to escape that a small light became visible through a narrow slit just below where the roof presumably met the wall. Invisible before in the failing light, Harold could make out its silent white glow reflectively outward into the night. The idea of Sarah being caught or hurt inside came flashing to mind.
Harold redoubled his courage before it fully fled and gave the front door a gentle nudge. Its wood glided noiselessly open at his astonishment, and he slightly cursed his misfortune it wasn’t expectantly locked up. The analytical brain continued to process where this placed him and whatever dwelled in the unknown. Sarah never left things half-finished, much less unlocked. Then this door was meant to be opened by whomever arrived or remained inside to leave. The state of the outside would invariably attract attention to a casual passerby, unless this road was more unused in this small town than most. Harold played with those thoughts as a chess player might until he arrived at the conclusion that the free entry was sinister. He needed to act slowly.
The white light wasn’t visible from the doorway, and he needed more information of what was ahead. His phone’s flashlight handily shone into the accursed darkness, and revealed a grey stone wall so close the door would almost scrape it by opening fully. From the concentrated light he could tell the wall shared too much in common with the outside: a terrible array of pictographs and obscene imagery. This was carved into the stone, however, not molded by hand well above the height of a man. The language of the symbols eluded him, being of some vastly ancient script, and so he didn’t allow himself to become hypnotized from looking. Harold jerked his head left and right down the hallway, and saw that they reached some distant corner deep without any obstructions. No traps, from floor to dizzily high ceiling, awaited him—only the corridor.
Harold pressed on, choosing left at random to explore. Given two options equally uncomfortable, any evil person would either need to man both directions or guess which he might take. So he picked at random to avoid a mental paralysis Harold was already vulnerable to. There were no clear changes between the walls of the forbidden home—old clay to Harold’s left and the more evil stone on his right. Turning to look backwards and shine the phone’s light towards the direction of retreat, everything looked the same. The same ever-present terror as it crept through the veins of his calves, up into his spine, and gripped with thin tendrils the skull all around. Some awful work of evil and man could grab up Harold’s scalp in this dark until he was bore down backwards to earth deep.
With a few steps forward, he found the floor seemed to radiate a slight warmth into the soles of his feet and further unnerved his delicate senses. Harold kept moving to the edge of the corner, only to find it equally abandoned with another long corridor. From this vantage, Harold spotted stairs in the middle of this new length of house. No rooms though. He followed the obvious path, too afraid to return back to his portal of escape, and Sarah’s well being pushed well back from his conscious thoughts. It seemed the half-flight of stairs worked straight down to another hallway intersection, one with similar left or right branches.
This place is cursed, Harold decided out loud. The stone replaced clay, and a sheer steel replaced stone compared to the first hallway. No more was the old stone a hypnotic mass of cuneiform or symbols for the steel held even more unbearable fascination. Letters cut precisely and perfectly covered the steel floor-to-ceiling. They formed words and the words sentences and the sentences paragraphs of utter gibberish. Harold’s mind, attempt as it might, couldn’t find any single connection whether within a line or a sentence. Just infinite language spilled out in a way which caused him to feel a thoroughly crushing sense of unobtainable familiarity to fellow mankind.
If the floor’s heat weren’t now insufferable, the descent made it so. Worse still his light caught the glimmer of a slight ichor coating on the floor. Harold knew what oil and gas smelled like, but the tainted fume was far worse in quality. If it was blood, there wasn’t enough copper; sulfur from waste was equally lacking. Decay and rot seemed further away, but nothing else Harold could think of retained the intense odor this black film did.
Ever deeper Harold walked, and decided not to take the second downward staircase he came upon. He walked fully around until he found his own footprints in the slime. The hallways made a perfect square, and he believed there might be another square found in the clay-stone hallways. He should have been able to appreciate such simple geometry; without bends or twists; without false angles; without wasted corners; without unequal lengths. Yet the primitive was combined with the unknownable. Harold’s mathematical mind grimaced at the alien design which pulled him down another staircase and into harsher heat and thick, black ooze.
The sound began. A machine sound of awful gears grating continually against one another, screaming in agony. On the final level, where he left behind clay, stone, and steel, the sound hid behind massive alabaster-colored pillars of some undefinable material. It echoed throughout the structure with a cacophony of inhuman noise that bowled Harold over. His mind had to know, though, even as he crawled pathetically around the pillar. The black ichor filled his fingernails and stained all it touched.
There, in the center of the four pillars, was his torment. The ceiling was no more, with the heavens bearing witness to two humanoid robots slowly being melded together. They were of similar size, and faced each other as the suddenly living black liquid pressed them together. One robot lacked any real motion. No lights flashed to indicate power, and the liquid made its limbs dance akimbo in mock life. The second robot was infinitely more complex, with a feminine face and a clear skull that provided a bright white glow to the spectacle. The liquid grated the metals of old and new robot together with such intense pressure, Harold wasn’t sure how the released radiation and light didn’t destroy him instantly.
He scrambled, but the thick ooze slowed him. Harold could feel its intent through the slurping, slippery, bubbling tension of its texture. A titanic terror of being drowned in the alien ooze filled Harold’s whole being, and faced with that unreal possibility he flailed to pull himself out of it with wild strength. His vision blurred as his mind gave up all its vestiges of thought.
Harold never knew how he escaped. Los Alamos authorities caught him in the early morning as he screamed and wept incoherently. He professed over and over of a building they never found, only the charred remains of what was similar to an ancient kiva. Harold repeatedly told of all the things he saw to anybody who would listen. How it existed before in the places beyond—beyond time and slipped between space. How he read the walls there, and they said, “I became.”
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Enjoyed!! Loved the NM theme.