When She Kissed the Earth

Cosmic Horror

(Authors Note: I decided to rewrite this for the Lunar Awards, and because I have grown so much as a writer by being on Substack. Plus, I posted it when I had a smaller following, so there’s a chance many subscribers haven’t read this one).

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Brockengespenst

The forest is completely silent and almost entirely still. The only movement, the peripheral twisting of shy leaves. A red sun sits half embedded in the horizon, a hot piece of metal slowly boring its way into the earth. Darren sits quietly in his car, his face flushed and puffy, his hands in a tight grip on the wheel. The knuckles of his left are bloodied, angry lumps in the process of swelling. There’s a pile of recently used tissues on the passenger seat. Underneath the tissues lies a weathered road map folded open to an obscure stretch of Pennsylvania green. His wife lay in the backseat, silent as the grave. He wipes his eyes, sniffs loudly. The car sits at a trailhead, three footpaths leaving the bare stone parking lot. Through the windshield, across the stillness, Darren can see the familiar path he plans on taking. It is overgrown, unrecognizable. He speaks to his unresponsive wife in a red velvet voice,

“Why are you making me do this… I don’t want to do this…”

He gets out of the car and screams, a violent throat-rending animal sound the trees catch with their branches and the hills return as a dismal groan barking back in the quiet of the woods.

His wife still sits in the back of the car, dead, forever silent like the trees.

Darren begins punching his car door as hard as he can. He punches and rages, denting the door into the shape of his pain. The leaves turn away, the trees shake their heads quietly.

Darren leans against the rear door, forehead pressed to the cool glass. He smells the silent dirt and hot blood. Flexing his hand, he opens the rear door of the car where his dead wife lies. He removes his hiking backpack and sets it on the ground.

He stares at what is left of the person he married, the love they had, the life they shared.

Carefully, he removes the generic urn the crematory returned his wife in. He holds it, closes his eyes to stand still forever, another dead tree in the forest. After forever, he opens his eyes. He gently lowers the urn into the backpack. Tears pool at his bottom eyelids until his vision quivers and warps. He blinks and twin waterfalls flow softly down his cheeks.

Darren throws a blanket overtop of the urn, so it doesn’t rattle or open. He gingerly slips into the dusty straps of the backpack. It smells of mothballs and moldy canvas. He wipes his eyes on his coat sleeve, moving to open the front passenger door. For a fleeting moment he smells her shampoo: a eucalyptus mint he always said smelled like wasp killer. He exhales the ghost of a laugh through his nose as he wipes his face again, grabbing the map off the seat. He sees a half smoked pack of her cigarettes sitting in the cup holder. His smile fades as he grabs those too, remembering all the fights and problems they caused. Beneath the map is a handwritten note splotched with the hazy circles of dried teardrops. Some of the words have been melted into the paper, forever lost to any who had not memorized their places. Midway down the page, a partially blurred line reads,

“I ~~~~~~ love you, Darren. ~~~~~ Take my ashes to the place you proposed, all those years ago. It was a beautiful ~~~~~”

Slowly, he begins to walk toward the thin dirt path that leads into the towering weeds. The trees gaze on, nodding sadly. He lumbers onward, back to the sun. His shadow reaches, shifting, stretching, out across the underbrush ahead of him to the place where the path descends in old wooden stairs. He is reminded of the rickety steps of their first apartment. For a fleeting moment, he is back there on the steps, carrying his wife up, tripping on her pristine white dress. The corners of his mouth are tugged upward as he recalls the final step breaking beneath the two of them. The weight of every moment after catches, hanging on the corner of his smile, bending it back down. He sighs a heavy breath outward. His shoulders settle into the remembrance of their marital flame flickering, being doused, and puffing out with a wisp.

Darren stops at the top of the worn staircase, the sun at his back, tentatively trying his weight on the top step. Stretched across the gulley below him is his own massive looming shadow; a mock Brocken specter lightly testing the ground with its silhouette foot. The sun is half hidden now and as he takes the stairs down, the world changes. The bright angelic lighting of golden hour is diffused into a dim and crepuscular purple. He knows this walk will bring back many memories, and he is ill prepared for it. He pauses at the bottom step, removing the pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. He stares at them. Opening the pack, he pulls out her generic green lighter. He lights a cigarette without knowing why, pulls on the end of it with lungs and lips for the first time in his life, the ember breathing softly, sighing into life. Darren immediately begins coughing, and sputtering out an effluvia of smoke. He feels sick to his stomach, his head hurts. He pockets the pack still coughing, and drops the unsmoked cigarette into the dirt. He stares down the path ahead while he steps on the tiny ember, carefully grinding into the soil. With a painful reluctance, he begins the trek toward the place where he once knelt on one knee.

Komorebi

The moon begins to show in the growing dusk, darting in and out of the ubiquitous treetops. Darren looks around, then down at the map, then back at the imposing forest. The sun still quibbles with the horizon. He stops walking, stares at his map, looks at the trees, looks at the map, growls a yell and hurls the map into the woods. The map flutters and flaps limply until it crashlands softly 20 feet away in a juniper bush. He flexes his hand, winces slightly and shakes it out uselessly. His outburst sends unseen critters skittering off deeper into the woods, loudly pushing thin trails into the leaves.

The gorge is dim, everything appears faded, sapped of color. Staring at the glowing white map hanging in the underbrush, he sighs an exasperated breath, sulking over to where it hangs. He picks it up. He stands in place. Overhead, the sun yawns forth its last golden beams over the treetops. He looks at the glowing map, briefly falling into a memory of his wife. She walks ahead of him on this same path, the underbrush cut back and staved off to form a perfect propylaeum around her. In the memory, his soon-to-be fiancé looks back and smiles at him, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail with a daisy patterned scrunchie. She has a pure and adoring smile, unadulterated by life’s later hardships, and her perfect white teeth glow in the dusky lighting. Then he is back, looking at the nearly luminescent map.

A faint unnatural snap sounds from ahead. Several distant black birds fly from the branches. Darren looks around while remaining completely still, save for the slight quiver of his heart. He waits, frozen, until he’s sure no other sound is coming. As he begins to move carefully back toward the overgrown path, sidestepping roots and dodging reaching branches, he hears another sound. This sound is continuous, growing steadily in proximity. It’s the dry paper sound of something or someone hurriedly running through dead leaves. His heartbeat quickens as he calls out to the harried noise with an unsteady voice but the only response is an increase of the rustling, louder, closer. He steps back onto the path, the noise swells, crescendos, and a bloody headless chicken bursts out of the underbrush, running past him crazily.

Confused and frightened, Darren looks after the decapitated bird as it runs through the woods to get caught in the thorns of a raspberry bush. It hangs, stultified, stymied, still, save for its legs twitching out the ghost of their pyrrhic flight in terrible paroxysms. He looks in the direction the headless fowl charged from. Through the thicket, he sees the straight unnatural lines of a manmade structure. In his sudden fright he accidentally flung the map aside. He stoops, pries the map out of the grasp of the twigs and thorns, and begins walking toward the structure in the woods. The closer he gets to the building, the more he smells rot: a horrid stench that can only be brought forth by the deceased. The trees part their spindly arms to reveal a cabin set deep into a clearing. There are several ghostly white shapes that reveal themselves as people, all motionless. Approaching, Darren hails them and asks,

“Hey. I’m a little turned around — do you know where Eagle Rock is?”

His call to the people dies away into a whisper, as his eyes begin to delineate the shapes ahead. His louder words are swallowed by the woods and he feels a stronger taste of fear. On the cabin porch are three pale white people; one sitting in a chair, the other two standing. The two standing figures are naked, though the foremost figure wears a discordant black glove. As Darren squints and draws cautiously closer, the standing figures are revealed to be wearing white long Johns. Darren walks slower now, hesitantly assessing the situation. The closer he gets, the more unnerving the scene, accentuated by the total silence of the three figures. All three appear pale beyond account, and gaunt to the point of near emaciation. Yellow sweat stains and copper blemishes bloom in mildewy circles all up and down the long Johns. The three figures have less than two dozen teeth between them, some pointing off in lurid angles. The sitting figure has two milky white eyes that stare blankly in disagreeing vantages, and he possesses only three of the allotted teeth. A glint from the gloved hand of the standing man reveals a short hatchet, covered in rust. The closer he gets, Darren sees it is not rust — and not a glove — both the hatchet and hand are covered in blood. Next to the cabin is the dripping and hollow carcass of a deer strung-up between two thin trees. Darren freezes. There are more gutted deer hanging in at least half a dozen trees. Hanging around the entirety of the porch are headless chickens, some still twitching minutely, fresh.

Darren begins to move very slowly backward. The figure bearing the hatchet breaks the vacuous silence with a drawl,

“You shouln’t be here. This here’s private land.”

Darren answers with wide eyes, “I’m sorry.”

The man holding the hatchet simply repeats, “You shouln’t be here.”

Darren turns to notice the familiar shadowed outline of Eagle Rock. He walks hastily away. He walks trips looks back speeds up, pushing thin trails into the leaves like prey. The figure on the porch, still unmoving, calls after him into the increasingly dark woods,

“Storms a’comin’. You ain’t gonna wanna be goin’ up there jus’ now. Them rocks are dangerous.”

But Darren doesn’t care to listen, moving quickly away from that terrible cabin and it’s ghostly occupants, those horrible gallows of chickens hanging like convicted criminals and deer spliced into the trees.

So many chickens. So many deer.

He feels the trees watching him, closing barkless branches over his head. A memory: a nearly decapitated rat, the spine and sinews leaving the job half done. Darren sees himself holding it by the tail and taunting his wife. She’s furious and crying and swearing. He says something about her being like a little girl, and she screams something about him being like his father. Suddenly the joke isn’t so funny and Darren wants to force the rat on her, just to prove a point. He’s brought back to himself by a slight trip on a rock and he pauses to rub his eyes with his good hand. He glances back to ensure he isn’t being followed. When he looks backward, he sees something moving — or nothing at all, it is impossible to tell. The forest shifts on restless legs. He dissects every detail of the trees behind him but cannot find any fault or cause for concern. Still…

Saudade

Through a gap in the trees ahead, the black silhouette of Eagle Rock lay superimposed onto the near dark sky. At the base of the rocks, a mangled corpse of rotten and splintered wood lay in a heap. The vague semblance of steps can be faintly made out amidst the pile of old lumber. Across the limned inference of stairs lies an incredibly large fallen tree. Darren looks at the wreckage and sighs. He gently adjusts his backpack higher onto his back, navigating the wreckage of stairs. The air is uneasy, the light, tricky. He glances over his shoulder. Nothing but the dark indiscernible shapes of trees. He stumbles on a long piece of wood, knocking loose a memory. He sees the floating debris in their flooded basement: the flotsam of their failing marriage.

He can hear himself yelling at his wife. She stands, analyzing the ground. The smells of mud and mold and insulation permeate the scene. All of the neighbors are out assessing the damage to their own basements, but they have functioning sump-pumps. There’s a large tree down across the sidewalk. After a short bout of yelling at her, he becomes silent and begins picking through the carnage. All she can manage to say is that she’s sorry, she fell asleep, and she forgot to check. His silence is on high, simmering threatening to boil over. He seethes at her useless apologies. The final straw is when she accidentally hits him with a long piece of trim.

He slaps her.

He hits her so fast and so hard that before she even apologizes she is sprawled onto her elbows in several inches of water, a large red flower blooming prettily across her left cheek atop a look of pure confusion. Darren looks at her. He's angrier, more revolted with her than before.

The memory smacks with a vivid sting. He pauses on a mostly intact stair, massages his eyes with the meat of his calloused palms. A strong cool breeze plays with the worn straps of his backpack. It smells cold and wet. He looks up at the storm clouds blown in from his memory, and he speaks toward them,

“It wasn’t all bad… we had good times too. Didn’t we?”

The wind takes the question, flits it away on a stormy breeze. Darren stares, mouth blank and eyes a million miles away. He waits for an answer, but only the storm comes. The storm and an all too detailed recall of the note she left. Some of the words have become saltwater craters, but they are all known to him.

They will always be known to him.

“I tried to love you, Darren. Despite it all. Take my ashes to the place you proposed, all those years ago. It was a beautiful mistake.”

Small drops of rain begin to patter softly off his backpack. The sky mirrors his memory of finding her, tears dappling the blue-lined notebook paper, dissolving some of the words and none of the pain. He kneads his eyes with thumb and forefinger, trying not to think about those moments and thinking only about those moments. The rain begins to pick up, coming down in earnest, the pattering hands of rain become a solid droning hiss. Darren pulls his hood over his head and begins to scale the debris and weeds more quickly. He reaches the place where the first plateau would have been if the stairs remained intact. He is thoroughly soaked, hardly able to see, water peeling off his nose in a stream. He backs up against the base of the rock formation seeking shelter from the downpour. He bumps backward into the rock wondering how long the storm will last. A strong cool breeze wakes the hair on the back of his neck. There is a dark opening in the formation and the wind whispers to him through the rocks mouth.

He doesn’t remember the opening. It’s large enough that he can fit inside, but it’s tight, his backpack and chest touch the walls of the opening. He squeezes into the hole and ceases to feel the heavy impact of rain. The sound of the heavy shower warps and hollows out as he inches farther back and enters the small cave in the rock face. Squeezing through the narrow opening, he again hears a faint whisper, distinctly human, and a cool breeze. In the dregs of the breeze is the faint smell of wet death. The tight aperture of the rock face opens into a sizable cave, where Darren sits down. While he tries to dry off, he is given another painful reminder of his wife.

They are in their car while the rain pounds away at the windows outside, desiring entry. His wife calls attention to a black eye with thick makeup attempting to conceal it. In front of the car is a maternal fetal medicine office. They make it inside, swimming. Neither Darren nor his wife speak through the whole appointment. His wife doesn’t even cry, she just sits and occasionally nods. She is a husk bearing no internal life.

There is the steady plash of rainwater on outdated tile — plip plop plip — and the smell of cotton balls and tongue depressors in jars.

Darren sits on the cave floor surrounded by the soporific buzz of distant rain through branches, but what he hears is plashing drips on outdated tile — plip plop plip — the totemic sound of time leeching away, bleeding, pooling at his feet.

Ya’aburnee

There are spears of newspaper moonlight thrust through grommets in the cave ceiling.

Inside the small cave, everything is diffused into grayscale. The chiaroscuro of cave floor and moonlight creates unwieldy patterns in the puddles, small shadow parasites that twist and wiggle and writhe. Darren sits slumped on the ground, passed out from physical and emotional wear. The rain has ceased and the full moon bathes the landscape in a hollow white sheen. The incandescent glow reflects from the newly doused world: each drop of water, an impossible star fallen from the firmament.

Darren wakes with a gasp and a cold sweat and a pounding heart punching away beating at his chest wall in claustrophobic fear. He dreamed, remembers being frightened, terrified, but cannot recall the dream. As he attempts to conjure it from those drowsy moments, he can feel it tangibly slip away, dissipate, shrouded by the ethereal force of the waking world. He pulls his phone from his pocket and checks the time. He stands up, stretches his sore muscles and digs through his backpack.

Darren finds and dons the headlamp, turning it on with a rubber coated click. He gazes about, searching for the narrow entrance to the cave. Each section of cave wall is whole, solid, no exits anywhere he can see. His light passes over a darker section of rock when a glint of white catches his attention. He returns his gaze to the spot but isn’t sure what he is seeing. There are thin white tines poking out from an ochre pile of dirt, but the longer he looks, the more he discerns.

Not dirt, but a pile of moldering deer carcasses, ribs and antlers jutting out in strange, artistic angles. He gasps and gags. Revolted, he turns away, hand on mouth, and notices darkened drag marks on the ground. He looks around again desperate frantic searching for the small entrance but sees nothing save immutable stone and a path deeper into the cave.

The drag marks lead into the dark.

There must be an exit down there, the drag marks have to go somewhere. He picks up his backpack but the strap rips loose, falling to the floor and spilling the urn onto the damp cave floor. Darren is horrified and stoops attempting to scoop the ashes back into the urn clawing at the paste breathing through teeth. But it is a futile gesture. He rakes his fingers through the amalgam substance until his hands grasp something solid and cylindrical. Unsure what could have been inside the urn, he imagines holding a blackened bone and shudders. With fingers curled around its shape he raises the thing up and brushes it with his thumb but he already knows. He knows what the glowing orange plastic is. And he knows without checking it is the exact pill bottle his wife overdosed with.

Darren’s hands are shaking as he brushes the label off and reads the prescription details anyway. His heart thumps eyes stare hands recoil, dropping the bottle back into the wet cement of his wife. His head swivels whips, looks around, sees a shape a person, a woman in the dark, a shout of terror escaping his mouth, feet tripping back stumbling, hands catching scrambling, nerves molten pulsing liquified until he sees.

It is an uncanny rock formation. He leans over, hands on knees hiking breaths between his legs.

From deeper in the cave comes a cool breeze carrying a faint whisper.

Darren backs up against the cave wall, shaking.

A faint whisper.

He rubs his face with trembling hands.

A faint whisper.

He tries to convince himself he doesn’t hear it, doesn’t hear her. She’s dead.

A faint whisper.

Darren breathes, closes his eyes, breathes, stands upright and hesitantly ventures further into the cave in hopes of an exit. He walks deeper, the air grows colder, and the moonlight no longer reaches its pale fingers into the dark. He walks slowly forward into the cool breeze. He sniffs, catching a minty scent mingled within the river rock smell.

Eucalyptus mint.

Wasp killer.

Darren looks backward for a moment, hearing sounds, feeling eyes, smelling memories. When he looks forward again, he walks into a curtain of hair that smells strongly of that familiar shampoo. He strikes out, batting swatting smacking away the hanging hair, heart stuttering, half-shrieking, ducking and flailing and panicking but when he looks back with his headlamp, he sees it is only a stringy growth of lichen or moss, hanging from the cave ceiling. Yet, the smell. He knows that smell.

He draws closer again and holds a section in his hand to sniff it: mildew, dirt, lightning bug. No mint.

Letting go of the moss, he notices something and looks again. There in the midst of the pale green lichen, wrapped impossibly around the length: a daisy patterned scrunchie.

His heart slows. His blood sloshes in his ears.

Woosh. Woosh. Woosh.

The cool breeze returns, stronger, a discernible whisper on it.

Woosh.

He walks into the dark, compelled by the whisper, deeper into the cave, mindlessly shambling forward.

Woosh.

He passes more ravaged corpses of deer. He doesn’t spare them a passing glance. He feels bathroom tile under his feet. He looks down and sees ragged rock. He passes discarded prescription bottles in the corner of his vision. He looks and sees leaves. Memories surface from sequestered places, dredged up and played out. Every time he hurt his wife, every verbal slight, every emotional cut, every hit.

He weeps.

A faint whisper, soft and still, and he walks on.

He walks until his headlamp shines on a large stone door. It is flanked by two incomprehensible carvings and is set into a frame of bones. The need to follow the whisper ebbs and Darren stands drained, emotionless, empty in front of the thing that called in the darkness. There are shiny red drag marks disappearing underneath the door, into places unseen and unknown.

Darren glances blankly to his left. The headlamp illuminates rows and rows of stone figures, each one an anguished supplicant in this horrible darkness, postured in an ascetic position with dark, viscous tears flowing from the eyes. The walls behind them are no longer rock, but bones, reverently placed to create a crude mausoleum. Most of the bones are human, some are not. Some are unidentifiable.

Darren looks to the right and sees the same: rows of silent Qliphoth tending an ossuary of eldritch things.

The ancient door opens inward soundlessly.

Light does not penetrate this primordial place. It is a black rectangle cut away from the fabric of the universe. There is only void behind. Beyond. The whisper calls from inside.

Woosh.

A subtle peripheral shifting. Darren looks over to the stone figures. There are none to be seen. He looks back to the stone door. Standing in the darkness, suspended in blank space, is his wife. She is a denizen of that featureless place. Her form is lustrous, bearing every injury he ever gave her. She raises a broken arm, points it toward him, condemning. Her hand turns over, calling. She beckons him into the dark. The void thrums with a cacophony of abhorrent chittering and febrile buzzing, growing louder and louder, intensifying, drowning. He takes shambling steps forward, tears spilling from his vacant eyes. The unmoving mouth of his wife whispers his sins into his ear. He steps into the impenetrable black. The discordant hum of other-worldly sounds abruptly ceases. All is silent. The door closes behind him without a sound.