Dream: A cosmic thriller of Lovecraftian horror by Daniel Willcocks

Author:Daniel Willcocks [Willcocks, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Devil's Rock Publishing
Published: 2023-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Necrotic Celebrations

I stagger with tired legs until the all the graveyard’s teeth rot, break, and crumble and all that is left is gum, cracked and parched like arid desert wastes.

The landscape is barren but for smatterings of springs of shrunken weed. Wind gusts pockets of dirty cloud and occasionally I am called to mask my eyes and mouth with my elbow crook. The sky hangs grey and thick, and I wonder if another storm will come soon. Though I see no lightning and hear no thunder, I detect something that crawls and swims among the duvet of clouds but remains ever hidden from its full reveal. At times I spot the shadow, silhouetted in the blanket. At other times a fin or leg, though at this juncture I question my own sanity and wonder that all that I knew of my mind is now gone.

Are you mad, Alice?

I walk until my legs grow weak and my feet grow sore. I walk until my throat shrieks for water, each dry swallow like the scratching of a thousand jagged beetles racing to my stomach. At first, the emptiness and reprieve from impossible creatures and hypnotic foliage was comforting, but now I long once more for ocean, I long for the beaches, I pray for forests and mushrooms and a break in the monotone to bring a palette of colour and wonder. Air with humidity. Jungle with calls of ape and song of bird. I am left with time to think in an infinite that is truly endless, and I see my rabbit-brother’s ghost frolicking in the dust clouds, hear his fever dreams in my own addled mind, feel his skin on mine as though he is all around me and yet nowhere at all.

It is as I surrender hope and yield to my knees that the voices inside my head grow. They begin as giggles, double into chuckles, erupt into laughter, and taper into guffaws. Strange cackles from passerine throats, yet it is when I look up from the starved ground that I see them, wandering toward me as though they had always been a part of my world. As though my isolation was a yet another level of dream of its own creation.

They appear to me as hideous malformations of humans, goblinesque and torn from the pages of a children’s book. Strange, elongated features mark the melted wax of their faces, hands draped to the ground, scoring the earth with knotted and gnarled fingers. Their chest cavities are as pronounced as tarp stretched along a network of tree branches, and their noses could puncture flesh. The wildest feature among the pair wasn’t their bulb-like eyes or staggered steps, but the stretch of fleshy fabric that combined them together, holding their heads in place as though they were one.

The pair that is one hobble towards me, eyes fixed and unblinking. At first, I believe that they have no mouth or lips, until they are close enough to smell the briny stink

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