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After it came from the dark
I didn’t care what the therapist said. Reliving that night through the aftermath as described by the police helped reinforce my sanity.
Candice was the same. Luke trusted the advice more than us two so he avoided the newspapers for a while. Margot already had diagnosed PTSD, so she ended up in a ward for a few weeks and wasn't out till well after the dust had finally settled.
The tradition that led us to where it all happened had been going for three years by then.
The five of us would all agree on a place suitable for a hero dose of shrooms—psychadelics speak for consuming a large amount in one go—and to collectively take the Timothy Leary express to nirvana with a good view.
University had broken for Winter holidays and we decided on the famed rocky outcrop overlooking the ranges for that year’s trip. Apparently the sunrises there were breathtaking. Beyond civilisation, out there, Matt told us: bushland rolling over massive hills through the smokey distance to the mountains, where the sun crested orange and cast long shadows across the landscape and pink streaks through the clouds, if there were any.
He had a sometimes pretentious way of describing things—he was a typical English undergrad—but he’d nailed the sales pitch that time. The place sounded better than perfect for another unforgettable experience together, even if the shrooms turned out to be crap.
None of us had a chance to confirm if he was right or not, and we’ve never been game to go back and find out. Far too painful, and, more than that, bloody stupid to even consider.
It was an hour and a half before sunrise when Candice parked the van off the dirt road about a stone’s throw from the gate. The farmland before the treeline that bordered the lookout was about a kilometre from there. Several electric fences inbetween that we had to climb, which wouldn’t be a problem for a band of country kids like us.
Shouldn’t have been, anyway.
Matt being the guide ran ahead with such a boyish enthusiasm that he didn't check the wire before jumping the first. Turned out the farmer must’ve been a sadistic son of a bitch. The voltage was so high that a bright spark flashed before Matt yelled and toppled head first over the other side.
He immediately cried out in pain when he landed on his bad shoulder, which he’d dislocated playing footy over the summer (which is what we call Australian Rules Football, if you're unfamiliar.)
It was the middle of July and overnight a frost had crystalled on the paddocks. A kind of deep ocean haze rose over the horizon, but it was behind our phone's torchlights as we neared Matt’s groaning. He looked almost contorted, the poor bugger.
"Shit mate, came a cropper," I said, placing a boot carefully on the wire below the electrified one.
The story we gave the local journalist regarding what happened next was too outlandish to gain the kind of traction that it should have. Even locally, actually. Fortunately the police took us more seriously given how we were under questioning, but mainly because of the footage off Leah’s iPhone, which after a short deliberation, we all agreed not to release.
The attention from something like that wouldn’t do our studies any favours, we reasoned. We didn’t mind the speculation that one or all of us had committed murder. Made us cool in a fuck-up kind of way. But it was around federal election time so after a couple weeks no-one in the city where we lived seemed to give a shit.
What happened to Matt is still a blur, but I'll do my best. This time I'll include how the others saw it from behind so you get a better picture.
I do remember the first branch breaking, though. A hundred metres over the way to right of us was the other end of the farm, after which the trees were more thinly spaced than where we were headed.
It wasn't loud, but by the echo you could tell that it was loud up close. Shortly after that there was crashing of some kind through the sticks and bracken fern, before it stopped a moment, and started again. Like whatever was out there was unsure of its direction.
Then it stopped, and went silent entirely.
I looked back at the others.
Before I could say anything, again it was moving. Leah was the first to see it come into view as it cleared the fence, and later on she described what she saw as a faint dark shadow.
Once it hit the grass it picked up speed and we all heard the impossibly rapid footsteps that it made.
It was moving so fast that the other guys had barely pointed their torchlights down the fenceline before it was close enough to properly make out with the naked eye.
Only Leah had the foresight to start filming. It was better that way. She had more self-control than we did and was less likely to rewatch the footage over and over, than we would’ve been.
More importantly, none of us wanted to remember the face that it wore.
When we’d all heard that first crashing sound Matt had actually managed to stand and was just as curious as we were, and like us was staring down into the half-dark as it approached.
It was like a flash in a fucked-up dream. The thing must’ve been moving a hundred clicks an hour. Way faster than however fast a cheetah runs, only, it was running on two legs; and its arms weren’t in sync, and from what Luke said, were actually straightened diagonal, halfway to making a cross.
We saw it less than a blink, but it was still too much. Nothing more than a few seconds, Candice would say. She was the one who told the journalist that only in nightmares could something be half as terrifying.
All grey and all skin, it was, and it had the cadaverous stature of a tall and starved elderly man, with an elongated head tapering to a blunt point. None of us remember seeing its eyes. Just that there were these hideous indents between its wrinkles where its eyes should have been.
It moved so, so unbelievably fast. I could barely see it as it tackled Matt’s torso and his spine crunched sideways and it carried him over its shoulder quick into the black between the hills.
His scream carried high with a tortured Doppler effect as they receded. That's how fast it was moving.
It was several acres away before we even knew what hit us.
And how Matt kept fucking screaming.
Farther and farther away until suddenly his screams were the same volume, meaning the creature must have stopped running. Two of the most horrifying grunts you can imagine then resonated as if from everywhere, and the sound thereafter, fuck me… my mate was practically screeching as his body was torn apart.
Which we know is what happened by the scene after the police arrived and walked us there an hour later.
We all started yelling at the top of our lungs back, but none of us moved. None of us could move, and our cries quickly became crying screams of our own.
It wasn’t long before it stopped. That thing ate fast as it ran, and the last of it was the same rapid steps disappearing far away from us, quiet, almost silent around the slopes.
The branding of Matt’s last cry for help in my mind is where the obsession came from. The pain he was in, those final moments. Crying out while his body was being shredded to pieces, knowing how hopeless it was.
What would you do, if a fate like that befell your best friend?
Maybe, you’d do exactly what Luke and I did, before we started our masters degrees.
Take a gap-year from study, and learn how to spot hints of the same phenomenon in the papers as it made it’s way north up the state.
You might watch a bunch of YouTube how-tos teaching welding for making robust-enough traps and home-made weaponry.
Possibly, you’d even learn how to build remotely detonated bombs, even though you’ve always sucked at electronics.
But eight months in, like us, you’d also probably realise that you and your mate weren’t able to construct the kind of equipment sturdy enough to stop something like that, not without putting yourself in mortal danger.
That something able to move so fast on two legs would logically be stronger than the materials you could afford, and no doubt would have enough ingenuity to counter any damage you tried to inflict.
The enterprise of revenge was really just a way to handle our grief. And no matter how badly we wanted to stop that thing, we were better off just accepting that nothing was ever going to bring our Matt back.
Besides, there’s plenty of time left. And we did learn an awful lot. Maybe, one day, with the benefit of better resources, we’d both have it in us to follow through.
For now, though, it’s a couple years on and it’s back to the books this semester.
Matt would’ve wanted things this way.
Easier to move on, and try to forget how he went, without forgetting the friend that he was, when he’s still by your side.
#entertainment
source
I didn’t care what the therapist said. Reliving that night through the aftermath as described by the police helped reinforce my sanity.
Candice was the same. Luke trusted the advice more than us two so he avoided the newspapers for a while. Margot already had diagnosed PTSD, so she ended up in a ward for a few weeks and wasn't out till well after the dust had finally settled.
The tradition that led us to where it all happened had been going for three years by then.
The five of us would all agree on a place suitable for a hero dose of shrooms—psychadelics speak for consuming a large amount in one go—and to collectively take the Timothy Leary express to nirvana with a good view.
University had broken for Winter holidays and we decided on the famed rocky outcrop overlooking the ranges for that year’s trip. Apparently the sunrises there were breathtaking. Beyond civilisation, out there, Matt told us: bushland rolling over massive hills through the smokey distance to the mountains, where the sun crested orange and cast long shadows across the landscape and pink streaks through the clouds, if there were any.
He had a sometimes pretentious way of describing things—he was a typical English undergrad—but he’d nailed the sales pitch that time. The place sounded better than perfect for another unforgettable experience together, even if the shrooms turned out to be crap.
None of us had a chance to confirm if he was right or not, and we’ve never been game to go back and find out. Far too painful, and, more than that, bloody stupid to even consider.
It was an hour and a half before sunrise when Candice parked the van off the dirt road about a stone’s throw from the gate. The farmland before the treeline that bordered the lookout was about a kilometre from there. Several electric fences inbetween that we had to climb, which wouldn’t be a problem for a band of country kids like us.
Shouldn’t have been, anyway.
Matt being the guide ran ahead with such a boyish enthusiasm that he didn't check the wire before jumping the first. Turned out the farmer must’ve been a sadistic son of a bitch. The voltage was so high that a bright spark flashed before Matt yelled and toppled head first over the other side.
He immediately cried out in pain when he landed on his bad shoulder, which he’d dislocated playing footy over the summer (which is what we call Australian Rules Football, if you're unfamiliar.)
It was the middle of July and overnight a frost had crystalled on the paddocks. A kind of deep ocean haze rose over the horizon, but it was behind our phone's torchlights as we neared Matt’s groaning. He looked almost contorted, the poor bugger.
"Shit mate, came a cropper," I said, placing a boot carefully on the wire below the electrified one.
The story we gave the local journalist regarding what happened next was too outlandish to gain the kind of traction that it should have. Even locally, actually. Fortunately the police took us more seriously given how we were under questioning, but mainly because of the footage off Leah’s iPhone, which after a short deliberation, we all agreed not to release.
The attention from something like that wouldn’t do our studies any favours, we reasoned. We didn’t mind the speculation that one or all of us had committed murder. Made us cool in a fuck-up kind of way. But it was around federal election time so after a couple weeks no-one in the city where we lived seemed to give a shit.
What happened to Matt is still a blur, but I'll do my best. This time I'll include how the others saw it from behind so you get a better picture.
I do remember the first branch breaking, though. A hundred metres over the way to right of us was the other end of the farm, after which the trees were more thinly spaced than where we were headed.
It wasn't loud, but by the echo you could tell that it was loud up close. Shortly after that there was crashing of some kind through the sticks and bracken fern, before it stopped a moment, and started again. Like whatever was out there was unsure of its direction.
Then it stopped, and went silent entirely.
I looked back at the others.
Before I could say anything, again it was moving. Leah was the first to see it come into view as it cleared the fence, and later on she described what she saw as a faint dark shadow.
Once it hit the grass it picked up speed and we all heard the impossibly rapid footsteps that it made.
It was moving so fast that the other guys had barely pointed their torchlights down the fenceline before it was close enough to properly make out with the naked eye.
Only Leah had the foresight to start filming. It was better that way. She had more self-control than we did and was less likely to rewatch the footage over and over, than we would’ve been.
More importantly, none of us wanted to remember the face that it wore.
When we’d all heard that first crashing sound Matt had actually managed to stand and was just as curious as we were, and like us was staring down into the half-dark as it approached.
It was like a flash in a fucked-up dream. The thing must’ve been moving a hundred clicks an hour. Way faster than however fast a cheetah runs, only, it was running on two legs; and its arms weren’t in sync, and from what Luke said, were actually straightened diagonal, halfway to making a cross.
We saw it less than a blink, but it was still too much. Nothing more than a few seconds, Candice would say. She was the one who told the journalist that only in nightmares could something be half as terrifying.
All grey and all skin, it was, and it had the cadaverous stature of a tall and starved elderly man, with an elongated head tapering to a blunt point. None of us remember seeing its eyes. Just that there were these hideous indents between its wrinkles where its eyes should have been.
It moved so, so unbelievably fast. I could barely see it as it tackled Matt’s torso and his spine crunched sideways and it carried him over its shoulder quick into the black between the hills.
His scream carried high with a tortured Doppler effect as they receded. That's how fast it was moving.
It was several acres away before we even knew what hit us.
And how Matt kept fucking screaming.
Farther and farther away until suddenly his screams were the same volume, meaning the creature must have stopped running. Two of the most horrifying grunts you can imagine then resonated as if from everywhere, and the sound thereafter, fuck me… my mate was practically screeching as his body was torn apart.
Which we know is what happened by the scene after the police arrived and walked us there an hour later.
We all started yelling at the top of our lungs back, but none of us moved. None of us could move, and our cries quickly became crying screams of our own.
It wasn’t long before it stopped. That thing ate fast as it ran, and the last of it was the same rapid steps disappearing far away from us, quiet, almost silent around the slopes.
The branding of Matt’s last cry for help in my mind is where the obsession came from. The pain he was in, those final moments. Crying out while his body was being shredded to pieces, knowing how hopeless it was.
What would you do, if a fate like that befell your best friend?
Maybe, you’d do exactly what Luke and I did, before we started our masters degrees.
Take a gap-year from study, and learn how to spot hints of the same phenomenon in the papers as it made it’s way north up the state.
You might watch a bunch of YouTube how-tos teaching welding for making robust-enough traps and home-made weaponry.
Possibly, you’d even learn how to build remotely detonated bombs, even though you’ve always sucked at electronics.
But eight months in, like us, you’d also probably realise that you and your mate weren’t able to construct the kind of equipment sturdy enough to stop something like that, not without putting yourself in mortal danger.
That something able to move so fast on two legs would logically be stronger than the materials you could afford, and no doubt would have enough ingenuity to counter any damage you tried to inflict.
The enterprise of revenge was really just a way to handle our grief. And no matter how badly we wanted to stop that thing, we were better off just accepting that nothing was ever going to bring our Matt back.
Besides, there’s plenty of time left. And we did learn an awful lot. Maybe, one day, with the benefit of better resources, we’d both have it in us to follow through.
For now, though, it’s a couple years on and it’s back to the books this semester.
Matt would’ve wanted things this way.
Easier to move on, and try to forget how he went, without forgetting the friend that he was, when he’s still by your side.
#entertainment
source
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