He was in the shed, walking in a slow, dreamy fashion. The freezer at the far end of the little room drew all of his attention. Although from the outside it looked the same as it had for months, even years, he knew he would never see it the same way. In his dream, he felt like he knew more about that thing. It was as if he could sense its unknowable age, its power, and its darkness. It drew him to it, as irresistibly as a moth is drawn to a flame, but he found that he didn’t want to resist. He wanted to open the freezer and gaze down upon it. He wanted to know its secrets. In his dream state he felt no fear, only awe, like a deep, primal part of his brain was aware of what had entered his life and his home. His feet carried him towards his goal of their own accord, and he let them.
His foot connected with one of the almost empty paint cans which had until recently littered the lid of the freezer. It clattered hollowly across the bare and uneven concrete floor, a sound jarringly incompatible with the dreamlike sensation of his situation. After a moment or two, Rick realised what else was wrong with that can: he had felt it connect with his toes through his shoes.
This isn’t a dream, it’s real, this is real I’M AWAKE!
Rick felt a bolt of panic as his feet continued towards the freezer anyway, until he finally regained control of his body and brought himself to a stop. His senses suddenly came back to life, and everything around him lost the soft hues of a dream and became dingy reality again. That sense of primeval knowledge disappeared, and fear rapidly filled its place.
Rick had never sleepwalked before in his life. He was willing to bet that he still hadn’t. His mind felt different – violated. The thing in the freezer wasn’t dead at all.
He grabbed the nearest heavy thing to hand – a thick slice of a tree trunk that he used as a chopping block – and ran to the freezer, sure that at any second that lid would begin to lift, and thin, long fingers would reach out of the gap, glistening with ice, the claws scraping the white metal exterior of the freezer.
The lid stayed down. He dumped the log heavily on top. He felt the vibrations travel through the freezer, down to the floor and through the soles of his shoes. He knew the thing in there had felt it too, had been jolted by it, and undoubtedly angered by it.
Was that the freezer’s motor reacting to the weight and producing a different hum, or was it something else?
Rick turned and fled. On his way through the shed’s open doorway he paused long enough to grab his tree-felling axe from its place leaning in the corner. Outside he replaced and locked the padlock that he had no memory of unlocking, and only then did he realise just how badly his fingers were trembling.
He picked up the axe and held it with both hands, looking like a bizarre and deranged woodsman. He stood six feet away from the locked door, looking at the faint glow that emanated from the gaps in the boards. During Rick’s sleep (or entrancement), the sun had set, and dusk was giving way to night. He stood in his yard, axe ready, listening for a sound he didn’t want to hear, listening for the sound of a heavy piece of wood falling onto a concrete floor. When he finally walked back to his house, axe still in hand, it was due more to a growing unease in the darkness than to a growing confidence in his situation.
He made himself a drink, a strong one, and went and stood on the back porch. He didn’t sit down tonight. Tonight he wanted to be ready to move if he needed to. The axe leant against the wooden panelling of his house, never out of reach.
To hell with the money. He had to get rid of that thing, and fast. He didn’t know how, but no way was he going to try to do it in the dark.
*
Rick didn’t mean to sleep, and he was never sure if he really did sleep or not as he waited for dawn with the axe by his side. Emotions that were not yet fully formed thoughts swirled in his head. He felt sorrow, and fear, and loss and desperation, but in a detached sort of way, as if he was just feeling the pain of others. He grew dizzy. His head gained that cotton-wool feeling of a few too many drinks, even though he only had one. At times he was sure he was sitting in a chair in his living room, at others he thought he was pacing, or watching the shed through the window. Sometimes he didn’t know where he was at all. He was caught in a mental whirlwind with no way out, and something remained through it all, something older than time and of darkness too deep for Rick’s mind to even begin to understand.
Then the images came.
Rick saw things too terrible to take in. Torturous and relentless scenes of devastation and horror cycled through his mind, which had become his own private cinema of the damned.
Then he saw his Grand-pappy.
He was walking through the woods that bordered the family land. In those woods Grand-pappy stumbled upon a small cave, revealed by a recent heavy rainstorm. Within that cave, Rick saw, was the same creature that was now trapped in his freezer, appearing as dead then as it did now. It looked exactly the same, despite the sixty or so years that had passed. He watched as Grand-pappy picked the thing up and carried it back to the farm. He watched him lay it down in one of the barns, and then lock the door.
He developed an obsession with the thing almost instantly. He ignored his wife, his son and his work, spending his days shut in the barn, sitting before the stiff body as it showed him things that he never could have even imagined. He sat there staring at it, trancelike, as it slowly ate his mind.
Rick experienced a blast of what his grandfather’s mind had thought and felt during his last days with that thing. Rick realised that what he was going through now, this personal, mental hell, was only the beginning. He felt the callous joy that the not-quite dead thing took in Grand-pappy’s decline, and in forcing his grandson to watch it.
Rick watched as Grand-pappy regained enough of himself to try to destroy the thing. He watched petrol soak that dry, almost rawhide body, and saw as it went up in a roar of fire. The inferno burned out within a minute as it exhausted the petrol. The body remained, untouched by the flames.
And finally, Rick saw as Grand-pappy, his hair was now white instead of ebony, did the only thing he could think of – he entombed it in the earth, and filled the surrounding ground with rocks so that it would never be uncovered by a plough.
Until he, Rick, had come along with his pickaxe.
The final scene Rick saw was of his Grand-pappy, free of his demon but no richer in sanity, continuing his downward spiral.
*
Rick awoke, if that was the right word, as dawn was spreading across the horizon in the east. Unlike most of his dreams, the visions he had seen during the night didn’t fade away within a few minutes of waking; instead they remained in his head, merciless and undeniable. Once, when Rick was very young, he had sneaked a peak at a particularly graphic and disturbing horror movie. Afterwards, he hadn’t felt right within himself, as if he had witnessed something so distressing and evil that his very soul had been tainted by it. That feeling was nothing to how Rick felt as he slowly sat up in his armchair that morning.
The axe was lying on the floor in the middle of the room, presumably dropped during his pacing. He picked it up and looked closely at the well-kept, sharp blade.
And felt slightly ridiculous; he felt like a solitary soldier standing against the advance of an army. What good will an axe be against that thing?
"Got to start somewhere," he answered himself. "If the axe don’t work, the plough might."
But Rick had a horrible feeling that not even the blades of his plough would be able to damage that thing. It had spent sixty years in the ground in his field, and if his vision was true, it hadn’t changed a bit in that time and the fire hadn’t even blackened its skin. He had to do something, though. He had to try to destroy this evil that he had brought into his home, and that had so gleefully destroyed his grandfather.
The air outside was already growing warm as Rick walked across the yard to his shed. He unlocked the padlock and opened the door, grateful to see that the log was exactly where he had left it. He cleared a space in the middle of the floor as he approached the freezer. He tentatively lifted the log from the lid and put it down in the middle of that space. He turned back to the freezer, and the menace that emanated from the simple rectangular box was almost unbearable. Reluctantly, Rick lifted the lid.
Freezing had no more changed its appearance than burning. It was as if the ice had refused to form on it. Rick looked down at it, its body wreathed in gloom as Rick stood between it and the light source, and wondered how he had ever thought this thing looked even vaguely human. Its body was the same shape, for the most part, and some of the features were similar, but this thing was quite clearly a beast. In the shadows, that face seemed far from human, and even more twisted and cruel than before. In fact, the thing looked decidedly reptilian. Now that it had made contact with his mind, he could feel the part of it that remained alive inside that husk, and he could feel its evil and its darkness. He knew now why fire had not been able to destroy this thing, this devil. It had been born in fire.
He set the axe down, and lifted the thing out of the freezer with disgust etched onto his face. Its skin didn’t even feel cold after two days in the freezer. He put it on the chopping block log in the centre of the room and hurriedly wiped his hands on his trousers, but that wasn’t enough to rid himself of the feeling that tiny insects were crawling all over his palms and fingers.
He picked up the axe, but before he swung he looked at the thing again, sitting on his chopping block like a demonic piece of kindling. Or, he realised, like something laid on a pagan altar.
He held the shaft of the axe in both hands and lifted it, felt is weight poised in the air above and behind him, and gazed down at the devilish thing with hatred and fear mixed together on his face.
He swung the axe.
An image flashed into his mind and burned there. It was of the thing in front of him but it was alive, standing upright, looking at him, baring rows of sharp fangs. Hissing.
The axe blade hit the dead-looking creature on the rib cage and bounced back up without leaving a mark. The force of Rick’s blow sent the axe rebounding back up at rapid speed, and before Rick even had a chance to react the blunt side of the steel axe head crashed into the centre of his forehead.
Everything went dim and fuzzy in an instant. Rick fell backwards, powerless to stop himself, and landed on the pickaxe leaning up against the wall, the sharp point piercing the skin just beside his spine and bursting through his body and out the other side.
Rick lay slumped on the floor as his vision grew darker and darker, the world wavering and fading away before his eyes. Gagging, retching sounds came from his open mouth as his lungs filled with blood, drowning him. Numbly he looked down at his chest. The point of the pickaxe was there, glistening red. His shirt around the exit wound was fast becoming sodden. With a colossal effort he lifted his gaze and looked at the creature lying on the chopping block, unharmed. As he stared at it, the world went black.
And then in his mind, as the last of Rick’s life left him, another vision came, this time not of the past but of the future. Eventually people would come looking for him, and they would find his corpse. In front of his corpse they would find this devil of another dimension, and shadowy government agencies would quickly swallow it up. Housed in a secret facility, dozens of scientists and specialists would examine it, study it, would be exposed to it. People with connections to the highest earthly chain of command. In Rick’s final moment he felt the joy of the beast, as it was let loose on the world
*
It was precisely thirty-one days before the police arrived at the farm. Rick didn’t have regular contact with many people, and so it took some time for anyone to notice he was missing. The two police officers knocked at the front door and received no response. The door was locked. Going round the side of the house they noticed a chicken coop and pen. Ten dead birds lay in the dirt. They searched the main building via the open back door, but found no sign of life. It was quite evident that nobody had been in the house for some time. Then one of the officers spotted the open shed door across the yard.
Neither of them spoke as they stepped inside and surveyed the scene in front of them. Rick’s body was in a bizarre and somewhat disgusting phase of decomposition, as it appeared that not a single animal, not even flies, wanted anything to do with it. Instead, it was being consumed only by bacteria and the heat of the summer. But what drew their attention even more was the thing laid on top of a thick log, the log itself an island in the sea of long-dried blood that covered much of the shed floor.
One of them finally whispered, "Better radio the station."
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