You've been dragging the body across the desert for days
2024-01-01
You’ve been dragging the body across the desert for days.
The contours of the sand blend together in an almost hypnotic pattern, and you are unsure if you’ve actually moved at all. The drugs and the hallucinations they cause make the desert feel alive, like a glittering ocean of gold.
Just one step after another. No matter what you see, no matter what you hear, you must keep moving. Not resting for even a second until the task is complete.
You feel an ever so slight movement on your left arm.
Swiftly you pull out a dagger from your belt and plunge it into the body. The blade has been dyed to a pitch black onyx color and its point has long since dulled.
With enough pressure, it sinks in and the body wriggles. Hopefully in agony.
You pull out the dagger and stab the body again, this time between the eyes. You feel it go limp once more. As you pull the blade out, it drips with a viscous black sludge, and you instinctively shudder.
Quickly you turn away from the thing that elicits a very primordial fear in every single human being.
The hallucinations are a blessing in disguise as they disfigure the creature, turning it from one indescribable horror to another. Now the thing seems to have less eyes than it did at the beginning of your journey. Or perhaps it has more?
You try to recall what the thing truly looked like, but you feel your mind won’t let you. Instead of a clear image, all you feel is fear. Fear of something all humans have feared since the dawn of time. A true apex predator so terrible that it has imprinted itself into our genetic memory. The very reason we fear the dark, even if we do not consciously know why.
You feel that you’re heading the right way, as the thing seems to recover faster and faster the closer you get to your destination.
Perhaps it senses that you’re slowly dragging it towards its doom.
As you cross a massive sand dune, you peer over the horizon at the glittering golden ocean of sand.
In the distance you see the earth and the sky torn apart by an outline of inky black. In your delirium the black line shifts and distorts like an oscilloscope.
You pull out your compass to verify your heading. The needle twists and turns like one of Dali’s clocks to point directly at the the fracture in the earth.
Seeing the final end point of your nightmare fills you with a sense of determination. You cannot stop now, you must keep moving and cannot afford to stop. You grab a fistful of drugs from your satchel. A cocktail of stimulants and anxiolytics that act as fuel for the perpetual motion machine that is your body.
You tighten your grasp on one of the body’s many extremities and begin your descent down the dune.
Only on the very edge can you truly comprehend the size of the pit.
It is as if you were looking at two pictures, one of the sky during the day, and another of the night sky, stacked on top of each other.
In a 180 degree arch, all you can see is the blue sky hovering above an endless abyss of pure black. It is truly the blackest black you have ever seen, and every other black seems gray in comparison. The pit seems to swallow everything, even light itself.
The body you are dragging wriggles slightly. The thing knows where it is. You doubt a thing like that can even feel fear, but if it can this is probably it.
It barely stays dead anymore. Each stab incapacitates it for merely a couple of seconds. Once it springs back to a state that resembles life, it tries desperately to thrash around. Thankfully it is so gravely wounded that it can just barely manage a wiggle. Yet even when it stops moving, you feel the animosity and the omnicidal malice. The incredible aura of hate feels like so palpable that you find it hard to breathe. As if the hatred fills the air and stuffs your throat, making you choke to death on the hate itself.
Pushing the thing off the edge is harder than you expected. The fear is stronger than it has ever been and it nearly paralyzes you. Yet you find that last ounce of strength that allows you to push the damned thing into the abyss. As it falls, the veil of hatred lifts and you feel you can breathe and think clearly once more.
You hope to all gods out there, new and old, that it never learns how to climb out of that bottomless pit.
Written in 2024 for the prompt “You’ve been dragging the body across the desert for days” by u/tssmn on r/WritingPrompts