Fiction:Hallow

Darkness ahead. Darkness behind. Rain, dark and unstinting, drenches his mane and pours down his shoulders.

Farid stumbles onward. He pushes through the trees. Black mud squelches beneath his hooves; black rain patters against the leaves. Everything is black this night --

-- black as oil --

-- and the ground is uneven, the trees have roots growing everywhere, if I twist an ankle here I won’t see morning but I have to get away --

Lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the world in stark black and white, and the noise of it is almost physical. Farid flinches and falls. Soft mud engulfs him until he manages to push himself back onto his feet, soaked through and cold to the bone. He can’t stop. He can’t stop. He needs to get away from the town, away from the river --

-- the river running black and soaking the banks with glistening tar. They used to drink from that river, would catch fish in it during the wet season, when it flowed full and fast and filled with slippery silver bodies, but no one wanted to see what they might find in it now. At least they still had the aquifer.

But something had happened to the river, and none of the local lords knew what. So Magistrate Reshadze had sent a couple of his guardsmen upriver to see if they could find the source, and in the meantime everybody tried to stay away from the water (except for a few youths who dared each other to drink it), and Farid had taken a cart to Kem in the east where he had to see someone about parts for the old loom in the back of his shop because life went on even if the river hadn’t…

And when he came back, a week later, a mere hour ago…

He’d seen every window in the town streaming with light. And in that light he’d seen the ground stained with oil. Seen every surface sticky with it. In places it had hardened into some kind of resin, forming bizarre spiraling spires and structures like looked like something alive.

And on the oil, he’d seen…

Farid trips over something soft. He falls. He slams his chin on a root and bites his tongue. One of his hands scrapes open on rough bark. One of his ankles twists painfully.

He limps back to his feet, glancing at the soft thing. It’s a deer, a dead deer, he thinks. It’s too dark to see properly. No, not dead: it twitches fitfully where it lies, spasmodic and random. Not dead, but dying at least.

Lightning crackles across the sky again. And in that brief flash, Farid sees the deer’s fur, matted and sticky with oil. The sound he makes when he sees it does not belong in a living throat.

The horror makes him dizzy. His stomach churns. Not dead. Dying but never dead. How far did the river run? How far away from the river did the oil run? How far did he have to run? Gods! He turns, tries to flee, but his legs won’t listen to him, his ankle sings with pain, his legs are weak and cold with fear. He falls again. Mud to his elbows. He crawls instead.

Light ahead. Light ahead! The steady white light of a glasslamp rises out of the darkness and the sheeting rain. Farid claws at a tree, dragging himself back up and standing. He calls out.

“Hey! Hey! Over here!”

The light bobs, then meanders closer. Farid suddenly wonders if he shouldn’t be warning its owner away from here. But something makes his throat stop up closed.

And then, as the glasslamp draws close, he sees the shape of his rescuer.

There are three of them. The one on the left is holding the lamp. The one on the right is a deer. Oil clings to their fur, dripping off with the water. More oil seems to well up from their skin to replace it. It trickles from their mouths and nostrils. It trails from their utterly black eyes like tears.

The one in the center is nothing from this world. It is tall, and thin, and its body is made of black resin and shimmering iridescent drapes. Its face is an unformed thing that melts and runs like wax.

Wordlessly, the befouled aphor points a gnarled finger at Farid.

“Why are you running?” it asks.

Farid can’t speak. He can’t move. He can’t even tremble from the awfulness of it all.

“Both of us are hallowed,” says the aphor. It shifts the point of its finger to Farid’s right hand, the hand he scraped open, the hand now clutching a tree for balance.

Something makes Farid’s other hand move. From a distance, like a prisoner in his own body, Farid watches himself rake the black mud off his right hand with his nails, exposing the wound there. There is no blood. Farid scratches harder. His nails dig fresh wounds into the back of his hand. There is no blood. Farid claws his own flesh open, and there is no blood. What flows out is black, as black as mud, as black as oil.

“Both of us are hallowed,” the aphor repeats. “Come with us back to the village. We’ve been waiting for you.” Farid begins to move again. His legs won’t listen to him. His arms won’t listen to him. His throat won’t let him speak. It’s the oil in his veins, soaking into his muscles and bones, that moves him, not him. It will cross the barrier between blood and brain soon enough. After that, whether Farid can still be considered Farid will be a matter for philosophers to debate. Until then, he can do nothing but watch his own body follow the other three back the way he came.

Lighting crashes overhead, some time later. The four of them are already gone.