I Do Not Know You (the_stranger_) wrote in wildhuntthreads, @ 2020-09-30 23:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | !post: narrative, the stranger |
Who: The Stranger
What: A Strange Occurrence
When: Thursday at midnight
Where: The Kilaga Mountains
Status: Narrative, Finished
Warnings: Horror, mentions of blood, graphic insect mutilation, insect death, circus imagery
Something is not right.
A bear freezes halfway through a thicket of huckleberries. The woods around it are still as every animal falls quiet, listening, watching, waiting. The sudden hush that is created by trembling anticipation hangs heavy in the air. An odor of sawdust and wax, ozone, plastic, and formaldehyde overtakes the normal forest scents, getting stronger until they replace them completely.
The animals do not know the names of the things they smell, but they don’t need to. The woods erupt into a flurry of motion as every creature turns and runs. Predator and prey take no notice of each other as they race to get away from the thing, each individual creature spurred on by the same primal drive.
Something are coming.
The silence is broken, shattered by the thumping of desperate feet and hearts and a sudden, sourceless swell of music. From nothing and nowhere comes the distant wail of a pipe organ, out of tune and out of rhythm. It is vomiting a blasphemy of what might have been a carnival melody. A bright line of light cuts through the forest. The rip grows and grows, until the music becomes bloated and the forest is no longer a forest. The limbs of the trees bend backwards, and the sky is stiff and flat with colors just a little too uniform, a little too painted. The animals do not notice. They don’t know where they are, or what they are, or what sky is. They are too afraid.
A polished black leather boot emerges from the light and settles on the mulchy earth. Earth. Earth. Earth. Earth. What is earth? Nothing but a mashing of letters, a string of sounds and symbols with no meaning. Earth. Blurred and ugly in the mouth, rounding the tongue and pressing against teeth in ways that are all wrong.
The wooden sun overhead twitches, and the rip vanishes. The carnival music is gone. The contorted thing that said I am a forest is gone. The sky is gone, the earth is gone, the plastic orbs pretending to be huckleberries are gone, and the branches twist around until they look almost right again.
A circus ringmaster stands alone in the woods. At first glance, it looks like a woman, but a woman she is not. White, lifeless hands reach out and pluck a cicada from the air. The insect struggles helplessly as smooth fingers carefully tear its skin away, smearing its wings with thick, red liquid that pools around its now unrecognizable form and drips onto the mulchy earth below in a steady, delicate stream.
The exoskeleton is freed and the remaining pulpy mess is flung away. Cold, hard fingers bring its prize to a cruel and lifeless face. It is different from the ones on the other side of the rip. It is wonderful and new. Similar, but not quite the same.
Bits of sawdust trickle out of the cicada’s exoskeleton, the wooden dust bulging behind glassy eyes. The not-a-cicada spasms. After several seconds of twitching, it lifts its wings and takes to the air with jagged, mechanical movements. The animals it passes as it buzzes towards the sea know to give it a wide berth.
They Do Not Know this cicada.
It is not one of them.