The Fourth Night

Written for the Sunday Scaries

Written for the inaugural Sunday Scaries, Visual Prompt, put together by Conor MacCormack Labyrinthia Mythweaver and Mathew C. Bryant • Horror Poet

— I took the visual prompt and moved it to a rural farm in nowheresville.

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Scenes of animal harm, and horror. Please by advised.

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The Fourth Night

For three nights now, the dogs have howled at three am. A mournful ululation that seemingly goes on and on unchecked. The night responds with only quiet. But in the morning there are dead cattle spread out around the farm, and the air is greasy and stifled. And no matter how hard you scrub, you can’t wash the clag from your body.

It was my brother who first realised the animals had been positioned into the shape of a five pointed star, using a drone he’d got for his eighteenth birthday. He was also the one to realise that the star had been placed within the confines of a bloodied triangle, carefully constructed from the carrion of hundreds of birds. So that the whole area around the house buzzed with flies and the miasmic stench of death.

The house is in a large clearing surrounded by trees and grazing pasture, with a single road leading through open fields to to join with the main road some three miles away, and then town, even further on. In the beginning, we messaged our friends, and told them what was going on, but no one could help us. Once the signal died and we couldn’t break through the star, we were on our own.

Helicopters flew nearby, but nothing could get near. Not even the police, or press.

Of course mom worked hard to keep everyone happy. She baked. She talked. She gave good advice: “Surely, the police will do something! They can’t just leave us.” And dad did Dad things, sometimes driving his 4x4 directly at the wall of carrion, only for the car to just stall at the peripheral; the smell, (and maybe something more) overwhelming him, so that when he stumbled, bleary-eyed, back into the house he had to change his clothes and shower. After that, we mostly stayed in the inside. The dogs were all kept close-by.

There was something else in that five-pointed star. Something rank and slimy and eldritch. It wasn’t just dead cattle. Oh, you could see hooves in the air, see the flies; but there was also other things too. From my bedroom window, I thought I saw tentacles moving in the brumous haze; of course they all said I was mad. But, if you watched it out of the corner of your eye, you could see antennule. I tried to tell people throughout the day, but no one wanted to hear. And then of course we lost our signal, and everyone panicked. I just went to my bedroom. You could hear the insects buzzing, even from there. Like the tentacles, it wasn’t immediately obvious, but there was a slight vibration emanating from somewhere outside the house. Something, unnatural.

As I lay on my bed, I could hear my parents arguing, and my brother’s voice getting high-pitched. He was a few years older than me, but I could tell he was scared. We all were. But it was the night we were really worried about. What would happen? No one could sleep because they were too worried; later, it was decided that we would all sleep in the front room together, and one of us would keep watch. I was first.

In the end, it didn’t matter, as the black pressed in against the windows, none of us slept. It was quiet. No one could check their phones, or watch videos without a signal, and so we all just sat together, dreading three o’clock.

At two-thirty, one of the dogs began to gently whine to itself, then the other two joined in, and it became a long soulful howl. And no matter how hard dad tried to shush them, they wouldn’t stop. One would quieten a little, and then just start up again. There was a massive detention from the back of the house, as if a large crane had smashed a wrecking ball into the back door. The lights went off: several things happened simultaneously. The dogs all raced off to investigate, my mom started crying, with dad holding her. My brother got his gun and followed the dogs . . . and then the screaming began. It started in time with the strobing lights flashing on and off, and knotted my stomach into fear. The sound was the dogs, but . . . not. There would be a bark, which turned into a yelp, then a full-pitched throaty scream. I’d never heard an animal sound like it before. I looked to mom and dad, but I couldn’t see them. I was alone. And the house started to vibrate and the screaming went on and on, and the strobe lighting pulsed ominously. I found myself blindly running up the stairs and into my bedroom, and then into my bed.

The house continued to rock on its very foundations; the pitiful screams going on and on. Why didn’t they stop? Why didn’t they stop! Where was my mom? Warm urine coursed down my leg, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. The bed was soon soaked, and I had to get up, my clothes sticking to me. I didn’t even notice the dark figure standing in the doorway, where the door had been ripped from its hinges. It had no face, and appeared to be made of long grass, or straw, or moss, or all three. I stood watching this straw man, frozen with absolute terror, while the awful screaming and the strobing bombarded my senses. Until. They. Stopped. In the light from my bedroom window, I could see something moving towards me: a tentacle. Two tentacles. Hovering uncertainly before me, they gently pulled my wet clothes from me, leaving me naked, shivering and piss-soaked; I stood, unable to move, until a third tentacle lifted me up off the floor and gently inserted me into the fuselage of the straw man, so that my face was all that could be seen, and I was cocooned in a warm plant-like substance, the air in the swaddle thick and sweet, smelling of crushed ferns and fresh grass. And then we were moving.

We travelled quickly. Across countryside, streams, over houses, and other dwellings. I thought of the dogs; I thought of my parents; I thought of my brother: but all seemed remote and there was no emotional connection. I just thought of them. We flew for sometime, until we passed a thick wood. And on the other side of the trees, we came across a vast Chthonian leviathan, emanating from the rubble of multiple acres of farmland, with thousands of tentacles, and a thousand more cocooned people like me being offered up to the cyclopean creature who had eyes to see, and mouths on every orifice. I screamed until my throat was sore, and then I did nothing; what could I do? I was trapped, held immobile by the straw man.

We’d slowed, now that we were surrounded by other cocoons, other white faces buried in the grass of the manifold straw men. Off in the distance, in the half light, I could see that some people were literally being sucked dry, as they were pumped like gasoline out of their cocoons and into the body of the monster; I just had to wait for my turn. To my left, a gibbering woman was being pulled upward. There was no screaming now. Just the wet, liquescent thrum of the leviathan’s heart. I now knew why we hadn’t been allowed to leave. Why it had kept us for four days. It wanted us to ripen.

As we approach the shadow of the main body: a mountain of pulsing, stygian flesh and tangled vine, a tentacle thicker than an ancient oak hooks up to the top of my straw man. We immediately stop moving. I don’t feel pain. Instead, I feel a rush of memories that aren’t mine: the taste of sunlight on leaves, the slow movement of tectonic plates, and the cold, starving hunger of a god that has been buried for a million years. It isn’t eating us for spite. It’s simply refuelling. The cocoon begins to tighten. The warm, plant-like substance is no longer a cradle; it’s a straw. I look out one last time and see the horizon beginning to bleed into a grey dawn. The fourth night is over.

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