Three Mile Drove, Chapter Twenty One (standard:horror, 1258 words) [22/29] show all parts
Author: Brian Cross	Added: Oct 27 2007	Views/Reads: 2796/1960	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Things are hotting up for Darren Goldwater as events in Three Mile Drove reach their climax

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE 

Darren gave chase along the tree-lined track, and as he tried to clear
his throat from the smoke that was clogging it up, he saw a 
grey-cloaked figure running ahead of the child. 

He broke unwillingly into a sprint, ignoring the rasping he felt as he
raced through boggy ground. He saw the figure ahead of the girl more 
clearly now, it was hunched and trailing a leg, though it seemed to 
find the conditions no more of an impediment to its retreat than did 
the child, treading quickly through the terrain, the polluted air not 
hampering it. But despite his smoke smeared eyesight Darren knew the 
child ahead couldn't be the missing girl, she was too tall for a minor, 
he guessed she was nearing her teens, in fact she ran with the fluency 
of a teenager. 

The wind blew like a hungry draught freed from a vacuum, while overhead,
 giant conifers bent double as though humming a warning down at him. 
Flames leapt into the sky, showing themselves above the trees like 
torchlight guiding the way, and over to his left where the ruins of the 
house lay, snapping timber erupted into flames creating solar-like 
flares, illuminating the ground in brilliant, transient light. 

It was amidst one such flare that the figures suddenly halted, reaching
a point where the track diverged northeast and southwest. Seeming 
uncertain on which path to take he saw the deformed figure stop, then 
grab the girl as she ran into it. 

Darren stopped and gaped, a cold sweat running down his forehead. He saw
skin riddled with holes, like craters on a lunar surface. He thought he 
saw it, though his mind was willing him not to believe it – and there 
seemed to be tiny pieces writhing in those holes, like worms maybe. Its 
brown texture blistered, its cracks deep and raw like a partly peeled 
potato. The  bulbous head seemed grotesquely large, out of proportion 
to the frailty of the body. The eyes were sunken so deeply into their 
sockets he couldn't be sure whether they were eyes at all. Its nose 
seemed little more than a gnarled twig while the mouth was simply a 
slit, which crossed from cheek to cheek. 

Then, just as you might snuff out a match, the light thrown by the flare
had gone; even the main blaze seemed to be subsiding, leaving a murky 
orange twilight. He realised then, that rain had begun to fall heavily; 
it was as though ghost firemen from the heavens had arrived to 
extinguish the blaze. 

And with it, the creature (for that was all he could call it) had gone,
lost in the smoke that drifted across the area like unrelenting fog. 

Perhaps his mind had begun playing tricks, he'd only had that split
second or two to form his visual impression. Perhaps the creepiness of 
the area, the sudden contrast between the light from the blaze and 
rapidly approaching dusk had stolen onto his mind like an intruder in a 
dream, distorting and fragmenting reality into a kaleidoscope of the 
unreal. 

Except that it hadn't. 

Because what he thought he saw had been reality. Above all else the
stench, which had made him want to wretch, told him so. More animal 
than human, but not even the most wretched beast could be so ugly. It 
was as if he'd left the real world unknowingly and been shown the 
footpath to hell in those few seconds. Every instinct told him that he 
should run from this place, this godforsaken area, retreat before he 
became engulfed in whatever evil existed here. But the adrenaline that 
surged through him now determined otherwise. He dithered for only a 
second and then chose the southwest track. *                            
         * 

McPherson stubbed his cigarette end in a tray and rapped his fingers on
the desk, running the patrol officer's message through his mind for the 
umpteenth time. It could be an out of control bonfire of course, one of 
the Tomblin tribe burning off the crap they'd let build up over the 
weeks, maybe months. 

Or might it be something else? He just wished the officer who'd spotted


Click here to read the rest of this story (57 more lines)