Ruin

I needed a place to ruin so completely it would become the means of my salvation.

The location settled upon was a rustic shelter erected long ago where our young town had once hosted the Briar Hills silver mine. No other site for the work of such an escape was to be possible. Here is found the source of the plague on reality that has snared me.

Here it is stable, unchanging.

It was here that founders labored to provide for a community while being plotted against by owners. In those happy days a vigorous community of men laid siege to the hills that describe our skyline, hoping to unearth its secrets by day, and slept out under stars during lonely nights.

Time went on, and deeper into the earth the work progressed, it was discovered there was an abomination at its geologic core sealed in granite.

The hills held a circulatory system, a vasculature of putrid lava—a cosmic pus that had no earthly analog. A fluid rotting, a substance that melts as base chemicals, viscous, diseased, spreading and climbing. By mediums of liquid and vapor and additional means of conveyance we have no name for, the ruin of this wilderness town was sealed when industry pierced the heart and killed our world. In our arrogance we caused an offence that cannot be repaired, a disaster unending.

It started simply in the pioneering days.

First, the hill’s broad face was torn open and peeled back before being thrown away. Rocks set by nature during earth’s dawning were pulverized onsite, the process releasing deposits of arsenic, lead, and other elements unknowable into the water.

Locals, working men and their families lived hard lives of exploitation. Uncounted numbers, robbed and abused, lay forgotten in multiplying shallow graves littering the soil.

In time it became inadvisable to travel alone or to drink the now torpid water. People learned not to forage or eat the fish for fear of toxins and animals with bellies full of parasites with human faces. Most avoided the old mine campgrounds after operations ended, believing that people sleeping under the stars risk being pulled into graves by the lonely dead.

People do not remember what ended operations here. The most common explanation is there was simply no more silver to be found, but don’t you believe it.

Some explained a conglomerate bought the owners out and ran them out of the industry, take it from me, this story is groundless.

The truth is that a time came when the operation found what was housed in secret by this mountain range. They didn’t know what they would find when they blasted and scratched their way into the hill’s deepest interior. Those who were present at the moment of breaking through didn’t live to learn of the novel and inconceivable pollution they loosened onto the world that still pours forth from the heart of the mine. A liquid death that is difficult to fit into words.

Think of a golden mud, of animal fat rendered and flowing as a hot grease. Feel how the wavy chemical vapor makes you ill. Listen how the sound of it splashing and flowing is a chorus of screaming and weeping souls.

It was too late to do anything but contend that the enterprise meant no harm. Slowly the fallout spread until all the town was corruption. The first signs were immediate and observed where water collected and flowed.

Rainbow trout bleached ashen and scattered air-drowned along the river’s burning alkaline shore.

The lampreys grew large and became strangely spiteful in their aggressive behavior; they grew human appendages that appeared to burden their movements.

Trees along the bank now change location, some species choosing to avoid the poisoned water when it ran to the height of its banks and other species greedily thrusting roots into the current, a few now standing contentedly in deep water. They expand and contract as if breathing heavily from their efforts.

Since the disaster, we all have become alloyed with the substance.

I have come to understand that this sludge is something like the waste product of time’s moving gears, the scatological remains of existence. The byproduct of forms birthed into the material world.

After a blast pierced the heart of the mountain, people dwelling here also became alloyed with an otherworldly toxin that flowed like a river of bile and lava that absorbed time.

The people were shadows of themselves, most unaware of how we had been altered. I engaged many about Mainstreet and found them to be simple and attempting to carry on as before, now only the simplest tasks filled their time. I saw in many vacant grey eyes that I was regarded by them as little more than a dream. I set about leaving.

The pains of my confinement accumulated slowly as new boundaries presented themselves. I was in a cage made to appear as the world I knew before.

First, I found there would now be an overriding default wherein all things would no longer be changed. Objects reorientated would revert to their default state once unwatched. My bed would be again made without my intervention. All work and change to my own appearance would no longer take; all would be as before when I stopped paying attention. No engine would start and equipment would no longer be energized.

Next, I found that no road taken would lead a traveler outside of this jurisdiction. Walking for a day’s time would take me outside of town. The surrounding land was enveloped in impenetrable fog indistinguishable from the sky’s light grey firmament. I penetrated deeply in the void until I found the atmosphere became thick as mud and made me deaf and blind in the accumulation.

In fear I flailed to penetrate the veil and pulled back to where I could breathe. Desperate, I threw myself headlong at the phenomenon with passing through as my object.

To my horror I would emerge again where I had entered. Again and again, I tried to pass and found I was turned about and emerged again into city limits from the exact point of entry.

What followed was my era of indolence.

In a town that never changed under an unmoving light grey overcast morning sky, I lingered. I believed myself dead and no longer took the world around me to be real. A festering depravity metastasized inside me, and I began to wantonly harm and brutalize this imposter of the town of my birth.

I once set fire fueled by gasoline that I watched smolder for a day. Returning later, the plants and stumps that I burned were again intact and stoic in moon cut shadows that never change.

I spent weeks engaging every man, woman, and child of the jurisdiction.

All were residue of the people I knew in my youth. I came across a man I knew to be a cruel bully as a child at the hardware store he owned. I tried to bully him, to pick a fight and make him angry. My former tormenter was present in body but seemed a fraction of his old self. An overwhelming anger born of frustration rose inside me looking at my rival’s vacant grey eyes.

I pushed him with all my strength and he fell. Without a thought I was kneeling on his chest and beating him with fists until I was breathing heavy. Then, having attained a sledge with a maul end, I stood over his unmoving body and went to work on him until the floor beneath had been beaten through. I left combing his brain matter out of my hair between my fingers.

It felt like weeks before I returned. I regretted to have sullied the hardware store with my first murder; the business held the most important supplies for my survival. I dreaded to see what had become of the mess I made.

Entering, I was speechless when I saw my victim again at his assumed place behind the counter. This man now had intellect; he knew me. He had a sadistic countenance and was smiling and meeting my eyeline as if we had just shared a private vulgar joke. He spoke.

‘Hey killer.’

I leaned against the wall for support while wiping the sweat from my forehead and studied him. His color was now healthy. The combination of his balefire eyes and teeth-gnashing smile showed a mixed pain and pleasure. He and the area I had recently covered in his blood now appeared vibrant in color and clean in the way only new things are.

I was coming to my first understanding of how it still remained in my power to alter my town. I was still able to ruin it. I saw it was with violence I could struggle against the trap I was caught in.

This facade that had taken the place of my hometown was not simply undoing my changes and damage; it created replacements that were unwholesome and far from belonging in the world I had known.

My former schoolteacher was on her porch as I expected to find her.

As were the rest, she was a greyish shadow of the real Miss Murdoc. A young widow and now in her dotage, she lived alone and wore her long-dead husband’s ring. I confirmed her to be like the others, unreachable and without intellect. She stared with moist grey eyes into the empty street before her, not noticing me study her.

At this time, I was under the impression it would be a favor to revive her with the same unmaking process I had with my bully. I thought it would be a kindness for her and a gift to myself to perhaps establish pleasant company with her forthcoming replacement.

I concluded it best to dispatch her with a firearm.

I did so with two barrels of a shotgun fired simultaneously at the closest possible range. I left her spread across her porch, intending to return in a day or so after her resurrection.

Arriving days later, I found she was indeed reanimated and vibrant as a new creation, though slightly wrong and uncanny. Her new person was obscured behind endless grief that issued from her in an endless wailing lamentation. Disturbed, I abandoned her at once, never to return.

To my knowledge she has never ceased her weeping. I avoid her home so as not to listen to the haunting cries of anguish.

Time passed and I endured as a prisoner in a dreamer’s memory, a world that was mere vapor. A nightmare existence stretched before me unchanging. I wandered a landscape searching for some meaning among the cheap substitutes that replaced the forms I had known.

I told myself stories I didn’t believe about Gods warring with one another in the heavens in a struggle whose unknowable fallout had resulted in a wounding of existence.

Other times I thought it was more likely I had been snared in a deception by demons who took offense to our town yet had chosen to make me a parasite burrowing into existence.

I was the only one who kept his own mind, a lone example of the original form.

I have been given free rein in hell.

In the absence of time, I would remake all that the fog boundary contained if it would agree to remain changed by my hand. In a town as small as mine, I was able to visit every home. This task seemed daunting in retrospect, though I accomplished it with surprising efficiency.

We have no need to catalog each act of horror I dealt out.

The nature of my project was a wholesale destruction, defilement, and dispatching of all. In this way I hoped to advance the town out of its sleepy dream. Be assured by its conclusion every structure had burned, everything ruined, every person deconstructed, and then I left for the woods out of sight. I stayed away for a time, allowing for the town to revert to its default state in the interval.

I found a village that had returned itself to what I had unmade, but as if crafted by madness.

Mainstreet now hosted shops and storefronts that no longer offered symmetry or straight lines. Doorways and windows appeared too large or too small. Many doors opened to showrooms of buildings located across town. Looking into windows I was surprised to be viewing the interior of houses unconnected with the structure before me.

It was the state of the population that forced me to the mines.

Instead of dull introverted nobodies, these people grew feral and vicious. Some weeping and crying without end. Others expressing obsessive behavior and sexual preoccupation. A few simply feeding as wild animals on the weakest people whose bleating cries for help haunt my sleep. I have not been back.

Destruction remained my only means out of my predicament. Only this narrow mode of change and influence had I so far discovered to leave an indelible mark on the world around me.

Always in the back of my consciousness is the worming little creature that forever seeks means of penetrating the membrane that binds me.

I would investigate the source, the heart of the mountain, and seek the place where the bleeding of existence gathers and pools therein. Only there could be any means forward.

In my mind was a conception of a destruction so complete that an orifice communicating with another world would manifest.

Craving oblivion, I closed my eyes and threw myself in. But there was no end.

I found myself seated again in my shack, with my notebook. With mounting concern, I again walked the tunnel and threw myself in the pool and again found myself at my little writing table at the mouth of the mine.

While leaving this third time, I was forced to stoop under the doorframe as my newest form was taller. My fingers, now longer, grasped the doorknob strangely.

I lost track of how many times I repeated this cycle of ending myself only to come back a little changed in body.

For what could have been years, I entered the pool and was again returned to my shack and altered in body in a novel way.

As of this writing, I long ago ceased to enter the cabin completely and now leave much of my newly acquired bulk outside.

I find many new appendages that are able to hold the pen to write. I appreciate my newest sets of eyes which are insectoid and allow me to see in the dark.

In desperate times I weep in harmony with myself due to several mouths on my neck and back. Although not under my control they often cry along with me when they have nothing to say for themselves.

I endeavor to throw myself in again until I become something outside of humanity. My body is becoming less solid and closer to an infection kept from flowing by its coagulation.

I lose interest in recording this narrative and will be writing no longer.

God, please allow me to become one with the blood pooling in the heart of the mountain.