Shooting Gallery - Halloween 2018
- Thread starter MoonlitRain014
- Start date
The day that Danny Daylight turned 14, his dad took him to the state fair. Danny had wanted his father to make the two hour drive to the nearest big city so he could see the latest superhero blockbuster but Alvin Daylight had refused. He didn’t want to tell his son that he hated everything about the city, so instead he just said ‘no’ and insisted that they go to the fair because it was closer and Danny would have more fun on the rides there anyways. The boy had shouted, stormed off and slammed his bedroom door in a fit of adolescent pique but eventually, given the option of just staying around the farm, he’d agreed that the state fair would probably be fine.
They’d piled into the beat up old Ford F-250 that his father drove and made the thirty minute trip to the fair. Right away, the combined odours of candy floss, cheap hot dogs and that indefinable funk that somehow accompanies events like state fairs hit Danny. The boy had never liked that smell, something about it made him uneasy, but he wasn’t about to endure a tongue lashing from his father for complaining so he just swallowed and hoped that the queasy feeling in his stomach would subside.
It didn’t. In fact, if anything, it got worse as they moved around the heat and the crowds. Danny was miserable but his father would just tell him that they’d paid good money for admission and they were damn well going to enjoy themselves. Danny had decided that he’d better make the best of things so he looked for something to do that wouldn’t make him feel worse. As he wandered, his eye fell on the shooting gallery. It seemed strangely deserted, almost as if people were walking past it and not even noticing it, but he nodded to himself and turned to move towards it. He was a good shot, famous amongst his friends for his dead eye when it came to plugging gophers with a .22, so he figured maybe he’d be able to win a prize.
As he got closer, something else struck Danny as odd. The shooting gallery was painted in a rural scene backed by wooded hills with a pastoral looking foreground, but it exuded a strange air of menace. There was nothing that he could really put his finger on but the landscape that he viewed was dominated by brooding clouds and a pervasive sense of decay. Ramshackle houses and farm buildings dotted the painted landscape, but everything was empty and devoid of real life.
Shaking his head to dispel the images, he strode up to the booth. He came to an abrupt stop and stared. The man’s face was...well...what was wrong with it? Danny couldn’t decide. It wasn’t as if he was disfigured or even ugly. After a moment, the teenager had it figured out. It was as if he were wearing his face like a mask.
The man’s expression shifted into a plastic smile as he regarded Danny. “So kid, you wanna take a shot and win a prize? You look like you’re a born marksman.” His voice, like his face, very nearly had a synthetic quality but retained just enough humanity not to sound like a robot’s.
Well shit, Danny thought, I guess that I might as well give it a try now that I’m here! He nodded. “Yeah sure. I’ll give it a try. How much?”
There was a shift in the man’s eyes, as though something had been decided, although none of his features actually moved. “Tell ya what kid, if you can hit the target I ask ya to hit, it’s on me.”
Something about the man’s tone struck the boy as odd. It was yearning and vaguely desperate as though whatever happened when Danny shot the target, it would be something that would save the man’s life. Once again, figuring that his imagination was running away with him like his father said it did, he smiled. “O.K. deal! Gimme the gun!”
As though holding a precious object, the attendant put the gun in Danny’s hands. It felt strange, cold despite the sun beating down on the metal and wood of it, but also strangely light in his grasp. An odd whisper of something skittered through his mind but disappeared quickly.
The man’s voice trembled slightly as he spoke. “Aim at the skull on top of the fence post and don’t miss!”
His voice had the air of a command to it rather than an encouraging statement. It was as though much more than a simple fairground attraction was riding on this shot. Danny concentrated, sighting the gun as his father had taught him and squeezed the trigger. There was a sickening lurch in the boy’s stomach, a feeling like he was being pulled out of himself somehow and the attendant’s laugh rang out. It was a high, keening laugh that sent shivers trembling through Danny.
Something had changed. It took the teenager a few moments to work out what it was and when he did, his already churning guts couldn’t take it. He vomited loudly into the clump of discoloured grass next to him and took a look around. There was no doubt about it, he was inside the landscape that he’d seen painted on the backdrop of the shooting gallery.
He began swearing softly to himself. How the fuck had he ended up here? It wasn’t possible. Shit like this just didn’t happen in the real world but his eyes couldn’t deny the evidence that they were taking in. The ramshackle farm buildings, the boggy ground in front of them and the skeletal snag of a dead tree were exactly as they’d been in the painting. Glancing around, Danny half expected to see the attendant staring down at him but there was just a pewter sky with the tiny hint of a watery sun peeking past the edges of one of those dead looking clouds.
There was nothing else to do but see if there was some way out of this place. It was still all that the boy could do to convince himself that he was really here, but no matter how often he pinched or slapped himself, everything around him was still the same as it had been. He began to walk, feeling the ground squelching unpleasantly under his sneakers, but it grew more firm after he’d hopped across the strangely green-hued stream. He was making his way towards the run-down buildings when a movement caught his eye.
It had come from behind one of the grimy windows of the building but when the teenager looked again it was gone. It had been nothing more than a flicker but it left Danny feeling disturbed again in a way that he couldn’t quite describe. Then again, this entire experience was deeply unsettling and disturbing. Danny had never been very susceptible to superstition. He usually spent most of his time during church sermons rolling his eyes to himself but this was different. It was real. There was absolutely no disputing it.
Shrugging, he decided to see if anyone was home, so he strode off towards what he presumed was the farmhouse. He walked up the door and knocked on it. The wood felt almost spongy under his hand and that disconcerting sensation tied his guts into knots. There was a momentary pause and then a voice could be heard speaking from the other side of the door.
“So there’s a new one eh? What’s yer name, child?” It was an ancient sounding voice and something in it held a vague hint of inhumanity.
“Uh...my name’s Danny. I...well...this is gonna sound nuts but I got...transported...here.”
The silence seemed to stretch out interminably but eventually the voice spoke again. “Oh did ye now? Ye’re a damn fool child but ye’d best come in.”
The door opened slowly and Danny stood on the threshold, peering into the darkness. Everything was weird enough, so he figured it couldn’t really get much worse. He stepped into the darkness and let his eyes adjust to the room’s half light.
The room looked like it could have been transplanted from one of the pictures his dad kept of his family’s original homestead that had been his great grandparents. It was a sparsely furnished space that contained little more than a lit oil lamp, a simple metal-framed bedstead and a table. Oddly there were no pots, pans or other cooking implements and there didn’t appear to be a stove either.
The owner of the voice that had spoken was still wreathed in the heavy shadows that seemed to sit with physical weight in the room. Danny could see that he sat, hunched and crooked in the simple straight-backed chair, but he still remained shadowed even though the lamp lit the room in a soft glow. “So He sent ye here eh? Ye should never have taken anything He offered ye, boy!”
The boy glared at the wizened silhouette with hostility. “He tricked me! I didn’t ask to come here!”
The figure raised his hands in a placating gesture and pointed to another chair across the table from him. “Well, sit ye down, lad. I best explain to ye where ye are and who He is.”
The sick feeling in the pit of the Danny Daylight’s stomach only grew more intense as the man’s glittering gaze fell on him and the import of his words started to sink in. He simply nodded as if to say, “Get on with it then.”
The ancient, wizened man sighed and began to speak in his creaking, croaking voice.
“This place, this place exists in between times. It really ain’t now and it ain’t then either. It’s the place where times cross over. It’s a crossroads. One of many crossroads that He created.”
In spite of himself, the youth scratched his tousled hair and asked, “He could create all of this? How?”
The ancient man glowered at the interruption but after a moment he still replied. “If ye’d have waited, I woulda gotten there. He has power, boy, More power than you can imagine, but he also has a problem. His problem is that He made a deal with someone even more powerful than Him and if He don’t fulfill the terms of the deal, well, let’s just say it ain’t going to be none too pleasant for Him.”
As the ancient man had been talking, the shadows around him had slowly dissipated. Danny recognized, with a sick feeling churning in his stomach, the same face that he’d seen at the fair. The boy stood, sending his chair clattering to the floor and began backing towards the door of the room but the ancient man snapped, “Ye really think that if’n I were Him, you’d have any chance to leave. I’m the echo that He left behind.”
“He is what I became. He’s...my wishes made flesh...I guess. He struck the bargain for the power and part of the price was leaving what He was, who He was behind and trappin’ it here.”
Danny glanced around in panic and he leaned in to whisper to the wizened, twisted figure in front of him. “He...can’t hear us, can He?”
A laugh like two rocks grinding together came out of the man’s mouth before he replied, “He thinks that He took all my power away, but I had enough to shield myself from Him, so don’t worry. He ain’t gonna find us so easily.”
Now the boy leaned in again and asked, “You still haven’t explained why He needed to make this place?! How does it fit in with the deal you say He...you….made?” In spite of the fear that he felt, Danny’s innate curiosity propelled him forwards.
“He owes souls to the one He made the deal with. If ye like, this here place’s a way for Him to trap souls.”
“What? What happens now?!” Danny’s stomach clenched and he began to glance around with wild eyes.
All of the weight of all of the years seemed to descend on the ancient, wizened man in front of him. “He’ll want ta come ‘n collect ye, take ye to the middle of the crossroads and give yer soul over to the Great One.”
Danny felt as though he was about to puke again, but he managed to choke back the gag reflex.
“What do I have to do? To escape?”
“Do? There’s nothin’ you can do, kid!”
“There must be something you can do! Haven’t you helped other people who have come here? You know about this place, you know about him. Hell you used to BE him!”
The wizened man sagged even further into his chair and the wrinkles on his face seemed to be etched like mountain ranges and valleys on his dry old skin.
“Ye’re the only one who I could get to. Something about yer soul let me do it, but I cain’t leave this house. This place is how I c’n hide away from him.”
Danny set his narrow jaw and glowered at the old man. “I’m still getting out of here! If you can’t come with me, at least tell me about anything that might help me fight Him.”
With a great heave of effort, the old man struggled to his feet and hobbled across the room to the cabinet that leaned up against the wall. With stick-like arms, he opened the door and reached inside, removing an ornately decorated black rifle. Strange, arcane looking writing ran up and down the barrel and the stock was carved with twisting symbols that made Danny feel ill to look at. He brought the weapon to Danny and handed it to him.“Take this. Ye were a good enough shot ta get yerself here, mebbe ye’ll be a good enough shot ta get out again.”
The boy took up the gun, arms braced for the expected weight but it settled and felt as light as a piece of balsa wood. He thought he could hear a voice whispering somewhere in the back of his head. As he took the rifle from the bent figure in front of him, the old man let out a bone rattling sigh. “Well I ain’t really doin’ you a favour by givin’ ye this but ye’d best go. The longer ye linger, the more likely He’ll find ye here.”
There seemed to be nothing else to say, so Danny took his leave of the old man. The moment he shut the door to the cabin, it began to melt into the ground around it, gooey and insubstantial. A faint odour of decay lingered on the air and with a disgusted retch, the skinny boy went on his way. His feet felt like they were sinking into spongy moss with every step and the whispering in the back of his mind was growing more insistent.
His dragging footsteps had carried him into the forest of disturbingly humanoid-looking trees. Their bark reminded Danny of the seamy, wrinkled flesh of the elderly and their twisted limbs reached upwards, as if begging to be released from torment. Danny’s fevered brain came to the realization that a shadowy figure was walking parallel to his path, half-hidden by the trees around him. The boy stopped, leveling his rifle at the shadow. “I’m armed! Who are you?”
The fleshy forest was silent but out of that silence a sibilant voice rose, a voice that sounded like wind blowing across a graveyard. “You are not armed, foolish child. It does not matter who I am. All that matters is that you will not leave this place without giving us your soul. Give us your soul, Danny Daylight. Surrender to His will. His will be done.”
“Fuck you! I’m not giving you shit!” Danny’s voice was thin and reedy, but still filled with defiance.
A laugh filled the air with a soft sibilance, the sound of desiccated flesh falling from ancient bone, the sound of a last breath rattling in a dying man’s throat. “Very well then. We will take it from you. The agony is much more delicious that way.”
The figure was gone again, maddeningly vanishing, just when Danny thought he’d drawn a bead on it. He turned and began trudging along again, feeling like he was bounded by some invisible fence. As he walked, he felt a growing heaviness pervading him. His steps began dragging even more heavily, like he was weighed down with lead, until each step was a grinding effort. His racing thoughts began to slow down, drag and stumble now too.
Trying to give himself something to do, Danny glanced down at the rifle that he was carrying and examined it. The writing on the muzzle still made him feel queasy and he was sure it had to be magical. The shadow being had mocked his suggestion that he was armed. Was the weapon invisible to the creatures? If so, the old man had given him quite an edge. Why then had the old man had told him he wasn’t doing him a favour in giving it to him?
As he wandered through the rotting forest, the boy began to notice that there was a flickering just at the edges of his sight, but it only existed in his peripheral vision. It was like pixelation in an Internet video that was loading slowly but if he looked at it, it went away.
He continued walking, his feet nudged into position by some invisible force, directing him towards the crossroads. Surely this trap was all meant to push him in that direction? Once again, that shadowy figure was there, dogging his steps. This time it didn’t wait to challenge him, but simply began to speak in those dessicated tones. “Danny Daylight, we will have you. Your soul is so young, so strong and will help Him to grow. Don’t you want to help Him grow?”
In his clouded brain, the voice was clamoring, but another voice rose over it. This voice was clotted and thick as though a mouth never meant to form words was trying to speak. The voice spoke in a language that was unlike anything Danny had ever heard, but its meaning was clear. It said: This one is protected, this one is for another, do not touch him.
In his hands, the rifle grew cold. The metal felt as if it had been blasted by a freezer, but the boy flexed his fingers and the sensation dissipated. A wave of displeasure radiated through Danny’s mind, a wave that came from the direction of the shadowy figure, but it stopped trying the wheedling words with him.
Whatever had been done by this rifle, it was obviously something more than a simple weapon. It had the feeling of being….what? Protective? No. It wanted to own Danny, just as much as the soul collector did. Now the youth began to realize what the old man had meant about not doing him a favour. He was trading one kind of possession for another kind. The ancient, wizened man had saved him from one dilemma only to plunge him into another.
His leaden feet had lead him into the centre of a clutch of ramshackle houses. Each of the dilapidated buildings squatted there, black and foreboding, windows half hazed with panes broken like jagged fangs jutting at odd angles.
The outlines of the houses seemed to flicker when he saw them from the corner of his eye. It was a disconcerting effect, but he still didn’t really know what to make of it. Shrugging, he began to walk through the collection of rotting houses, moving back towards the twisted forest that surrounded them with black shapes.
It was only as he approached the edge again that he saw three lone figures in ragged robes. They stood, motionless, just at the margin of the trees. Danny’s feet carried him towards them and even if he’d wanted to stop or turn away, the force that compelled him dragged him onwards. Eventually he did stop, close enough that he could see the shrouded forms and smell the scent of decay that wafted from them.
A soft whispering filled his head now. It was a voice that sounded like insects falling all over each other in a mad rush, chittering and skittering, incoherent at first, but out of that susurrus, words began to form. “You are chosen by Him. You belong to Him. He will devour you.”
The mantra started to throb in his brain. It repeated over, over and over again. Danny tried to think about something else, do something else but nothing but the voice would come. He pressed his hands to his ears, dropping the black rifle and rocked back and forth as the words pounded in his mind and dug at his sanity. It wasn’t the content of the words so much as the horrible sound of the voice and the fact that the phrase was so relentlessly repeated that began to drive him mad.
He dropped to his knees now and the jolt broke the mantra for a moment. In that moment, Danny’s eyes fell on the rifle. He saw those arcane letters etched into it and his mind began to clear. He concentrated on it and another voice began to roar in his ears. It was ancient and dark and came from a place beyond the stars.
The voice’s words were unclear but they filled Danny with power. He lifted the rifle and aimed it, rising to his feet. Once he stood upright, he checked his aim and squeezed the trigger. Once, twice and three times he squeezed the trigger. After each shot, there was a deep percussion, far deeper than it should have been and the whole world around Danny flickered. The ragged figures in front of him exploded violently in a flash of deep violet light and the spongy ground under his feet rocked.
A scream rose up from the land around him. It was a high keening thing that came viscerally forth and reverberated. After the scream, there was silence, but it was a silence that didn’t last long. The world around Danny exploded in a whirl of light and color. As if he’d been lifted by a huge hand, he was tossed into the air and sped along at a nauseating pace. He clung desperately to the gun as he was thrown through the air.
When it all stopped, the youth found himself standing at the crossroads. A single modern street lamp illuminated the scene. It was a woodland where a pathway stood. Above the pathway, three familiar figures swayed hanging from a tree. Directly in front of Danny, a tall figure in a cowled hood stood, a sickle clutched in its hand. The decaying miasma that emanated from it nearly choked the boy and the voice it spoke in was the sound of a thousand coffin lids opening, “You have dared to fight Me! You have dared to harm those who are Mine! HE gave you the weapon to destroy them, HE made you do this and for it you will suffer!”
The disorientation was fading now and so Danny lifted the gun. “No! I’ll stop you like I stopped them.”
The cowled figure shook its head. “No. You cannot stop me. You are a fool, boy. You do not understand the thing you are doing. You do not know what it is that He has given you.”
It was Danny’s turn to shake his head now. “Yes I do! He’s given me the only thing I need to get out of here!”
Unexpectedly the creature began to laugh at him. “Oh you stupid child! Of course he has given you the means to escape, but to what? Did you stop to ask where it was that the escape would lead?”
“Home of course! Where else would it lead?”
Another croaking laugh came from under the cowl. “Home? There is no home for you, boy.”
Standing there, black rifle aimed, there were doubts swirling through the young mind that directed the aim. What if this thing was right? What if it had all been a trick by the old man? Danny concluded that the old man never would have helped him if any harm had been intended and he pulled the trigger.
Everything around him began to melt and dissolve. A stench unlike any he’d ever experienced filled his nostrils and he felt like his entire frame was being stretched in ways that defied physics. Everything went black.
Consciousness returned with a rush and Danny found himself in familiar surroundings. The fairground smells came flooding around him. He looked out at the fairground and….looked out? He realized that he wasn’t facing inwards, looking at the shooting gallery, but inside of it looking out.
Something was wrong about how he was looking out. It wasn’t a human perspective at all. It was as if his form was trapped in some kind of chamber and he was staring out from that chamber. It occurred to him that he could smell metal and gun oil in an all pervasive fog around him.
His body was stiff and metallic .His monocular sight was bounded in only one direction and his mind felt constrained by an odd desire to destroy everything around him. Danny Daylight had become that whispering voice that he heard in the back of his mind, every time he picked up the gun. He’d escaped but the old man had been right. He certainly hadn’t done him any favours. He hadn’t done him any favours at all.
They’d piled into the beat up old Ford F-250 that his father drove and made the thirty minute trip to the fair. Right away, the combined odours of candy floss, cheap hot dogs and that indefinable funk that somehow accompanies events like state fairs hit Danny. The boy had never liked that smell, something about it made him uneasy, but he wasn’t about to endure a tongue lashing from his father for complaining so he just swallowed and hoped that the queasy feeling in his stomach would subside.
It didn’t. In fact, if anything, it got worse as they moved around the heat and the crowds. Danny was miserable but his father would just tell him that they’d paid good money for admission and they were damn well going to enjoy themselves. Danny had decided that he’d better make the best of things so he looked for something to do that wouldn’t make him feel worse. As he wandered, his eye fell on the shooting gallery. It seemed strangely deserted, almost as if people were walking past it and not even noticing it, but he nodded to himself and turned to move towards it. He was a good shot, famous amongst his friends for his dead eye when it came to plugging gophers with a .22, so he figured maybe he’d be able to win a prize.
As he got closer, something else struck Danny as odd. The shooting gallery was painted in a rural scene backed by wooded hills with a pastoral looking foreground, but it exuded a strange air of menace. There was nothing that he could really put his finger on but the landscape that he viewed was dominated by brooding clouds and a pervasive sense of decay. Ramshackle houses and farm buildings dotted the painted landscape, but everything was empty and devoid of real life.
Shaking his head to dispel the images, he strode up to the booth. He came to an abrupt stop and stared. The man’s face was...well...what was wrong with it? Danny couldn’t decide. It wasn’t as if he was disfigured or even ugly. After a moment, the teenager had it figured out. It was as if he were wearing his face like a mask.
The man’s expression shifted into a plastic smile as he regarded Danny. “So kid, you wanna take a shot and win a prize? You look like you’re a born marksman.” His voice, like his face, very nearly had a synthetic quality but retained just enough humanity not to sound like a robot’s.
Well shit, Danny thought, I guess that I might as well give it a try now that I’m here! He nodded. “Yeah sure. I’ll give it a try. How much?”
There was a shift in the man’s eyes, as though something had been decided, although none of his features actually moved. “Tell ya what kid, if you can hit the target I ask ya to hit, it’s on me.”
Something about the man’s tone struck the boy as odd. It was yearning and vaguely desperate as though whatever happened when Danny shot the target, it would be something that would save the man’s life. Once again, figuring that his imagination was running away with him like his father said it did, he smiled. “O.K. deal! Gimme the gun!”
As though holding a precious object, the attendant put the gun in Danny’s hands. It felt strange, cold despite the sun beating down on the metal and wood of it, but also strangely light in his grasp. An odd whisper of something skittered through his mind but disappeared quickly.
The man’s voice trembled slightly as he spoke. “Aim at the skull on top of the fence post and don’t miss!”
His voice had the air of a command to it rather than an encouraging statement. It was as though much more than a simple fairground attraction was riding on this shot. Danny concentrated, sighting the gun as his father had taught him and squeezed the trigger. There was a sickening lurch in the boy’s stomach, a feeling like he was being pulled out of himself somehow and the attendant’s laugh rang out. It was a high, keening laugh that sent shivers trembling through Danny.
Something had changed. It took the teenager a few moments to work out what it was and when he did, his already churning guts couldn’t take it. He vomited loudly into the clump of discoloured grass next to him and took a look around. There was no doubt about it, he was inside the landscape that he’d seen painted on the backdrop of the shooting gallery.
He began swearing softly to himself. How the fuck had he ended up here? It wasn’t possible. Shit like this just didn’t happen in the real world but his eyes couldn’t deny the evidence that they were taking in. The ramshackle farm buildings, the boggy ground in front of them and the skeletal snag of a dead tree were exactly as they’d been in the painting. Glancing around, Danny half expected to see the attendant staring down at him but there was just a pewter sky with the tiny hint of a watery sun peeking past the edges of one of those dead looking clouds.
There was nothing else to do but see if there was some way out of this place. It was still all that the boy could do to convince himself that he was really here, but no matter how often he pinched or slapped himself, everything around him was still the same as it had been. He began to walk, feeling the ground squelching unpleasantly under his sneakers, but it grew more firm after he’d hopped across the strangely green-hued stream. He was making his way towards the run-down buildings when a movement caught his eye.
It had come from behind one of the grimy windows of the building but when the teenager looked again it was gone. It had been nothing more than a flicker but it left Danny feeling disturbed again in a way that he couldn’t quite describe. Then again, this entire experience was deeply unsettling and disturbing. Danny had never been very susceptible to superstition. He usually spent most of his time during church sermons rolling his eyes to himself but this was different. It was real. There was absolutely no disputing it.
Shrugging, he decided to see if anyone was home, so he strode off towards what he presumed was the farmhouse. He walked up the door and knocked on it. The wood felt almost spongy under his hand and that disconcerting sensation tied his guts into knots. There was a momentary pause and then a voice could be heard speaking from the other side of the door.
“So there’s a new one eh? What’s yer name, child?” It was an ancient sounding voice and something in it held a vague hint of inhumanity.
“Uh...my name’s Danny. I...well...this is gonna sound nuts but I got...transported...here.”
The silence seemed to stretch out interminably but eventually the voice spoke again. “Oh did ye now? Ye’re a damn fool child but ye’d best come in.”
The door opened slowly and Danny stood on the threshold, peering into the darkness. Everything was weird enough, so he figured it couldn’t really get much worse. He stepped into the darkness and let his eyes adjust to the room’s half light.
The room looked like it could have been transplanted from one of the pictures his dad kept of his family’s original homestead that had been his great grandparents. It was a sparsely furnished space that contained little more than a lit oil lamp, a simple metal-framed bedstead and a table. Oddly there were no pots, pans or other cooking implements and there didn’t appear to be a stove either.
The owner of the voice that had spoken was still wreathed in the heavy shadows that seemed to sit with physical weight in the room. Danny could see that he sat, hunched and crooked in the simple straight-backed chair, but he still remained shadowed even though the lamp lit the room in a soft glow. “So He sent ye here eh? Ye should never have taken anything He offered ye, boy!”
The boy glared at the wizened silhouette with hostility. “He tricked me! I didn’t ask to come here!”
The figure raised his hands in a placating gesture and pointed to another chair across the table from him. “Well, sit ye down, lad. I best explain to ye where ye are and who He is.”
The sick feeling in the pit of the Danny Daylight’s stomach only grew more intense as the man’s glittering gaze fell on him and the import of his words started to sink in. He simply nodded as if to say, “Get on with it then.”
The ancient, wizened man sighed and began to speak in his creaking, croaking voice.
“This place, this place exists in between times. It really ain’t now and it ain’t then either. It’s the place where times cross over. It’s a crossroads. One of many crossroads that He created.”
In spite of himself, the youth scratched his tousled hair and asked, “He could create all of this? How?”
The ancient man glowered at the interruption but after a moment he still replied. “If ye’d have waited, I woulda gotten there. He has power, boy, More power than you can imagine, but he also has a problem. His problem is that He made a deal with someone even more powerful than Him and if He don’t fulfill the terms of the deal, well, let’s just say it ain’t going to be none too pleasant for Him.”
As the ancient man had been talking, the shadows around him had slowly dissipated. Danny recognized, with a sick feeling churning in his stomach, the same face that he’d seen at the fair. The boy stood, sending his chair clattering to the floor and began backing towards the door of the room but the ancient man snapped, “Ye really think that if’n I were Him, you’d have any chance to leave. I’m the echo that He left behind.”
“He is what I became. He’s...my wishes made flesh...I guess. He struck the bargain for the power and part of the price was leaving what He was, who He was behind and trappin’ it here.”
Danny glanced around in panic and he leaned in to whisper to the wizened, twisted figure in front of him. “He...can’t hear us, can He?”
A laugh like two rocks grinding together came out of the man’s mouth before he replied, “He thinks that He took all my power away, but I had enough to shield myself from Him, so don’t worry. He ain’t gonna find us so easily.”
Now the boy leaned in again and asked, “You still haven’t explained why He needed to make this place?! How does it fit in with the deal you say He...you….made?” In spite of the fear that he felt, Danny’s innate curiosity propelled him forwards.
“He owes souls to the one He made the deal with. If ye like, this here place’s a way for Him to trap souls.”
“What? What happens now?!” Danny’s stomach clenched and he began to glance around with wild eyes.
All of the weight of all of the years seemed to descend on the ancient, wizened man in front of him. “He’ll want ta come ‘n collect ye, take ye to the middle of the crossroads and give yer soul over to the Great One.”
Danny felt as though he was about to puke again, but he managed to choke back the gag reflex.
“What do I have to do? To escape?”
“Do? There’s nothin’ you can do, kid!”
“There must be something you can do! Haven’t you helped other people who have come here? You know about this place, you know about him. Hell you used to BE him!”
The wizened man sagged even further into his chair and the wrinkles on his face seemed to be etched like mountain ranges and valleys on his dry old skin.
“Ye’re the only one who I could get to. Something about yer soul let me do it, but I cain’t leave this house. This place is how I c’n hide away from him.”
Danny set his narrow jaw and glowered at the old man. “I’m still getting out of here! If you can’t come with me, at least tell me about anything that might help me fight Him.”
With a great heave of effort, the old man struggled to his feet and hobbled across the room to the cabinet that leaned up against the wall. With stick-like arms, he opened the door and reached inside, removing an ornately decorated black rifle. Strange, arcane looking writing ran up and down the barrel and the stock was carved with twisting symbols that made Danny feel ill to look at. He brought the weapon to Danny and handed it to him.“Take this. Ye were a good enough shot ta get yerself here, mebbe ye’ll be a good enough shot ta get out again.”
The boy took up the gun, arms braced for the expected weight but it settled and felt as light as a piece of balsa wood. He thought he could hear a voice whispering somewhere in the back of his head. As he took the rifle from the bent figure in front of him, the old man let out a bone rattling sigh. “Well I ain’t really doin’ you a favour by givin’ ye this but ye’d best go. The longer ye linger, the more likely He’ll find ye here.”
There seemed to be nothing else to say, so Danny took his leave of the old man. The moment he shut the door to the cabin, it began to melt into the ground around it, gooey and insubstantial. A faint odour of decay lingered on the air and with a disgusted retch, the skinny boy went on his way. His feet felt like they were sinking into spongy moss with every step and the whispering in the back of his mind was growing more insistent.
His dragging footsteps had carried him into the forest of disturbingly humanoid-looking trees. Their bark reminded Danny of the seamy, wrinkled flesh of the elderly and their twisted limbs reached upwards, as if begging to be released from torment. Danny’s fevered brain came to the realization that a shadowy figure was walking parallel to his path, half-hidden by the trees around him. The boy stopped, leveling his rifle at the shadow. “I’m armed! Who are you?”
The fleshy forest was silent but out of that silence a sibilant voice rose, a voice that sounded like wind blowing across a graveyard. “You are not armed, foolish child. It does not matter who I am. All that matters is that you will not leave this place without giving us your soul. Give us your soul, Danny Daylight. Surrender to His will. His will be done.”
“Fuck you! I’m not giving you shit!” Danny’s voice was thin and reedy, but still filled with defiance.
A laugh filled the air with a soft sibilance, the sound of desiccated flesh falling from ancient bone, the sound of a last breath rattling in a dying man’s throat. “Very well then. We will take it from you. The agony is much more delicious that way.”
The figure was gone again, maddeningly vanishing, just when Danny thought he’d drawn a bead on it. He turned and began trudging along again, feeling like he was bounded by some invisible fence. As he walked, he felt a growing heaviness pervading him. His steps began dragging even more heavily, like he was weighed down with lead, until each step was a grinding effort. His racing thoughts began to slow down, drag and stumble now too.
Trying to give himself something to do, Danny glanced down at the rifle that he was carrying and examined it. The writing on the muzzle still made him feel queasy and he was sure it had to be magical. The shadow being had mocked his suggestion that he was armed. Was the weapon invisible to the creatures? If so, the old man had given him quite an edge. Why then had the old man had told him he wasn’t doing him a favour in giving it to him?
As he wandered through the rotting forest, the boy began to notice that there was a flickering just at the edges of his sight, but it only existed in his peripheral vision. It was like pixelation in an Internet video that was loading slowly but if he looked at it, it went away.
He continued walking, his feet nudged into position by some invisible force, directing him towards the crossroads. Surely this trap was all meant to push him in that direction? Once again, that shadowy figure was there, dogging his steps. This time it didn’t wait to challenge him, but simply began to speak in those dessicated tones. “Danny Daylight, we will have you. Your soul is so young, so strong and will help Him to grow. Don’t you want to help Him grow?”
In his clouded brain, the voice was clamoring, but another voice rose over it. This voice was clotted and thick as though a mouth never meant to form words was trying to speak. The voice spoke in a language that was unlike anything Danny had ever heard, but its meaning was clear. It said: This one is protected, this one is for another, do not touch him.
In his hands, the rifle grew cold. The metal felt as if it had been blasted by a freezer, but the boy flexed his fingers and the sensation dissipated. A wave of displeasure radiated through Danny’s mind, a wave that came from the direction of the shadowy figure, but it stopped trying the wheedling words with him.
Whatever had been done by this rifle, it was obviously something more than a simple weapon. It had the feeling of being….what? Protective? No. It wanted to own Danny, just as much as the soul collector did. Now the youth began to realize what the old man had meant about not doing him a favour. He was trading one kind of possession for another kind. The ancient, wizened man had saved him from one dilemma only to plunge him into another.
His leaden feet had lead him into the centre of a clutch of ramshackle houses. Each of the dilapidated buildings squatted there, black and foreboding, windows half hazed with panes broken like jagged fangs jutting at odd angles.
The outlines of the houses seemed to flicker when he saw them from the corner of his eye. It was a disconcerting effect, but he still didn’t really know what to make of it. Shrugging, he began to walk through the collection of rotting houses, moving back towards the twisted forest that surrounded them with black shapes.
It was only as he approached the edge again that he saw three lone figures in ragged robes. They stood, motionless, just at the margin of the trees. Danny’s feet carried him towards them and even if he’d wanted to stop or turn away, the force that compelled him dragged him onwards. Eventually he did stop, close enough that he could see the shrouded forms and smell the scent of decay that wafted from them.
A soft whispering filled his head now. It was a voice that sounded like insects falling all over each other in a mad rush, chittering and skittering, incoherent at first, but out of that susurrus, words began to form. “You are chosen by Him. You belong to Him. He will devour you.”
The mantra started to throb in his brain. It repeated over, over and over again. Danny tried to think about something else, do something else but nothing but the voice would come. He pressed his hands to his ears, dropping the black rifle and rocked back and forth as the words pounded in his mind and dug at his sanity. It wasn’t the content of the words so much as the horrible sound of the voice and the fact that the phrase was so relentlessly repeated that began to drive him mad.
He dropped to his knees now and the jolt broke the mantra for a moment. In that moment, Danny’s eyes fell on the rifle. He saw those arcane letters etched into it and his mind began to clear. He concentrated on it and another voice began to roar in his ears. It was ancient and dark and came from a place beyond the stars.
The voice’s words were unclear but they filled Danny with power. He lifted the rifle and aimed it, rising to his feet. Once he stood upright, he checked his aim and squeezed the trigger. Once, twice and three times he squeezed the trigger. After each shot, there was a deep percussion, far deeper than it should have been and the whole world around Danny flickered. The ragged figures in front of him exploded violently in a flash of deep violet light and the spongy ground under his feet rocked.
A scream rose up from the land around him. It was a high keening thing that came viscerally forth and reverberated. After the scream, there was silence, but it was a silence that didn’t last long. The world around Danny exploded in a whirl of light and color. As if he’d been lifted by a huge hand, he was tossed into the air and sped along at a nauseating pace. He clung desperately to the gun as he was thrown through the air.
When it all stopped, the youth found himself standing at the crossroads. A single modern street lamp illuminated the scene. It was a woodland where a pathway stood. Above the pathway, three familiar figures swayed hanging from a tree. Directly in front of Danny, a tall figure in a cowled hood stood, a sickle clutched in its hand. The decaying miasma that emanated from it nearly choked the boy and the voice it spoke in was the sound of a thousand coffin lids opening, “You have dared to fight Me! You have dared to harm those who are Mine! HE gave you the weapon to destroy them, HE made you do this and for it you will suffer!”
The disorientation was fading now and so Danny lifted the gun. “No! I’ll stop you like I stopped them.”
The cowled figure shook its head. “No. You cannot stop me. You are a fool, boy. You do not understand the thing you are doing. You do not know what it is that He has given you.”
It was Danny’s turn to shake his head now. “Yes I do! He’s given me the only thing I need to get out of here!”
Unexpectedly the creature began to laugh at him. “Oh you stupid child! Of course he has given you the means to escape, but to what? Did you stop to ask where it was that the escape would lead?”
“Home of course! Where else would it lead?”
Another croaking laugh came from under the cowl. “Home? There is no home for you, boy.”
Standing there, black rifle aimed, there were doubts swirling through the young mind that directed the aim. What if this thing was right? What if it had all been a trick by the old man? Danny concluded that the old man never would have helped him if any harm had been intended and he pulled the trigger.
Everything around him began to melt and dissolve. A stench unlike any he’d ever experienced filled his nostrils and he felt like his entire frame was being stretched in ways that defied physics. Everything went black.
Consciousness returned with a rush and Danny found himself in familiar surroundings. The fairground smells came flooding around him. He looked out at the fairground and….looked out? He realized that he wasn’t facing inwards, looking at the shooting gallery, but inside of it looking out.
Something was wrong about how he was looking out. It wasn’t a human perspective at all. It was as if his form was trapped in some kind of chamber and he was staring out from that chamber. It occurred to him that he could smell metal and gun oil in an all pervasive fog around him.
His body was stiff and metallic .His monocular sight was bounded in only one direction and his mind felt constrained by an odd desire to destroy everything around him. Danny Daylight had become that whispering voice that he heard in the back of his mind, every time he picked up the gun. He’d escaped but the old man had been right. He certainly hadn’t done him any favours. He hadn’t done him any favours at all.
Mystydjinn
[Insert rimshot]
Understanding of Premise: Kid gets swindled by some dick with a debt to an eldritch horror and goes on a supernatural adventure, but winds up fucked in the end anyway.
Rating: 6/10 (I know there's a fuckin' skeleton around here somewhere)
A good piece and mechanically sound, but complete honesty, this didn't spook me. If this were an adventure contest or something it'd be great, but that's not what this is. Your included story elements didn't detract from or make me question the path of the narrative, though they did feel a bit contrived (I mean that's kind of a dumb critique because most stories are made up unless they actually happened but bear with me). Like Will's piece, it felt like you were pulling spooky things/themes from a witch-cap and tossing them in.
Unfortunately for you, your overall premise wasn't scary either, just creepy. This was an adventure story with creepy backdrops and set pieces, not horror. A Twitches (it's a Disney Halloween movie series) verses Monster House or Disney's Haunted Mansion. Te playing field was too level for the protagonist to be terrified, and in turn me.
It's too fair (ironic considering the kid's fucked over anyway). And because it feels fair, it feels safe, and because it's safe it's not scary.
Mechanically the piece is fine, but too surgical to display the emotion of your protagonist and allow the reader to get fearfully invested in the tale and scared. Instead you piqued my interest and made me want to know what happens next, so your real problem is the story's structure. The protagonist was just given too much power and the description of reality and the protagonist's inner state was too dry.
Nice job though, I'd like to see more of the characters in other myths or something because their story elements are interesting and used nicely.
Rating: 6/10 (I know there's a fuckin' skeleton around here somewhere)
A good piece and mechanically sound, but complete honesty, this didn't spook me. If this were an adventure contest or something it'd be great, but that's not what this is. Your included story elements didn't detract from or make me question the path of the narrative, though they did feel a bit contrived (I mean that's kind of a dumb critique because most stories are made up unless they actually happened but bear with me). Like Will's piece, it felt like you were pulling spooky things/themes from a witch-cap and tossing them in.
Unfortunately for you, your overall premise wasn't scary either, just creepy. This was an adventure story with creepy backdrops and set pieces, not horror. A Twitches (it's a Disney Halloween movie series) verses Monster House or Disney's Haunted Mansion. Te playing field was too level for the protagonist to be terrified, and in turn me.
It's too fair (ironic considering the kid's fucked over anyway). And because it feels fair, it feels safe, and because it's safe it's not scary.
Mechanically the piece is fine, but too surgical to display the emotion of your protagonist and allow the reader to get fearfully invested in the tale and scared. Instead you piqued my interest and made me want to know what happens next, so your real problem is the story's structure. The protagonist was just given too much power and the description of reality and the protagonist's inner state was too dry.
Nice job though, I'd like to see more of the characters in other myths or something because their story elements are interesting and used nicely.
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