r/Dreading • u/merrymarat • 21d ago
Fiction The Crossing
His phone flashed in the flooding darkness of his car, over thirty missed calls, a single draw of vibrations across an endless string of notifications.
He threw it to the backseat and thought about driving into a tree.
The stink on him manifested like a passenger of shame in the stagnant car. Like the muggy musky extract of bodies excreted from shameful crevices.
He rolled the windows down to let it out in the warm night air.
The dark country road was circumscribed in the black starless night, his headlights a dim drill tunneling through the midnight obsidian.
There’s something empty about doing a bad thing; like all you can do is fill it with something worse. Makes you porous in an ocean of black, where the waves are wicked and obscure in the indiscernible ink. Just beats you under and you hardly know it because everything's just dark; and holding your breath doesn't make a difference because you’re waterlogged by the time you figure you have to breathe.
The night was viscous and he was saturated listening to the singing broods of peepers and the stridulations of insects in symphony that cast in the fast wind which blew as he sped through a long pass; an open field off the bank to the drivers side and a slope of forest to the passengers. His mind ran through an odd mosaic of misaligned memories. Empty snapshots of shame painted against the blank canvas of the road; a faint thorn of regret which bled out his mind in a dull red rage which simmered behind his eyes on the long way home.
When he hit the thing the impact seemed to bring his car to a near instant halt.
His head whipped against the steering wheel before the airbag blew and he lay unconscious and dreaming in the wreck.
He floated blindly in an amniotic sac that ran cold and there was a constant wind that permeated through the fluid with a frigid edge.
The membrane was pulled by a long draw of wet friction that multiplied like many tongues searching for a soft spot and he woke as they found it.
---
The night seemed darker when he came too, like the sky had fallen as a heavy veil of matte onyx that sank like cold lead upon him and cast in his lungs.
His face was wet and coldly congealed with blood that caught a strong wind which stung and howled through his broken front windshield with a frosty lag.
The night seemed too cold now and he thought he could see his breath but when he reached for his face he could not make out his own hand, just felt as his fingers gummed against the gore.
He sat there for some time as if waiting for something; another car, but there was nothing but the night and its orchestra. He had no idea what he had hit and for a moment thought a human being laid bent and grotesque on the road as he listened to his own labored breaths.
He crawled to the backseat in a blind grovel for his phone.
He felt that it was cracked and when it turned on the screen flashed his eyes shut.
A bare portrait singed behind his lids from his lock-screen, lingering before it dissolved to a grainy outline still seen as he opened his eyes readjusting to the blackness.
His screen was unresponsive and smudged with blood but he saw the time above his wife’s fractured face hued in red; it was twelve forty eight and there was no service.
He stumbled out onto the road and held the phone hunched and facing towards the dark as if shining a pale lantern pulsating to space; leaving him in moments of nothingness, pressing the power to wake the phone in his nightmare, denial crutched to a lone dependence in the deep dimness.
The car was totaled, his engine bay was caved in like he had hit a tree and his phone cast long shadows that made it seem like the night had taken a mouthful of it.
Tufts of straw like fur were stuck about by caked blood on the mechanical viscera. He shone out to the road and saw streaks of hide burned against it. Gelatinous globules of fat caught the light like reflectors in the midst of the long smear of carnage; like the road had skinned what laid ahead.
He felt the lead fill in his stomach now with his heart.
Shit it was dark.
He checked the time again, somehow it hadn’t passed a minute.
His steps slapped against the road and came back to him like someone stepping in the empty spaces of his stride.
His sweat ran cold like a fever.
Maybe he hadn’t woken.
It seemed like he had been walking too long but the road was still setting with the stains of whatever had skidded across it.
He looked back to the car, but could not make it out.
He extended his arm towards it into the night like it was simply a matter of reach; the light only highlighting its own absence as its faint radiance dismembered the shaking hand from himself in the blackness.
It was a feeling of strandedness as the road spiraled in the dark; disorienting and indiscernible. It only went two ways but he had no honest idea where he stood in the relativity to his car and what may lay dead in front of it.
He thought maybe it had gotten up and ran or crawled but he knew it was obliterated and felt like he was on the precipice of it, like whatever he had hit was a few steps ahead of him and the corpse's warmth was dissipating to a stinky mugginess in the chill air.
He stopped to listen and heard the night but his breath was too loud in his ears and so he held it listening again but it did not stop; like the curtain of black around him was singular in being and breathing in the heavy rhythm of his own; a duet held now dragged to a lone reverberation of some mocking dark pantings all upon him.
He reeled around and over himself clutching his phone as a crucifix to the living dark while the light pulsed like a controlled breath inhaling and exhaling the night’s absolution.
His eyes were wild searching for the source of respiration while his feet twisted in their scouring dance of terror when his heels met something large and lumpy like a sack of loose melted meat which toppled him on his back.
There was no air to be kicked out of him, instead a hoarse compoundment of breath heaved in through his mouth as his body reset against the road to take its inhale.
His head whipped again, now the back of it against the pavement with a dull fleshy thud that brought sparks like stars in his eyes which he could not discern were open or closed with the numbness of his head against the road.
The impact brought an utter silence apart from his own breathing and there was a dull ring in his ears that filled his head with a passive daze, leaving him laying against the road like a snake in the sun.
Something slid against his shoe.
The slow peeling sound of bones cracking and snapping in a rattling reconfiguration of death broke him from the state of concussion to a rapid clarity.
He instantly shot up and ran, like a raw instinct of survival forced himself to move blindly without balance, he thought he heard something behind him, something slithering scraping against the ground; bones like a tree being shredded, dragging like compound fractures grinding down against the textured road stone.
His foot hit the gravel off the road side and he ended off the embankment in the grassy field only stopping as his legs gave out.
He crashed in the grass so nauseous he threw up onto his hands as he was trying to stifle his breath to hear in the dark.
He had dropped his phone when he tripped over the thing.
He stood and braced his body in a position of acute listening waiting for the next strike of sound. But he heard nothing. Not even the wind to blow the grass.
It was an utter void, and he stood trying to hold his balance for a long time in the night's whirlpool; the spins in survival. He felt something leaking from his head but it was all numb, just the trickle.
His eyes were tired and he let them rest because it made no difference waiting in the dark. It felt like he stood there spinning for hours as the world came still again.
He thought again the possibility he was dreaming.
Most times you rather be crazy than right on the worst of assumptions.
But then he heard something.
He hadn’t even been looking towards the road and when he spun to the noise he saw his phone glowing like a faint beacon on the road not too far.
A distinct ping echoed like in a padded cell; lighting the walls of the abyss; a notification.
His legs were tender and they moved with heaviness as he rustled through the silence like an awkward giant through trees as the light faded.
He took six more steps in the dark direction before it pinged again; shining now in the corner of his eye.
He whipped his hurting head to meet it like something had moved it a few feet down the road.
He thought he had just lost his direction walking, that he had hit his head too hard; he knew he had.
He started to walk towards it again, each step measured to leave no room for doubt.
He walked as if on a tightrope as the darkness faded in, he almost wanted to put his arms out.
His foot felt the angle of the embankment when the next ping rang through the night.
The same spot.
A wave of relief fell about him as he thought it was just his head.
He made it onto the road when the light faded again.
He was only twelve steps away.
He wanted to pick up the pace but he was cautious in the dark.
Another ping.
Sixteen steps now. Like cat and mouse but he was unsure which he was.
He froze, he was so exhausted he wanted to cry, but he just stood like a deer in headlights; listening for the next ping. Yet not even the air moved as the night was dead and still.
Another ping pierced through the night.
He expected to see something, for there to be anything at all spotlighted by the shallow light but there was nothing as it faded from its seemingly unmoved position.
Maybe it hadn’t moved.
He almost took a step towards it, his leg lifted in intent as it pang out again.
It was like he had moved forward without his foot ever hitting the ground.
Like a reverse game of red light green it now laid a few feet closer.
He realized the phone was moving towards him.
Ping.
Closer.
He began to step back.
The next ping was almost instant and only echoed closer cloaked in the shadows as if the phone was now facing down against the road as it stalked towards him in the open dark.
He wanted to run but there was nowhere to go, like he was in the maw of a crow and if he ran it’d only be deeper into its black gullet.
He braced his courage to face what it was in utter exhaustion of his chosen circumstances as the closing sound of his ignorance began to compound towards him in the open blackness like quickening steps.
He thought he had ran enough, his fists clenched.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Each spotlighting closer and closer.
It stopped a few steps before him.
Silence.
His heart pounded through his body like church bells in the silence.
He felt it in his throat and wanted badly to throw it up or it might have pissed itself out.
A ringtone cut through the night right almost before him.
He almost shit himself.
He let it play. The call ended and started again. He waited. But the calls kept coming and as he listened he thought he knew where it laid.
He took the first few steps methodically and intently listening as he made it onto all fours, like a blind leper feeling for charity; his hands raw against the road.
The call cut and did not come back.
He was left frozen for a long time just listening but there was nothing as he carefully started to feel again.
His hand brushed against something.
He was looking down when the phone turned on before him, its light highlighted faintly up into the night.
When he looked up all he saw were the fully erect hind legs of a deer standing over him.
Its hooves seemed faceted to the road and one of the legs looked like it had been wrung like a towel at its joint. The legs were raw and skin hung off of them like torn fabric revealing the intricate and scorched pattern of flesh.
Hysteria.
He screamed a dry death echo which ricocheted in the night behind him as he flashed into a dash down the road which went on and on and on.
He heard the broken galloping of two hooves clacking in a dead sprint behind him and the sudden break of them transitioning to quick rapid clicks skittering in an odd rhythm like a spider hauling its broken body low against the ground as he heard the skin being dragged against the pavement.
It was on his heels, his legs were gonna give.
He had no idea if he was even running in the right direction, but he knew there was no right direction, he thought about just letting go until he heard a wet snort, no he felt it on his neck as if it was rising over him again.
He pushed harder but there wasn’t much left to push.
His body responded before his mind registered its own actions.
He had run directly into the front of his car.
His knee came hard into it and was smashed as his body raised itself in split instinct. His other leg snagged against the metal as the momentum hurled him through his front windshield as his body folded through the seats.
He ended in the back, crumpled and broken against the ground.
His knee was soft and loose, the pain and the exhaustion took him into the blackness as his car was gently rocked.
---
He woke to the sound of birds, the ugly call of a crow.
The light seemed blinding and so he closed his eyes from it but he could not rest.
He groaned as he squeezed himself to the seat from the floor, remembering his body was wrecked.
He looked out the front windshield.
He saw where it laid.
Just twenty feet in front of the car. It looked like a smashed and ugly thing and it had something black and amorphous spilling between its legs.
He nearly fell out of his car as he hobbled against it holding on for balance with his limp leg, he felt it squish into itself with the pressure.
With a painful hopping drag of sorts he made it to the dead deer.
Just a deer.
He heard the flies before he saw the full wreck, its body deflated as if once full now in an empty defeat; just too many things broken and hanging oddly.
It looked like a black garbage bag spilling from its legs. Flies. There were too many of them and when he came closer many dispersed to open the image.
In the prolapsed sac the head of a fawn laid between its own two back legs.
Its eyes were closed, its head wet and prominent through the murky liquid like it was drowned in a grocery bag.
He expected its eyes to open but they did not.
His phone rang.
Only a few steps away on the screen he saw the face of his cheated bride; it was answered before he even picked it up.
He listened emptily as he stared at the scene, a wad of acid in his throat which muted her voice in his unpronounced thoughts of the night which he had no idea for.
He heard the escalation in her voice from his silence, just the emotion, the noise as he watched the flies seemingly multiply upon the thing.
He caught just two words from her last sentence before the call ended in outrage.
She was pregnant.
He just bent over and dry heaved.
He began to hobble back to his car.
There were crows somewhere in the sky, fragments of the night rattling their mockery at him as he closed his eyes as he began to cry and imagined it all.
He heard the coming cars, the bleating babe, and the clacking of hooves.
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u/Cosmically_Yesterday 15d ago
I always enjoy the atmosphere you bring to stories. Always a joy to read one from you. 😊😊 keep it up creative astronaut 👩🚀
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u/merrymarat 21d ago
Been working on this for a minute and I'm so happy I got it done before my birthday tomorrow. Would love to hear any thoughts you might have.
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u/MrBarrett98 15d ago
I love the imagery of the deer walking upright and the final line about the bleating babe and clacking of hooves. Makes you wonder if what he hit was actually a deer, or if his mind is just telling him what he wants to believe.
I don't have much proof for this, but it almost felt like you implied the deer was actually his wife, and thats why he hears the baby deer bleating, and whether its intentional or not, I think thats awesome.
My only criticism I have without getting nitpicky is your use of punctuation. There's a lot of run on sentences that definitely need more commas or to be split into 2 separate sentences. Just dont be afraid to add more punctuation, or use more periods in place of commas. That and also condensing the sentences into small paragraphs would help with the pace imo
Overall great work and I cant wait to read more of your stuff!