Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20160902203638

A/N: Second story for the collab. This just came out after a weird urge to write something based on the trope "dug too deep". I've gone through it and made a number of edits and changes and it's wound up strangely more ambitious than I ever thought. My concerns are that it suffers from tonal dissonance (the tone pre/post chasm feels most noticeable when I try to wrap things up in the end). Other than that I'm kinda interested to see how this Lovecraftian tale will be received.

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The town of Hallowroots [placeholder name] is the sort of place that you enter, flee, and somehow end up returning to despite a lifelong promise to never go back. Like I’ve said to many other employees here; plenty of people live long lives there and a shocking number of them just adapt to the weirdness. It’s not a meat grinder but you won’t come back the same either.

Still, everyone who hasn’t gone wants to know all the gory details. I’ve worked for a long time at the IRS and I’ve had my fair share of frightening tales from all over the country, but more than anything people want to know about my experiences at this specific town. Maybe it was the way Annie Davies came back after trying to audit Intra Inc., or maybe it’s the fact that most of you have snuck a couple of sneak peeks at the various state-approved tax deals even though it’s a federal crime to do so. But I’m not here to chide you all—Hallowroots is a poorly kept secret—but when I finally retire I’d like you to have some understanding of what Hallowroots truly is.

First thing you might want to know is that yes, I lost my eye because of Hallowroots. But very few of you might also know that I lost one kidney, three metres of intestine, and a third of my liver because of it as well. But none of those events are what any of you would expect. Instead I’d like to describe my first trip to really make things clear. It all started because I went and found an account that no one had touched since 1932 and I thought that if I could get back taxes from this RoxWell Mining Co. then I’d get my boss’ attention.

It took a while to find on a map, but I finally took off from the West Coast on the 15th May and eventually found the right place on the 23rd May. And yes, I drove in a straight line. It was disorientating, and kind of confusing. Hell, I’m pretty sure one of the diners I stopped at had pictures of an old JFK shaking Tony Blair’s hand but that’s just something you’ll need to accept about Hallowroots if you ever go there; time doesn’t really flow the way you're used to. But anyway, I finally arrived and I decided to skip the first Inn I arrived in since there was some poor guy outside with a finger missing and blood pissing out all over the longest handkerchief I've ever seen. I did take a moment out to try and help but he didn’t seem very interested in me so I just kept going.

As I kept driving I started to see some more houses, and a couple of shops. It’s important to remember that you won’t always hear the same description each time when you ask around. I remember a pretty quaint little place, but Alec from down the hall will make it out to be a bustling town with a moderate population. Everyone tends to remember the same key details though, and most of us have some sort of scar, and no matter what we all know that it’s the same place even if it seemed to have… presented itself a little differently each time.

But yeah, for me it was a dry little Southern town. I remembered tumble weeds rolling from out of alleyways and across the road, and old folks sat on porches with pipes and cigars. It seemed kind of nice actually, and after I found somewhere to stay I spent some time wandering. I didn’t notice much at that time. There's no spooks in this part if you're curious; I guess I’m telling you this because it’s important to let you know that Hallowroots might not meet your expectations straight away. Just don’t let your guard down. Nonetheless it was a peaceful night for me and I woke up the next day stretching and yawning and feeling finally rested. It was nice to feel like I’d reached my destination since I’d spent so long on the road and once I was ready I made my way to the home of RoxxWell Mining company that lay somewhere along the East-bound road.

When I arrived I realized why this company hadn’t filed for taxes. It was in ruins. The building would have been shoddy looking in its prime and it couldn’t have helped that it sat in the middle of nowhere. In particular, it seemed to sit in the middle of some flat long reaching fields which had overgrown with a tall and oppressive wheat grass. I’d only found records of this one particular mine and the accounts made it sound busy so it must have been doing something in its prime, despite the location and lack of mountains. As far as I could tell somewhere between the buildings and warehouses the mine itself must have been hidden away. Still, it was clear as day that the place was abandoned, so I remained in my car parked up on the side of the road for some time while I wondered what to do. Part of me wanted to call it a day and leave but I’d invested a lot of my time by this point so I decided to brave it and enter. There was a lot of piled up corrugated iron by the fence, and the overgrown bushes let me know it’d been empty for a long time. When I noticed all the doors were locked, and that they were far too heavy for someone like me to kick down, I kept on looking until I found some iron rungs that formed a ladder on one of the walls. A little pressure revealed them to be reasonably stable.

What can I say? I was young and a little bit adventurous. I climbed them and I wound up on the roof of the first building. The metal beneath my feet felt pretty unstable so I was really careful as I inched across the rusted ceiling towards a small hatch that was left open. At first I was just going to look down into room below but by the time I’d clocked an old-timey typewriter and an office chair covered in cobwebs I began to hear some creaking and fell straight through one of the panels. It was a painful fall, but thankfully I landed on a large desk which collapsed when I hit it. I think it helped break my fall enough to stop me seriously hurting myself, though I’d still been scratched up pretty bad on the way down.

You know when you’re bleeding, but the dust cakes the wound anyway? And it itches like hell, and stings like a bitch? The palms of my hands and most of my right shoulder felt like that. I stood up and coughed out a big lung full of dust and gripped my arm while trying to ignore just how much it had fuckin’ hurt. Looking around I saw the usual fifties office but it was hidden away in this kind of sepia darkness. The window to the right of the desk was cracked and let a lot of amber tinted light through but not enough to make the place feel safe. Once I’d let my eyes adjust I limped up to the desk and noticed that the type writer still had paper in the tray and once I’d yanked it free I saw a memo half typed.

All administrative staff are instructed to not discuss work details with our competitors; especially Intra – and then it stopped. I looked and saw that across from the type writer were a pair of post-war style women’s glasses with a smashed lens. It was clearly the receptionist’s desk as it faced an entrance and had its back to a long hallway that led into the facility itself. It was much darker the further the hall went but I still managed to see one lone little woman’s red shoe some distance away. I limped away from the dusty desk and towards the shoe. Shuffling past the cracked window I looked out towards the distant road where my car remained parked, and reminded myself that despite the dark and abandoned office I was only a thin wall away from safety and the outdoors. It was a bright and sunny day too and it helped to calm me down.

It was a shame then that once I looked back from the window I saw that the shoe was surrounded by a rust-coloured splotch. Curious, I leant down and picked the shoe up but as I turned it around I heard a rattle from within and saw a collection of small marble coloured rocks come tumbling out onto the floor. Most of them scattered away to the dark corners but one fell into my hand, and it didn’t take me long to realize it was actually once a toe. I threw the damn thing away but damn if I it didn’t pique my curiosity. I actually kind of wanted to know what the hell was going on in, and I thought that this place might have been the source of all those strange rumours in Hallowroots.

Of course, that place was, and remains, just one facet of the town and hardly the start of all its problems. But that’s another story isn’t it? What’s important right now is you know what I found elsewhere in that place. Well in that back room there was an archive and what I pulled outta there told me they’d dug up all sorts of strange things. Not just oil and coal but remains of old marble rock too large for them to haul up out of there. The last few entries made mention of a ‘sonic engineer’ coming to test this marble for signs of weakness; I inferred that this made reference to ultrasound.

Either way I kept on going, and past the archives were a load of offices, and even a few primitive computers, that had been smashed to hell and back. I’m talking about chairs in the damn plasterwork and a femur in the door of a bathroom stall. A lot of the place was like this. There were splintered bones and destroyed machinery, and a lot of signs of panic including blood splattered hands, barricaded offices, and skeletons propped on top of one another. It just seemed so old at the time that I thought the threat was long gone. Or maybe, I just really really wanted to know.

Anyways, I eventually found the shaft that went down below. It involved walking through a mile of smashed up rooms. The shaft itself was just after a set of communal showers; the sign for which was shredded on the floor and sprayed with blood. I ignored this room and kept walking until I found the actual shaft only metres ahead. Looking down it I felt a terrible fear rise up in me. Wide as it was, and riddled with machines, I could see that it was a tremendous rip in the face of the Earth. More than anything else I had seen before me that one sight struck me as a genuine threat to my person.

I also noticed that near the shaft was a lump of that marble they must’ve pulled up. Jesus Christ such a thing has never been seen before. It was a cascade of colours that never seemed to stay still and it was radiant even in the dark. Being near it was unpleasant and it emitted an audible hum that didn’t seem to get louder or quieter no matter where you stood. To think they’d hauled that up out of the Earth was an unsettling thought, and I couldn’t help but assume that it was that stone’s radiations that made me feel afraid, and not the shaft itself.

At the side of the large elevator that descended the shaft was a ladder. Again I ain’t gonna make excuses so just accept that I was a moron and that this particular moron went down. A lot of you will have seen me as the big honcho up-top so it might be good for you guys to know that I too have been young and stupid. Anyways, by the time I was near the bottom I could scarcely see the top. It hung above me like a star in the distance. It helped me feel safe enough to rush the last few rungs. Once I reached the bottom I was thankful to see that there was a load of torches piled up on the ground—still charged—so I picked one up and shook off the bony hand that still gripped it. When I lit the hallway ahead of me up I saw several tunnels stretching off into the distance.

<p class="MsoNormal">Most of them I didn’t pay attention to. Most of them looked like good old fashioned mine shafts. But one of them was wrecked with carnage; shattered metal was embedded in the rock beside skulls and grimy ribcages that were strewn along the tunnel. Many of the remained on top of what seemed to be near a hundred empty overalls caked in blood and dried viscera. Around about this point I started to realize I’d volunteered to be the victim in a horror film but when I looked back up I could only see the darkness. The ladder stretched on for a while but there was nothing there above it. I panicked and thought I had been trapped by someone above who had covered the entrance. But just as I began to lose control a draft washed over my face. It didn’t take a genius to know which of the several tunnels was beckoning me.

<p class="MsoNormal">So I went onwards, shuffling around the empty suits and smashed pickaxes, until I came to a point in the tunnel where the walls opened up to reveal a colossal chasm made of that very same stone marble. It was expansive beyond imagination and I was stood at the top of a set of cyclopean stairs. From their size I believed them to be a natural formation, but they were the only thing I could really see and they did not reach far into the darkness. I could not see another wall or roof in the place except for those that surrounded the arch from which I had emerged and they too were swallowed by the abyss after only a few metres. For a moment I remained fixed on the spot unsure of what to do when a most peculiar filament rolled down from the darkness above. It lay ahead of me by about a foot, and dangled precariously at head height while shimmering in the light of my torch. I was transfixed until I noticed another hanging low beside it. I shone my light upwards and saw that the blackness above me was riddled with a complex web of a thousand strings made visible only by my torch.

<p class="MsoNormal">And then another strange thing happened. In the darkness high above the webbing I saw a red and smoky shape convulse just beyond the veiled abyss. It seemed almost fluid, but it was also clearly solid; it reminded me of fabric in the ocean. Or perhaps like a quivering and billowing drop of velvet red ink dropped into black water. I stared at this mesmerising fleshy movement when, from further above it, some lights started to glow dimly. Suddenly they flashed much more brightly and there was a shimmering symmetrical kaleidoscope of bioluminescence, and it dawned on me that I was staring at some sort of colossal thing most reminiscent of a jellyfish. It floated up in the air like a hot air balloon defying all sense, and I couldn’t help but revel in the beauty of it all. This thing was at least fifty metres across, and I could see that its tendrils dangled beneath it while it floated alone in the abyss. It really was beautiful.

<p class="MsoNormal">And then its lights went off, and I could see it no more. For a moment I felt sad but I pushed this aside to appreciate the glory of what I had seen. It was a most strange but enchanting creature, and the knowledge that such an unknown variable could exist was an awe inspiring discovery that reaffirmed within me some spiritual hope. I wanted to see it again but as hard as I tried to reach up with my light I could only glimpse bits of its red and fleshy underbelly. I breathed a bittersweet sigh of happiness when, for a moment, I saw the bell flare up and glow faintly like it had before. Once again it flashed suddenly and revealed itself in a glorious halo.

<p class="MsoNormal">But my feeling of joy lasted only a moment for I saw something else in the darkness. A gaping maw, and white eyes that possessed no intelligence but whose cornea bore scratches as thick as my arm. I saw the jellyfish swallowed whole in an instant, and watched the tail of the predatory beast whip past me by no more than fifteen feet. It was neither a fish, nor a squid, nor really anything anyone would have ever seen before. It just… was. It was a skittering mess of legs, fins and teeth that was large enough to dwarf the empire state building.

<p class="MsoNormal">And it too lit up, but a thousand times brighter than its meal, to reveal that this abyss was colossal and that it was not alone. It, and many others like it and the jellyfish it had just eaten, bobbed up and down and swam through the air between the ruins of a city carved from the stone of the floor and the walls. Each step of each building must have been thirty of five metres high, and the buildings themselves were simply too large to make any rational sense. The architecture was glorious and frighteningly familiar; it was at once classical and modern. In another aeon it must have been beautiful but it had so clearly been dominated by a rank and frightening infestation.

<p class="MsoNormal">I saw terrible thing skittle across broken and overgrown aquaducts, and enormous floating walkways that had crumbled only for the ruins to float up aimlessly into the ether. I saw fleshy spiders with toothy abdomens jump between these weightless stones. There were pillars, and columned pantheons covered in pulsing inky fungi that snatched furiously at floating krill the size of cars. I caught glimmers of towering turrets with cephalopod tentacles coiled around the base, and of glowing eyes set within the darkness of strange and hollow temples. It was monstrous, all of it; that terrible and colossal skyline of shivering madness that glowed in the familiar radiance of the marble I had seen above.

<p class="MsoNormal">I remained unable to move. It could have been seconds, or hours, but as I looked my eyes were drawn along the streets and buildings that wormed their way towards a massive hole carved cleanly in the floor of the chasm. What I saw slither from that hole and snatch away one of the enormous monsters that had eaten the jellyfish left me weeping with madness. At first I thought it was some strange centipede, or perhaps some enormous equivalent to a snake. But the head was all wrong; it was a strange long shape that curved gently before tapering to a point, almost like a bishop’s hat. It was only when the cataclysmic entity bent at what was so clearly a knuckle that it dawned on me that it was a wretched black and bony finger.

<p class="MsoNormal">I found my stomach started to feel light as I saw all this; like the moment when you dangle over the edge of a roller coaster. I put this down to the immense sensation of terror that gripped me like a fever, until I noticed also that my coat tails rose behind me and my feet felt like they made less and less contact with the floor beneath me. It was at this moment that I started to sense some sort of impending danger and used what little traction I had on my surroundings to fling myself back into the mine. As I passed through the air I grew increasingly weightless and for a second I felt like I was floating. But as soon as I crossed the marble arch back into the mine itself I collapsed with my usual weight.

<p class="MsoNormal">I don’t remember much of what followed. Not really. I do have strong memories of reaching the top of the shaft and realizing that the tunnel curved in such a manner than the light above me was obscured when I was below, meaning that I had no need to think I was ever trapped. I also remember struggling through the endless hallways back into the entrance where I fell through the window near the receptionist’s desk. I wanted a quick way out and that seemed to do. But I don’t remember driving home, nor do I remember the date and time of year when I returned.

<p class="MsoNormal">But this was all a long time ago, and it was the first of many other visits in my lifetime. Like I said Hallowroots isn’t that dangerous a place you just need to be careful. Like this story it will reveal as much as it conceals, and it will never let you feel safe or secure in any meaningful way. Just don’t be an idiot like I was, and don’t think that the laws of reality will keep you safe. Hallowroots is where something in this world gets peeled back and you’ll never really be the same afterwards.

<p class="MsoNormal">For those of you still curious; I lost my eye while staying in the Moonlight Inn. Some of its permanent residents have a perverse understanding of the old saying ‘it’s all fun and games until someone loses and eye’ (I kept telling them that the saying didn’t confer a desired unit of ‘fun’). I lost a third of my liver due to alcoholism after my first trip (I know that’s cheating but I feel like it counts). A kidney of mine was ‘borrowed’ by some rather unpleasant fellows who were the most incompetent grave robbers imaginable. And the three metres of intestine? I’ll just say that Intra Inc. hate their tax audits and hate the taxman even more. <ac_metadata title="Vernian Marble"> </ac_metadata>