Faces streamed out of the darkness, laughing, shouting and
screaming as they were sucked past her line of vision by the darkness. They
seemed to her as never ending as the leaves in the autumn stream. Dawn ploughed
onward through the torrent despite the seizing and creaking of her legs with
every footfall. The ‘tick tick tick’ of her hand wound torch winding her
forwards, home. Exhaustion pulled her down as the spectre-esq faces pulled her
sideways, back ways, stretching her existence into the darkness, pulling focus
from her somethingness.
She looked away, up or down: Dawn knew not which. The blue
earth starred with cigarette butts and the black sky stubbed with stars. Her
perception began to spin on a counter axis to the globe.
Upon the path that lay before her, bunting lined jaws began
to close their bright triangular teeth, a mile wide mocking grin bearing down
upon her.
At first Dawn pulled her face pulled back in fear, as it
contorted it began to swell and distort, lumping and rearranging itself into a
grotesque hanging upon her skull. The creeping mass began to move down her
spine warping her body and swelling her figure impeding her movements as she
the struggle against the shrieking spectral torrent.
Clutching her coat closer to the once human mass now coating
her bones Dawn lumbered away from the jam pot street lights and made for the
tree line across the brook.
The smell of pine prickled across her numbing skin as the
torch led her on, revealing and erasing each millimetre it swept across;
existence closed in and confined within it’s soft spherical glow.
Tripping across the trees many feet, as they faded in and
out of being, Dawn heard the dancing voices grow fainter. Perhaps they were now
a memory of what had once passed through her sphere of existence.
Hulking onward though the squelching mud an unclean odour
began to seep through the confines of her internment. It dragged its way to the
olfactory receptors in her once ‘button’ nose, which now resembled more of a
hideous cauliflower. She beat the meat sacking hanging from the front of her
skull, to no avail, as the rank gagging sensation slew her to her knees
regardless of her protests. Convulsing and writhing she found herself half
buried in the fermenting undergrowth, wretched and clawing at the bulging
ground.
All at once the ground began to pulse and seethe spilling
out a swarm of toads ripe with primeval slime. Dawn sank despairingly low as
the ground gave way from beneath her, she grasped at tree roots as they sailed up
above her and water reflecting the shadows of night began to swell beneath her.
The torch still slung round her wrist gave it’s gears one final revolution and
stuttered into darkness.
Something from beneath began to rise up to the surface, the
horrific realisation dawned that it was a part of her own body. Swelling and
massing a blister of gigantic proportions broke the surface of the water
simultaneously floating the lower portion of her body and sinking her head
below the water level.
Chocking and spluttering Dawn’s human instinct to live was
the only thing keeping her above water. Heaving each breath she gazed upward
and caught sight of the moon shining it’s clean light onto the pool’s surface
soothing her enough to calm her unconscious struggle against death. The
moonlight guided her vision towards a small alcove in the side of the pit, made
perhaps by a rabbit in the base of the tree roots. Slowly Dawn, with her fat
blunt fingers, grappled her way up the side of the crater dragging alongside
the growth of gigantic proportions. Disturbed by the seismic tremors spawned
from Dawn’s flapping things, insects massed to the surface of the crater. In
search of sanctuary they began tripping down the ridges of her back, living
rain plopping into the pool below.
The pus filled monstrosity nipped at Dawn’s internal organs
as she lugged the dead weight the few feet to the alcove. Just big enough for
her clubbed feet, bugling through her strapped sandals, the hollow gave her
enough purchase to propel her mass out of the fissure where she collapsed,
exhausted, over the blister which was now the size of a small sheep. She felt
it ripple and boil beneath her, hot and angry, sapping away her strength.
Dawn gazed back down into the moonlight reflection in the
pool. The face of herself, as it had always been: slim, feminine with that cute
button nose gazed back at her. Lifting her hands to her face Dawn felt the
normality that had returned to her body. The relief and calm and joy and
ecstasy washing over her were short lived as realisation broke. It was still
there. The lump, having devoured her grotesque deformities, continued massing
and growing from her lower body, threatening to eclipse her entirely, pressing
her spine down into the earth.
Something new began to grow inside of Dawn. Hurt, anger,
sorrow, rage and desperation began to charge within her. Seizing the redundant
torch around her wrist Dawn brought it crashing down upon a rock, the plastic
shattering and leaving behind a razor sharp edge. Pinned down upon her back she
began to cut.
Hacking away she found that what anchored the cyst, to the
join between her hip and groin, was quite a small area indeed, around the size
of a five pence piece. Gasping with pain, her eyes streamed and her chest
pounded, the ulcer crushed adrenaline charged breath from her lungs which
caught in her throat.
Spent and shuddering Dawn severed the last tendril; she lay
in the moonlight gasping shallow swallows of clean air.
As the song birds of morning began to sing Dawn picked her
way back to the path, the stream tumbling with brightly coloured party cups
from last night’s festivities. The field was empty, last night’s clamour
leaving bunting tide marks across the ground, trestle table ruins and the
corpses of half eaten sausage rolls.
Crossing the threshold of her home, she felt a sickening
relief, so much so upon heading to the bathroom she vomited violently. Dawn sat
on the floor feeling out her somethigness,
she looked down at where the scar would sit. With the last of last night’s
terror removed from beneath her nails: it was over, it was gone. But in some
way it would always be there, a ragged reminder of a night spent writhing in
the dirt on her back.
