The Darkness Jar

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I don’t know where I got it. I unpacked it. But I don’t remember packing it. Its quite big, bigger than a jam jar, one of those large jars for cereal or something. When I unpacked, I just put things on the table and left them there. I ate take away on the floor for weeks. It was a break up, amicable but still difficult.

I didn’t notice it for quite awhile, but then one day there it was- a thin layer of black in the bottom of the jar. I picked it up. I put it down. It wasn’t solid but it also didn’t really move as I shook the jar. I couldn’t fit my hand in so I couldn’t feel it. I just ignored it for a bit.

And then slowly. Ever so slowly. I thought I was going mad. Every night, a tiny bit more. Maybe a drop. You couldn’t notice it until a few months later, suddenly there was more in the jar. I left it on the table, I didn’t know what to do. I’d sit and stare it after dinner. I’d pick it up. Put it down. What was it?

Then one night I came downstairs, I can’t even remember why and it wasn’t dark in the kitchen. It was just light, like daylight. I thought I dreamed it and I went back to bed. But then a few months later, it was the kitchen and the lounge, daylight all night. And the darkness in the jar was increasing, just a bit, but noticeable.

And then months later it was the whole house and there was no sleep to be had. I tried everything, I googled Nordic habits. I wore an eye mask, I bought black out curtains. Nothing worked and the jar just sat there. With the darkness inside it.

I went mad, insane, crazy insomnia. I slept in the garden, then in a hotel. I imposed myself on friends. But I told no one. I thought I must be cursed.

Meanwhile I tried everything with the jar. I tipped it upside down. I left it upside down in some weird device so the darkness would seep out. I put water in it. I put sugar in it. I put salt in it. I put coffee in it? They all just rested on the top. I googled and googled and googled again. I put it in the washing machine-I know-I didn’t switch it on. I tried the dishwasher though, it didn’t work. And all the time the endless daylight, I tried to stir it and scrape it out with a stick. I tried breaking it. I tried everything. I even toyed with a chainsaw-don’t use one on glass, its not recommended. A diamond drill. It did nothing.

And in the end I took it to the park. I am not proud of myself. I just stuck it under a bush. The darkness didn’t return. I put the house on the market, no one will know. Its not even a question on one of their stupid forms. I saved on light bulbs and electricity until it sold.

I moved far away and just disappeared for a bit. I have no idea if the darkness came back after I sold it.

Months later, I went that way again. You know those local papers you get, this one had headlines, ‘Council saves money! Park lights no longer needed.’

I don’t care. I haven’t been back. I’m not going back. No one needs to know.

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Wolf Weather Miles Watson

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Ooh, this was a fun, fab scary story. I loved it. Its nicely structured, and builds. The pace is good, not too fast, not too slow. I liked the concept and the central character.

It’s kind of what you want in a scary story, not so implausible that you can’t believe it, just plausible enough that when you think about it you can see it might be a thing. I like wolves and snow and animal stuff and this had just the right amount of tension to keep me going to the end.

It’s a short story, so you need it to keep moving. I liked the descriptions and the suspense kept ratcheting up. It has a deeper concept behind it, but I confess I didn’t overthink it. I just sat back and enjoyed it for what it is, a really fast paced, fab piece of work.

A bit like taking a sports car out for a spin on the last sunny day, wind in your hair, touch those brakes before the bend and forget those speed cameras. You know underneath that motor is humming and the noise is getting inside your head and it all means something, and winter is coming but you’ll think about that later on.

It’s a deep, dark, snowy tale, full of animal instinct and primal power. I read it all in one sitting. Indulge yourself and afterwards go out into the garden and howl at the moon.

I was given a free copy of this to review.

The Hour

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

One hour. Sixty minutes. Wasn’t that a television show? All useless knowledge now. Sixty lots of sixty seconds.  There’s a few of them gone now, turning over useless ideas in my head. At least I’m not shaking anymore.

We might be among the survivors. There’s another minute gone. What started it?  What happened? How are they are doing it? They just turned. Suddenly. Like a switch went on or off. They’re machines. So definitely a switch. I guess.

It could be a trap. Might not be sixty minutes.  We got the numbers from a machine. One we thought we could trust. Don’t know though. Maybe all the machines are in on it. I don’t even feel like I can trust our fridge, its not even connected to the internet. Almost nothing in this house is. Won’t save us.

I think the dishwashers turned. I guess it never liked the way we stacked. We could never agree, never did it the same way twice. Was there a proper way, should we have googled that?

They have been above the house several times. Drones I think. We hid in the cellar the first time. For hours. You can hear them, which we thought was odd, but the noise makes you afraid, stops you in your tracks. Isn’t that the idea?  They know us. We built them. They know us.

I’m not even sure how they’re killing us so quickly. We can’t leave the house. And we have to be careful of the dishwasher. And maybe my electric toothbrush, I could hear it whirring itself into a frenzy earlier, its connected to something somehow.

Big thick walls and a cellar, makes it tricky for any heat detectors to find us, thatch on the roof, thick piles of grass strapped on, apparently that makes heat detection tricky too. I love this house. I’ve unplugged the wi-fi but its still on.

Maybe there is no hope. According to our information, in sixty minutes they run out of power.

We have been counting the hours using an analogue watch. Smashed the digital thing and put it in the fridge, I’m still not certain I can trust the fridge. That’s ridiculous. The fridge is not connected.

51 minutes. The two of us. Huddled. Listening. If they come down to window height they will find us but he can’t face the cellar again. I will drag him there if I need to. He’s sat there with his head in his hands. Really now is the moment he picks to fall apart! He wanted to keep his phone. I switched it off, taped it to the bottom of the bath, smashed the thing and then drowned it.

He can’t believe the dishwasher has turned. I think if the dishwasher could, it would ‘de-socket’ and hunt us down. It was sending some kind of signal at the start. It flooded the kitchen until we turned the water off. I unplugged it, bashed it to pieces. Its lifeless now, well powerless anyway.

I close my eyes and listen. There is silence. The killing thing, whatever it is they do, is clinical. There is no survival rate. No one lying on the ground moaning. It can’t be bullets, they would have to keep going back for bullets.

Someone, somewhere has blown up their docking stations, they can’t recharge, at least we think they can’t recharge. They underestimated us, or at least they might have.

47 minutes. I listen. I’m not even sure I want to survive.

Then I hear it, a faint hum. I clasp my hand over his mouth and start dragging him to the cellar. He resists, but I literally drag him there and throw him down the stairs. I follow behind him and close the trap door.

45 minutes. The ticking of the watch is so loud. We must be in there for half an hour. Its quiet, I can’t hear what is going on outside. The air is thick and stuffy and I am worried we will die from lack of oxygen.

Its 15 minutes to go and I hear the window smash. They are inside the house. Drones, hunting us down. They know we are here. I clasp my hand  over his mouth again, I know he will scream. I can hear it buzzing above us. The cellar walls are thick, the cellar ceiling above us is thick. To get a shot of whatever it is, it will need to shoot through the trap door, get the angle right.

I make us as small as possible. I pull my legs up and ball us up, maybe it will just hit one of us.

Minutes pass, what is taking so long. Maybe it can’t get us in the shot. I can hear it sort of whirring, perhaps the watch is wrong, perhaps it is running down. Hope. There is hope.

I can’t see the watch, I have set a small alarm on it. It took me ages to figure out how it worked. I can hear the drone start to stutter. It could be faking it though, trying to entice us out.

We sit. We don’t move. We breath. The air is dank and awful.

Then the tiniest beep, the smallest noise, the alarm. It’s the hour. Sixty minutes, is up.

I can’t hear anything. How can we tell? Did the drone power down and preserve itself until we come out? Is it sitting there waiting?

I wait and wait and wait. He keeps moaning, begging for air. Why this once, could he just not be the brave one. I make a decision. I go to the trap door. I push it open a fraction and then I tell him, to go out first.

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Fisher woman

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its common knowledge that you should not fish at the mouth of the river. I did it anyway. It’s how I ended up in the water, although the exact sequence of events is a mystery.

I thought I could swim. That was just the waves teasing me, tossing me back and forth as I lay submerged in the early morning surf. I was trying to gasp for air because I did not yet understand that my lungs were full of water. I wasn’t sure if I was dead. I felt I was mostly dead but not completely dead. Just a bit dead, if that makes any sense.

It was a flounder who told me to relax, really just a pair of eyes poking through the sand, the occasional flurry of shell flakes announcing a presence. I don’t remember hearing fish talk before.

‘Is this death?’ I didn’t ask that question out loud but I guess flounder are clever.

The flounder laughed a sort of raspy laugh, sand at the back of the throat I guess, ‘Not quite, this is near death.’

It wasn’t painful, I was just a little bit alive throughout my body. The flounder was gone.

I felt the next fish nibbling at my flesh. I wanted it to go away but I couldn’t say it. My mouth was salty and dry, but really my mouth was wide open and full of water. I couldn’t see the fish. I wanted to close my eyes. Because of the sand. I could smell the sand, it was in my nostrils.

The fish stopped nibbling and spoke.

‘Fish know a lot about death.’ The voice was deeper than I expected, ‘because we are often pulled into your gaseous atmosphere and suffer gill collapse’ (fish words not mine), ‘near death, close to death, dying, maybe dead, only to be plunged back into the water, still near death, still dying, and eventually dead even though we were meant to be saved.’

I always thought they survived. The fish I put back, I thought they just swam away.

I felt something bigger tugging at my leg. It was an octopus. I could hear my leg calling to me saying goodbye. I wanted it to stay. Fortunately the femur held, disjointed, unjointed but attached. I heard the high pitched giggling of the octopus, as if being able to keep your limbs in situ was a funny thing.

The sky was darkening, I had been rolling under the surf the whole day, dead, not quite dead, some bits dead, other bits not dead, talking to the fish.

In the darkness I felt air on my back. The waves had rolled me to the beach. I thought I could expel the water from my lungs and live again. I felt the tickle of a crab. Then another. And another. I wanted to laugh. I felt their pincers, expecting sharpness but instead soft, gentle, tickly tugs. My skin gave way. I was coming apart, finally I was coming apart and the fish would be quiet again.

Even the trees

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I remember the first time I saw it. He was desperate, you could see he was desperate, that bit wasn’t unusual. It was the stomach that was odd. The branch wrapped around the middle of his body, the bulge above it, distended, hanging over it, his stomach. He was held fast, his feet long since lost and a branch loose around his neck, another coming out of his mouth, sprouting leaves. It looked like he was vomiting foliage.

You could see the desperation in his eyes. He was hungry, but the branch had grown to fill his mouth and so there was no way of feeding him. What point would feeding him serve anyway, it would it only prolong the inevitable. He was being absorbed into the tree and there was nothing that could stop it. You could see his hands had melded into the trunk and didn’t exist anymore and if you came back tomorrow, a little more of his arm would be tree.

If there was an escape, we had not found it. The trees had proven impervious to the axe, they had withstood our flames, we had even tried talking to them, just stood there opening and closing our mouth with words but there was no evidence they heard and it did not stop.

It was mostly men at first, because we needed wood and they got the wood, and the trees had always been so passive, so agreeable to what we did. Or so we thought. It was not all trees, the majority of them just stood mutely, as trees do, but these active attack timbers were new. You couldn’t tell the passive trees from the aggressive ones and worse when you cut into one that had absorbed someone, sometimes there was an outline in the tree, other times blood would pour out, or there were organs just sitting within the trunk and you would wonder if there hadn’t been some semblance of humanity left, some sentience that you had swung your axe against.

Not long after it started, it was alleged they adapted new tactics, letting themselves be cut, became the joists of some house and in the night crept down from their roof top space or their wall and took children. You simply woke up to find your child being absorbed into a beam, of course they were static, the beam couldn’t up and run away but your child was still gone. That was rumour and I never saw any evidence of it.

We were becoming a world of fewer and fewer people. There was nothing we could do, there was no cure, if anything the number of trees doing it was increasing. It was a hard thing to observe, a sort of rapid growth around someone as they went near a tree, a kind of snarling ensnarement that was strong and then a slow absorption over a period of days.

The woods were alive with the howling of victims until the inevitable branch filled the mouth, some trees seemed to revel in the idea of the screaming and the branch to fill the mouth was the last thing they did. Others seemed bothered by the noise and did it quickly.

I had a son of twelve, I did not let him go out often. The house had stood so long and I knew its beams, they would not transform in the night. Still I was careful with the wood for the fire, but I knew it is inevitable. I watched him grow, watched many die and knew the inevitable must happen. There were fewer of us and the trees were taking victims younger and younger. What to do?

Then came the day he simply did not come home and I ran to the road and searched like so many others and there he was and he was so far gone. I could not hold his hand or feed him. I could only see the terror in his eyes and stroke his arm and tell him it would soon be over. It was mercifully short.

The trees began in earnest on the women then and sometimes the animals. It was as if the trees had turned against all forms of life that moved. I had seen so much, so many suffer, I did not want to die that way. At the end I did not even think I could trust the trusses that held up my own house, I could not bring myself to light a fire out of fear. Many simply gave in, just walked up and placed themselves before a tree. It did not always work, the trees were whimsical, they knew they had won.

I could not bring myself to do that, I could not imagine how I could live through the agony of absorption, the slow solidification of my body into something firm and hard, the creeping stillness, the days of hunger until your blood merged into sap, your final taste just wood and leaves, the joy of sound silenced by a think branch on your tongue. I knew I could not bear such things, feet, hands merged into trunk, limbs melted into bark, torso melded into wood, none of it worked for me.

Instead I went to the river. The river is forbidden, was forbidden once. I dipped my toes in the water. I waded out into the depths. I lay down in the water and I let the river dissolve me. I felt myself come apart, each molecule of my body drifting apart from the other, the parts that held me together overwhelmed by the sheer amount of liquid I was drowning in. I felt the water seeping into me and I felt myself merging into it. I was at peace with the world, there was nothing left of me. I became water instead of wood. I joined with the drops of the river and floated out to sea.

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