Limbs - Half Two, Made Whole
Short Story - Horror/Mystery
Greetings, Talebones Readers!
This is the second (concluding) part of a horror/mystery tale that I am calling Limbs.
Read Part One here.
❗ By Way of Disclaimer: this is a horror tale, and therefore may contain themes and situations that are darker than my average fare.
Reader discretion is advised.
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Limb V: Cassie
That night, Olivia tossed and turned, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. First on one side then the other, she passed in and out of a disturbed veil, dream-realities weaving around her like tangled fabric. All was black within the tent and without, only the glow-in-the-dark safety clip of the bear-spray can was visible, an eerie green misshapen moon resting beside her pillow.
She had considered leaving her lantern lit while she slept. She had been deeply unsettled by the visit of the old woman, but somehow the idea of her tent being the only illuminated thing in a forest of darkness—too visible, too easy to find—felt more frightening than simply hiding in the gloom with the other creatures of the night.
Her dreams were scattered things, and terrible. The feeling of the earth softening underneath her, opening to receive her. The ferns along the trail quivering of their own volition, like reaching arms. The thick, lichen-rimed roots of the trees swelling and receding slowly, like throats swallowing. In her fevered mind the forest turned to a writhing thing, one complete whole, all arms and legs and eyes and veins, dripping and spongy and clean-smelling with an undercurrent of rot. And it was aware of her footsteps on its flesh as she walked the path deeper, deeper still to a place where it longed for her to go.
It was sometime late into the night when she finally fell into a deeper sleep. But this was not quite the relief she hoped for.
Lying on her side, she became aware of the sound of the tent flap unzipping, a slow and deliberate action. But she could see nothing in the dark.
A warm body climbed in to sit at Olivia’s feet, bringing the scent of loam into the tent with it.
It was Cassie. Olivia could not see her, but she knew.
She tried to move, but her body was frozen in place on her side. She tried to say Cassie’s name, to say anything at all, but no words would pass her trembling lips.
At her feet, the figure rocked gently back and forth. She could imagine it sitting with its knees drawn up to its chest, as Olivia knew her sister often did when relaxed. The figure said nothing for a long, long time.
Finally, when the figure did speak, it was Cassie’s voice. Not ghostly or strange or distorted, but warm and normal. Good-humored.
“You know I’m not really here, don’t you, Liv?” she said. “You’re dreaming. I know you’re not used to imagining things, but it’s okay. Out here, we’re both just as weird as each other. That’s a first, right?”
After two months without it, Olivia felt the sound of her sister’s voice as a visceral thing. She was overwhelmed with a desire to reach out and touch Cassie’s arm, her shoulder, to feel her solid under her hand, to prove something to herself. But she couldn’t. She could not move a muscle except the roll of her eyes, helpless in the utter black.
“The good news,” Cassie said, “is that I’m close. We’re close, and it’s almost done. We both did everything we were supposed to do.”
A tear slid warm down Olivia’s cheek and sank into her thin camping pillow.
“It all had a purpose.” Cassie’s figure shifted, and Olivia felt a hand on her ankle, gripping softly. The voice thickened with emotion. “It all meant something. You’ll see.”
Then, the figure shuffled past Olivia, climbing gently over her, and she could feel it settle down beside her to lay spine-to-spine. It was a familiar action; they had often done this as children when one of them couldn’t sleep, to comfort each other.
Olivia wept softly into her pillow, still paralyzed. She knew, without knowing how, that Cassie would be gone when she woke up. She knew that she would be alone, again. Even so, she was lulled to sleep by the feeling of her sister’s back against hers—solid and impossible—and the pounding of her heart.
And when she woke the next morning, it was true: the tent was empty, and she was alone once more.
*******
Limb VI: The Voice
By morning the hike had changed, and not for the better.
If Olivia was superstitious, she might have thought that the visit of the old woman the night before had put a curse over the trail, over the very air. It didn’t help that her sleep had been so scattered and unsatisfying and drenched in unsettling dreams. She did not feel refreshed. But she truly had no other choice; it was forward or back, and she couldn’t stay put.
A milky dawn furrowed darkly, clouds pulling together over the mountains. Olivia packed up her campsite in an un-forecasted drizzle and by the time she was a half-mile down the path it was raining steadily, an assertive sort of rain, the kind you can’t ignore. She was grateful that she had thought to bring a raincoat, but not a little resentful that she had to use it.
The unexpected shift in the weather brought with it a strange wind, directionless, like spirits tumbling up and down the slopes on either side of the trail and whistling through the trees in vague sighs.
And on the wind was a voice.
The first time Olivia heard it she assumed she had imagined it. Maybe it was simply the wind in a rock cleft. But about an hour later it happened again, and this time Olivia caught it more clearly as she was taking a quick break to eat a granola bar.
It was a man’s voice, very faint. It was not close by, and this was a relief. It didn’t sound angry or upset, but calling as if trying to attract someone’s attention across a great distance. Another hiker, maybe, on an adjacent trail?
It happened again, and again, every so often as she walked on. And every time the voice slipped past her on the wind Olivia would pause, lift the hood of her raincoat away from her ear, try to get a sense of where the sound was coming from. But it was too far away, and the rain created too much underlying noise, and the wind was too unreliable, whipping this way and that. The voice never seemed to get any closer. Out of an abundance of caution, she paused to pull the bear spray from her backpack and clip it to her belt loop instead.
It was on this leg of the hike, rain dripping down through the thick trees and rising in silty puddles along the dirt trail, that Olivia really considered for the first time that she should turn back.
She was deep in the heart of the woods. Lake Quinault, her car, and the entire world of her life was behind her, such as it was, but still within reach if she chose to turn now. Leave the memory of Cassie to the woods like an offering of bones and try to find a way through life on her own.
The thought nagged at her, an unscratchable itch. But the idea of turning around felt like an insurmountable goal, as if choosing to do so would change everything. Cause irreparable harm.
Every time she set herself a milestone and reached it—at the next big boulder, I’ll turn; at the next clearing, I’ll turn; at the next hair-pin in the trail, I’ll turn—she found herself remembering the sensation of Cassie’s spine against hers, the glance of the old woman across the camp stove. And these kept her facing onward, deeper into the trees, up and down the rise and fall of the path.
“Don’t stop, Youngest. This trail only leads one way. You’re here now, and that’s what’s important.”
Hazel was a stranger, but something about her words felt like cords, pulling gently at Olivia’s wrists and ankles, guiding her forward.
“It’s almost done.”
Her sister was close. That’s what she said in the dream. But Olivia didn’t believe in that stuff. She couldn’t.
Under it all like a pulse, that feeling she had experienced when she reached across to hand Hazel the cup of coffee kept coming back to her. It was the feeling of stretching her arms out to the old woman, reaching for her. Hazel’s hands, her eyes, her face. And the familiar sensation was echoed in the reaching branches above her, the thick roots splitting the earth and rimed with moss, the home-like spreading of their limbs under and over.
The man’s voice shivered past her on the wind, calling out from far away.
Miles passed without pause, green to green, gray to gray, brown to brown. The rain never ceased, a steady rhythm with Olivia’s footsteps on the trail. She was exhausted, wrung out. Her diet of lightweight trail-side meals and coffee had caught up to her, along with the lack of sleep and her sore muscles.
The desire to turn back faded as the afternoon wore on and another night loomed. She couldn’t turn back in the dark. She would need to camp, again.
After all, Cassie was riding on her back like a child, urging her on.
The old woman was following along beside her, hidden in the trees.
The man was calling, somewhere ahead.
All trails must end somewhere. Olivia kept walking and walking until she couldn’t anymore, as the dusk drew in once again, and then she found a place to pitch her tent for another night. She moved stiffly, her actions on autopilot.
Too tired to eat or even change her clothes, she crawled into her tent, kicked off her muddy boots and unclipped the bear spray, and shivered herself to sleep.
*******
Limb VII: The Strangers
Olivia was roused from her deep, exhausted sleep by the sound of her own name.
Whispered or shouted, her confused ears couldn’t tell the difference.
She lifted herself up onto her elbow, listening, heart pounding. After hearing the wind and rain all day long on the trail the sudden and inexplicable hush around her tent felt sinister. The frogs didn’t even sing. The owls were hunting elsewhere.
Olivia waited like that for a long time, just listening, hearing nothing. After a while, she reasoned that the sound she had heard was another dream, the result of her fatigue. But as she leaned back down to return to sleep, she felt it.
The earth under her tent was moving. Shifting like a muscle.
Every nerve in Olivia’s body leaped, skin tingling as she recoiled and stood, bumping her head on the soft ceiling. She fumbled for the zipper with a sobbing noise, tore it open, and tripped out of the tent in her socks.
There was no light, and a strange, humid warmth had settled over the woods after the rain. But under her feet was a softness, rippling, and above her the trees were creaking, groaning, as if bending to lift her into their arms.
Olivia, in a sudden burst of inspiration, reached back into her tent and scrambled to find her flashlight. Clicking it on, she whipped the narrow pillar of light around, revealing the thick choke of the woods, pressing inward. Roots and branches, writhing.
She did not remember the trees being that close when she chose this site.
And when she whirled around to sweep the flashlight back toward her tent, she nearly dropped it with a strangled cry.
Two figures stood beside the tent. It was Hazel, next to a long-haired old man who looked eerily like her. The flashlight glinted on their crowns of white hair, threw shadows on their craggy faces. Both were leaning on walking sticks, dressed in their leather boots and thick woolens and straw hats. Mirror images of each other.
“Calm, Youngest,” Hazel said, and her voice was sweet and gentle. “It’s time.”
“Home we go,” said the old man, soft and kind. “Follow us, now. Hazel and Hedge will take you.”
The word Home in the old man’s gentle voice was like an enchantment over Olivia, the promise of something long yearned for. And as the very stone and soil rippled and tipped below her and all around her, like they were all riding on the back of some strange immortal beast, she could almost cross the divide to these strangers, let them take her hands and lead her Home. She could almost give up, give in, and she very nearly did.
Olivia felt the pull, those cords of hope wrapping tight around her ankles, her wrists. Down through her feet. Up through her crown.
She swayed. Her arm dipped.
The flashlight beam that she had been pointing at the old man and old woman faltered downward, and in the slip of the light the two pairs of staring eyes glinted like animal eyes, reflecting, four globes of uncanny neon.
That broke the spell. Olivia panicked.
She dropped the flashlight in a seizure of terror and turned to run away from the campsite, socked feet soaked and snagging on every reaching branch, every thorn. The trees creaked to lower themselves, closer and closer. Tent, bear spray, stove, lantern, all left in the black.
Behind her, the old man’s voice called out, a ringing sound. It did not sound like her name that he said.
It sounded like—
Her toe snagged on something unseen. There was a shallow gully of mossy stone before her in the darkness and Olivia fell straight into it, tumbling headlong to land beside the cold rush of a mountain stream—swollen with the rain—that she could hear but not see.
In the pause after, Olivia lay dazed. In the dark, the world seemed upside-down. Her head throbbed, and her right ankle ached sharply, twisted. Her whole body screamed in weariness.
I can’t run anymore. I just can’t.
I have to go Home.
Olivia heard the old man’s voice call out again, echoing through the trees like an incantation.
It was the last thing she heard before she lost consciousness.
*******
Limb VIII: Reunion
Olivia fluttered in and out of awareness. She was so cold, and so sore.
She felt, as through water, her arms lifted and stretched over thin but unnaturally strong shoulders, carrying her away through the night. Her socked feet bumped against stones and roots, and there was a warm stain of blood on her brow from knocking her head in the fall down into the gully.
Voices whispered on either side of her. She knew them; the old man and the old woman spoke softly to each other, sang little songs as they slowly and carefully picked their way down a path only they could see. Some of the words Olivia felt she understood. Some of them she knew she didn’t, but felt she could if she tried.
They traveled on through the dark, the three of them, and the woods seemed to part ahead of them.
It was in the half-light just before dawn when Olivia woke for real, lying on her side in the thick duff of a bowl-like clearing, giant trees towering around her like sentinels, stark against the rising light.
Her right ankle was swollen and so painful that it made her nauseous to move. Underneath her the ground was warm and soft in an unusual way, mossy yet supple. There were thick brush-plants and ferns all around on the edges of the bowl, but there was something wrong about the way the plants grew, here. She could not think of it. Her head wasn’t working quite right.
When she glanced down, closer to her legs, she realized that someone was sitting beside her with their knees drawn up to their chest, rocking gently, humming.
It was Cassie.
Looking clean and fed, unharmed. Looking just fine, like she had only wandered away for a day-hike.
Olivia blinked. Her throat was sore when she spoke. “Am I dreaming now?”
Cassie smiled, shook her head. “Nope. Not this time.”
Olivia reached out with tentative fingers and touched her sister’s arm. The fabric of her shirt, the resonance of her skin underneath. It was real and true under her fingers.
“You’ve been here? For two months?” Olivia said. She could not keep the awe out of her voice, nor the accusation. “How—?”
Cassie shrugged. “Hedge and Hazel and the Others have taken good care of me. I’ve been very safe, just waiting and hoping you would come and look for me. I’m really glad you did.”
Olivia looked around as well as she could without moving her aching head too much. The clearing was ringed with towering trees, unnaturally wide trunks with large tentacles of roots rimed thickly with moss. The branches above dipped and swayed, though there was no wind. And the trunks of the trees appeared to seethe, rippling with colors and patterns: greens, browns, deep blues, blood reds. These colors bled into the moss underneath them, a living carpet. It all seemed to breathe.
“Why does this place feel familiar?” Olivia asked, even though she didn’t want to.
“Because it’s Home,” Cassie replied. “We’ve been walking toward Home the whole time and we didn’t even realize it. Lost, but not really. They knew how to get us to come. They sent me their own flesh as an invitation, knowing I would come out here looking for the truth, even if it was the wrong one to begin with. And when I didn’t come back, your invitation was your fear of being alone. Without me.”
Olivia felt a shiver of offense flicker through her at this. “I thought you had gotten yourself killed,” she said. “I just needed to find out what happened to you.”
Cassie smiled down at her sister, kindly. “It’s okay, Liv. Our loneliness was a crucible. It had a purpose. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Without it, we wouldn’t have found our way back. This all needed to happen. It was forty-four years of pain, a wandering in the wilderness, part of our life cycle—”
“Cassie, if this has anything to do with the whole cryptid bullshit…”
Cassie laughed, a self-deprecating sound. “Geez. That stuff, that was all nothing,” she said. “I was just trying to satisfy something in me, like filling a bucket with smoke. The truth is better. Fuller. It’s forever.”
She rested her hand on Olivia’s ankle, the way she had in the dream.
“It’s time now. Are you ready?”
Olivia recoiled, but was too sore to move away. “Ready for what?”
“Liv, you know what.” Cassie smiled sadly. “You’ve known it since we were kids. We’ve never been whole, but it had a reason. And now we get to fix it. This is where we finally fix it.”
It was Cassie. Olivia kept searching her face, looking for a reason to think it was someone else, something wearing her sister’s skin. But it wasn’t. It was her sister, her twin, the mirror image on the other side of the fence. Closer now than she had ever been, before. And in an unfamiliar place that felt like Home.
That pull came again. The desperate desire never to be lonely again.
“I don’t know how to trust this,” Olivia whispered.
Cassie nodded, understanding. Then, she said, lifting her eyes to the trees, “I dream, sometimes, of the Shepherds, and the way they pulled us from the earth. Cold and shivering, fresh from our amnion, we shrilled and reached for their faces and throats in desperation. We knew, somehow, what they intended to do. When they split us, our howls of grief rent the night sky, scattered like stars and tumbled to the soil again like drops of blood. I have never felt Home again since.”
Her voice died away in the writhing, roiling mossy womb as fingers of dawn reached through the canopy above. Then, she whispered, lowering her gaze, “Have you, Liv?”
The words were the truth, and Olivia knew them. Because she had said them, too. She had recited them to herself before sleep. She had heard them in her dreams. A shared memory, too strange to understand or explain in the finite world beyond these trees.
For once, she and Cassie had read each other’s minds.
Olivia shook her head, her answer to her sister’s question.
“I never have,” she said. “Not until now.”
Cassie reached out and took Olivia’s hand, and Olivia squeezed it. Then, Cassie moved out of sight. Olivia felt her sister lie down beside her, spine to spine, the way they always had as frightened children.
For a moment, it seemed that nothing would happen except their twin hearts beating side by side, twin pairs of lungs filling and emptying.
But then, as the very earth seemed to shudder beneath them, the seams of their clothing quietly split. Flesh crept against flesh, bowing and buckling, bones sliding away, muscles and veins branching, twisting, weaving. It was painless, merely two pupae opening at their appointed time, but the sounds of cracking and snapping filled the clearing.
The twins fused back to back to become one thing, eight limbs together instead of four apart, sliding easily out of their wounded, imperfect human skin and hair, their limiting human senses.
Freed, this being grew, expanded, inhaled. The trees bowed down, their bark singing in otherworldly colors.
When the reunion was done, the newborn thing—a young god of eight fleshy branches and boughs—lay glistening in the strange light of the deep-forest dawn. It heard the birds singing with its echoing tympanic ears, clicked hidden beak within a cavernous mouth, and blinked heavy-lidded alien eyes.
Cold in its naked skin it sank four limbs into the warm earth and raised the other four to the sky, roots and branches, to await its growth of moss and lichen over time, a sweet symbiosis. Centuries yet to breathe together, never to be separated again. And as the roots of its feet sank into the soil deeper and deeper it found the Others of which it was the Youngest. A thrumming throng below the world, a wordless family, the pillars of the earth, the mind and memory of the ancient forest.
Watching from a safe distance, the old woman and the old man—Hazel and Hedge, or so they called themselves—sister and brother, grasped hands in grateful triumph.
It is not an easy thing to tend to a nursery of gods, when forty-four years of abject loneliness in finite, fragile bodies—division, wandering—is the crucible that perfects their divinity. A life cycle without end.
But someone must do the task.
The Youngest took its rightful place among the rest of its family, and Hazel and Hedge made their way back, stepping carefully and with singing reverence through the writhing mossy flesh under their feet, calling their prayers to the hidden ears below the soil. They passed through to the next clearing over where the birth throes of a new god had already begun.
Hedge pulled the curved blade from his belt.
END
Author’s Note:
Thank you for reading Limbs!
First, as referenced in the first half of this story, my original inspiration and goal was to make a somewhat surrealist horror tale out of the otherwise-delightful Pacific Northwest lore of the tree octopus, about which Lyle Zapato is the obvious expert and conservationist extraordinaire. ;)
Second, I want to thank
once again for his Flash Fiction Friday posts! This story made use of all four of his recent “Gone Home” prompts; I have saved my thanks and acknowledgments about this to the end, since I was a little worried that the prompts would be a bit of a giveaway to where this story was headed.Thanks, Scoot!
Woah....that was trippy...in a good sense! Reminded me very much of King's "Tommyknockers". Limbs has the same sort of Otherworldly feeling to it. A sense that this horrifying ending was the way things were meant to be. So, congratulations on writing a piece that grabbed me and would NOT let me look away or cover my eyes, no matter how much I wanted to at times.
Splendid!
Wonderful. You have such a talent for building tension and suspense. The use of nature and it's mysteries and wonder bring me back to your writing every time. Makes me feel like coming home.