No Longer Human - A Snippet

 

Yet another snippet I wrote for the prompt game I created! Fantastical, creepy, and definitely on-the-mark for me. Now that I am reading it again, it reminds me slightly of Kafka's Metamorphosis, although I'm quite sure I wasn't drawing from its influence as I wrote.

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When we finally found him, he was barely human anymore. It was me who found him - and the eyes that I noticed first as I squinted into the black of the cavern. They were hard to miss - two blood-orange orbs, hovering in the dark, following my every move. They were mesmerizing, flickering like candle flames suspended in air, and it was difficult to break contact once my gaze had fallen upon them.

We discovered later on that this was a common reaction, that his eyes, which once calmly held you in place with their lovely blue, would keep you prisoner with their dancing flare. They were the invisible web into which one must not tread, and into which I tread readily that day.

Predator’s eyes - and I was oblivious then to their approach as he closed the distance. I was oblivious to the sounds - those sounds that haunt me even in the depths of my dreams now, decades later - those sounds that made me quiver and quake in my worn leather boots, and I was oblivious to my violent shakes. Instead the eyes wrapped me in a kind of silent presence, lulled me into a loss of my senses, until all there was in the entire world, in that very moment, were those two glimmering blazes.

Had I some control of my senses, I would have heard my men’s terror behind me. I would have heard their frantic search for weapons, their alarmed calls as they begged me to come back from there, to run. They saw what I could not see as I stood before him - his monstrous form under the cool gaze of the setting sun.

For he was a monster. He was as much a monster as the other had been before it dragged him into the woods.

It was my men who saved me, in the end. They could have left me there, and perhaps it would have been safer for them in that moment, but I suppose they knew even then that they had to stay and battle the monster my son had become.

More specifically, it was the arrow that somehow found its way under his shiny black armor, those large plates that had now fused into his body - a body that was not human anymore - that truly saved my life.

He reared back, breaking the trance he had put me in, and let out a scream so horrible that it was difficult to hear much of anything afterwards. Confronted now with the horror of his true form - my senses having returned to me in one resounding clash - I felt terror rush through my veins like the icy water of the River of the Dead, and I fell back, scrambling away from the hideous beast.

It was just as that cursed soothsayer had said - just as those traveling witches had warned. A fortnight, and the man my son used to be was gone.

The transformation was complete.

I found my father’s sword at my side - the sword that was meant to be his upon his ascension to the throne - and marred my terror with wretched resolution.

As day turned into night my men and I fought to push this monster back, and by the time the moon was high in that cursed night sky - that blessed celestial body, that kept him at bay - we had closed the entrance of the cavern with layers upon layers of rock and mud, so that it might torment us no longer.

Upon hearing of it, my wife became cold with melancholy and hatred. She shouldered the blame for her words to the witches, but she despised me just as much as she loathed herself, for I had returned the victorious killer of her only son. I might have loathed myself, too, if I hadn’t seen what I had seen.

To this day, I can say with near-absolute certainty that that creature - that unholy beast that grew out of his body and used him as a conduit - was in no way my son. There was no inkling there of the man he had once been. There was none of him left. Even in the short time that I battled with that monster, that we pushed him back into the cavern, wounded - even in that time I knew that it was not my son.

It was not my son.

The story of that evening and that night spread through the kingdom and became a legend - a horror story that would not disappear into oblivion. And so it was, that to my great horror, that legendary cave of lore was breached. Fortune had it that it was no longer, and instead all the people found were the corpse-like remains of a beast they had never before seen - a monstrosity that could not be explained, that could not be natural. 

I thought perhaps that its death would mean it would never again resurface to plague our lands - to take our men and women and children in broad daylight and drag them back into the woods as it had with my son.

But it was only a matter of time before the news came.

Only a matter of time before I realized I was wrong.