Rainier Dreams by Marten Hoyle Ashes…ashes…ashes… On the star swept summit of the true Olympus which the eyes of mortals cannot see, whether for sport or for jest, the Gods in their kingdom cast misery and death upon creation. Myriads unto myriads of demises all align waiting for the chance to be born as a man’s greatest fear brought to life. For me, that most unsettling of trepidations is the natural disaster. I have always been quite comforted by my mortality. I know that I not only shall but that I must die some day for a number of reasons, including A.) making room for the next generation and B.) finally knowing for sure if something lies in wait in the Great Beyond. Will my father be there? Will the suffering since his death finally end? It is not death itself but the manner in which the Gods may choose to execute me that floods my nights with dread. While none of life’s tragedies truly end–we never fully move on from those we have lost, the earth moves on quickly, having done herself the service of destroying the pests upon her surface. The organism upon which we dwell, this great orb of the cosmos filled with antibodies of its own destroys all virus cells arrogant enough to think themselves (ourselves) in some way a threat to her magnificence. No! The Earth is a greater power; one which we may never fully understand beyond the assurance of our infinite smallness and that every man’s candle seems so bright to the individual, but is a mere, weak flicker for her breath to extinguish without a moment’s thought. My terror of Earth’s hazards was not a learned behavior. I am told that I actually slept through a (mild) earthquake once when I was a little boy on vacation in Vancouver. But the fear seemingly born with me haunts every one of my earliest memories. The first moment in this life which I recall with clarity is of gazing on the swift, muddy current of the Falls River in Helm, Washington. In the summer time, when all the ice and snow melted, the river overflowed. Nothing which entered its murky, tenebrous rush could hope to escape. Signs depicting swimmers with a red line crossed through them read: STAY OUT STAY ALIVE in red capitals all along the immersed banks. Ah! One day (I shriek to think of it!) I stood high above the current with my mother’s loving arms wrapped ‘round my shoulders as she called my father’s name. Rooted by terror, I stood strangely tranquilized; so afraid, incapable of feeling it physically from within. Trepidation, voyeuristic spirit and sensation who so greedily dines on woe separated from my nerves and flesh. With web-choked, cadaverous fingers he took me by the shoulders, his breath the fetid exhalation of Hell Hounds burning against my neck whilst he enfolded me in his rancid garb of the wild, bloody-eyed and dead faces who scream eternal under the power of his touch. Helpless in a soul-dead sphere outside the dimensions I knew while the world turned about me and the spaces between objects, from the sun’s rays showering between pine needles on the farther bank, the gaps between cars, in every tear my sisters shed as they stood behind me begging our father to come back; in the frilly grass at the base of every flower, every dandelion and in the regions which stretched between each individual pebble on the ground and the appearing and disappearing, appearing and disappearing shadow with the sway of our swing set in the back yard, all filled with closet monsters and bedside fiends, crawling into the full light of day to inhale the black, intoxicating and blissful essence of my fear. For sauntering carefully down the bright, sandy slope to the water’s edge, my father descended with the purpose of removing four mattresses. Naked and mildewed remnants of the spring time’s homeless who resided on the banks, building fires, drinking cheap liquor and singing songs in rough and flat tones until the water rose and drove them to a new home, leaving everything behind. I recall they reminded me of enlarged squares of Raman noodles with their slightly tan color, and the yellow cushioning which projected from the old, torn fabric. To these objects, my father crept in fashion of a stalking predator, fearless and ready to strike–ignoring perhaps the high-pitched, lugubrious pleas of my sisters for him to rise back to safety. One by one, with his heavy boot, he kicked the beds into the racing depths. When I look back on this moment, I hear an alien, lurching blup-blup-blup as each pad depressed to the river’s depth. Then my father with the duty he had deemed necessary completed, turned from the water and ascended the steep incline, reaching us much to the joy of my sisters and with a relived sigh from my mother the sanctuary of flat land. All terror departed me and I looked for the first time upon my father (as I believed nearly every boy does) as an indestructible force: A hero without a cape and costume, with more courage and strength than any living man, and he created me. For the remainder of his years, I stood behind him not only as a son, but a loyal disciple. His will was law, his power unmatched. The nightmare fiends who sought to destroy me that day never dared show their faces again, for I need only call upon my true savior to protect me with his light divine, to guide me to safety and strike the intimidations dead. Of course, it was difficult for me to accept that my father’s immortality and Herculean capacities were but a dream whilst I dreamed often of the river. In my nighttime horrors, I found myself standing and speaking in any given location surrounded by those with whom I spent the hours of waking life and out of the blue became a prostrate form on the surface of the water, incapable of escaping the current while my sisters screamed my name whilst helplessly reaching for my fresh, aquatic corpse. In those nightmare realms, the reality of my father’s simple mortality became abominably discernible. Nevertheless, when I feared the gales, hails and winds of winter might carry me away, he with his strength assured me of my safety. When on one day the sky’s blackened slate of clouds shifted to an emerald hue and from its thunderous depths descended a funnel, I stood by his side as he told me to appreciate the power of the shifting winds as we watched the spiraling cone pass. And when I dreaded the end which may come on that day, and when I expressed my fears of the far-off volcano, he took me by the hand and said to fear not, for ’twas unlikely I would feel the force of nature from our perch in Helm. I dreamed often of a far-off mountain erupting. I saw myself standing on the ledge of the apartment we shared, and plumes of ash swirling to meet me. I felt the heavy weight of death descending on my person, but woke always before the Reaper Grim could cast his hand upon me. And always my father assured me, “You’re alright, son. You’re alright.” I knew that I was safe… …for he was with me. However, life, as my great hero once stated, happens. Helpless, I witnessed my only true Lord and Love drown in the fluids of emphysema. It was I, the one who would dare to follow him into the deeps of all darkness without a moment of doubt (for he was my King and I would serve him to the bitter end) who heard the gargle of his struggle for air as I tried in vain to administer CPR. Oh! How I, with such weak and trembling hands, pumped his chest and attempted to force air into his reduced lungs with my warm lips, rosy with life, against the cold, pale flesh of his! Following his passage to Genesis or whatever else may lie Beyond, I embarked on the road out of Helm. Following the most bitter of tragedies, there truly is no moving on. There is no healing, there is no closure. One of the things which keeps people locked in the past is because–in the aftermath, when the dust has settled, they attempt to piece their existence back together the way it was. The problem with this is that nothing can ever be the same again. The puzzle that is life alters at every turn. It is not a jigsaw with one dazzling spectacle: No, only the Holy Grail we all seek (something special and different for each individual) remains locked in place. Everything else changes. When the world we know comes crashing down, a whole new vision must be created. I came to this conclusion following Two months of staring at every space my father’s form once attended (we laughed under that tree…he always stopped and said he’d like to eat there…I wish he was here now…there is the spot on the floor where his heart stopped…) and came to dread the possibility of becoming ensnared by the past. And when I began to hear voices of my surviving kin–of my mother in particular calling out to me, “Leon! Leon!” I began closing my eyes, and begging myself to waken from the nightmare. I long have wondered if existence is the dream, and dreams (where my father still lives) are the reality. And hearing people call for me as if trying to waken me…was I going mad? Was all this a dream? Wake me! Wake me voices! But when I opened my eyes, my father was still dead and I remained in this trap. I decided to sell what possessions from which I could bear to part and leave Helm as soon as possible in the hopes of finding greener pastures. Unfortunately for me, in my desperation for removal from darkness, I forgot those pastures (truly by far greener than anything in Helm) lie beneath the countenance of a merciless Goddess of Flame. All those I know in this place call her beautiful, but I know her true power. One day, a wind shall sweep over the meadows of the area wherein I sought refuge. The grasses ripple as waves of an emerald sea; branches of lush forests roar and crack with every leaf screaming, some snapping free of the boughs to take flight with the birds as the Goddess of Winds bears them on her proud, sweet chariot to refuge from to come. Whilst walking so that my eyes might drink the wine of horse-chewed ranchlands, algae-skimmed bogs and trickling springs beneath the skirts and the proud crinoline of leaf, pine, ash and brush which the hillside’s wear in the outskirts of Auburn, I saw Her to chilling of my spine. And even when Her menace in stratus lies cloaked, I see the indention of the previous eruption, a hammer blow to her bleached, ever-frowning face. There once a fuming lahar outpoured below the growing cauliflower blooms of pyroclastic flow, consuming all in its wake with a snarl electric veins of white in violet incandescence suffused. One pale malignancy of the snow-clad body of mountain range; Oh! this Goddess of Death over each serrated summit towers. Her name is Rainier. Like Vesuvius before her, she… …shall blanket all …in …grey. In ashes…ashes…ashes… Every man I meet, every woman I see, every child who cries and plays in this city, I see them in my mind’s eye as they will be: Frozen in time, cradling one another, clawing at some invisible menace, for they died with hands raised as if they could stop the onslaught. I see some who will die crawling, dragging legs broken in the stampede of all trying to survive as the ground heaving, cracks and glittering showers of glass descend from the erupting windows–a rain of stars cutting flesh amid shrieks and the crash of steel–cars colliding, bridges collapsing, the Puget Sound rising, swallowing the shore and eternities: Every possible future of those who must drown punctured and bled to death by the blade of Poseidon. I see those whose corpses will lie welded together in cemented mounds; I know others who will die trapped in prayer and spend ages like unto cemetery cherubim–statues of their own graves. Every face in a grimace and scream will be trapped forever in the white flash of agony before the great flame devours the candle of every life–and all their futures tomorrows that could have been destroyed as well. There they rest…cadavers row upon row. All grey. All ashes…ashes…They never rot. But they forever cry. I saw it! I saw it all at every waking moment of the day under the mountain’s height. How many times in my life have I risen drenched in icy sweat from nightmares of the catastrophe? I do not know. Long before I ever settled into Auburn, I dreamt of Helm affected by the blast, always waking just as the cloud came. I felt the slowness of death as time lost all meaning; my heart nearly stopped. Then, I woke. Always…right at that moment… I ceased to rise in fear once I arrived in Auburn. I woke in tears, for I did not die. I would sit in my bed and cry, looking to the little urn of my father’s ashes and wish I was dead, on the off-chance that an “After Life” may exist and I would find him there. “But not that way!” I said one night. “Not in the eruption! Please! Not that way!” My heart was so cold, so heavy, so torn without him. I wanted to die, but… Again, I wonder if dreams are the reality and reality is the dream. I closed my eyes that night and found a pale dawn in the realm beyond. This was strange. I had grown accustomed to arriving here in the dark; when stars we cannot see in the mortal sphere mesmerized me with their gleam: The belt of Orion adorned in diamond rings, the Big Dipper filled to the brim with nova mists of sapphire, crimson and jade. Planets rimmed in moons aglow with city lights roll across the starry dome, and one fat world, incarnadine and smooth as a surface of glass hovers just above a horizon of caliginous fumes. In the cold blue of dawn, these stars and worlds disappear. I came often to this place some years ago. In the horrors of sleep paralysis, I learned to force my consciousness from the gelatinous hulk of my flesh. I remember the dread experienced the first time I rose and looked at my bed to my own prostrate form. That night (the one when I looked at myself) was the first I told myself to breathe calmly. These were dreams that were more than dreams, for they felt more like wakening, but for so long after these episodes began, I swore I was dying. But all I had to do was breathe. Just breathe, and in this night (or day), find the man who meant more to me than anything else. The moment I left my body, I yearned to go outside. Not simply to search for him, but to witness what this reality looks like under the sun. Eagerly I rushed down the stairs. The structure around me remained the same as it always had in “waking life” but when I threw open the door, I discovered much had been altered. There stood the familiar dirt road to my new home, but around it, the flora of Auburn grew among alien blooms I cannot name; such plant life has never before been beheld in the dimension I left behind. To the North, where across the miles the volcano stands the trees I knew had vanished from existence. Here small, flat greenery grew, foreign from all fields recognizable to me by the décor of crescents of thin, pallid stone. Several of these chipped, semi circles led seemingly nowhere, but passed them I beheld a hill, and from this hill rose like unto decayed fangs, tombstones ancient and inscribed by letters dissimilar to any figure of the human tongue. Fascinated as I was by the spectacle, my eyes abandoned these markers, for waiting on the emerald crown stood a figure which I can only describe as an entity. Far from featureless, yet at the same time without features, this being was all of a polished, silvery luminance wrought, and every inch of its form made entirely of wandering, unblinking eyes with irises of black. Hurrying lest I “waken,” I ran toward this creature, but found much to my own fright that the being shrank with every step I took, falling to a smaller and smaller character until at length it stood as little more than a flickering flame as I passed between graves to the top of the hill. However, this state of dismay moved aside to make room for astonishment and glee as I saw the specter replaced by doorway marked 108: the very entrance to the apartment my father and I shared! Gathering speed, I bolted like lightning with my hand reaching for the old knob. But before the tips of my fingers could touch the brass, I felt the one thing I truly feared. The high rise on which I stood became the belly of a beast rumbling with savage hunger, the tweeting of morning birds rose to shrill utterances of despair; the world quivered and quaked. From the North, a sonic boom arose. I looked and, as I heard those voices trying to waken me, crying out “Leon! Leon!” I beheld the mountain, her snowy gown stripped, leaving only her iron flesh. The skin blackened and peeled away, tumbling downward as from within the blast of ash burst forth and clouds of atomic heat swiftly came, burying all in suffocating dark. To my surprise, I did not fear this. No! I welcomed it! The billow comes! It is coming now! I see it! I can feel it! One moment of true pain and I will be with him again–forever! The gloom shall take me, and together, my father and I–we shall be ashes! Ashes…Ashes…Ashes… In a room of linoleum tiles, white as pearl save for tall paddings of green along the empty walls, all lighted by florescent tubes, a figure sits alone. As he has since that fateful night three months before when his father died before him, he rocks to and fro muttering low under his breath. Attended by members of his family he cannot see, time and time again the young man says, “We shall be ashes. Ashes…ashes…ashes…ashes…” The doctors of this place have encouraged his family to call to him, to try (if they may) to waken him from the state in which he suffers. “Leon?” one says. “It’s me, Leon. It’s Mom. Leon? Leon?” The only reply from the wild-eyed youth: “Ashes…ashes…ashes…” Credit To – Marten Hoyle Read more at creepypasta/#TES47POt87dvZIZZ.99
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 05:21:58 +0000
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