Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (38 page)

It was early January, the heart of a cold, lonely winter, when my son Jason first exhibited symptoms. I woke at five as was my custom and went out to feed the goats, only to find him sitting on the frozen ground with his head in his hands. When I asked him if he was alright he looked up at me, his features slack, and told me the ground beneath his feet was crumbling. That he kept thinking about nothing. Terrified, I brought him out to the horse barn that we had abandoned for lack of need and locked him in with a jug of water and a plate of food. I went back into the house to confer with my wife, trying to avoid the others at all costs until we decided how to deal with this new crisis. By that afternoon it was impossible to hide it from the rest of the family, as Jason's wife and son were beginning to question my excuse that he had decided to try his hand at hunting. By nightfall he was pounding on the doors of the barn and howling in a wholly inhuman way. When I went out to bring him his dinner I found him laying on a moldering bale of hay, his fingers bleeding and shredded almost to the bone from trying to scratch his way out.

The next day two grandchildren went. Knowing I had to keep each of them isolated from the others I put Lori in the hayloft and locked little five-year-old Casey in with the family's solitary pig, figuring he was too small to do any real harm. When I went out to check on them at midday, I found Lori on the ground unmoving. She had flung herself so hard against the clapboard wall of the second-story loft that she'd crashed right through it, hurling herself down onto a pile of neglected threshing machinery. Her spine was broken in such a way that the lower half of her body bent at a nearly ninety-degree angle to her torso, but her arms were still gently swaying, trying to grasp at something she couldn't see, unaware of the situation the rest of her was in. When I went to check on Casey he was in a corner of the pig pen with his face buried in the eviscerated stomach of our sow, his arms wrapped around her body almost lovingly. One of them had been broken in the struggle and a jagged peak of bone showed through the skin, but he had won out and the pig's innards were piled on the ground, steaming in the frigid air. I fled.

Over the protestations of my entire family, I went into the basement and retrieved the shotgun that I had hoped to never have to use. Putting Lori out of her misery was the easiest, as there was nothing left of her to salvage, neither body nor mind. I wept as I entered the pig pen to deal with Casey, unsure if I would be able to do what I had to, but all agency was taken from me when the boy ran at me screaming, ravenous and furious, his face and hands smeared with the blood of our only food pig, his ruined limb dangling useless. Without a thought I raised the gun and ended the struggle in a clap of thunder and a cloud of sulfur smoke. Cold, numb and despairing I went to the horse barn and found that Jason had spent the night eating the only meat he had available--his own leg. When he saw me he tried to stand and rush me as his son had, but with little more than bone below his knees he fell immediately to the ground. I knelt by his head, just out of arm's reach, and cried. My boy, whom I had raised and taught and been proud of and stern to, at whose wedding I had danced and whose hand I had held as his own first son was born. He had been reduced to nothing more than a screaming, gibbering lunatic, poisoned by the void and lost to the Plague. I put the gun to his temple, closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

Over the next two days I lost my family one by one. I did everything I could to quarantine them, keep them apart from the healthy and from each other, but I was running out of places to put them and solitary confinement inevitably only led to self-mutilation. The morning I awoke to find my wife Ella rocking in a corner of the bedroom repeating "empty, empty" I very nearly lost all hope. I knew I didn't have the heart to kill her, so I gathered my eldest daughter Candace, the only one left with her mind intact, and we fled.

It took us two weeks to reach Paris. I don't know why I thought the urban heart of France would be the best place for us, but as the months of isolation hadn't helped I took a gamble. The city was a wasteland, rotting fragments of corpses strewn in the streets and alleys like confetti after a parade. We encountered a few survivors, but none that had not already fallen victim to the Plague. We dodged into and out of buildings to avoid them, locking ourselves in closets to sleep at night and scrounging whatever little canned food was left in the once thriving metropolis. We tried our best not to think about what was happening back at the farmhouse we'd abandoned to our family's mania. As Candace wept herself to sleep I would tell her stories of the dark ages and the fragments of European history that are still lost to us, anything to add a little mystery to our lives and distract us from that dark certainty that would be our undoing.

We stumbled upon the Bibliothèque quite by accident. I'd been to Paris once in my thirties, but had no real recollection of the city. When I saw the library I knew that it was our last hope, a repository of history and culture. We closed ourselves inside and began to read. There was a fair-sized collection of English-language history books that I devoured immediately, and Candace decided to try to teach herself French. Every few days we would sneak out to forage for food then return to our sanctuary.

But the seeds of the void were already in us, like a dormant virus, and it was only a matter of time before we were taken. On March 23rd I found Candace in the astronomy section throwing books around and pushing shelves over, screaming that it was all lies. I ran to her and wrapped my arms around her, begging through mucous and tears for her to come back to me. She turned in my arms and stared into my face, her eyes sad and her spirit broken, with the combating looks of hunger and despair clouding her features. She grabbed me then, tearing at my clothes. I pushed her off of me with all of my strength and she stumbled for a second, her sad eyes going blank. Backing away, I tripped over a pile of texts she had flung to the ground and fell on my back. I am no frail old man, but I am an academic and not as sturdy as I once was. As I struggled to get up I saw the emptiness in Candace's eyes turn to rage, then to bloodlust. She pounced on me and straddled my pelvis, pinning me to the floor. I flung an arm up to push her off, but she got her teeth sunk into the flesh my forearm. As blinding pain shot up my entire left side I struggled to detach her without hurting her, but to no avail. I hit her with whatever was at hand – books, bookends, her recently discarded shoe--but it was not enough. I scrambled desperately for something a little more effective, and found a bracket from a bookshelf Candace had knocked over. One wide end, one narrow. Seeing no other option, I gouged at her eyes with it. My arm was unsteady and my aim a bit wild, but after a few hits that tore the thin flesh on her forehead I got her attention. When she raised her face from her meal, her teeth dripping with my blood and scraps of skin, I put my entire weight behind one last strike. The small end of the bracket entered through her cornea like an arrow into a bull's-eye and I felt a sickening pressure as it punctured her eyeball and pushed into her brain. My daughter, my only surviving family, slumped forward onto my chest without further sound. I rolled her off and leapt to my feet, senseless. With great effort I pushed over the shelves to either side of her, burying her in case she should happen to still be alive. Weak, nauseous and bleeding I ran. I have never returned to that section of the Bibliothèque.

I have bandaged my arm and it is largely healed, but reliving the past has taken a serious toll on me. I can feel the Plague overcoming me. I know what it is to have touched the void, to have looked out into the vast, empty universe and know the truth--that more than any living being in the fourteen billion year history of our cosmos I am alone, surrounded by nothing but emptiness and the horrid finality of death. I want out of this skin, out of this uncaring existence. I want to tear and destroy and devour, to become an animal. Because the animals don't know. The animals haven't seen the end of the universe.

This recording of mine is meant as a warning. Our ignorance is a lifeboat. The human mind was never meant to know everything. Once we understood the universe in total, all that was left was the void; the emptiness seeped into our sanity like water from a leaking roof, infecting it and turning it toxic. We should have reveled in mystery instead of despising it as weakness. If you're here, in this library in this desiccated city on this blood-drenched planet then you know what our hunger for information has wrought. Since the dawn of sentience mankind told tales about forbidden knowledge, that we would destroy ourselves by discovering something we shouldn't know. But they were wrong. What destroyed us was discovering that there was nothing we couldn't know.