An Impossible Waterfall

Claire was six when the end began. She was watching a cartoon in which the humanoid animals in the cast learned valuable lessons about things like sharing and obeying your parents when the cartoon cut out and the newsman came on. She didn’t understand much of what the man was saying. He said the video they were showing was of the skies over New York city. Even at six she knew things weren’t as they were supposed to be. The video showed a crackling mass of purple and green lights. The general shape reminded her of the scab she had gotten on her knee after she fell chasing Shane from down the street, except her scab hadn’t had the strange looking tendrils coming off of it. She called for her mother, more out of annoyance with the interruption than out of concern. Her mother was immediately enraptured with the videos on the screen.

While Claire lost interest quickly, her mother sat fascinated with the scene unfolding on the TV. The wound in the sky grew as the hours of coverage wore on. Supposed experts were paraded before the camera each with their own theory as to what the anomaly was and what the cause could have been. One claimed it was simply an aberrant manifestation of the Northern Lights. Another claimed it was the result of recent experiments at CERN, stating that they had inadvertently torn a hole in the very fabric of reality. None of them had it right, they were thinking too logically, too scientifically, but they had no way of knowing that at the time.

By the next morning the anomaly had grown to several miles across and the light it shed had intensified to the point that it nearly drowned out the sun. People had begun to panic, in spite of the government's instructions to the contrary. The streets filled with traffic. The traffic quickly slowed to a standstill. It wasn’t long before people were abandoning their cars in the street and attempting to walk out of the city. All the while the festering wound in the sky continued to grow. As it grew the colors began to darken, only really remaining vibrant around the edges where the purples and green mixed and bled out into the sky in thick tendrils.

Just as the sky began to darken into twilight the anomaly changed for the final time. There was a brilliant flash of light accompanied by a deafening crash of thunder and the wound opened, the deep purple center became black in the wake of the flash of light. There were a few brief moments where nothing happened, then without warning it became a waterfall. The wound in the sky began dumping a steady deluge of water into the center of New York city. Thousands were killed instantly by the impact of untold tons of water crushing them into the pavement. The streets quickly became rivers, the current washing people away. Most drowned before anyone thought to try to recover them.

Claire’s mother stared in horror as this unfolded on their TV screen. She began to cry, tears of grief for all those lost souls. Tears shed also for a world that formerly made sense, a world in which an alien ocean doesn’t just begin emptying into the streets of a major US city. Claire’s mother kept whispering “This can’t be happening” to herself, over and over. Claire tried to comfort her, but it seemed to do little good. Her mother picked her up and carried her into her bedroom, tucking her into bed telling her it’s time to sleep. Claire began to protest when her mother left the room, it was nowhere near her bedtime, but she realized that this was not the time.

Her mother went back into the living room and continued to watch the coverage of The Event, just as many across the country and around the world were doing. The reports were now largely being delivered from a helicopter as the streets were continuing to fill with water. People were attempting to recover those lost in the flood; teams of rescue workers making their way through the streets on boats, hoping to find survivors, but mostly finding corpses. The reporter began shouting that he saw shapes moving in the water, he thought maybe there were survivors. They were moving towards the rescue boats. He soon realized that no human could stay submerged for that long. He had barely finished the sentence when the first creature burst forth from the murky waters.

The camera man zoomed in close enough to show the figure of a humanoid creature. Humanoid in shape only, it was covered in scales and had a face more closely resembling a fish you would see in a deep ocean trench, huge mouth with a jutting lower jaw and the maw was filled with long dagger shaped teeth. It latched onto one of the men in the boat with a clawed hand and jerked the man towards its mouth. There was a spray of crimson as the man disappeared below the water's surface. The other men in the boat panicked and began trying to get away, but more creatures darted out of the water, mauling the men as they were dragged into the murky depths. The camera man followed the empty boat as it puttered down the flooded street, trailing blood in its wake. The reporter was in hysterics at this point and the station cut abruptly back to the news casters in the studio, who promptly offered a meek apology for the disturbing scene the audience had just witnessed.

The wound stayed open, continuing to spew an avalanche of water into the city below. The government tried everything they could think of, they even fired a nuke at it. The missile just passed through the opening and a few moments later a flash could be seen within. It did nothing expect provide the onlookers with a silhouette of the massive horrors that still lurked within.

Within a week of The Event other portals began opening across the globe. As they resolved each seemed to have its own unique view to offer. A primordial forest was the view in the heart of London that eventually began to disgorge large furry creatures that looked like wolves, if wolves had been designed by a madman. A frozen waste land was the view offered to Beijing, the icy winds that howled forth from it quickly freezing the surrounding city. In St. Petersburg they saw only the inky void of deep space dotted with twinkling points of light. The portal in Washington DC opened onto the ruins of what may have once been a great city, but the geometry of its structures was so alien that many who dared to look upon it were driven mad.

Cloaked figures began to gather outside the DC portal. They sang, a strange chant in a guttural language not designed for human throats. By this point so much of the world was in chaos that the police didn’t even attempt to disperse them. This is often a subject of debate amongst what survivors remain. If the police had stopped the chanting would things be different now?

But they didn’t and things aren’t.

After several days of chanting a tall figure shambled out of the DC portal. It wore the guise of a man, clad in a tattered yellow cloak with a hood that kept the face deeply shadowed. Its movements were not that of a man regardless of the shape it wore. The chanting came to an abrupt stop and those gathered dropped to their knees. Only one remained standing and he slowly made his way to the yellow garbed figure. He stopped and knelt a few feet from the imposing creature.

“We have prepared the way my lord.” The man rasped though his now shredded vocal cords.

After a considerable pause the large creature nodded and a voice that sounded as if it was speaking through a throat full of congealed blood said “You…shall…be…rewarded.” Before anyone could react, huge ropey tentacles shot out from under the cloak, wrapping around each member of the assembled throng.

Their screams were not brief and reached heights that witnesses later described as inhuman. When the tentacles finally retreated back beneath the cloak, those who had assembled before the portal were no longer human. Their limbs were too long, ending in three fingered hands and their mouths had been replaced by masses of writhing tentacles. “Spread…the…joyous…news…my…Heralds...” The massive figure spoke. “The…King…has…arrived…to…claim…his…throne.”

With the arrival of The King in Yellow the world changed forever. The other portals continued unleashing their own horrors. The world, what survived any ways, was carved up into kingdoms each ruled by a different extra dimensional terror. As time wore on some worked together, the others reached a state of equilibrium where they couldn’t overtake each other. This was the world children like Claire grew up in.

Five years had passed by the time the Heralds came to her hometown, many people had already packed and run. Claire’s mom had gone out to find supplies so they could do just that a few days prior, but she never came back. Claire was hiding under her bed when she heard the front door of the house shatter. She listened to the sounds of heavy footsteps moving through her home. This had once been the safest place in the world for her and now the monsters had come. Her heart thundered in her ears as the footsteps drew closer and closer to her room. From under the bed, she could see the massive feet of the creature, like scale covered tree trunks, as it approached her. She felt the tears welling up in her eyes and held her breath in the hopes that it wouldn’t hear her. The creature paused; the floorboard groaned in protest under its bulk as it shifted its weight.

That’s when the bed was torn off the floor by the creature. Claire gasped and then frozen in terror as she took in the monster, it had three huge arms and a mouth that bisected its torso where a human would normally have a head, two huge eyes sat on either side of the mouth. It let out a roar so loud she lost her breath for a moment. Then Claire shrieked in terror and bolted from her bedroom. The massive creature lumbered through the house behind her. She ran for the kitchen, hoping to escape out the back door. As she rounded the corner into the kitchen, she caught sight of another one of the massive creatures, she slid to a stop, falling over in the process. The creature turned and began moving towards her.

Claire scrambled to her feet and rushed toward the creature; it blocked her only way out of the house. In a desperate gambit to get by she faked to the right and then cut left as quickly as she could. The creature was faster than she imagined it would be and one massive hand locked onto her wrist and raised her off of the ground. She screamed and thrashed, trying to free herself from the monster's iron grasp, but it hardly even seemed to notice. It stomped its way back through the house and out the shattered remains of the front door.

The sky was grey with smoke and ash fell into the streets like snow. Claire continued to struggle against the monster as it made its way out to the street, towards the dark cloaked figure that waited there. When she caught sight of it, she froze, she had heard descriptions of the Heralds, by this point everyone had, but that hadn’t prepared her for the truth of it. The Herald seemed to give off an aura of pure dread. It turned towards them as the monster holding her approached it. She could see the tentacles hanging out from its hood, twisting and writhing around each other. When it spoke, the tentacles twitched and its voice sounded like a blend of dozens speaking, screaming and whispering at once.

“Your struggle can end now little one.” It said, hands spreading in an almost welcoming gesture. “You are so frail looking, a season or two on one of the Kings Farms will fatten you up.”

She swallowed hard, making an audible gulp. She had heard tales of the Farms, places where the King’s minions took those they captured. The King in Yellow had been fast to establish them when it rose to power, to ensure the human population did not fall below acceptable levels. A King must eat after all. The thought of being eaten was enough to snap her out of her fear induced paralysis. She began flailing again and even tried to bite the monster. There was a thunderous boom and Claire was splashed with the creature's blood. It howled and let go of her arm.

Claire hit the ground with a thud and scrambled away from the monster. She looked up at is and saw that it was holding one hand over its eye, blood seeped out from under it. The Herald stood at the edge of the street, scanning the houses for their attacker. Its tentacles slithered and twitched. There was another cacophonous bang and the Heralds chest exploded in a burst of purple blood. It fell to the ground and the massive creature that had been holding Claire shambled toward its fallen leader. Claire stood and started to back away from the scene when a hail of gunfire caught the massive beast, shredding it. Her heart soared when she saw the shabby looking people come rushing out of the shadows down the street. They wore dark clothing and carried guns, she didn’t know what kind, her mother had never been keen on them and wouldn’t even let her watch TV shows with gun fights in them. She had heard whispers of people like this, pockets of resistance against the horrors that had taken their world, but she wasn’t sure she believed in them until now.

There were five of them, three men and two women. One of the men, a grizzled looking bear of a man with a bushy salt and pepper beard, trotted over to her. He kept his rifle trained on the corpse of the creature near her. “You ok, kid?”

She tried to speak but just ended up nodding, there were tears in her eyes. Their attention was drawn back to the street when one of the women let out a yelp. She was backing away from the Herald when they turned towards her. The Herald was pushing itself onto its knees, it let out a gurgling noise and spat a gob of purple tinged fluid onto the pavement. “You dare strike a Herald of the King?”

The woman trained her gun on it and looked at the rest of the group, even Claire could see the panic in her eyes. The man next to her called out. “Damn it, Sharon, put that monster down!”

Before the woman could pull the trigger, the Herald made a gesture with its hand and an ear-splitting shriek came from the sky. Sharon and the rest of the soldiers aimed their guns to the sky as the first shriek was answered by another, and another. Again, and again the shrieks called out, black shapes began to appear in the clouds. The Herald began to make a noise, Claire couldn’t be sure what it was, maybe it was having trouble breathing. The soldiers began to fire into the sky, drawing Claire’s attention upward once more.

Swooping down from the ash filled sky were creatures with oily black skin, massive bat-like wings and hands and feet that ended in cruel looking talons. Some of the shots the soldiers fired hit their mark and sent the horrid creatures spiraling, but most of the panicked firing missed. The creatures swooped down, like birds of prey coming in for the kill. One of them snatched Sharon off of the ground in the blink of an eye and carried her away, screaming. Another crashed into the big man near Claire, it shrieked as he drove a knife into its side, but it drove him to the ground, talons shredding him as they fell. That was when Claire understood the noise coming from the Herald. It was laughing.

What little hope had sprung to life within her at the appearance of her would be rescuers died quickly as one by one they were plucked from the ground and torn apart before her eyes. All the while the Herald gurgled its horrible laugh.

In the years to come Claire would think back on many things as she labored on the Farm. The impossible waterfall that started this whole mess. Her mother’s forlorn face as she left for that last time. The brave men and women that tried to save her that day.

But when she would tumble, exhausted onto the pallet of dirty rags that served as her bed, the memory that kept her awake would be the Herald’s laughter. It would haunt her for the rest of her short, miserable life.