Schroder Farm Part 2

Lucas sat Jude at the end of the kitchen table farthest from the door with the rifle still in his hand. Hamish slouched on the opposing side of Jude, supported by his elbow as he stroked his course, graying beard. All three of the farmhands stewed in silence that was only broken once, by the roll of the thunder as he quaeritated the right words to say to Jude.

Finally, Hamish cleared his thought and asked the shivering compatriot, "Jude," he started calmly, "what happened in the barn?"

Jude slowly lifted his head, his eyes red and glassy, " I... I saw a monster," he mumbled. Laccase’s grip on the rifle tightened and he muttered something quietly to himself.

Hamish paid no mind to Lucas. "What did this monster look like," he prodded gently as he then placed both of his hand in front of himself.

Jude, parched, looked up at Hamish and asked dryly, "can I have a glass of water?" Hamish turned toward Lucas and gave a slight nod. As Lucas began retreating a glass from the cabinet beside the sink, Jude began explaining why he was at the barn and that the describing that dreadful sickly, gray, thing in disturbing detail. Describing it having the upper body of a man but with black quills spread out over the upper area of its back. He remembered the thing having maybe more than nine sickly, serpentine tendrils no thicker than a man's forearm and longer than two yards each, Lucas had given the glass of water to him be for he had finished describing them. Jude gulped half of the glasses contends in seconds then went on to describe the things lanky arms. Along with how the second pair of forearms branched out from its elbows and that the upper forearms ended with three bony fingers and a thumb, and the lower arms terminated the same way but two instead of three and with no thumb. There was a brief pause of silences till Hamish asked, "What about its head?" Jude didn't answer, he only slouched in his chair clasping the half-empty glass in his cold, white-knuckled hands.

"Well, what of it? what did this hallucination's face look like", Lucas mocked as he asked.

"That's enough out of you," Hamish barked out to Lucas.

"Don't tell me you believe this," Lucas chuckled, "what a monster, here? Only children and the superstitious belief in such things, let alone the nuts."

"I said that's enough," Hamish shouted half standing and nearly knocking over his chair.

"I'm done with this nonsense," Lucas sneered, "I'm going out for a smoke," he spat as he begrudgingly stormed out the front door, taking the rifle with him.

Hamish lowered himself back into his chair with a grunt and pleased a hand across his bearded chin. He then let out a sigh as he said to Jude, "Never mind, just go rest," as he gestured towards the hall that linked four different guest rooms. Jude quietly stood and obeyed the command, dragging his feet into the first bedroom neighboring the living room, closing the door behind him with a squeal of the hinges and a click of the nob. Hamish stayed in the kitchen for a moment gathering his thoughts on the event till he stood up and went to the coat rack next to the front door. He then slid on his patchy wool coat and taped his hat onto his brow before walking out the door.

Lucas was leaning against the support beam to the left with a cigarette protruding limply out of his mouth with his arms crossed; the rifle leaned against the door frame with the barn pointed up. As Hamish emerged from the farmhouse, he took it by the barrel and adjusted his grip to the handle. Lucas turned to half face him, glancing at him from the corner of his eye. Hamish only exchanged glances with him as he passed by but he then stopped a foot ahead of the porch in the sprinkling drops of cold rain when Lucas asked mockingly, "You're going out to the barn, aren't you. You really believe in that wild delusion?"

Hamish didn't turn around but replied with, "I don't know if I do or don't but the fear in his eyes told me enough. Also, he might have left the lantern on the barn floor, we don't want our job to go up in smoke, do we?" he started walking again, and Lucas trailed behind him a minute later after contemplating if he could or not.

Ones they had reached the barn they saw that the full door swung creaking in the wind. As they stepped in, the sound of semi-damp straw crackled under their feet. Lucas tried the light switch, but nothing happened. Hamish stepped cautiously in from the barn door and saw the lamp laying on its side, burnt out and out of oil. That is what he first saw, but as he got closer to the extinguished light, a wretched stench filed his browned knows and covered it with a handkerchief in hand. Ones he was standing nearly on top of the lantern, he looked in the nearest stable. A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and eliminated the bark, empty barn. Hamish stud there in silence and with widened eyes at what he saw there in the cold flash of the bolt. His voice cracked as he called for Lucas and him hurried over from the call, his face twisted with disgust of the repulsive stench and was then paralyzed by the shadowed silhouette. Another flash shot from the black sky removing the veil; it was just as Jude had described, a cow with its eyes and stomach tore out with a large cavity within its chest. Though there was one different, patches of flesh were missing. The two farm-hands stepped closer as Lucas croaked half out loud, "Lord have mercy," with a broad sense of disgust and repulsion.

Hamish was only a few feet away from the hollow, bloodless corpse when they both came out of their stupor. They heard a scream come from the barn house which was suddenly choked off. They both ran through the now pouring rain with Lucas in the lead. First, to the soaked house, he barged in through the front door, Hamish trailing behind him raspingly huffing do to his old age. Lucas swung open two of the entries in the hall till he found Jude but what he saw in that room was more horrifying than what he and Hamish had seen in the barn. Hamish followed soon after, and the two of them stood, stunned in the doorway. Jude was levitating at an angle of the bed where he had been resting, his mouth wide open, his eyes glazed back into his skull, and his forehead was a sickly yellow which reseeded to the center to a black mark. Then there was a shrill, ear-piercing shriek that emitted from a source unseen by the two in the doorway now but then they soon after the shrieking subsided.

An eye, seemingly out of nowhere appeared without a sound; almost a vale was pulled away, floating in the air less than a few feet from where Jude spectrally levitated. Then around the eye manifested a pale gray, fleshy lateral cone-shaped head with a sharp, pointed bone like fin jutting from the back of it. A thin, tube-like neck connected its finned head to a starved human-shaped body. Vibrating in rhythmical waves were black needles spread out over its back. Its back was facing Hamish and Lucas at an angel giving them an unwanted view of its' sickly thin, abnormally long arm which branched into two different sets of forearms. One ending with three fingers and a thumb and the other with only two fingers, all of which were bony and long like its arms. Below its shrunken waste was a mass of thick tendrils; all long and constantly moving in and out of the woodwork of the floors and gliding with haunting ease through the metal framing of the bed. Jude had been in the air by three of these tendrils, one around his waist, another around his left arms wrist as if Jude had tried to fight it back. The thread tendril constricted around his throat joined by its right arm. Its hand phasing through his skin, through its skull, and undoubtedly sinking its grotesquely thin fingers into his brain. Corroding all that it touched with its phantom flesh with that sickening yellow trailing beside it. The unholy terror then shifted slowly, moving Jude away from above the bed to the left of the doorway and as it did so, the front of its dual cone-shaped head turned with it and revealed a large, unblinking, serpent eye. They felt a medusa-like glare come from that black veined eye, but it also felt as if it were staring right through them like it didn't even notice them standing there out in the hall.

Breaking free of the petrifying glare, Lucas swung the rifle up into his shoulder and fired a shot aiming for the spiteful eye. It was ineffective and instead shattered the window behind it. Its glare then shot at Lucas and simultaneously let out that same shrill shriek. Both Lucas and Hamish's ears rung from the rifle and the pale things scream. It then lashed out one of its tendrils out at Lucas ripping the gun out of his hands and flung into Hamish. The strike knocked Lucas into the kitchen, but Hamish hammered against the door frame. Its freezing gaze then flowed towards Hamish and dropped the now shriveled corpse that was Jude. It reached out its hand and slowly gripped and lifted him towards its self as its hand slowly sunk into Hamish's forehead. His eyes shot open in a blind panic, and he let out a horrible wail of terror and pain, but that dreadful sound was then snuffed by the collapsing of his throat by a constricting tendril.

Lucas, stricken by terror unknown by man, but his want for survival outweighed the paralyzing fear. He got to his feet slowly and shakily knocking over a cutlery rack as the thing killed Hamish in the slow, excruciating process. Lucas struggled towards the front door with his body numb in both terror and pain. He fumbles with the doors handle and out the front door to the farms only motor coach with the stroke of a lightning bolt guiding him. Then last sound Lucas hires as he climbed into the vehicle was Hamish's scream perusing through the patter of rain on the windshield. The chilling wail even overcame the roar of the thunder that boomed from incredible heights.

The coach sputtered ones, twice, Lucas prayed under his breath, he had never been one for prayer until this night when he witnessed that thing from Hell. Or could it be that this thing was from some were worse than the lake of fire and eternal torture? The coach sputtered a third time, and the engine rumbled to life at last, and the head lights flash a pale yellow onto the front of the house. He swiftly grasped the clutch to place it in reverse, but he then soon stopped when he looked up at the hood of the vehicle. Staring threw him, was that detestable pale thing with its fist-sized serpent eye. It had slithered unnoticed through the walls of the house twisting and rippling the wood panels and bricks in unnatural ways, like a hand reaching through murky swamp water. Lucas felt a cold wave of dread engulf him as its tendrils flowed out of the wall and towards him. And then in a flash, they struck out at Lucas like vipers pouncing on a mouse shattering the windshield and tearing through the seats, but he darted out of the crotch and into the mud. The thing kept its emotionless eye locked on to him and reached out to him with its ghostly boney hands, but Lucas instinctively jolted to his feet and ran for the nearby woods east of the farm's field.

Weaving and ducking, Lucas fled from the horrifying thing through trees and bushes though he now doubted that any of these would slow the serpent horror. It would glide through it all with ghastly ease. There was a peal of lightning, and the flash of it illuminated the shadows in the trees. But before his eyes could adjust from the flash, Lucas stumbled on something in the tangle of roots and was sunken into the viscous mud. It was hollow, but he did not dare look at what it was, he feared his nerves could not take any more of a shock. He persisted in running till he found himself in a wide-open clearing shrouded in the dark of night with nothing but the sound of rain and distant thunder. He could see nothing till lightning strobed through the twisting black clouds. Lucas wished he had closed his eyes at the first pale, near-blinding flash of lightning. The site in that clearing stupefying him to where he only continued in haunted trudges through the patchy, eaten grass and around pale, hollow animals.

Lucas would have stood there in the rain for hours peering into that pale hell before him, but he was struck out of the stupor once he heard that soul-chilling shriek coming from some were close behind. He crept around the empty carcasses like a drunk, trying to avoid tripping over any of the tumults of corpses as he attempted to pass through the clearing. Unfortunately, his foot became caught by a large, rigged form. He fell with arms outstretched with one hand landing on the matted fur of a fox's neck, strangling the lifeless shape. Lucas then shot back in a horrified disgust, slamming his back against something hollow. He swiveled his head around only to come face to face with the half-dissolved skull of a twisting horned stag, once jolting back in disgust. A bolt of lightning sprawled across the dark, bubbling clouds eliminating the fleshy skull with a disturbing phosphorescent display. Following the strobing flash was its booming roar, but interrupting it halfway through an inhuman, unearthly scream over shattered threw the dull rumble.

Lucas peered past the antlers of the stag and saw gazing back at him through the low branches of the woods. The spiteful eye of that ghostly horror glared unblinkingly at him as though it had never removed its gauss from him. His movements stuttered as he tried crawling back from it. As he did, the pale nightmarish thing slid out from the brambles and trees and towards him. Lucas backed over corps after corps unconscious of the cavities' his hands, arms, feet, and legs tumbled into and turned over. As he climbed over the piles of bare flesh, fur, and bone the sound of flesh tearing open and bones snapping surrounded him. His hand became stuck ones, but then swiftly yanking it out of the clammy, empty chest of a wild boar. His foot trapped in the hollow stomach of a deer, he had only kicked what was left of its spine till it cracked in half freeing his foot. But these struggles were futile for that squid shaped thing was just perhaps a yard from him.

Its tendrils rose from beneath its self and in between the still corpses surrounding the two. Lucas clenched his eyes shut and gritted his jaw as the tendrils were near inches from him, he saw nothing but the black void behind his eyelids for what felt like an eternity. As the pale tendrils began to wrap around his arms, legs, and throat, a sharp scream electrified the air behind him. He finally opened his eyes slowly, but kept his mouth still clinched, he saw the dreadful black veined eye feet from his face and its three-fingered hand closer and the fingers of that hand practically touching his brow. That evil, serpent-like eye looked past him. The things hand then soon retracted away from his forehead and the tentacles clutching him were loosening and then dropped him into the damp grass, mud and corpses, his head landing on the broad of a ribcage cracking a few of the ribs beneath.

Lucas could only lay where he was; the adrenaline had left him paralyzed with exhaustion. His chest burned from the huffing of the cold fall air, his legs were sore from running, and his arms were weak from being thrashed about, but his vision was still strong enough to see the black sky webbed with arcs of lightning. The cold, lifeless clearing with damp animal corpses strung about it all bloodless and hollow. The horrifying, pale, tentacled thing with a boney pointed head with long thin arms branching out at the elbows staring across him to something else he could not see with its slitted pupil that was as dark as the void.

There was a sound from above, a sound like a deep guttural wail emanated from organs unnatural to earth. The pale horror looming before Lucas then slowly turned its emotionless gaze to the sky and began to float up towards the rumbling clouds. As that one ascended, Lucas saw a second of it fly upwards as well. There was then a third in the dissents, a fourth coming from another direction, and another and another. Lucas's eyes widened, and his breathing became frantic, his gazed followed the horrifying spectacle and saw that something was dissenting out from the lightning sprawled clouds. An immense shapeless horror squirmed and writhed out from the vale of bubbling storm clouds. The only part of it that held form was its grotesque, bulbous eye which in its self-eliminated the dark sky only dimly.

The colossal eye had three oval-shaped rings around the horrible pupil, each holding within its self a distinct color and pattern of shapes. The outer ring seemed to bubble inwardly with a sickly aqua blueish green. It seemed to be the cause of the illumination in the sky being that it was possibly the brightest next to the innermost eyries. It drew closer towards the vacuous pupils as though it was sucking in like a pare of incredibly large lungs towards it but kept in its orbit by the two inner rings. The second ring glowed a harsh rust like the color and looked textured with revolving peramelids in a constant state of spinning in and out of each other. It felt as though it held an unsatisfiable hunger and scorn for everything it gazed upon, hungry for will devour body and soul. The innermost ring was assumable arched or sunk in weirdly with its horrifying black pupils sucking it in, and indeed it looked as though it was flowing into it like clogged streams of blood and icier eliminating with both a disgusting darkness and a tainted light like from a mud-caked lamp. It glowed with undefinable colors, it was a browned yellow but seemed a blackened silver while also being a detestable shade of purple and a vile red. That is the madness that encompassed the things pupils, its three pupils strung together like abyssal black pearls. They were darker, blacker than any reach of space. The vacuous eye contracted and then widened slowly. Suddenly reverberated with its unnatural sickening sounds, the titan horror that floated above uttered a blasphemies angulation of guttural sounds. Lucas could only lay there amongst the dead animals and cry out his unnatural sounds, sounds of fear, terror, dread, hopelessness, and madness.