By Charlie Ilett

The thing is blind. It knows where I am.

It makes a noise like clacking teeth, though its face is smooth as clay.

I dart behind a tree and press my back to the trunk. I can hear it scrambling towards me.

I adjust my grip on my rifle.

And push off. Then I’m barrelling through the forest.

The fog-stirred trees seem to be laid out in rings. An outer ring of white trunks, an inner circle of blue ones. The trunks wave like lazy tentacles. The whole forest moves.

‘Are they even trees at that point?’ Gius would carp.

But his tinny voice sputtered into static hours ago. My earpiece is well out of transmission range.

I point my rifle upward. An atmospheric film hangs above me, rendering the stars as smears. I fire without thinking.

A white pulse-bolt illuminates the pointed tips of the trees as it ascends.

It pokes a pinprick through the film, throwing a shaft of starlight onto my boots, cutting a bright path through the fog ahead.

A rasping screech cleaves the air. My helmet’s audio filters thrum. The readout behind my visor gives up after 490 decibels.

That didn’t come from the creature.

‘You saw the air pulsate. That came from all around,’ Gius would’ve said in my ear. ‘That came from the forest itself, bullet-brain.’

I kick off from the tree and turn around. I see it for a split second.

It’s nearly like a man, but not quite. More like a stick figure smudged by a left-handed penman, eyeless, mouthless. Grey and indistinct, but it’s no phantom. It’s real.

I run.

Its feet pound behind me. Teeth clack.

What would Gius do? Pedant or not, the man was clear-eyed.

Is. Is clear-eyed. I’ll see him again.

He’d say: ‘Look around you. Notice everything. How does it know where you are without eyes?’

I look down.

My metal boots pound the earth. Is it earth?

It’s red and squelchy, like jelly. It’s dense enough to support me.

And the air. The air is thick and gooey. It feels like I’m running through treacle. It pushes my armour against me. When I push my arm out, the fog makes slow, sticky rings around my gauntlet.

I’m running through liquid. Is that what the atmospheric film is for? Keeping the liquid in?

I trip and fly through the air. I fall slowly. Everything’s so viscous.

I squelch into the red jelly that’s not earth. When I pull my head up, the red slime peels from my visor in fleshy strings. There’s a crack down my sight.

My helmet won’t survive another impact. It will shatter, and the viscous liquid will slough through.

‘I wonder what it tastes like,’ Gius would’ve quipped.

I would’ve laughed.

But who cares what it tastes like? I’ll choke. I’ll drown.

Footsteps behind me. Teethless clacking. I decide to shoot it.

I wheel round and train my barrel on the creature looming out of the mist. I send a pulse-bolt through its eyeless, mouthless head. Or rather, I mean to.

It jerks out of the way. I fire a fusillade. It dodges every shot. How does it see?

I let out a cry and train my rifle upward. I squeeze the trigger.

A broken line of pulse-bolts ascends. Pennies of starlight splatter the ground.

The fog thrums. That high, terrible shriek.

The creature falls back in pain.

I’m running again. I can’t keep this up for much longer.

I burst out of the blue trees.

I’m looking at another copse of black, branchless trunks. I can see the copse bend away on either side of me. A black circle of these lazily waving strands.

I’ve made it to the centre. I know it instinctively.

‘How do you know it?’ Gius would’ve asked. ‘What have you noticed, chum?’

I gasp.

I don’t have long to savour my partial realisation. The forest is darkening.

Two great wings are obscuring the smeared sky like impenetrable black clouds. One soars in from the east, one from the west.

The fleshy ground rumbles.

I run into the final lance of light. I turn.

The creature is almost upon me this time. It reaches out.

Then the wings crash closed up above, and all is darkness.

The creature falls. I feel it hit my boot. Its arms are scrabbling, reaching every which way in frantic arcs.

It’s blinded now. Of course it’s blinded.

The lids have closed above.

The slit of light returns. It grows thicker, opening.

The creature is pulling itself to its feet, regaining the planet’s sight, perhaps plugging itself back into a great celestial mind. It turns, disoriented —

And I send a pulse-bolt straight through its mouthless, eyeless head.

The hole is ringed by embers.

It slumps to the ground, dead.

I collapse onto the ground beside it, panting hard.

Then the ground is rumbling again.

The pointed tips of the trees curve backward. The fluid is rippling, making rings. A great shadow falls over me again, slow and dark.

I clamber to my feet and look out over the trees.

Not just one shadow as before. Four long shadows, protruding from a base of shadow, with a fifth stubby outcrop at the side.

I throw my head back, but I know what I’ll see.

It’s a hand. A titanic hand, blanketing the sky, lowering towards me.

If I’m in an eye, then I’m gunk.

I feel the fuzzy blue static of a teleport embrace me, but it’s too late.

The hand is engulfing the forest.

At the end, I think of Gius.

That old inkhorn was probably the best friend I ever had.

About the Author

Charlie Ilett has been writing since he was six, producing short stories of terror, fear and comedy.

He has a fascination with all things biological, horrific and psychologically specific.

He thinks there’s nothing more terrifying than a thought so specific it could only have been real.

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