The Dark Somnium - If your voice stops echoing, it's about to strike

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

A Story by matt dymerski--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/darksomnium/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I set fire to several miles of forested terrain, and I got away with it. There's really no way for them to tell who did it. Thing is, raising that stretch of trees might not have solved the problem. Midwestern parents are often characterized as helicoptering around their children, but now that I have a kid myself, I think I'm starting to understand. Even here knows the truth, even if it's just on an unconscious level. The forest is still here. While cities have become fortresses, high-walled bastions of man, the primordial forest that

covered the world for millions of years is still around us in the Midwest. We surround our houses with grasses, bushes, and trees in an attempt to appease it. We carve what we have to, and leave vast spaces of woodland untouched. More than anything, we never let children stray off on their own anymore, for we broke our pact, and the forest is always watching. This time of year, human activity outside dies down. This time of year you're more likely to be alone. It's chilly.

The sunlit hours are short, and the forest hungers in the devouring days before winter's sleep. But it's not going to come at you so obviously. A few hours before a road trip we'd planned to go camping an hour away, I noticed that my voice had stopped echoing. Checking the physicality of my voice was a ritual I always undertook before driving anywhere long distance, and I've never had the unthinkable happen a second time. The first time I'd nearly died.

I'd been small then, and with my grandfather. The experience was a vague collection of half-memories of darkness, cold, and something out there that hated me. Now, thirty years later, I was standing outside my house and calling to the trees with no reply. Beside me, my son shouted at the forest too, and then giggled as his echoed back. He raised a mitten-covered hand at me. Dad, why doesn't your voice echo? I didn't answer him. The afternoon was white, harsh dim in that way the only autumn days can be, and the trees behind our house swayed with chilly breezes, hiding and revealing dark places between them as they moved. I stared at one of these blank spots as it shrank and grew innocently.

The longer I looked, the more I felt I was staring into something, and that I was being watched in return. It was hard to believe memories from so long ago. What had I really seen back then? The ritual of listening to my own voice had become a habit for its own. own sake, rather than one born of any lasting fear. I couldn't really call off a trip because my voice wasn't echoing, could I? A distant vibration moved through me, maybe from my feet, and maybe the air, and only for

just a moment. It was just me and him for the first leg of the trip. I did get in the car and start driving, but nothing felt right. As we pulled off onto the interstate, I began to calm down. what could happen out here at sixty-odd miles an hour. As the trees rose on either side of the highway, my son laughed and touched the window and said, The moon looks weird.

I couldn't see it from the driver's seat, but I did lean and bend a few times to try to get a look. When I finally caught side of it, I had to grab the wheel to keep from swerving off the road. The moon wavered between huge and small, as if we were looking at it reflected on the surface of a rippling lake. Looking that direction repeatedly also caused me to notice the trees below. They were shooting by with all the speed one might expect, nothing I hadn't seen before while idly watching out a car window on a long drive, but the trunks flying past and the dark

spaces between them were beginning to blur together. They began to move too fast for my eyes to catch and run with. I started gazing directly at them. the passenger side window, the forest became a rapidly undulating curve that went up and down at a slower rate than the passing of the trees themselves. It was enormously disconcerting, but I couldn't help but repeatedly look. Slowing down slightly made the pattern begin to dissipate, while speeding up brought it into better focus.

The curve became a static blinking span, approximating a circle pointed on the sides. An uncomfortable feeling of looking upon a closed eye grew in me. And then it opened. I knew in an instant that what had happened to me as a child had all been real. This was some sort of anti-existence. Perhaps the universe as it had been before sentient life. Wind tore at my hair despite the windows being closed. It was so cold, colder than anything I'd ever felt before, except once.

That un-living eye was filled with ice and stars, and it hated me, and all the more so for escaping its grasping clutch once before. It remembered me. Something about it was hypnotic and had been from the start. The only thing that snapped me out of it was my son screaming in terror. I blinked, aghast, and finally looked away. The speedometer was dead on one hundred and seventeen in a third miles an hour. In seeking the right speed to perceive the gate, I'd

somehow accelerated past the red line. The car shook around us and my son was rightly terrified. But I couldn't slow down. That was the one thing I remembered from thirty years before. My grandfather had gone over a hundred twenty miles an hour to try to save me from whatever force it was that lurked out there in the ancient world. We could only see each other, only interact at certain speeds. That was the key.

Whatever it was, it could never rest, and all parts of it were always. in motion through an emptiness colder than death. Silhouettes began to emerge from that eye, infinitesimally small at first, as if the gate was unthinkably far away, but growing as they ran parallel to us. They were set forward in their blazing gate, running so fast that we could see into them at purple and blue and white stars burning in distant voids, and they matched pace with us while slowly moving closer and closer. A hill made the forest jump, but only for a moment, and the runners were right back alongside us.

What are they, Dad? The question struck my nerves like a hammer. They weren't in my imagination. He could see them too, and I was beginning to feel tired and drained, the same way I'd felt before at the approach of just one of those entities. I couldn't speed up this time. If I passed out, we would crash, no doubt. What else was there?

Did they have us? He was buckled up, that much I'd always insisted on. You're going to have to trust me, all right? He was crying, but he nodded and tried to act brave. I locked the doors and told him, Hold on tight. Even entranced, I'd seen something in the formation of the gate. The first time I'd seen one of the entities it had already been here.

This time I'd gotten to see how they got here. I sided a dirt bridge to the other side of the highway up ahead and slammed on the brakes. The car squealed and turned at random. Whenever it threatened to go too far left or right, I let up and tried to stabilize. Still, decelerating took forever, and the runners were upon us in moments, clawing at the doors. The night sky seemed a blight upon our windows as star-filled voids hammered at the glass. I let the car turn too far, hit the gas, and shot across the dirt bridge right into traffic going the other way. A numb chill fell across my senses, but I accelerated with traffic, gaining speed as fast as I could, cars honked at each other and swerved out

of our way. Curious, we'd been alone on the other side of the highway. It was as if it had waited for the perfect opportunity. Glass sprayed over me. My son was screaming, but I was blind to all but the lights and the dashboard directly in front of me. Darkness drained away all of my other senses, but I kept the last of my sight focused on the speedometer.

117 and a third miles an hour just past the red line, going the opposite direction. We hit that number and I put it on cruise control. To my left, out the shattered driver's side window, curving darkness rotated the other way. Ink drained out of my sight, leaving me to blink and stare as the hate-filled silhouettes were torn from our car and flung away into the vortex as it circled in on itself and closed. It was the pattern that it opened it, and it was the pattern reversed that it had closed it. I let the car slow and just drifted for a while as I tried to recover. Finally, I pulled over, and of course about a dozen people had called the police. I sat there in shock

and let my crying son explain until one of the officers demanded that I speak. None of this was possible, he had said. And I must have been insane the way I was driving. I'd even shattered half my windows driving the way I had. When I showed him, he just backed away and waved off his partner. This is out of our jurisdiction." He stammered. I'll take care of the calls about you speeding. Have a safe trip home. He let us go for the same reason that I went back and burned down those woods two weeks later.

It's not a scar. Not exactly. But I have a feeling the blackened skin frost-bitten in the shape of a clawed hand on my left shoulder will never heal. I don't know.