Emma Rose Darcy writes dark fantasy and horror, which you may have already realised for yourself as you read this one. She stumbled upon horror in her childhood, discovering authors like Joe Donnelly and G M Hague among the Kings and Rices in charity shop books cases. It may be why she has a hunger for reading and writing body horror and transformation horror stories, hauntings and huntings.


TENDRILS

by

Emma Rose Darcy

The traffic was at a complete standstill. Kacie glanced down at the clock on her dash and wondered if her car had moved at all in the last hour? Two? The highway was clogged in both directions. She studied the cars sitting just as still, facing the other way, and wondered if she was making a mistake. Maybe they knew something she didn’t. There had to be a reason so many were fleeing. She leaned across the passenger seat of her car and tried to peer through the windows, but she couldn’t see anything. The people on the other side, and their reasons for running away from the most incredible event of their lives, were unknowable.

Equally unknowable were the people on her side of the highway, the travellers who were joining her on a pilgrimage of discovery, of hope and optimism for the future. What were they leaving behind? Families, jobs, children? How many loved ones were looking for each other on opposite sides of the highway, separated by hope. By fear. Kacie didn’t have anyone looking for her. As of that morning she didn’t have a job to go back to. She was throwing herself into the air, full commitment. Whatever small moments of doubts she may have had… they only served to strengthen her resolve. Kacie told herself again she was driving to meet the dawn of a new era, and if that meant sitting in traffic for a few hours it was worth it. It had to be worth it.

What was the alternative? This was the thought that made her feel full to bursting, vibrating with excitement, with dread, with joy. Because the answer could not be Not Knowing ever again. No one could claim that the spectacle did Not Meet Expectations. Whatever came to pass, whether it be discovery or death, no one would be able to say they were disappointed.

Despite the distance Kacie still had to travel, the forest and the mountain range of the National Park that lay between, at no point was her view of the creature ever obstructed. Due to its incredible size, and its height in the atmosphere, it was always seen. Where before its arrival there had been as many different types of people as one could imagine, now there were two; those that flocked to, and those that fled from.

Outside of the car, Kacie realised there were shadows, bodies, passing her by. People had given up on the highway and their cars and were progressing on foot. They carried nothing with them. Kacie looked dubiously into her back seat, at all of the supplies she had been so proud of herself for planning and compiling. The water, the dry snacks, the thermal underwear and torches. She left it all behind.

In the sky, as the sun set, the creature pulsed an exquisite magenta. The sunset became a lurid, blazing skyscape. Kacie had never seen such colours. It was a pleasure to look. Surely this was meant to show that the creature was friendly? Why expend its own energy singing to them in glorious light if it planned betrayal? Cruelty? It was unfathomable.

Kacie walked, aware of more and more bodies surrounding her in the gloom until it was completely dark.

And then she followed the glow of the creature.

The press of bodies surrounding her as Kacie approached the creature was, as far as she could imagine as an atheist, a religious experience. Someone nearby was crying, but it could have been with happiness. Above her, the purple hue of the creature was more than something she saw. It was something she could taste. It throbbed in every cell. She vibrated at a different frequency. She could no longer see the sky.

There were bodies in the air above her. Kacie could hear some of the gathered begin to murmur in alarm as more of them looked up and perceived the dangling feet, the limp arms. The people hung, passive, from the frond like tendrils which descended from the maw of the creature so far above them. Every so often, shivers of energy rustled the bodies. Kacie saw one, blackened with decay, fall to the ground from what must have been stories up. She couldn’t see where it landed but the cries of alarm and disgust rippled out like a stone skimming a pond. Some people tried to turn and run, but it was too late for anyone to change their minds. There was nowhere to go.

Kacie didn’t want to run. She reached her hands up, let her fingers brush the tendrils, expecting them to be fleshy, solid, to be cold or hot or wet. They were nothing like that. They were nothing. Her fingers passed through them like beams of light, and she felt a crackle of static between her fingertips.

All at once there was a collective gasp among the bodies crushed against her, and Kacie found herself rising into the air. In her peripheral vision she saw others rising also, flailing in the air or lifting their arms as if to embrace an old friend. She was in the light. She couldn’t close her eyes. Above her the creature throbbed, blurred, spun in a kaleidoscope. She was rising. It was a pleasure to look.

How could this be anything but joy? But love?