I originally wanted to hold off on posting this until the Fan Content area opened up again, since I think that posting it there would make for a better reading experience. However, since that part of the site is still borked, I think Spooktober is as good a time as any to go ahead and share this in the form of a regular thread.
I'm not particularly happy with the title, but it's the best I've been able to come up with.
Enjoy.
******
“Stopping a while to watch the fading day,
I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,
When through the ivied panes one sunset ray
Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.
I glimpsed - and ran in frenzy from the place,
And from a four-pawed thing with human face.”
— H. P. Lovecraft - Fungi from Yuggoth XII
"Well, here we are."
The sound of Ludvig's voice stirred me from my thoughts, made me look up and stop alongside him and Moa. In front of us lay our destination—an oblong, one-story brick building tossed out into the pinewood. The evening light made its walls burn an orange color. It looked bizarre in this environment. Ludde had tried to research the train station's history but hadn't found much information, other than that some kind of communication error was responsible for its placement here in the middle of nowhere, quite a distance away from the village it had been intended to revitalize a century earlier. It had been abandoned only a few years after it was built, and the footpath leading down to the village had become overgrown when folks stopped using it. The rail had been removed but no one had bothered to tear down the building itself, which was good news for Ludde.
He was the kind of person who could make anything sound interesting, which was also the case with his newfound interest in urban exploration. He'd shown me a couple of the forums he'd started visiting, and which he wanted to contribute to with explorations of his own. The problem was that the shithole we lived in could hardly be called "urban". The only thing to explore that could conceivably be of any interest to the forums' users was the old train station.
It had sounded a bit silly when Ludde suggested it, a measly thing compared to the French catacombs and Russian military bunkers he'd shown me pictures of, but now that we approached the station I did admittedly think it looked pretty intriguing, mostly because of its strange placement. If it had stood rotting in the middle of the village, one would've had to make a conscious effort to even notice it, but out here among moss and spruce where patches of snow still lingered in the chill of March, where the odd bird sang in the crowns of the surrounding pines, it became an anomaly. Something worth investigating. What's that doing here? Better go in and check. I thought of jättekast— "giant's-throws", the name people in the old days had given to glacial erratics—and pictured how the entire station was actually a toy dropped by some enormous child during a walk through the taiga, imagined the roof's two chimneys as a broken handle. The place almost demanded such an explanation.
We went around to the far side, the side that had once faced the railway. Most of the windows were intact but so darkened by grime that it wasn't possible to see much through them. Shrubs and moss grew all along the foundation and stretched up the walls as if they were trying hug the station to death. Once we stood in front of the building, all three of us looked along the overgrown passage where the rail had once stretched through the forest—the vein through which the industralization had once pumped out its black, billowing lifeblood to the provinces only to then recede and leave nothing but a trail of gravel behind. Not much that was worth looking at. My eyes were instead drawn to the building's front door and the surface above it where the name "Råxjö" had once been spelled out in iron letters. Most of them had been plundered or fallen off, and the bright marks they'd left behind had almost completely darkened to the same color as the surrounding brick. The only letter that remained was the X right in the middle, patchy with rust. I thought it was a bit creepy that, of all the letters, it was that one that remained.
X: Prohibited. Toxic. Cancel.
One shouldn't trespass where X stood on its own. That was my gut feeling, and it was that feeling that prompted the first words I'd spoken since we went into the forest: "You think it could be dangerous?"
Ludde glanced at me. "What do you mean?"
"Like beams and shit that could fall down."
Ludde let his eyes sweep over the façade and roof. "Oh, that kind of thing. Nah, I don't think so. Looks pretty... stable to me. I mean, it's still in good shape." He prodded the wall with his shoe and then gave it a light kick, as if to test if it would collapse or send something crashing to the floor in there. Nada.
"Should probably be careful anyway", Moa said. She stood with her hands buried in the pockets of her hoodie, the one that fit her so well. It had almost the exact same reddish-brown color as her hair.
"Obviously", Ludde replied with a tone that said You don't think I know that?, which gave me an excuse to take my eyes off Moa and look at him in his mop of blond hair instead.
"So are we gonna go in?" I asked.
Ludde scratched his ear, the way he always did when he felt unsure. It was rare for him to display that emotion, but I'd known him long enough to recognize the sign. After a couple seconds of hemming, he said: "I was thinking I'd take some pictures of the outside first, before it gets too dark. And a little bit of the surroundings. But..." He hesitated and sounded reluctant when he continued: "You two can go in and get started in the meantime." He tested the door handle. The door opened with little resistance; the lock had of course rusted away long ago. I knew he'd brought a knife that he'd borrowed from his dad in case the doors were locked, but he looked relieved that he hadn't had to use it. Probably didn't even know how to.
It was black inside the door. He took a step back, motioned at the entrance, and said: "And yeah, as I said earlier, take a shitload of pictures of everything. It's better if we get 200 crappy pictures and 10 good ones than—"
"—than 30 meh ones, yeah. We heard you the first time", Moa interrupted before pushing past him.
He raised his eyebrows at me as he picked up the small digital camera hanging from a strap around his neck. When I went past him, he touched my shoulder and winked at me. I tried to answer with a panicked look, but he had already turned away and started heading to the corner of the building. I paused at the threshold and took a breath of the cold air. Alone with Moa, if only for a couple minutes. Good God. At the same time, I felt grateful—this was Ludvig's project, not mine. I knew that he felt reluctant about letting me and Moa tread the sacred ground before him (so to speak), but that he did it anyway for my sake. The meaning of the wink was obvious: Stop being such a coward and talk to her already.
I was the only one that Ludde had shared his urban exploration thing with so far. To drag Moa along with us had been a whim of mine. Ludde's approval was expected, but what I hadn't expected was that Moa—when I went up to her during recess on Wednesday, told her what Ludde and I were planning, and mumbled something about her being interested in local history—would interrupt me with a "Sure, that sounds fun" and a question about time and equipment. I replied with "Friday at 5", that we were all expected to bring a flashlight and camera of some kind, and avoided mentioning that I personally thought it was a terrible idea to head out there in the evening. I would've preferred to head out on a weekend during the day when there was still sunlight, which I had also pointed out to Ludde, but nope. He wanted to do it as quickly as possible after the school week was over and also claimed that the evening light would make for nicer pictures.
Like I said, I didn't bring this up to Moa, and unlike me she didn't protest against the agreed-upon time. She instead gave me a nod, a quick smile, and a "See you then" before a flock of her friends swept by and dragged her with them. For the rest of the week, I couldn't decide if I wanted Friday afternoon to arrive immediately or if I wanted the government to intervene and announce that the weekend had been postponed until the next ice age.
Moa had already pulled out her phone and flashlight when I came in. I fumbled my own out of the pocket on my jacket, for a moment afraid that I would embarrass myself by having accidentally dropped or forgotten them, but of course they were there. No coverage, but of course the phone's camera worked anyway. I considered saying something to Moa about the fact that we'd both settled for bringing our phones, that we didn't take the whole thing as seriously as Ludde with his camera, but couldn't come up with any way to put it without ridiculing my best friend's interest and coming across as a jerk.
What we stood in was apparently the entrance—vestibule, antechamber, prochamber, or whatever. Dust everywhere and cobwebs in most of the corners. Sturdy wooden beams in the ceiling that, to my relief, didn't look about to fall down. A run-down ticket office, doors to what I assumed was various other offices, and an opening to the waiting room on our left, where fading evening light found its way in through the windows. A door standing ajar farthest into the corner on our right caught my eye. I took a few pictures of it and then pushed it open with the tip of my shoe, since I didn't want to touch the dirty surface with my hands. It was pitch-dark inside, and the flashlight revealed a stair leading down.
"What do you think this is?" I asked.
"A basement, right?" Moa replied.
"Yes, right. 'Course." I felt how my cheeks turned red and quickly added: "Wanna check it out?"
"Of course."
She headed down the stair in front of me and I followed while doing my best to keep my balance without having to hold the rusty handrail. I remembered my earlier question to Ludde and realized that I—despite my earlier concern—almost hoped that there would be something dangerous in the building. Something that made the interior match the expectations created by the exterior. Nothing that could cause harm for real, of course, but still enough to create some excitement. A hole in the floor, a rotten part of the stair where Moa would get her foot stuck and I could pull her out. Be a bit of a hero. I immediately felt ashamed for the cringeworthy thought and would later regret the fact that I'd thought it in the first place. Not to mention, the stair was made of stone and felt stable under our feet. No heroics here.
At the bottom was another door, this one closed. After we both took a few pictures, Moa tried opening it while I shone on it. She was able to push down the handle but the door itself was immovable, even though she first tried pulling it toward herself and then pressing it away with her elbow while pushing away from the floor with her feet. As she struggled, my sense of worry returned and I started feeling a crawling unease. I wondered how dark it must be in there. How long ago it must've been since anyone entered. I pictured spiders—that the basement was filled with thousands of spiders, both dead and alive. One thought spawned another and they went racing off in a chain I was unable to stop: hidden corpses, skeletons, mylings, kobolds, mutants, cannibals, lizard people, giant bats, sewer crocodiles.
Moa turned back to me and said: "This is driving me up a wall. Wanna try?"
The chain of thoughts snapped and fell to pieces. "Uh... sure", I replied while I thought: Calm down. You're in an empty train station, not fucking Pripyat.
We traded places and I plucked up my courage, was not about to show that I was freaked out by an old door. She picked up her flashlight again while I put mine in my pocket, stepped up to the door, and pushed down the handle. It felt as though it wasn't locked, but when I tried to open, it proved impossible. Like an idiot I started repeating Moa's method and pushed against the door as hard as I could even though I knew that I wouldn't have any more luck than her. After a while I was forced to give up, took a few moments to catch my breath, and then shrugged. "Feels like... there's something standing right in front of it and blocking."
"Mm. I thought so too. But why would someone do that? And how would they've... I mean, is there another entrance somewhere?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like, if someone went in and put something in front of the door, they must've left through another door afterward."
"Yeah. That or... or I guess they ended up staying in there."
We fell silent and looked at the door. There was no sound but for our own breathing.
"I mean, there could also just be something wrong with the door", she said after a while.
"True." There was probably a good reason for why someone had made sure it wasn't possible to enter the basement and disturb whatever was in there, but I kept that thought to myself.
Up in the waiting room, blueish-gray evening had fallen outside the windows, and it was now almost too dark to see anything in the room without the flashlights' aid. The floor was divided up into a grid of rotting wooden benches, and while I took photos of them I imagined rows of mustached men and women in headscarves that had once sat here and awaited the distant thunder of wheels approaching on the railway outside. I came to a stop when I saw one bench in a corner that had rotted and fallen into a heap in such a way that its planks formed an almost perfect cross. X again. I took a photo of that one too and then tried not to think about it as I went up to one of the less grimy windows and tried to peer out and see where Ludde had gone. Through the pane I heard a couple of birds greeting the arrival of night in the forest outside. I don't know enough about birds to say what species they belonged to. Among the scattered songs I also thought I briefly heard something else, something that sounded closer. Before I had time to wonder what it was, it was drowned out by Moa's voice behind my back.
"Hey, Leo."
"Yeah?"
"What kind of wood do ya think this is?"
I turned around. She was inspecting a row of benches and tapped a backrest with her finger. Her face was obscured by the darkness behind the illuminating cone from her flashlight.
"Er... no idea. Dunno anything about that sort of thing. Why?"
"Is it... rowan, maybe?" I couldn't see her expression, but she said rowan in a lighthearted way, as if it was meant to make me laugh. I looked at her, at the half-perceived shape of her head. I don't know if she meant what I thought she meant, and I will never find out if she did. I wish that I had asked.
We'd been together once, if you can use that expression about people that age. Incidentally, I don't remember how old we were, other than that we were little. When I think of it now, it's as if oceans of time separate the children we were then from the fifteen-year-olds in the train station.
Back then—when we were kids, that is—a small rowan stood in the center of the school yard. One cloudy afternoon, I ate some of the berries even though our teachers said we weren't allowed to, put three in my mouth at once while Moa watched. The bitter taste twisted my face into a grimace that made Moa laugh. Then she gave me a quick peck on the cheek.
After that, I guess we were together. Played together during the breaks. The other boys avoided me, terrified of my girl cooties. I was no less happy for it, had nothing against my newfound existence as vector and pariah, since I had Moa to be friends with. It lasted no more than a week, neither the status as plague rat nor as Moa's bestie. It got tired of, passed, and was forgotten, as things do at that age. But I remembered it, kept it as one of those memories from when you're little that you don't know why you've stored, since they ultimately don't mean that much. I think I knew that even then, but I still grieved when that rowan was cut down by the school janitor a few years later.
A tapping on the window behind me made me jump. Ludde stood outside, waving.
"Scared the shit out of me", I said, glaring at him. He just grinned at me.
We went out to him and he showed the pictures he'd taken of the station and its surroundings. He asked for our opinion, but it seemed he had already decided which ones were okay and which were ones were trash. We then took turns showing him our own pictures, but I got the feeling that he would ultimately think that only his own were good enough to share on the forums. I didn't hold that against him; it was pretty clear that neither me nor Moa had any future in photography.
"By the way, did you see another door or anything like that?" I asked.
"What?"
I explained how the door to the basement had been impossible to open, and we decided that we would all three go for another round about the station to make sure we hadn't missed any other entrances. We brushed away bushes leaning against the walls to see if any of them hid anything. They didn't. Just more bricks. The temperature had started noticeably dropping and I had to hold my arms close to my body to stay warm. When we'd walked halfway around the building, I heard that noise again. It sounded faint but also close at the same time. As if it came from inside the station, and not from the surrounding trees. I stopped and listened, but didn't hear it a second time.
"What is it?" Ludde asked, which made Moa stop and look at me as well.
"Just thought I heard a noise", I said.
"What kinda noise?"
My thoughts involuntarily returned to the basement. I tried to imagine what it would sound like if something moved around down there, and it seemed to fit with the volume and direction of the sound I'd heard. However, it had been too faint to make out what it was that caused it. A more reasonable part of my brain reminded me that I was on edge and that there were many noises in the forest at night that I simply wasn't used to because I never went out here. After all, it could simply have been an animal brushing past a tree. Or pushing something out of the way behind a cellar door.
I shrugged and said: "Eh. Prolly just my imagination."
I hardly need to point out that Ludde was eager to enter, examine, and document the rooms that Moa and I had already stomped around in. After carefully photographing every corner of the vestichamber, he wanted to continue straight to the basement, said he might be able to the pick the lock with his knife. The crawling unease came over me again, stronger than before, when we walked down the stair and the cones of our three flashlights flitted over the walls. No one said anything, but the sound I thought I'd heard echoed in my head. When Ludde reached the bottom and stretched out his hand toward the handle, I closed my eyes for a moment. I hoped that the door would be as immovable as before. I hoped that it would turn out that he knew nothing about picking locks. I hoped that we would forget about the basement, photograph the rest of the station, go home, and not come back. It didn't feel like much fun anymore. I opened my eyes.
The door opened with a faint creak.
Ludde looked at Moa and me with raised eyebrows.
"It was locked before", Moa said in response to his unasked question. "Or, like, it couldn't be opened. At all."
"Uh-huh", Ludde said. He was about to scratch his ear again, but interrupted the gesture and instead brought his hand to the camera. He pushed open the door a bit more with his left foot and shone into the compact darkness. Me and Moa's lights joined his. "What the hell?" he mumbled. When I saw it as well, I couldn't do anything but agree. What the hell was the only reasonable thing to say.
X.
The three walls in front of us were covered in small black symbols stretching almost from the floor to the ceiling. The first thing I could make out was X. Hundreds of them. In the second that followed, I realized that the chaotic mass consisted of almost as many circles. My eyes darted back and forth across the mess and tried to spot other symbols, but those two were the only ones. X and circles. Hundreds, over and over again, drawn directly onto the walls with what looked like charcoal. It wasn't a unitary mass. There were empty spaces that separated the madness into larger and smaller sections. Some clusters consisted of only ten or so symbols, others stretched over large parts of the wall like huge swarms of ants.
Of course, my brain made the connection right away, and sure enough, I saw that the signs were lined up into rows and columns. Uneven and slanted, but nonetheless obvious now that I'd looked at it for a while. The way it looked when you played that tic-tac-toe-like game.
"Looks like someone's been playing luffarschack", I said. Someone had to point out the obvious.
"What kind of fucking psycho would go out into the middle of the woods, walk down here, and draw on the walls?" Moa asked.
"Dunno", I said and swept my light around the room, came to a halt on the heavy bench and drawers standing in the corner inside the door alongside a kerosene lamp. "But I guess it's the same..." My voice trailed off when I heard how my own voice was trembling. I swallowed and tried again, managed: "I guess it's the same person who put those in front of the door earlier and has left just now."
Silence. We stared at each other, all three. One breath. Two. Ludde whispered: "We're leaving."
Thoughts of monsters once again rushed through my brain when we—as silently as we could—half-walked, half-ran up the stair. Moa came first, then me, then Ludde. My flashlight flitted over Moa's back and I thought of people. What kind of people would choose to hide in a cold cellar in a ruin in the middle of nowhere and play a childish game with themselves for so long that it grew to cover entire walls. Knife-wielding hobos, crazed addicts, alcoholics who had shot their wives with a hunting rifle and then run off into the woods. I wish it had been that simple.
Moa reached the top of the stair and disappeared through the door to the antefoyer. Moments later, I reached the threshold as well but came to a stop. The rectangle of blueish-gray night I'd expected to see in the far end of the room was gone. The front door was closed. We hadn't closed it when we came in, I know we didn't.
Only now did she seem to realize the same thing, stopped in the middle of the room and turned around. Her flashlight dazzled me, but I squinted and saw her face in my own light as our cones crossed each other. Her hair. Her face. Her eyes. She wanted to ensure that Ludvig and I were following. That she wasn't leaving us behind. Her eyes.
A body fell down on her.
Moa's scream made me instinctively recoil and almost stumble backwards. I had to grip the rail with both hands in order not to fall and ended up dropping the flashlight. It rolled back down to the basement with a rattling noise that was almost drowned out by... something attacking Moa, and the sound of how she tried to force it away from her in panic. I clung to the railing and couldn't think.
Something. DO SOMETHING.
I obeyed the first impulse I got and lunged toward her flashlight—which lay on the floor a few meters in front of me—and landed on my stomach. Maybe I just didn't trust that my legs would work.
My fingers had decided to stop working, too. The light felt as if it refused to remain straight and tried to slip out of my hand, but eventually I got a firm grip and directed it toward the spot where Moa had been standing, where she now lay on the floor and tried to punch and kick her way to freedom.
And I saw that which sat on her.
Have any of you seen Fuseli's The Nightmare? You probably have. It's one of the world's most famous paintings, after all.
I see it often. During some periods I saw it every night. Or rather a version of it.
For in my dreams, the demon always has white hair, as white as a patch of snow in the forest in spring. It always has the emaciated body of a human child, but twisted and bent with claws curving out of its fingertips, and it is always dressed in a boy's torn and dirty clothes. And the person I see it attacking is... well, I think you understand already.
There and then, the sight almost made my sphincter fail, but I managed to control it. Not a single conscious thought went through my head as I got to my feet, ran up, and kicked as hard as I could into the side of the creature where it crouched over Moa, its arms and legs wound around her body like a multilimbed slug. I felt, based on its collision with my foot, how hard its grip around her was, but the kick was nonetheless enough to send it flying to the side. It let out a gasp of pain when the air was forced out of it and I tried not to think about how much it sounded like a child.
I heard Moa trying to breathe. I shone down on her and... and my world crumbled. Her whole neck was torn open. Chewed open. The realization hit me immediately.
You can't survive injuries like that. You can't. You'll die. She's going to die.
Just as quickly, I pushed the thought away from me, and in its place my brain sent up the absurd thought that the dark red mass covering her neck and upper body looked like crushed rowan berries.
Have to get her out of here. We have to... We?
I suddenly remembered that there were three of us in the building and spun around toward the stair. Ludde just stood there, frozen, staring with eyes wide open. Behind me I heard the creature moving.
"Fuck's sake, Ludde!" I hissed at him. "The knife!"
That seemed to stir him from his paralysis. With jerky movements, he whipped out his dad's hunting knife from his pocket and stretched it out, blade first. I crossed the distance between us in three quick steps, grabbed it with my empty hand, and then turned around again to... well, what?
Be a bit of a hero.
I had never before used a knife to hurt another living creature. I had never even killed anything bigger than a mosquito. But in that moment, when I saw that twisted little being stand up over Moa, I felt capable of doing unthinkable things. Whatever it took.
Something else fell down on me from the ceiling.
My head collided with the stone floor and it felt like something exploded inside my cranium. I had instinctively extended my arms in front of me in a failed attempt to prevent my fall, and I still held the knife in my right hand. Slender fingers now violently pried open my own and took the weapon from me. I predicted what the creature was going to do and twisted away from it, hit its legs with my knees. The stab landed in my right calf. The blade sank in, deep. White-hot pain flared up in my head. The knife was ripped out of me in such a way that I perceived how a long horizontal wound was opened, something was sliced in two, and it felt like most of my consciousness was so far away that I barely heard my own scream.
It's difficult to remember or describe what happened in the seconds that followed. Other sounds reached me. Kicks, punches. Arms took hold of my own and dragged me to my feet. My right leg couldn't support my weight. I felt about to vomit and about to cry but did neither. Ludde half supported, half dragged me to the front door as quickly as he could, heaved it open, and got us out into the gloom of evening.
I managed to gasp something about Moa. I followed the cone from his flashlight when he turned around and shone into the station, and I realized that there was nothing we could do. In that moment, I saw a dead person for the first time in my life.
I wanted to shout at him that we had to take her with us, but a moment later, the creatures stood up from where Ludde had kicked them to the floor. They stared straight at us. And we fled.
I limped and he supported me on his shoulders. Together we fled through the forest, over shrub and stone, past crouching spruces and under towering pines that concealed the blackening sky with their branches. Warm, sticky blood constantly ran down my leg and into my shoe while pain was sent pumping up into my body and distracted me from the chill that surrounded us. Ludvig was crying. The breaths that punctuated his sobs were trembling, and snot ran down over his lips. In spite of this, he never let go of me, instead continuing to guide me forward as resolutely as before. The flashlight illuminated our path.
I don't know why I didn't cry, too. Shock and pain, I suppose.
My phone was still lying in the pocket of my jacket, but of course there still wouldn't be any coverage out here. We would have to get closer to home before we could call the police and ambulance. I didn't know what we were going to say. Every time I blinked, I thought I saw her face in the darkness behind my eyelids. Her parents. All of her friends. The village. The school. What would they think of us? How would I and Ludvig be able to continue living in a world where this had happened? I tried to see a future ahead of me and saw nothing at all. During those minutes of flight, nothing existed but the cold forest that surrounded us, the agony in my leg, and the soft sounds of our shoes against the moss and Ludvig's sobbing.
My thoughts were torn between her and the things that had killed her. I saw them in front of me, the way they'd moved, and realized that they'd seemed... weak. Exhausted. As if their attack from the beams in the ceiling had completely drained them of energy, and that this was why they hadn't pursue us out of the station. Despite this realization, I neither slowed down nor even considered stopping until Ludvig and I finally saw the first golden lights from the village peek between the trees.
For I had seen their eyes.
During the moment when our gazes met—the moment before we fled—I saw their bodies. They looked like children, both of them. Meager, starving children, both dressed in worn clothing. Dry skin pulled taut over twiglike bodies. I saw their heads. Both had hollow cheeks and snow-white hair, one cropped and the other flowing down to its shoulders. But above all I saw their eyes. Those are the eyes that I see staring out at me from the shadows in my nightmares, and in them I saw nothing that was recognizable as human. The only thing I saw was hunger.
