THE DAILY C

Night pierced by black ice pellets. An apocryphal jaunt on jagged, searing tundra. Material underfoot unknown and blasted. He was walking. The legs were working, though the brain was inflamed. His make shift backpack, blue cord and old plastic, cut into his angles as unknown disease and threat poisoned his veins. Veins and capillaries ruptured back to life in a sudden gust of “Get the fuck out of here.” The mound was far, impossible to tell how far, but threatening unreachability for sure. It stabbed at his mind when he cast his gaze beyond it, but it also delivered something; a new fragment. A gift or burden? A name? “Ramana!”. His name? He grasped at it furiously “Ramana!” It stood in contrast, made in relief by his new activity. A fresh word in his worn mind. He lost his dwelling and gained a name. “Ramana, Ramana, Ramana” he repeated aloud, waking up the blisters at the hinges of his flaked, bark-to-the-touch lips. “Ramana”. Everything was sharp, harrowed and without dependability. Distance as concept here could and should be replaced with endurance as measuring device. This landscape was vast, old and dead, like a room with the lights off, like the stomach acid of a beast, like Hiroshima after the bomb. How long could he keep the legs pointing towards the mound, now rising in the distance a bare shade less black-grey than the ink-black sky it slouched on. An exposed wound dragged across salt flats, a pure specter of doing and a reluctance to feel; he knew it would get worse before it got any better, if it could in fact get better at all. Was such a thing permitted by the rules of this place? He swatted the thought away. Ramana knew they would come. As he cast his minds fiction and faulty perception on that old “they” memory it was as if he beckoned them, here, now, alarmed, from the darkness all around. Then, footsteps, out of sink with his own: the only thing preventing cardiac arrest or an evolutionary freeze tactic at this juncture was the memory of the last attack pushing him forward and away. Once bitten, twice aware. They always came from the black, out here on the bog. A crumpled form approached from Ramana’s north east, or his 2 o’clock, like a buzzard to rotting carrion. Out of the black melted an acetate half-figure marching in a measured tirade of focused hunt and prowl against the infinite miles behind it. It was coming straight for Ramana as he himself was going toward the mound, the distance between them closing all the quicker as a result. Archaic details emerged in relief as the stalker drew closer with a long clenched tool under hand, the skin of its arms chalky white as it vaulted its legless abdomen closer and closer, each jerk with compounded fever, more excitation. Meat! The specter was like a leper without legs, a staggered, compromised gate made all the more twisted by the tool, awkward, under its right palm, a palm like a city pigeon’s feet; broken, dirty and missing digits. “What were cities? What were pigeons?” Ramana’s subconscious trying to rescue him with a distraction, the words, infinitely old and lost. A series of feint green, bluey brown rags trailed over the stalkers head like a haunch of rotted, matted hair. It stank, the stalker. Though it was 100 meters away the smell invaded and corrupted the already dank air without seeking permission to infuse. The ice pellets came down harder, pinching at Ramana’s sick hide making him snap from left to right as he hugged his ribs and chattered out freezing gasps. The stalker was gaining momentum, galloping two hands and clasped tool at a time, splashing his leg stumps and exposed graying genitals into the dirt and slush, charging. Out here the thunder bellowed at half speed as if the film tape of existence was interfered with and reels poked to pitch the audio down and dirty. Thunder erupted like a super slo-mo shotgun blast; the initial bite and shock of the sound was rounder, softer but the unfolding wail and mechanical roar was a chasm of pure assault to mind. And it was with the galloping, rain-soaked amputee stalker that the first boom of thunder exploded from the heavens as if to say “I am here! I am one of the elements of this land and I am evacuating a ghost from inside my own skull. Listen!” Like a freighter hull snapping, like a young athlete’s heart attack, black noise boomed 360. Ramana staggered as he kept his eyes on the figure ahead. “What does he want with me? Is he hungry?” Not 50 meters away the stalker trounced into full visibility, all terrible and fast and lunging and bleak. It wasn’t a mind that tempered this figure but a fire and a burning, the kind of cinder that tears children’s skin to black in the fire at the orphanage, or the inferno at the children’s hospital, slow and claiming, millimeter by embered millimeter, torched flesh made useless and dead. A devastating nightmare approaches with steel in hand and corruption in mind. There was nowhere to escape to, save more black on either side. Ramana was panicking. He couldn’t remember what happened last time he ventured out this far but the approaching threat was also somehow familiar. The memories appeared, though a few seconds late and lagging as reality filled in the blanks. The stalker, galloping like a swine in heat closed in and leapt upwards and forwards with the vigor borne only of pure unselfconsciousness, pure nature. A flash of blue lightening revealed the stalker as an airborne figure of paraplegic adaptation and pure drive, casting back a blackened steel pipe with which to plunge and nullify, its torso bloated, it’s stumps scarless and it’s cranium covered in ancient material, ancient rot, a tangle of copper wiring and immense discordant whip. No eyes but a definite vision, one of colorless destruction and torture as primary function. The pole or pipe was not sharp at the end that tore through the front of Ramana’s thigh and out the back of his leg, down into the wet crust below him, stapling him to the landscape. It bludgeoned skin, smashed bone and stretched tendons away from their function. Though he shuddered and writhed, he didn’t scream, he knew that this is how it goes. He grabbed the pole and came to see, now in its stationary raise, that this cylinder was about 20 feet long and stretched high up into the dark rain and protracted growls of thunder surrounding. “YOU’RE STAYING THERE!” a commanding tenor voice, deep and purposeful emerged from the awful thing, who was now encircling Ramana, upright, dragging its stumps from side to side with its muscular arms, like a silver back gorilla sizing up another male. The stalker made a full circle around the now pinned-in-kneeling-position-but-leaning-upright Ramana, and stalled right in front of him again, rain dripping from the lengths of old material, cascading down its weathered skull. “Looks like seaweed” Ramana mused internally “Where is seaweed again?” Click! click! The stalker snaps his terrible fingers. “LISTEN!” His voice was sour yellow and and sick. “LISTEN!” again, deep and timeless in its ancient clatter. An unknown odd rhythm, like a broken computer. “THERE IS NO LIGHT. THERE - IS NO GOOD. THERE IS NO GOOD. EVERYTHING - IS - NOTHING. IF THEIR - WAS - MEANING - IT - HAS BEAN EATEN. IT’S GONE.” It’s bellows louder than the bombs of thunder blasting them both, Ramana secured and compliant, the stalker, deliberate and in charge “IT WILL PUT YOUR CHILD IN A TRASH COMPACTER. IT WILL RUIN YOUR FATHER. IT WILL FEED YOUR MOTHER TO YOU. IT WILL. IT WILL USE CHEMICALS AND MEDICINES TO KEEP YOU AWAKE.” It stopped and arched it’s broad shoulders to the right, slamming down and digging it’s right thigh stump into the muck, then the left. “WAAAATCH!” With a triangular gap between it’s legs the stalker began to defecate, staring straight at Ramana through no eyes. Jet black feces poured out and dribbled under its crotch area. The air became putrid and intolerable, though Ramana had no choice but to breathe it. “Mmmmmmmm” the stalker began to shake and hum in semi-orgasmic expression as the squelch and bile flooded the ground beneath it, flowing to its hands, lapping the shoreline of its crooked digits. “HERE, SHIT! EAT IT!” it barked in value neutral tones. The stalker reaches down, scooping up some of the wretched material and flings it toward Ramana. “PUT - IT - IN - MOUTH. EAT. PUT IT IN YOUR WOUNDS.” It’s timbre otherworldly and menacing. Ramana wipes the decrepit soil hunk from his cheek and watches it dissolve, dark green, in the rain. Stalker beings to circle him again, all parts horrific alpha, all parts fiendish and brazen. Ramana follows the pole out of his leg wound with his rain soaked eyes, upward, to the heavens, or hells. A figure, hung from the neck appears swaying from the far end now. “It wasn’t there before?” The pain in his leg is relentless, a numb pounding. Ramana arks his head but can’t see the figures face. Looks like a middle aged man in moth eaten, discolored casual wear. His skin shrunken and tightened to a husk around old dead bones. Black shadows under his chin and in the caves of his various hollows. Swaying gently back and fourth the body makes a disjointed rhythm as it clangs against the pole. “GO BACK - TO THE SHACK” Ramana is snapped back to awareness. “THIS IS - FAIL-URE. RA-MA-NA.” Just then, a smile threatens Ramans jaw. No one has called to him in a very, very long time. Now this beast shows him the pure duality of being. A gift or curse? He sees a wet matchstick in his minds eye. It’s suspended over a grey wooden grain in a quiet location, dry. “Ramana, Ramana, Ramana.” He hears or says it, he is not sure which. Click! Click! The stalker snaps its fingers. “LISTEN” it barks as it rests back and sways a slimy hand down to its decrepit anus. First one finger, then two then a whole hand as the stalker reaches up inside its own vessel. Searching, looking for another tool inside, as it stares its rain spattered cranium in Ramana’s direction. “Mmmmmmmmmm” it rips its arm out and up toward Ramana holding an haggard old kitchen knife. “FIIIIIINE. - DO THE CUTTING.” The knife lands at Ramana’s feet as the stalker traipses off into the black from where it came, despondent, distorted, bleeding, lurching. Ramana reaches down with a shaking hand, letting out a deeply held gasp and a tangled vista of shudders and breadths. “Fuck!” The knife is light and serrated on one side and despite the gushing rain, very unclean. The kind of unclean that merges dirt particles and mildew to become one with its steel, on a chemical level, after years of neglect. Gazing down at his pierced limb, he knows what he has to do to free himself from the landmass that he has been newly skewered to. The chunk of leg meat to the left of the poles incision is thinner than on the right so he slides the knife sideways into the wound at that side to make for less cutting. It’s agony but he is so far beyond agony now that his nerves are fried and he barely register any sensation at all as he maneuvers the serrated edge of the blade outwards, away from the pole and deeper into the red inside his leg. Wedging his hand, between knife and pole Ramana begins to push his knuckles away from the cylinder and into his leg muscle, hard. The leathery tough meat is hard to break. He takes a deep breadth and let’s out a shout in the key of “Fuck!” and cleaves with a sudden jolt as he falls two feet off the pole and onto the soaking ground beneath. “Hahaha” he’s laughing. “I’m laughing.” It feels unnatural and foreign but he welcomes it. The rain lands in his mouth and on his eye lids as the red pours from his flesh. Sleep instantly pokes at him and begs to enter but he needs a tourniquet lest he bleeds out. He raises his head and sees, in the distance, where the stalker once stood a section of old fabric, that of the stalkers “hair”, on the path ahead.