Dream Eater - rough draft jellyfish horror story

Here is my latest whack at writing.  Rough draft, will be included with my creature feature book I am working on, to be released via Kindle.  Let me know what you think.  I wanted to write a story about how in small towns there is no escaping the entaglement of others lives; society has a way of sucking people in, under the backdrop of the discovery of a giant beached jellyfish.  To me horror is the inability to escape, no matter which way you pull.

DREAM EATER

The awesome stench of it cast its pall across the shore, over the rocks and scraggly grass, and into Ken’s bedroom, waking him out of a particularly pleasant dream involving a frisky Playmate model.  The details of the dream coalesced and disappeared like most dreams do as they retreat in front of the great rumbling yawl of conscious thought. He awoke suddenly from his slumber to a world of stench.  A world of straight up stank. 

Ken lived by the shore his entire life and he knew the normal salt smell of the ocean.  He breathed it and lived in it since he could first put one foot in front of the other; he learned to walk on the sand.  He learned how to throw a baseball by the beach.  He never truly appreciated the water, or rather the freedom and mystery it represented; he always seemed to take it for granted.  It was a constant in his small circle of life, one that never got much traction of thought during his adolescence.  No, now he was much more interested in girls.

And as always, it was an interest focused on one girl in particular; Kelly Korvac.  She was the next door sweetheart, the all American heart throb that he would never attain; he might as well quest for the Holy Grail.    He was a baseball nerd, not as bad as a pimply Trekker or some fantasy dork, but still low on the list of people that would ever have a chance with Kelly.  Ken wasn’t old enough to understand the feelings he had for her, the ramifications of the adolescent biological steam train that ran through his blood stream, only that he want he wanted to be with her, and more perversely, in her.  That last thought made him feel a little dirty, but dirty thoughts are fertile grounds for a boy’s rampant imagination.  Just as he was imagining what he’d do with her he heard her voice.  It came from below his window, but he thought he somehow imagined it, conjured it from his perverse fantasy.  Again he heard her voice, clear as the stench that wafted in through his curtains, and his face went red with embarrassment.  He was sure his cheeks were still rosy when he popped his head out his window to see what the commotion was. 

To his surprise he not only saw Kelly’s pretty face, but he also saw several groups of excited people walking and chattering across his lawn, then he saw kid closer to the shore pointing off in the distance at something, eyes wide and beholden.  The public beach was over two miles down the road, and while it wasn’t uncommon to spot a few people walking the beach, mostly with metal detectors, or big bird watching binoculars, it was rather uncommon to see hundreds of people combing the land, all heading in one direction.  He guessed it was the direction of the mysterious stench.

“Did a whale get beached or something?”

“Nah, it was something bigger…some ugly looking thing.  People have been taking pictures of it all morning; scared my mom half to death when she took the dog out to go potty.”  Ken had to smile.  He thought it was cute when Kelly used baby words like “potty”.  Then again he thought pretty much everything she did was cute.  Even her islander accent struck a magical cord within.

More and more people began to flow over the landscape towards the mysterious stench fueling Ken’s own curiosity.  He spent many days as a kid scouring the beach for treasures washed up shore.  Sometimes the treasure would take the form of a doomed jellyfish, or a weird looking shell; most of the time it would be loose change or broken bottles.  He read once that there is a massive heap of trash floating around the ocean the size of Texas; sometimes he wondering if half that trash ended up in his little back yard.

Ken threw on a shirt and flew down the stairs to his house, his feet only touching a few steps on the way down.  He heard his mother calling out from some nook in the kitchen; he couldn’t discern the words and couldn’t wait for her to repeat them.  Repeating meant that he would have to acknowledge them, and acknowledging meant he would have to do whatever she told him.  Usually it would be some form of menial labor, like taking the trash to the curb, but he had no time for trash, not when Kelly was waiting for him outside.

He always had a thing for Kelly, and half suspected his mother would let him loose if she knew “that sweet girl” from next door was over.  His mom liked Kelly, she was a smart and mature young lady who didn’t seem to let her looks or parent’s social statuses (high rollers around town) get the better of her personality.  She half expected Ken to have his heart broken by her at some point, she knew as mothers always know, or at least thought they knew, what their kids wanted.

She awoke although she wasn’t sure how long she was awake; the world was so pitch dark she couldn’t see or even tell that her eyes were open.  In this sea of darkness she lost herself.  Who was she?  Why was she here?  These thoughts gnawed at her sanity briefly before a wave of relaxation swept over her.  Suddenly she was as calm as a Hindu cow; her worries and doubt sunk into the background noise.  She was a child in the womb again.  Safe and secure in her self-contained universe; she was a bug in the rug, a child without a worry.  Was she drugged?  She had no memory of how she got here.  She had barely any memory at all.  Her name escaped her.  What was her name?  She meditated on her thoughts, focused on her breathing.  She began repeating an old mantra; even though she had no memory of where it came from, the words flowed effortlessly from her in a stream. 

“If there is no movement there is no sound.”

“If there is no light there is no sight.”

“If there is no thought there is only emptiness.”

What is my name?  Where am I from?  In the dark these ideas bounced around her for what seemed like eternity.  Time was kept pace by her heartbeat alone and it beat its drum a million times…. 

They followed the ebb and flow of the crowd; over the sharp rocks that Ken had scraped his knees over a thousand times as a kid battling make believe dragons by the buffs, into the dune of sand that separated the rocks from the shore.  The water line was receding, but the sand remained soggy, threatening to pull off sandals in the sticky muck.  Ken spotted some people who looked familiar, not quite acquaintances but in this small island community everyone seemed to bump elbows with everyone at some point.  Everyone’s lives were intertwined and connected in some way here; the idea made him feel a little claustrophobic, like no matter what happened, his mistakes, his triumphs, his whole history would always hang around his neck here.  He would always be inter-tangled in their lives, a niche in the community that he never asked to be part of and dreamed of escaping someday to college or the military.  But their journeys would always overlap with his and there was no way around it; no secrets about his past he could hide; he was sure this dead fish would be the topic of conversation around the small corner store on Main Street for years to come. 

He walked side by side with Kelly and swooned at the feeling of being with her, even in a purely platonic way.  He partially forgot his curiosity about the smell and the growing crowd of gawkers; he was getting lost in her eyes, in the way she moved, and in her scent.  She didn’t notice she seemed more worried than he was; he seemed slightly alarmed but didn’t want to let on that he was anything but a cool cat to her.  Plus with nearly everyone in the community converging here he wanted to keep up his game face; a facade to appear braver than he actually was.  If he had stumbled upon this creature by himself during one of his thoughtful strolls he was pretty sure he would brown his underwear.   

It appeared and smelled dead.  That deep thunderous musk was all around them now; Kelly pulled a handkerchief from her purse and covered her mouth, gagging on the smell.  It looked to Ken like a deep sea jellyfish of some sort, the largest and ugliest he had ever seen or heard of.  The thing was nearly 100 feet long, stretching from the black rocks of the shore all the way to the roaming waves of the beach head, where its long tendrils still floated like fine hair in the ocean water.  The enormity of the thing frightened him a bit more than he’d ever admit; he had to re-assure himself by kicking the side of it that it was fully truly dead.  Kelly stood back further than he did, unsure of the entire situation.  Now that she saw it she felt something dire in the pit of her stomach.  Something inside her was raising the panic alarm, overclocking her brain, making time slow down.  There was something wrong here.

His eyes open but there is no light.  His mouth opens but there is no air.  The darkness entombs him.  He tries to wiggle his arms, his fingers, his legs; none can follow the simple command to move.  Numbness sets in before he can exert too much strength.  He is a “Bob” as the old joke goes; a man with no arms and legs bobbing around the ocean.  But he wasn’t in the ocean, or in water, or on land.  Where is he?  More importantly, who is he?  He doesn’t remember falling asleep.  He doesn’t remember where he was or what he was doing.  He feels like a chalk board that was hastily erased; some of the old words still showed through if you looked hard enough.  All he had to do was recall his name.  Begin somewhere; who am I?

The fish lying in front of them, if it was a fish, stood nearly 7 feet tall on its side.  It appeared to have segments, like a worm, and it endlessly sloshed around like a garbage bag full of water.  Some on lookers had been brave enough to try to pierce the side of the beast with sharp sticks or rocks they found washed ashore.  The hide was deceptively strong, any poking and prodding seemed to only result in slight indentations of the tissue of the dead thing.  A glistening sheen of clear goop covered the fetid beast; slime that some small children began flinging at each other until their overly embarrassed mother apologized profusely and shooed them away.  He recognized her as the woman who lived down the street with all the bright plastic kid’s toys in her lawn; sometimes she would leave up a sign shaped like a turtle that said “slow down, children at play” by her driveway, prompting cars to take heed well after the children had retired to their playtime inside.  Her kids looked perpetually dirty, like Pig Pen from those Charlie Brown cartoons he could imagine little dust clouds following them around.    

The creature had jet back skin, slick and strong like a dolphin’s hide. It appeared prehistoric, like a monstrous dinosaur carcass vomited from the ocean, kept intact and submerged by some mysterious deep sea current that scientists have yet to discover.  He remembered hearing from a television show on the topic of deep sea creatures, “Monsters of the Deep” was the name, that every time scientist sunk into the inky depths of the oceans bottom they discovered new a new fish or species.  This could easily have been something hiding in the abysmal depths of the ocean, taking shelter in some impenetrable trench or deep sea cavern.  It had no eyes or mouth that Ken could discern, but it was lined by circular milky white ports on his side, like a ship.  The insides were far too murky to make out anything clear, but there were definitely some form of guts inside of the thing. 

It lay like a flaccid balloon on the sand, slightly rolling this way and that as the tide knocked it around.  Seaweed tangled in clumps around it.  It reminded Kelly of some grotesque salad, a thought that brought on a fresh wave of nausea.  It was gross and now that her curiosity seemed sated she wanted to leave.   She could find out what it really is by watching the news later.  Let the eggheads figure it out.  At one point in her life she dreamed about becoming a marine biologist, but that dream quickly dissipated when she found out more and more about the ocean and the potential horrors hidden within.  It was just too weird and outlandish for her white picket fence sensibilities. 

She found herself drifting in and out of consciousness; sleep came too easy in this dark womb.  She tried to shake free with the frantic energy of a snared animal, but nothing budged.  The darkness seemed to burst through her eyelids, burrowing into her skull.  She had repeated her mantra in the dark for as long as her sanity held; for as long as she could think the words and mouth them in silence.  But sleep came too easy, her body seemed so tired.  Her mind was working slowly now, she wasn’t sure if it was delirium or something else, but in her head she heard someone else.  In her thoughts she felt something, alien.  She felt eyes move over her mind, prodding her soul, observing her with alien detachment.   She no longer felt alone, and it terrified her.  It said “hello”. 

More people gathered around the great upturned beast; more neighbors and small town acquaintances lined up.  It got so Ken couldn’t turn without tripping or bumping into some townie, and he certainly didn’t want to fall in the sand covered in that strange jelly and tendrils from the dead monster before him. He knew from years of living on the shore that jellyfish can sting sometimes even when they appeared deceased. He was stung by a jelly fish once; he remembered how strong it stung and how he had to run Windex over his hands to finally snuff the ache.  It left a spaghetti trail of red rash behind it, an irritating scab he had to endure the rest of that summer and explain to his wide eyed friends.  He wasn’t entirely convinced this thing couldn’t still sting him as well.  He turned and saw Kelly disappear into the onlookers. 

Kelly was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic, working her way towards the back of the crowd, when she noticed some men being led by a police officer through the crowd of gawkers.  They didn’t look official to her, amidst the crowd of blue jeans and rumpled sleeveless shirts with pizza stains they were dressed formally, and something about them wafted of academia to her, like they absorbed the smell of the libraries they frequented, but these didn’t seem like professional scientists with lab coats and beakers; more like excited hobbyist.  They had brought a tape measure and some expensive looking cameras; she recognized the older of the two as the man who gave nickels and walnuts to the kids on his block during Halloween.  He had subbed at her middle school a few times and while he had never taught for her class she was sure the kids had a field day with him.    

The cop forced the crowd back a few steps so the biologists could conduct their study.  They certainly seemed just as buzzed as the rest of the crowd, she heard the balding gentleman mumble something about it being “an astonishing find” and his skinny red headed partner with the hipster glasses practically sprinted to take the tape measurement of it.  They had covered their faces with medical masks to cope with the smell of the dead fish thing.  People kept asking them if they knew what it was but they were reluctant to answer; Kelly suspected they were just as clueless about the creature as everyone else. 

Okay so he couldn’t recall his name.  No need to panic right?  Somehow he felt calm and in control despite conflicting feelings like he should be frantically trying to escape.   There was a sensation of rushing movement, of weightlessness, but it was brief and fleeting, like experiencing turbulence on a descending airplane.  He felt like he was in a flying coffin.  Did he die?  Was he dead?  Thoughts pinged around his mind in the eternal darkness, thoughts that seemed to never end, and none offered solace of any kind.  And in the perpetual darkness he felt strange tendrils crack open his mind and someone else slip effortlessly in. 

Soon there was a cacophony of voices wailing in the dark, and god help him he recognized them as neighbors and friends in his community.  Their panic, fear, and madness joined his own, entangled forever in the void. 

“It resembles a darker, less pretty version of the Portugese Man-O-War’s, but I wonder if it is a siphonophore or something else entirely.  Its pneumatophore seems deflated, but if it was sitting on top of the water some ship would have spotted it.” The balding biologist chimed in from behind a clip board, happy to share his esoteric knowledge.  He was a mousy little man with a pocket protector and brown jacket with worn elbows and frayed cuffs.  Despite being on the beach he looked like he just stepped out of a college lecture.  His hands were still dusty with chalk and it stained his pockets as he reached in to grab a mint.  “But I’m not sure that’s the case with our friend here.  The sack is deflated looking, and too heavy to give it buoyancy.  Maybe it used it to dive deep down? Jellyfish have been known to deflate their sack and submerge to avoid danger at the surface.”

“Yeah, no way is it gas filled.”  The red haired man spoke up, confident in his assessment of the great beast.

 “So if it isn’t filled with gas, then what’s in it?  What’s that stench?  I’ve smelled dead fish before, sure, live right down the road there, but never something like this.  This is like a red tide times ten you know what I am saying?”   A local fisher was looking at the man with great apprehension, as if he was trying to sell him a con.

“Well sir, that’s what we are here to find out.  If you would excuse me…” the professor began working his way closer towards the corpse with purpose.  Clenched in his hand was a shiny, sharp object; a surgical saw, one that he uses to cut through mollusk shells back in class.  Certainly more than match for the tough hide of the dead thing before them.

As he approached the hulk the crowd had backed up considerably.  Nobody was really quite sure what to make of the ugly black thing that emerged from the depths to fill their imaginations with curiosity and dread.  With gloved hands the old professor ran fingers along the side of the being, felt around the giant deflated sack for organs, and his hand grazed something surprisingly tough.  It startled him and left the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.  Typically jellyfish were very flabby, invertebrates typically were.  This was the biggest invertebrate he had ever seen in his life, or even read about.  He had trouble recalling if anything like this even existed in cryptozoology, an area of study he never took seriously but found amusing none the less.  His whole reason for becoming a biologist, besides following in his father footsteps, was to discover and catalog strange and bizarre creatures, maybe even name one after himself, securing his legacy in the annals of scientific history.  He silently regretted not having any kids to carry on his name; but this was better.  Maybe he would name this giant jellyfish after himself; “The Emperor Stubbard Jelly Fish”.  He kind of liked the sound of that.

But what was inside of it?  He felt around and around causing the giant sac to swoosh and billow in different spots, and again he came on to some protuberance.  Feeling around it more carefully it was almost as if this thing he was feeling had a humanoid shape.  No, that’s impossible.  Had this thing actually swallowed a human being?  A thousand terrible horror movies and creature features played out in his mind and he had to snicker at these ridiculous thoughts.   He would have to cut whatever this was out of it to know for sure, although even if he found a goat or unlucky seal in the stomach of this thing he wasn’t sure if it would dispel his creature feature fear.  More of his curious peers were on the way and he wanted first crack at the beast before someone else could stake their claim to glory and fortune on this thing.

After briefly consulting with his coworker, the wiry red headed hipster, the professor got into a wide stance, ready to cut into the mighty beached fish with his saw.  The moment was pregnant with expectation from the crowd of rubber-neckers; Kelly grasped Ken’s sweat slick hand, afraid of what was coming next but rooted to the spot with curiosity.  If some little kid spilled out of the thing she was sure to be sent screaming.  Ken looked on with almost a ghoulish glee; like a child pulling the wings off an insect.  He was less worried about the creature, and more focused on Kelly’s lavender hand in his palm and the idea that the rumor would spread that he and Kelly were together, all it took was one or two eye witnesses seeing those holding hands and that would be it.  They were never close friends, just neighbors who occasionally greeted each other when they took out the trash or passed each other on bikes, mostly kept different circles of friends, but by Monday the school would be buzzing with this new slice of gossip.  The simple act of her clutching his hand left Ken day dreaming about a dozen future sexual entanglements, he barely registered the drama unfolding before him, even the enormous stench of the dead thing faded into the background.

The professor made his first careful slice into the alien flesh with and to his utter surprise, it flinched.  A noxious green gas erupted from the beast, going everywhere all at once.  A horrified gasp came from the crowd.  Ken heard a scream to his right; someone fell to the ground behind him, Kelly turned too quickly and fell over her own ankles, slogged in the mushy beach sand.  There was animal panic everywhere as people ran from the beast.  The gas was all around; Ken held his breath as he desperately tried to help Kelly up so they too could escape.  The deep ember green color of the gas robbed it of all transparency.   His eyes bulged in their sockets as he strained to move her while his lungs begged him for air, but suddenly he felt all of her weigh pulling him down like a drowning man; she stopped struggling.  She went limp, but through the gassy fog could still make out that she was awake and conscious.  Was that a smile on her face?

A few feet ahead of them a cadaver tumbles out of the fresh incision like cordwood, followed by another, and another.  As the bodies pile heavily at his feet his mind screams in horror, but his mouth can’t stop laughing.  The gas has made him absolutely loopy; he couldn’t be brought to care about the dead bodies, and was struggling to remember why he was even here to begin with when the once flaccid tentacles began twisting around his limbs, pulling him into the abysmal black maw of the beast. 

Kelly refuses to budge; her dead weight is too much for Ken to overcome without the benefit of oxygen.  His thoughts quickly returned to the urgent matter of his own survival.  He is almost out of breath.  He tries to run but is held back but something tugging at his skin and holding strong.  It seems to have embedded itself in his leg without pain or much sensation of any kind.  To his horror he looks down to discover hundreds of red silica from the writhing tentacles of the jellyfish has bored into his calf muscles; he can see them worming underneath the surface of his skin, like the veins themselves have sprung to life.  He sees more scoot through the sand snaring other victims.  His stomach goes sour with fright and he makes a fatal mistake.  He breathes in. 

The thing that came from the sea slowly works its way back down the shoreline and into the salty water below leaving a cascade of crumpled, oily clothes behind it.  Its tentacles flail and kick sand; it’s slow moving but its belly is full and it is fat and happy despite being slightly wounded by the large monkey that pierced its hide.  It’s been hundreds of years since it last felt pain.  The sensation invigorated it, nearly delighted it, like a man feeling the soft glide of a woman’s touch for the first time in years.  It was a successful hunt and it had plenty of friends to keep it company in the deep, plenty of minds to explore and play with as it slowly digested its brood at the bottom of the lonely ocean.   It would be many years until it surfaced again and when it would the cycle would repeat itself as it always has for the sleeping ones endlessly dreaming and digesting our thoughts under the waves of the waking world.