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If you were in front of it, you would think you stood at the base of a cliff. Grey and porous, until you look closer. Then it’s like a cloud with a hardened core.
But it’s not a cliff, and it’s not a cloud.
I don’t know what the fuck this thing is .
But don’t I think Lovecraft thought big enough.
---
“How much do you have left in your camel-back?” Elijah adjusted the strap on his shoulder. His tan forehead was slick with sweat even in the arid foothills of the Rocky Mountains—we were working hard.
I gave my pack a shake. “I’d say at least a couple liters.” Squinting up at the clear sky, I added, “Should be another go-station in eleven miles. We’re probably better off just finding somewhere to set up camp in a few hours.”
Elijah tilted his head up to the sun, the gentle slopes of his face contrasting against the glare—he huffed a breath of air and held it for a still minute. Suddenly, my friend burst back into motion. “Okay. Let’s do this.” he breezed past my steady trek, swinging his arms purposefully in-step.
I watched him wade into the picturesque landscape before me. It was no lush green majesty, but the Great Basin Desert had its own indescribable wonder. Where we were in our journey, the dusty green of desert scrub had given way to grooves of gritty stone. We walked where the elements had scraped at Earth’s face and bared the hard, skeletal intrusions of its igneous core. Against the rolling backdrop, Elijah was no more than a shrinking mote of dust. A little pygmy rabbit shot across the expanse in the distance, slowly phasing into stone as if a mirage—I suddenly got the feeling that the earth was swallowing Elijah up, devouring him like the unstoppable waves of the open ocean in hurricane, or the undiscerning maw of a giant.
“Elijah!” I called out with panic edging my voice.
He stopped and turned around, eyes dark pinpricks in the vast beige. “What?”
I opened my mouth to speak.
“…What is it, Kenz?”
“Wait for me, dude,” I finally say, jogging down the slope with backpack straps locked tightly in my hands. “You can’t set up without me anyway.”
“Well that’s a far way off, isn’t it,” he muttered with a sharp turn that scraped a raspy noise from under the sole of his hiking boot.
“Don’t you think it’s pretty quiet out here?” I walked in time with him down the rock face.
“Sure,” he went silent as if to verify. “I mean, what’s going to live out here anyway? It’s a wasteland.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going to live out here—the couple of idiots who decided to go on a budget vacation in the middle of Nowhere, USA. ” I shoulder-checked him in a half-stumble. God, it was hot out.
“Yeah,” Elijah said with a distracted smile. It got quiet again, but the kind of quiet that buzzes static in your ears, waiting for something to break.
Of course, nothing did.
Waiting… waiting. The failure to deliver was louder than any calamity that nature could have summoned, and I began to think that I heard my heartbeat rebound off the limestone mountains around me like the footfalls of a stranger.
---
The sun was lower now, glaring drowsily through the air at a hard angle. Around us, the sky was a softer blue and its horizon glowed grimy yellow where it wasn’t boxed in by stark, craggy palisades.
“Whoa, is that a… cloud ? Out here?” Elijah breathed. The desert had drifted into the mildness of evening and its dryness felt more like a balm than a harbinger of dehydration. In the distance, the unstirring sky was thick with a palish haze.
I blinked. “Yeah.” Squinting gave the view no more clarity. “Must be. It seems…”
“Big.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. Weird.” The scene unnerved me, so out of place in the driest season of the arid Great Basin, but I couldn’t find any words to describe it. The inability to articulate made my tongue feel numb and useless as I stared at the specter.
We continued to walk toward it, up a gentle incline, in silence. It wasn’t awkward—after five days of hiking over empty hills and plains, silence becomes a necessity. But it was the calm, the unmoving world as we walked through the vacuum chamber. Peace. Its vacancy watched me intently, and there was nowhere to look but straight in its face.
“Peaceful out here,” Elijah murmured. Did he mean it the way I meant it?
“Yeah.”
He let out a weak laugh. “You sure say that a lot. ‘Yeah.’ ”
“Oh… I guess so.”
The cloud looked bigger and denser on its distant perch. It phased into the mountain range to our right and stretched out like a wall of mist over the landscape.
This time I croaked out a laugh, a bit pitchy and strange. “God, I just want to shake today off. This is weird. This is so fucking weird.”
“I know right?” Elijah echoed instantly. “I mean, it’s just clouds—it’s—that’s all. Clouds. ” He cut himself off and the silence threatened an encore.
“But…” I started forcefully, “it’s not just that, is it?” The second half followed weakly behind.
“What?”
I turned to him, meeting his eyes. “It’s not just that, is it?”
He laughed. Stopped. Laughed again. Then he turned quickly to the blurry horizon and picked back up his march.
“Elijah?” I called, but I knew my voice was too quiet to be heard. I was talking to myself.
---
We had drifted to the far end of the valley, hugging the side of the basin close. There was a sense of security in being tucked into the steep foot of a mountain, like a reprieve from the primordial fear of standing exposed in an open plane.
To the west side of the Rockies, there was no shadow to be cast over us in dusk. In fact, we were the only fixtures making shadows at all, stretching long across the reddish rock in funhouse reflections.
Elijah, I wanted to say. But I had nothing to follow it up with. The soft crunches of our footfalls fell in and out of sync. The path ahead was ablaze with slanted sunlight, trailing fire all the way into the impending obscurity of cloud.
We kept walking.
The evening’s mild warmth slowly grew clammy and chill despite the sun. Dampness slunk across the flinty fissures of the mountain base and wrapped around my ankles like spectral fingers.
“Should we set up camp before we hit this cloud? If we get stuck in there it might be hard to navigate, and it’ll probably get even colder at night,” I say to Elijah’s back.
“No.” He didn’t turn around so I jogged a few paces to see his face as he spoke. “I want to see it. It’s going to dissolve the second we step into it, anyway. It’s just a cloud.” His jaw was set in a hard line.
“…Okay.”
I shared neither his determination nor his indignance. But maybe the fog would be a welcome change, I reasoned, in a valley where its vast emptiness was viscerally, keenly felt. Even now I could picture us from an aerial view, two dark ants crawling across limy stone, scuttling inch by inch along a wall of mountain as if there were something at the end of our journey, as if we had anywhere to go.
But we did have a destination. Right, I guess we did. I peered into the fog that seemed to recede as we advanced, just like Elijah said. His pace never let up though, and his expression was still dark and sour as he trooped forward.
The hill we had been climbing gradually leveled off. It was a relief to my legs, though I hadn’t noticed until I could finally slow down, breathing in cool misty breaths as if drinking from the air. I let Elijah stalk into the further reaches of the thin fog’s gradient, far enough ahead of me for his silhouette to fade from black to grey to white in the mid-horizon. His steps still scraped out the unmistakable cadence of his trek as he disappeared and I grew far more aware of its soft impacts than I was before. Trading sight for sound, I suppose.
Dusk-light came through streaky in the haze, skipping overhead like the wobbly path of a stone over water. It was like a halo to the mountain face, framing its rusty earth tones in gold and warmth, stretching up, up, up, to its spiny, sloping face.
Spiny… sloping… face?
I felt a pressure and then a give around my shoulders as my backpack straps slipped off of me and thudded to the ground. Before me, I saw a gray-brown colossus of unspeakable proportions.
Textured columns of tan extended like obelisks into the sky from something like thirty yards away. Thick, sinuous outgrows split from the whole in grotesquely organic extremities. It reached above the mountains. So far above the mountains. My eyes strained up, neck crooked at such a steep angle the base of my skull met my spine. At the distant point where the column ended, the pillar bent with the most sickening swell of fleshlike haze, joining with a… body? The distended barrel of its chest scraped hollowly into a skeletal stomach, the rippled surface of its body warped back downward into two curved columns like knees caved inward.
Spines stretched over eclipsed the mountain range in blade-like, vestigial wings. Every angle of its hulking frame looked to be pulled outward like taffy. Especially its face . Or… where a face is supposed to be.
Where chest met leg met leg there was only an eruption of tentacular appendages and blunt spikes. In the sun they burned like bloody rust. It didn’t move. It was so, so big, so much bigger than anything man or nature could ever create, like its own planet. Like a god.
I began to shiver violently. And it didn’t move, for all its weight. It didn’t move an inch. Like stone, but so clearly made of something else , porous like cloth, cloudy like a noxious gas—yet solid. Yet still. It was only through implicit, bone-deep intuition that I knew it was alive.
At some point I think I noticed that the fog around me had retreated, but my eyes were frozen above. I couldn’t move either. Where was there to run?
My heart thundered in my chest so fast the pressure surged against my skull and icy nausea wrenched my insides. I remembered a story where a dog caught a bunny in its jaws, and held it there, alive. Its little heart pounded so furiously with terror that it arrested and died in minutes. Hanging gently between the teeth. I couldn't help but feel I was the rabbit just then, hunted and killed by terror sooner than predator. Could you even call this a predator? Would that demean it?
Is this how I
die?
No, surer. This is how I die.
Breath rattled out of a constricting chest. Move, move, move. It just stood there, unmoving as the earth. It felt inevitable. The grate of my boot against coarse rock screamed underneath me as I slid my leg back. I froze, paralyzed despite all of the struggle of my heart, beating furiously against my ribcage like a dying thing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing. Another step back.
“KENNEDY!” Elijah’s voice shattered the calm. I whirled around with panicked eyes, pleading him quiet, wherever he was—only to see a stream of blood running down my calf, and just above it, a little scaly head split in half with the unhinging of its jaw.
“H —” Oh. It hurt now. “HH-AGH—”
It burned.
My eyes darted around, torn between posts of impossibly different size and gravity.
“Kennedy.”
Up. To the right. Elijah. He stood ten feet away, his arms raised up but palms facing the ground as if pleading. As if he had forgotten how to pray.
“Elijah,” I called quietly. “Do you see it?”
But he wouldn’t look away from me. He wouldn’t look up. “S-see what?” he stammered. “Kennedy, we gotta get you out of here. Look at your leg .”
It burned .
“Elijah,” I shook my head. “Look up .”
He swallowed, blinking very, very quickly. “That’s a rattlesnake, Kenz, we need to…” His voice died.
Twilight began to filter in around us and despite the chill, I started to sweat. A rattling sound pulled my gaze down, just for a second. The snake was unlatched from my leg, coiled by my feet in a pool of my own blood. Its eyes glinted coldly in the red. So human. Like a magnet, my eyes raised back up to the behemoth.
“Just look at it, Elijah. Just look at it. I know you can see it out of the corner of your eye and—trust me, it’s worse than you think. Look.” I laugh, and the heat from the bite began to creep like wildfire up my skin. “Look.”
It loomed, ate up the darkening sky. I was shaking so violently.
“Get away! ” Elijah cried in my periphery, waving his walking stick wildly at the rattlesnake as it slithered off. And then he was in front of me, grabbing my shoulders, muttering. “You need to lay down, we have to—we have to clean the wound, and—” In his frantic movements his head eclipsed my view of it. Somehow my heart beat faster.
“Kennedy I’m—I’m scared.” Does he mean it the way I mean it?
“Isn’t it worse?” I ask him.
“Kennedy,” he pleaded.
Suddenly my leg collapsed beneath me and I plunged backward until my skull cracked into stone. I rolled to my side and vomited. It was mostly water, spilling from my mouth and bleeding across the grit in front of me.
Elijah crouched beside me, his hands hovering over my body, fluttering helplessly. “O-okay. Don’t—don’t move. Stay still. Stay calm.”
I just watched the space behind him. My leg began to twitch and seize, the bloated, purpling swell of my calf spattering blood on the rock at each impact. My throat was closing.
“Kennedy, come on, talk to me, look at me— goddamnit will you look at me? ”
I opened my mouth and my tongue felt thick and heavy as it worked. My eyes darted back and forth, back and forth. “I thought you wanted to s-see. You walked ahead of me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Kennedy.” Behind his hunched form it loomed. Impossibly big. Impossible.
Why are you making me do this alone? “Isn’t it worse?”
“What?” I learned what a dying man looks like through the dull reflection of my face in his eyes.
Like an animal. Like a rabbit. Eyes wide, face blank.
But you still know it’s there, don’t you? Elijah?
“Isn’t it… worse ? ”