Permafrost

You won’t hear about my town, not in the news or elsewhere. At first I thought it was a government conspiracy, but as time’s gone on I realise now that’s not the case at all. Whatever’s down there, sending these things up… it’s got us right where it wants us. I was ready to leave, so ready to put yet another town behind me and to forget it ever existed at all. It’d be just another link in a long chain of shitholes we’ve given up on. But it’s all too late for that now. I can’t remember where we are, or even what it’s called. Sometimes memories comes back to me but they go away just as quickly. Now I’m resigned to just getting the story out there. I know I’m beyond help, but that doesn’t mean I have to disappear into nothingness like all the others.

It all started with a nightmare.

I wonder if others had the same one. I’m not sure. I think they did. This wasn’t a normal dream. It was like waking from a coma. In the dream I saw a city fall from the sky, the buildings all wrong, the things that lived in them even worse. I lived there, maybe before or after it fell, shuffling around in sunken alleyways and sewage filled trenches, my mind snatching glimpses of thoughts and ideas. I had to hide from the masters, I had to hide from their gods. I was a dirty, filthy, grovelling little man with no power and they were chasing me relentlessly, a rogue slave. Just before they caught me, their dark presences close to snatching me, I opened my eyes to find myself desperate for breath, naked, coated in sweat, ankle deep in snow. My feet burned with pain and when I looked at my frozen hands I saw the tips of fingers shredded and bloody.

Behind me the sun was rising casting light onto a bloodied hole dug in the snow. Had I dug that? I wondered. Had I been on my hands and knees digging desperately? And now I was awake with a terrible fever setting in. My head aching and my skin on fire, I turned and shuffled back towards my house, tears welling in my eyes. It was like I was feeling someone else’s emotions, thinking someone else’s thoughts. I felt violated. I felt grief.

My wife found me slumped against the backdoor of our little farmhouse, passed out. She screamed when she saw me. I wouldn’t come to my senses for another week. When I did, the sun was a meagre light probing the slanted blinds of my bedroom. I looked outside to see that spring was under way, but around here that just means the sun stays up a little longer to reflect off blinding snow. I had no idea what had happened, but for some reason thinking about that ice, about digging into it, it filled me with revulsion and fear. I felt like I’d been taken over, puppeteered around like some kind of doll. After some time collecting myself, I shuffled downstairs desperate for an answer.

I found my wife at the breakfast table looking worn and saddened. I asked her what had happened, but she refused to reply directly, only breaking out into hysterics when I asked what she was holding in her hand

“How the fuck were you out there?” she asked. I felt like I’d done something terribly wrong, like I’d betrayed her. But I didn’t know how or why.

I told her I didn’t know what had happened and reached out to touch her, but she pulled away.

“And what were you doing with this?” she asked, her voice low with despair.

Looking in her hands I saw it, a small scrap of blue fabric. My heart sank low into my chest. I was flooded with grief.

“I thought you left all of her things behind?” I asked.

She didn’t respond, eventually leaving to me to walk away. For the next few days I was forced to stay in bed and recover but she never let go of that scrap. I spent most of my time trying to remember what had happened, but could only conjure up images of confused anger, as if glimpsed through an opaque sheet of ice. I thought that, maybe, before I’d gone out digging my wife and I had gotten into an argument. Something awful had happened not long ago, that much I was sure of. She had even removed my things from our bedroom, putting them into boxes in the spare bedroom. I was left staring at those boxes as I recovered, sweaty and weary from disease, wondering why she’d done something so hurtful.

Nothing about her seemed right, certainly not the way she was around me. When I was finally strong enough to carry myself, I resolved to find out more.

I waited until my wife went out on errands and layered up. My first steps outside were timid, my body cringing from bright morning sun and brisk air. But I pushed on, marching over lumpen fields until I found the small den I’d carved in the snow, visible even after all this time. I took my time looking around, noticing that I had somehow found a place where the deep permafrost came close to the surface. I reached out cleared away some of the loose snow, revealing another piece of fabric buried in the crystalline ice.

I’d brought some tools, and quickly chipped it out, and felt my heart fall to pieces at the familiar touch of that tiny fleece onesie.

That ice was over thirty millennia old. I knew that, everyone in the town knows it. But seeing that scrap of fabric nearly made me lose all perspective. For a while I grabbed the nearest pick and started smashing at it, over and over. I was desperate. Some lizard part of my brain was acting on wild panicked animal instinct.

She’s in there, it screamed. You have to get her out.

But I knew damn well she wasn’t down there. Just touching that ice gave me the worst feeling in the world. I could feel something radiating out of those depths, something that had risen up. Before I left I sniffed the fabric and smelled her once more, wondering just what the hell could have made such a thing possible.

My wife didn’t return for some time, and in the end I was forced to drive into town looking for her. Along the way, close to Jack Simson’s place I noticed more bloodied holes dug into the earth. Closer to his house, I saw his teenage daughter out in the yard. She was fixated on the snow, digging into it with raw broken hands. I did stop and call out to her, but she wouldn’t listen. And I would have gone further, getting out to help her, were it not for the sight of her father emerging a few moments later with a harrowing look in his eyes.

He was carrying ice picks, and he didn’t look up at me once, not even when I screamed and hollered as loud as I could. At one point I thought he glimpsed me, but the look in his eye seemed terrified, like I was some kind of wretched intruder. Realising he wouldn’t speak to me I moved and passed many similar scenes, all isolated people who were consumed by the need to dig. When I finally reached town I saw most of the townspeople gathered around the centre, staring inwards towards a half-buried building jutting out of the icy Earth. It was an odd thing, looking palatial in places, colonial in others. It was almost entirely frozen, only a few small turrets and spires poking free of the ice, but there was enough of it to attract a crowd.

“He’s in there!” one woman screamed. “I can hear him still in there!”

I coasted past the people slowly, taking in the strange hysteria that had run through the town. Shops were closed, cars were parked in the middle of the road, some buildings had even collapsed as if from an earthquake. In some parts men were dragging tools to the town centre and I watched as a few young men erected scaffolding around the palace, and an older man began ordering the townspeople around, telling them what to do and where to go. Pretty soon, it became clear to me that they were planning to dig.

I called out to an old friend who I spotted lingering near the back.

“Craig,” I cried. Quickly, he turned his plump frame around, momentary confusion across his face quickly replaced with warmth and joy. He ran forward and grabbed my arm through the open window like a child rushing towards gifts under a Christmas tree.

“Oh it’s good to see you,” he said. “Oh I knew good things were coming and seeing you here just proves it.”

“That’s good,” I said, a little apprehensive of the manic twinkle in his eye. “But what’s going on?”

“We’re digging,” he said.

“What for?”

“Don’t you see?” he asked. “It’s right there. We just need to help it get out.”

“That house?” I asked, confused. “Where did it come from?”

“Oh I don’t know that,” he answered. “But it’s our house. Don’t you see? I grew up in that house.”

“You grew up in Phoenix,” I snapped. “Don’t be daft.”

“I didn’t say I knew how it got here!” he growled back in anger. “I’m just telling you what it is! It’s our house and we all want to go back. People talking about finding other bits down below, coming up out of the ground on their land, or under roads, even under the school. It’s all over the place.”

“That don’t make no sense, Craig,” I said, feeling lost among his words.

“It don’t need to!” he said, growing more irate. “It’s where I grew up, it’s where we all grew up. Every one of us… We’re all in there. Don’t you see? It’s bringing it back, everything we’ve lost. I thought you of all people would know what’s down there.”

I thought of the blue fleece and palled a little. Before I could speak, Craig pointed to one of the collapsed shops with great enthusiasm. “That’s where Ms Pickers grew up, and over there that’s where my Shelly was born, and down there, you keep going and take a right, you’ll find the Irish Catholic school where Deputy Sanders was raised.” Craig pointed back to the building in the town centre. “And that’s the centre. That’s where it’s all coming from, so we’re helping it out so it can bring more to the surface.”

“Craig…” I began, before trailing off. Already a whole storey of scaffolding was up around the back of the building, and I saw men, women, and children all grab pickaxes and begin pulling back the tarmac. That building was like an icy fortress where just the tip of its highest towers could be seen. I shivered at the sight of it and pulled my coat up around my neck. I spotted others doing the same, and despite the early May conditions I watched as snow began to fall around those otherworldly spires.

It felt wrong. The whole damn thing felt wrong.

I drove on looking for my wife and saw more scenes of digging. People were organising themselves into little pockets labour, and I eventually found my wife carrying pickaxes to some young men. They were in the parking lot round the back of a hardware store, the lot of them standing around and staring at a door laid flat into the very ground itself.

“Amazing work boys,” she cried as she brought them their tools. “You able to get it open yet?”

“Not yet,” one of them said with a polite smile. “But we’ll keep trying.”

I pulled up and called out to her, insisting on her attention even when she tried to ignore me. She seemed nervous as she approached the car, as if she wasn’t quite sure of me. I asked her home and at first she protested, telling me:

“The whole town’s working together on this honey, I can’t just leave them behind. We’ve all gotta pull our weight if we want to bring it up. Just look at this door, who knows where it leads?”

“But what about…” I stopped and looked at the odd glimmer of madness in her eye, the kind I’d seen in my grandmother before her passing from dementia. I needed to her home, I decided, no matter what. “We have our own spot to dig,” I said, holding out the piece of blue fleece I’d kept. “We should go home and focus on that.”

My wife’s face grew pensive. She looked at the young men with concern only for one of them to stand and come over to us both.

“Don’t worry miss,” he said. “You go home with your husband. We’re all down there, bits of us waiting to be found, I can feel it.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said with a smile. “We all have a place down there.”

And with that she finally climbed into my car. I got her home and convinced her that we’d need a full night’s sleep before we began digging, but it didn’t change much anyway. I woke up to an empty bed at around 3am. Looking outside I saw the snow beginning to pile up. Hell, it looked like a damn blizzard, but at least it made her tracks easy to follow. They went right to that spot I’d woken up at weeks before, and she was there on her knees, blanket wrapped around her.

She was sobbing, a wracked confused angry, happy, sob.

I knelt down beside her and went to put my arms around her but stopped. She was holding something… something that had emerged from the ice like a splinter pushed out of skin. The sight of it turned my stomach and I felt overcome with rank despair. I felt like I was stepping further and further into a nightmare. I could have maybe explained the strange building as a ruin, or at least as something built by the town (who I figured had gone completely mad). But this was something else.

She was holding a hand sticking out of the ice, chubby little newborn fingers clasped around her thumb. For a brief moment, I think I lost my mind only for it to suddenly snap back into place.

I tried to get her inside. But there was no chance of her leaving. I had to light a fire and try to keep her warm in that little icy den any way I could. After a while, the cold grew too much for and, despairing, I left to go back inside. I found her the following morning, collapsed on the kitchen floor. I managed to drag her upstairs, where I was left to care for her over the following days.

During which time the town spiralled further into lunacy. I made only one more daytime trip to get some supplies, and there I found a belligerent horde of angry idiots who’d torn half the town apart to make room for whatever was coming. For every building pulled down, at least another two had grown out of the ground to replace them. They were haphazard things: listing skyscrapers that tilted over the landscape casting enormous shadows, plantation homes in the Southern style, dingy flats from dreary London, crumbling shanties, beautiful manors, mundane suburbia clashing with Imperial history. It was all there, like a kaleidoscope of architecture that was slowly consuming the town. Some people I saw guarded their little bits of madness jealously, screaming about it being theirs, theirs alone, and no one else’s, sitting ominously with rifles in hand while they waited for the Earth to make free their doorways.

Other people bickered over repaying favours, saying one such person helped dig for another and so it was owed back to them in due. Some people cried with joy, others despair. More than a few corpses were frozen stiff in the middle of the street as the weather had turned bitterly hostile. Quite a few people had just crawled up into a ball on the ground and never woken up, others were still standing, hands and arms frozen to tools half-buried in the Earth.

Before I left I found myself coming to a complete stop in my car without even realising why. Something had caught my eye, the sight of it making my limbs weak. It was a strange listing doorway, abandoned and empty, lodged half-way in a street close to the edge of town. The lonely porch it bore had been driven up straight out of the ground like a breaching whale. I stared dumbfounded at the rotten timber doused with snow, a sight I’d never thought I’d see. I recognised that door and for a moment I felt the temptation to leave my car and investigate. But when I noticed an eerie glow emerge from a half-buried window beside the door, one that I knew led into the very kitchen where my mother had spent years cooking for the family, I froze out of an uncanny nostalgia.

It was a light, perhaps a torch, or maybe even a flame. I pondered this, feeling a distant terror advance upon me like a tiger in the jungle, when I suddenly smelled the strong odour of pipe smoke and saw a strange face appear in the frosted window, gaping and strange like a mask. Suddenly, that terror was upon me, and I stamped my foot down on the accelerator as hard as I could and left that damned place behind me.

If I could have, I would have never returned. But my wife was still unwell, and we needed food and medicine. I was forced to return twice more but those times I let nightfall offer me some protection. It was a smart decision because the corpses were growing in number, and the few living people I glimpsed were dark and hostile. Those that weren’t digging were looking for people who could be dragged into it. One night I followed one of these men quietly, climbing onto the roof of a still-standing store so that I could spy the town centre from afar.

It was like something out of the stone age. That strange building was now dozens of stories high with strange arches, buttresses, terraces and walk-ways sticking out of it at all kinds of strange angles. All around stood it about a dozen wiry men, many of whom I recognised, whipping other townsfolk into hauling Earth. Barely a few hundred people remained out of the thousands who’d once lived here, and while plenty could be found dead, I could not help but wonder where the rest had gone. I was given some kind of answer when one worker managed to drag enough soil away to reveal a new door. He cried out about his discovery and the crowd clamoured around him, anxious and joyful.

Close to the back, an older man pushed his way forward and fell to his knees before the door. He stayed there, sobbing, before a slave driver came over and gently pulled him to his feet. He whispered quiet words into the old man’s ear and they both embraced each other, laughing and crying. The old man cried out some words but they lost in the blizzard, and then I saw him open the door and enter. It slammed shut behind him with the finality of a guillotine. For a few brief moments the crowd remained where they were, milling around before one of the slave drivers began screaming for work to continue once more.

“We all have our own doors!” I heard him roar. “We work to find them. Work to find yours! Help your friends so that they might help you!”

Just as quickly they resumed their frenzy and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

The second time I returned at night I found the town centre even emptier than before, but there were still enough shadowy figures wandering the blizzard to give me concern. I decided to stay closer to the edge of town where I gathered supplies from run down stores. At one point, as I huddled below the smashed window of a ransacked pharmacy—wind and snow pouring into the open shop, burying the shelves and goods beneath the sloping elements—I was momentarily forced to wait, breath held, for a stranger to pass me by. Except they never passed, instead they slipped and fell, angling over the broken window and sliding into the very spot where I hid.

There they began to wail in fear at the sight of me. I’d never seen this person before, but they wore ill-fitting clothes and something in their eyes made me think of idiocy. They didn’t look right. And I reached out to hush them best as I could.

“There you are,” I heard from above, the voice rich in warmth. Looking up I recognised the welcoming smile of Dr Alistair, an older woman who’d worked in the clinic for years. Confused, I greeted her and let her help me up, but found myself growing weary as she explained herself.

“This here’s my twin brother,” she said, and I could not stop myself looking at the man askew, since he was clearly no older than 19. “It’s been decades since I’ve seen him,” she added, taking my hand in hers and staring into my eye, perhaps looking for a sympathy she hadn’t found elsewhere. “Oh yes, he was my closest friend for a long time and I thought I’d lost him. Now come on,” she said, turning to her brother. “Let’s let our good friend go back to finding his own home down below.”

I watched as she dragged her brother up and propped him up under the arm. Strangely, his mouth opened and he let out a kind of wail. It wasn’t a normal cry, but it felt helpless and dumb.

“Oh I know,” Dr Alistair cooed. “We’ll go back as soon as we can, I just got a few people you ought to meet first.”

After that I stayed away from the town centre entirely, taking my chances with the houses dotted around the countryside. Down by Mr Simson’s a whole street had grown out of the very soil and occasionally you could glimpse him wandering from building to building, crying out for his daughter.

“Your Ma ain’t coming back!” he’d sometimes cry. Other times he’s scream things like: “Give her back! Give her back Marie! She ain’t yours no more, you passed on!”

I felt sorry for him, but I still ransacked his home as he wandered in the blizzard, stumbling from shop to shop in a street that, just a few days before, hadn’t even existed. I remember looking out his bedroom window and noticing how the strange palace in the town centre was so tall it could be seen from miles away. It filled me with unspeakable dread, and for a moment I was glad I’d managed to avoid the mass hysteria.

Then again, I hadn’t really avoided it at all.

There’s still no easy way to explain what exactly happened to my wife. At first, she was just unwell from her stay out in the cold. Then one day I went in and found her nursing. The sight alone was enough to bring me to tears and I’m still not sure I’m able to say these things aloud and stay sane. I just know that afterwards, after she got our daughter back from the den, she stopped acknowledging me. I was on my own, except I still had to get food for her and our daughter. At least, I think it was my daughter. She never let me get close enough to see. I understood why, of course. What happened way back was all my fault…

But still, it hurt to be so alone.

I’d say there’s maybe a hundred people left now. That makes me wonder if it’s safe to go back to town but lately I’ve been having nightmares about the smell of pipe smoke from my childhood. Out in our yard I can see the strange shape of a new house rising from the den. It started with a fence but quickly turned into more until soon a roof began uprooting trees. Now there’s a whole floor and looking in through the window reveals dusty abandoned halls and bedrooms. It doesn’t take much to recognise our first marital home, or the baby’s bedroom complete with a crib.

She left as the door was free from the ice.

This whole place… it’s like a thousand memories from a thousand people have become real and are all struggling to find the room to overlap. I wonder if that’s what that big strange palace in the centre of town is. Maybe it’s where all the memories reach out from. I’ve no doubt it’s the source of it all, and that most of it’s down below the ground and not above it. Sometimes I dream about it, though it looks different to what it is now. But it’s still the same, because in the dreams I somehow know it’s the same house.

Only in my dreams it’s a city, and it’s falling from the sky.

Ever since she left I wanted to leave, but I can’t remember how to. There’s no horizon anymore, just a haze. The blizzard has been joined by a thick fog that makes it harder and harder to see. I haven’t seen my wife for a whole night now, I think she’s moved into the house out back. I wish I could have gotten through to my wife. I wish I wasn’t alone. Doesn’t she know nothing down there is real? People don’t come back from the dead… even if it looks that way.

I nearly went down into the ice recently, if only by accident. I was looking for supplies and I was so dazed that when I broke into a house I didn’t even realise it wasn’t a normal house, but it was one of those ones that had come up out of the ground. I went looking for a basement where supplies might be kept, but around about the fourth set of steps down I realised something wasn’t right. Carpet gave way to ice-slick stone and furniture lay half-grown from the dirt and it dawned on me this wasn’t a typical house. Looking around I saw photos of a family with a teenage son; a geeky looking kid with thick glasses that bore a slight resemblance to a farmer I knew lived nearby. I couldn’t say for sure.

Still, looking down into that darkness I felt a strange terror. Close to panic, I managed to steady myself and shine the torch down below where I saw a single severed hand. The fingertips were bloody, the skin pallid and bruised, and a set of broken manacles were clamped around the shredded wrist. Blood that had pooled below the hand carried on down into the darkness; crimson handprints streaked against the ice, their long strange trail disappearing into shadow. Something told me those steps went on forever and ever. And when I heard the faintest shuffle as to suggest footsteps coming up to greet me, I was overcome with fear and fled, taking whatever I’d grabbed with me.

There were only two things in my hands at the time, the telescope and a few batteries that later turned out to be dead. The telescope, at least, has been helpful. Sometimes people come back, but not for long, and I can use it to spy them from a distance. Most of them I don’t even recognise, but I saw Simson wandering around out there just the other day. I called out to him and he burst in hysterics at the sound of my voice. When I finally got over to him I saw he was a brittle aged version of the man I knew. His back had been lacerated, whipped to shreds. His teeth had been pulled, his fingers bloody and raw, his feet black and blue, leaking puss into the snow. He was gaunt… a vision of death come to life, like something out of a history book. I managed to drag him indoors where I tried to help him get better.

“I don’t want to go back,” he said later that night. “I had a life once. It was better before we went down.”

“Then don’t go,” I told him, but he just shook his head.

“I can no more leave them than one of my cattle could have left my farm,” he sobbed. “You know that better than most.” And though the response made no sense, it terrified me nonetheless. It spoke to me the way my dreams had, making me scared of memories that weren’t even my own. It was like I had become awoken to a species-wide hopelessness, the kind I always thought humans didn’t actually know but which I now suspect lingered in our primitive history.

Did we once belong to something below the ice? Are we as feeble and as helpless to it as cattle are to us?

What if it wakes up?

Simson disappeared later that night, not even a whisper to alert me. But I saw it coming. He didn’t have a choice, none of us do. That’s clear to me now, if only because of what he pulled out of a nearby closet. I don’t know why he did it, but it was a small mercy.

I can see they picked out good hymns for my service. All that time and she never threw away my stuff...

Reading that pamphlet has helped me understand myself a little better, putting order to the chaos of my mind. I know now why it doesn’t matter if I go down with the others or not, and why I felt such terror at the thought of following them. I already know what’s down there, even if I can’t remember. Like a cow that has glimpsed the inside of a slaughterhouse, I can’t grasp the context or nature of my torture, but I know enough to stay away.

It’s like purgatory out here. I wonder if the storm will ever lift? When it does, I hope somebody finds me, if only to prove that I’m real. I had to walk so far to get enough signal to post this. Will they cover up the disappearance I wonder? Whatever’s down there is old. It owns us whether we remember it or not. It can reach into our heads and change our deepest desires, rewrite the world to convince us of lies… it can even bring back the dead.

Don’t be surprised if this is the only record you ever hear of my town. Pretty soon no one will be left except for me, sat here reading my own funeral service over and over and over…