Landscapes for the Dead

Just a quick one this time

It hurtled down to earth from above the sky, and landed with a solid fwump in the paddock closest to Farmer Adolf's house. The thing untangled itself and slid out of the dry dusty dirt in the centre of the new, small crater. It was shapeless: it vaguely resembled a glob of glue stuck full of noodles, but the noodles were jointed and a poisonous shade of yellow. They slid in and out of the white mass of its body freely. It crawled out of the crater using these legs, its white centre continuously flopping over and folding in on itself.

What it wanted was a hole to curl up and hide in. It prodded the soil with its stiff noodles, seeing if digging was an option, but the surface dirt was dry and solid. The creature moved on, towards Adolf's house.

Outside the back door Adolf had left his work boots. He usually put them up on his boot rack, but he had only popped inside for a moment this time to grab a pair of wire-cutters and was coming back outside shortly. These work boots were the first things the creature found that it could slip into and hide. It was puddled in the toe of the left boot with its spines directed up towards the heel when Adolf came out, wire-cutters in hand. He went for the left boot first.

The creature didn't know what was happening. It felt something intruding in its hole, coming to eat it or crush it up against the steel-capped back wall. It defended itself in the only way it knew how: it struck with its noodles. Adolf was much softer than the animals it was used to spiking. The way it attacked was by almost vomiting the two largest of its yellow spines out towards the danger. The white centre quivered for a second, before squeezing in in an instant and stretching out thin to fling the spines forwards. They traveled halfway into Adolf's foot, deposited fluid, then detracted back into the blob.

Adolf yelled. Something (a spider, he thought) had just bitten him out of nowhere. He jerked his foot out of the boot. The thing had punched two holes into his sock. Christ, I can't deal with this right now was the last pure thought he had before his brain was swamped with pain. His leg was wracked by spasms and agony and he fell over on the ground. Dust puffed up around his shoulder when he landed. It felt as though cold electricity was slowly spreading out through his leg, cracking him into tiny grains, growing upwards to eat other areas of his body.

He managed to get himself up into a sitting position. He noticed his sock had a deflated look. With bugging eyes and shaking hands, he reached out and rolled up his pants leg. His sock lay in the dust, removed from the rest of his outfit and body. A trickle of white-and-black powdery stuff lead from it up to what remained of Adolf's leg. It had been eaten away up to half the length of his shin. He grasped his calf with thick, unsteady fingers, but his skin gave way and his fingers came together in a fist. His leg was brittle and crumbly, like chalk. As he watched, the upper section of his leg caved in. The inside had turned black, hollow, and rough. Adolf was reminded of the insides of some stones he used to break open with a hammer as a boy, to reveal tiny black crystals. That's what the inside of his leg looked like now. Like dry dark tree sap. The pain was up in his hips now.

Suddenly his flesh became too weak to support his weight, and he crushed his bottom and hit the ground with his lower ribs. He screamed and bellowed. His neighbours heard across the bare paddocks, but delayed in coming to help and were far to late to save him. His right leg lay aside, half in the shade of his house and half in the sunlight. Of his left there was nothing left but the flat leg of his trouser. The material of the right occasionally dimpled downwards as the leg inside disintegrated.

The pain was more intense than anything Adolf could compare it to. It was numb but blazing at the same time. It was more than any human could cope with, and by the time the skin over his gut got infected and burst out in a spray of powder as his intestines and stomach fell to the ground, Adolf was already dead. When his neighbours finally arrived, all they found was a pile of clothes and a spillage of black and white dust.

Inside the boot, the spiny blob remained hidden.