A quick note before we begin

This piece uses themes of psychological horror and, of course, spoils parts of the Twisted Strand storyline in Dredge. Please be sure to explore the seas beneath the trees to your satisfaction before continuing.

Tread carefully, dear reader!

 

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There were a few air routes that passed by the Marrows, most of which involved traveling in a straight line. It was safer to give the turbulence created by the high mountains of the Gale Cliffs and the Devil’s Spine a wide berth, but the rest of the region was flat, safe, and entirely unremarkable.

“I’m telling you! The fish glow! Y’gotta be doing this on purpose, right, Lieutenant?”

“There’s no way you’ve seen it with the fog that rolls in at night. C’mon, Commander, back me up here!”

Unremarkable to the Airman, at least.

As his squadron crawled across the sky on a routine flight that passed directly over Little Marrow and headed off to the north-north-west, the Airman found himself subjected to the routine bickering of his squadmates. Today’s in-flight entertainment? A live radio show where the youngest member of their little crew, the Private, had once again picked a silly fight with the grouchiest pilot in the skies, the Lieutenant, because he had committed the crime of saying that the cluster of mangroves they would be passing by soon was the nicest area in the region.

“I don’t know why you’re so eager to die on this hill,” the Lieutenant grumbled, “It’s just a bunch of sand around a hole in the ocean!”

“As if some lame trees without a name are any better!”

“Last week you said everyone in Ingfell called it the Twisted Strand!”

“Doesn’t count if it’s not getting named on any maps, y’know!”

“You are such a–”

“The nighttime fog’s pretty recent,” the Commander cut the Lieutenant off, chiming in a couple beats behind in the conversation, “and the fish do glow, but can’t say I liked it when I flew over it on a night assignment way back when, a bit before the fog came. It was pretty, sure, but it creeped me out just as much.”

“M-maybe it just looks better from the ground!” the Private stammered out, the Airman picturing his pout as the Lieutenant turned on his transmitter to make sure everyone heard him laugh directly into his microphone.

Though the whole conversation was childish and he’d sooner crash his plane than throw his hat in the ring, the lively chatter over the radio as his comrades argued about things that didn’t matter made for decent company as they lazily made their way towards the distant horizon.

“Hey, uh, Commander?” The radio crackled to life and an unfamiliar voice filled the Airman’s cockpit, “Speaking of fog… it’s looking pretty strange portside…”

The Airman turned towards the debatably named cluster of trees off in the distance and saw the tan haze that perpetually hung over the tangle of mangroves visibly shift. At first glance he thought it might’ve been from a large gust of wind, but as he watched it move, it looked less and less natural and more and more…

“The hell is that?”

Exclamations from the other pilots continued to pour in, panic flooding the airwaves as the fog moved like an irritable beast awoken from its slumber. It uncoiled from the mess of trees; its eyeless gaze followed the flock of planes as they passed by from a distance that no longer felt safe. It pulled back, like a snake preparing to strike, and then—

 

The Airman found himself standing on the ground beneath the trees, ears ringing, staring at the wrecked remains of his plane.

There was a dull ache in his heart as he slowly processed that his partner would never fly again. The damage was immediately apparent: the crash had snapped the tail clean off, the left wing had practically shattered, and, while he couldn’t know how bad it was until he opened her up, the engine had a lot of delicate parts that wouldn’t enjoy a hard impact with the ground.

She was gone. A constant part of his life had been ripped away from him, but as he tried to grieve, as he tried to understand what he was looking at, panic climbed him like vines choking a tree.

How did he crash? How did he get through the crash uninjured? What happened to everyone else? Did they crash too? How had he managed to travel from the open ocean all the way to–

splash

The sound of movement in the water behind him was quiet and easily drowned out by the sound of his brain being pulled in a dozen directions by every other thought already running through it, but some part of him was able to signal the alarm and he spun around to face it, barely able to catch a glimpse of a massive snake-like, slug-like creature as it retreated back into the shallow water. He stared at the murky water for a long moment, trying to match the little that he saw with any animal he knew of, but…

The Airman was already on high alert from the crash, but that thing made his hair stand on end. It was as thick as his plane’s fuselage, and the bits sticking out of its body that glowed a sickly pale yellow, and the eerie noise it made… the Airman would readily admit that he didn’t know a lot about animals, but, as the ringing in his ears faded, he couldn’t escape the feeling that what he had seen was something else, something that, like the mist above the trees, he couldn’t explain.

That sensation closed in on him, like the haze surrounding him, like the noises in the forests, growing louder, growing denser, wrapping itself around his heart and paralyzing him with an emotion that wasn’t quite fear. He needed to take action, to take stock of his supplies, to look for survivors, to do something, to do anything, but he was rooted to the spot, unable to bring himself to look away from where it had slipped away.

He needed to run. He needed to run. He needed to run. He needed to run. He needed to run—!

“There you are, Airman!”

Snapping out of his trance, the Airman spun around again, this time finding a man headed towards him, stumbling over the naturally knotted nets formed by the jungle’s cluttered carpet of vines.

“Thank goodness you’re alright! Already met up with a few other survivors and we’ll regroup by the massive tree in the middle by nightfall. The one y’can see from the air, y’know?”

It was the Private.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“…”

“Are y’okay, Airman?”

It didn’t seem real. Too much had happened all at once, and he still didn’t even know exactly what it was that had happened aside from the vague sense that it had all come crashing down.

The Private looked past the Airman for a brief moment, at the wreck of his plane, but quickly brought his gaze back to the Airman as if he had been looking at something he shouldn’t’ve been.

“…Are y’still a little dizzy? There’s some time before sundown, so if y’need some rest before we get moving…”

The Airman held his head in his hand, his temples pinched between his middle finger and his thumb, massaging away a headache that didn’t exist. He let out a hot, exhausted breath into his palm and suddenly the Private’s suggestion seemed like the best idea in the world.

“Yeah, I need a moment.”

But it was real. The heavy, hot, humid air was real. The shattered plane and shattered dreams were real. The feeling of his fingers dragging across his skin, tracing above his eyes until they joined together to pinch his brow… it was all real.

“Alright! I’ll… uh… step away for a moment, then! We still haven’t found the Lieutenant, but it looked like he was going down somewhere to the northeast of where y’landed, so I’ll go scope out the area and see if I can find him.”

The Airman slowly sat down, too tired to remain upright and too tired to watch the Private go.

“Do whatever you need to.”

Whatever he had seen before the crash, whatever he had seen in the water, the ringing in his ears… that was all real too. The threat of starvation, the threat of dehydration, and the threats that lurked in the forest and lurked in the water were all real. Whatever sense of urgency he was supposed to be feeling wasn’t there, so it didn’t feel real, but… lying down for a bit, resting for a bit, or at least stewing in those emotions and letting them sink in for a bit would fix that, right?

 

The Airman heard someone approach from the direction the Private had left in.

“Do y’hear that noise?”

It sounded like the Private had returned.

“What noise?”

“It’s just me, then? It’s some weird… droning screech… I think…”

The Airman definitely wasn’t hearing anything like that.

“Anyways! Y’feelin any better, Airman?”

The last part of what the Private said came out garbled, a strange mishmash of syllables and sounds that had no relationship to any language the Airman was aware of; it was like a record player that kept jumping to random sections of the track and played in three directions at once.

The strangest thing, though, was that it was deafeningly quiet, like a whisper from across the room he wasn’t supposed to hear that, despite its low volume, smothered all other noise. He couldn’t hear the nearby splashing, or the distant bird cries, or the wind in the leaves of the trees, or the ringing in his ears… all he could hear in that brief moment was some weird, incomprehensible nonsense that left as quickly as it came.

But maybe he had just misheard?

“A bit.”

He wasn’t feeling much better, and he might even be worse for wear if he had misheard the Private a moment before, but his brief not-quite-a-nap had given him just enough energy, just enough drive, just enough of a boost to be able to jump into action and get to work.

The Airman dragged himself to his feet and paused.

“The Lieutenant’s plane crashed on the island a little ways off to the east, outside of the strand. I didn’t see him, so I don’t know if he made it or if I just missed him, but…”

The Private trailed off, clearly uneasy about the Lieutenant’s odds of survival.

“I was thinking we should probably move camp over somewhere around here tomorrow anyway, so passing ships have a chance of seeing us, right? Whadda y’think, Airman?”

The weird noise returned again, but the Airman was more focused on what he was looking at.

He was looking at the Private. The Private was standing there, several paces away, in full view, and the Airman was looking at him. The being that was nearby and speaking to him that he was looking at was ‘the Private’.

“…Sure,” he said, distracted and unsure exactly what he was agreeing to.

But doubt crept into that assessment, into that identification, staining it like an oil slick on the ocean.

“Commander asked me to grab whatever supplies I could, but I think we should probably leave some stuff if we’re coming back. Have you checked on your cargo?”

There wasn’t anything obviously wrong with him. The Private was just the right height and he was still wearing the same oil-stained, ill-fitting flight suit had on when they boarded their planes that morning. His unguarded posture was correct, and his disheveled hair was correct, and the nose, the eyes, the mouth, the jawline… all of it was correct. Each individual part was correct. At first glance, there was nothing he should be worried about.

But as he stared at the Private’s face, his body caught his attention, and then his hair, and then his eyes, then back to his face as a whole, then to another part and another and another and another. Every piece was in focus, every piece was demanding his focus, demanding that he listen to them insist that they were correct, that nothing was wrong.

But why did they need to insist? Why would they feel the need to convince the Airman?

“Not yet,” he said, unsure of who he was speaking to.

The man turned to the Airman’s plane’s corpse and began to pry away the sheet of metal that once served as a door to its cargo hold, apparently eager to reach the emergency supplies hidden inside.

The Airman just stared at him.

“Y’gonna help, Airman?” the man said, grunting as he tried to damage his plane.

The strange noise returned, and whatever urgency the Airman had been missing crashed down upon him all at once. Even while identifying and misidentifying the man, he had been taking it for granted that he was a person… that, like the Airman, he was a human.

But humans didn’t make noises like that. He wasn’t a doctor, or a physician, but there were… limitations to a human body. He didn’t know what those were, but certainly this noise exceeded them, right?

His suspicion was grounded in reality; there was no need to question it.

The Airman stared at his… at its back.

This thing… it wasn’t just a mere stranger… it was something else entirely. No matter how much this man, how much this thing pretending to be a man looked like his comrade, it wasn’t him, and it definitely wasn’t a human pretending to be him.

How did it know to find him here? How did it know about the Lieutenant, about where they were camping, about the supplies in his plane?

With a grunt it managed to tear off the door to the cargo hold, desecrating her even further.

Why was it pretending to be the Private? What happened to the Private? Why was it trying to lure him away from here?

The fake turned around, as if it knew the Airman was watching it pretend to go through the cargo hold.

“What’s the deal, Airman?” it said, an awkward, sinister smile on its face, “If you keep staring, y’re gonna make me blush.”

Like the mist that moved, like the snake-slug thing in the water, he didn’t know what it was. He instinctively knew that he would never understand what it was. All he knew was that it had plans for him and that he was in danger, and that was all that mattered. He could sort the details out later.

“…”

“…”

He couldn’t let it know that he had figured it out. He couldn’t let it be the first to act, he couldn’t let it gain the upper hand.

“Let me help you with that.”

The Airman started to approach it.

“Feeling better?” it asked as it turned back to the plane.

“Yeah,” he said with a smile as he reached for the survival knife sheathed on his belt, “I’m feeling much safer now.”

 

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Afterword

 

This was written for Messages in a Bottle: A Dredge Fanzine, and I had the pleasure of working with Srrrokka, who drew the amazing spot art of the Airman and the Mindsucker. Be sure to check out the other pieces in the zine!