The Driftless Horror

I have seen many of the great arts, back when my eyes still functioned. My travels to Europe were steeped in the nomenclature of the artist. The ardent reverence for old Rome’s sculpture, Prussia’s composition, and the English play. However, there was no moment more profound than stepping into the Cappella Sistina, Man’s towering achievement. I needn’t walk twenty steps before I fell to my knees, overwhelmed. All surfaces, each and every milli-glance blazed with transcendent awe, awe of the unfathomable.

When I left for education out East I learned to worship the known. Put quite simply, the heavens didn’t exist, because the heavens aren't known, extrapolated ad nauseam. But to have witnessed the numinous grandeur of man’s bygone age, and for it to hold my mind captive and prodded, retching my presuppositions and notions of reality, I grew to know that though their masters had long past oblivion, they revealed that us fallen creatures can touch the divine.

I had made a mockery of myself over the past decade striving to warp the perception of my peers through my visions. I wanted more than anything to impact Man like the great masters did an age ago. The American theater is nothing more than a novelty to the New York crowd, and I have neither the mastery nor the resources to bring to them what I could feel. Perhaps the world was better off because of it, I began to think. Man will endure a great many horrors if it even hints at the promise of glory; think of Captain Ahab for example. But I write to you now, knowing it was wrong for me to seek out the indescribable. I was enraptured by it. Just imagine the nightmare that must’ve appeared before Mary as she was told of her coming child. Something that knows of its own monstrosity, enough so to command the girl to, “fear not.” It is that dulling deluge, that heightened hysteria that I mistakenly sought out.

As a boy, my family and I were settled in the Midwestern highlands; numbingly cold in the winter, with plains so flat, they rival the ancient Eurasian Steppe. I always envied the pioneers that braved these plains to reach the warm, warrantless, Wild West. “At least out there, stories endless flowed back East” I always thought. Whether the stories were true or not I never really cared. There was never much to do during the day, so I spent my time in delinquency like most young boys. Playing in the mud, causing a ruckus about, even breaking apart an old quarter plate, just to learn how it captured an image. I’d dig at the brass fittings, undo the steel woodscrews and even pull back the lensboard to create a queer effect; creating imperfect captures of what was before it. One time I took a distorted image of my mother out of total innocent curiosity, but once the photo developed, I recoiled from the sight, knocking over not just mine, but my father’s prints as well, ruining an entire batch. I was beaten for the transgression, but no discipline could shake me of what I felt in that image. The tender, soft shape of my own mother contorted into something so ghastly.

I had been made privy of the eldritch monsters that roam the great lakes. The Algonquin Windigo was described as a towering cadaverous creature with an antler crown. It is also known to retch out a sound so piercingly horrible, like the bubbling cries of a thousand burning soon-to-be corpses, and the screeching that of no other being natural to our world. What flashed in my mind upon glancing at that image, had a presence beyond any campfire story. The tribes that called this place home before us knew of it too, and I never believed what they passed down orally could be mistaken as folktale, but the world seems to have, however.

My father had made known to me another monster, Meshekenabek, the Potawatomi Great Serpent of Devil’s Lake. He never spoke to my mother of this, but expressed a need to tell someone, as if it was eating at his conscience. He was a surveyor and weatherman, the boots on the ground kind, that is. He would tell tales of his journeys across the Midwest, and of his findings. There was one area however, that he never did speak of, but one night, he broke that unspoken promise. In a grim funereal tone, his words subsumed my vivid imagination with morbid curiosity. It was that moment when I became obsessed with the cryptic, accursed, and the profane. It wasn’t until my European awakening that I recollected upon all this. It was then where I identified my white whale. That longing feeling I was trying to regurgitate in my prior work. Only now, I knew where to find it.

Upon my return to America I charted my course back to whence I came. To that forbidden area I grew knowing to avoid, The Driftless Region. A place untouched by the Ice Age, its karst geology unchanged for aeons, and its lifecycle uninterrupted, since before man. If Behemoth or Leviathan truly roamed this Earth, her stones and soil likely resembled there in the land bereft drift.

My travels back West were full of reflection. I hadn’t returned since I first left for school. I was seeing the roads I once took, only reversed and with a woefully warped worldview. I passed through Appalachia, seeing the barrier they still provided to the Northeast, and the last incline before reaching the Great Plains. I thought again of that image I took. I questioned how something so beautiful and familiar as my mother could cause me to panic. Is the indescribable that I obsess over simply the distortion of my perception, or does my homeland hide something truly profane?

It was after crossing the border into Wisconsin when it really set in the weight of the journey ahead. Drivable paths into the region only extended for a few miles, only horseback and hiking led you deep into the region. I reassured myself by considering my preparations. Survival equipment taken from the surplus of the war, warm and moisture resistant clothing, and most importantly, with what funds I had stored away I had obtained the greatest lens the world had to offer, the Eyemo 35. She was a beautiful hunk of steel with an ergonomic grip and hand-crank. She was small enough to fit in a simple slinged case, and could film continuously for over a minute! And it was she who was going to show the world the truth of my obsessive intrigue.

Despite living so close to the Driftless Region nearly my whole childhood I never had stepped foot inside its domain. From what I can remember, it was unrecognizable to everything that surrounded it. The wetlands and plains that I knew erupted into sharp, hillous rock and valley. The region was supposedly inhabited by a mad few, with rumors that a sect of the indigenous people of old still roam the heart of that land. Maps and guides were few, but I was one with perhaps the greatest non-public recordings of the region. My father, as he weakened, gave to me his journal, knowing his time was approaching. I dared not look at it while he still lived, but once the time came, the journal told a vivid image of who my early caretaker was. Appended to his story was his time charting the plains as a surveyor, including the Driftless Region. Though very sparsely inhabited, his superior still wanted the area charted out for possible future development, and they believed the data captured would become invaluable in due time. That time never came however, partly due to my fathers later reports, but there I was, entering that same trail my father trekked before me.

In between his ramblings about his unscrupulous overseers, he would make note of the oddities he found. Rock formations spanning for miles that severed the horizon. He also offered the description of a noisome aura that would repel him from certain ventures, something so foul that it stirred no repugnance in him, but rather an animalistic acute fear that he said, “spiked his mind like a rabid hangover.” I am not the meteorologist my father was, nor do I have expertise in the geology of this aeon-untouched cove, but it was what this place may hold that called to me, an antediluvian secret, unsubstantiated for millennia.

It’s no mystery why this area has remained untouched by American expansionism, but I knew not the extent to which that place went to remain undisturbed. It wasn’t long that even trodden pathing began to disappear. It was at that point when my father’s notes switched to utilizing landmarks as passage descriptions. The deeper I sunk into the dense canopy, the more the air began to betray me. My nose began clogging forcing me to breath through my mouth. My throat too started seizing up as I noticed my mouth had accumulated a layer of a waxy substance, thick and bitter. Panic began to build as it felt that the mere atmosphere of this place was trying to asphyxiate me. I couldn’t think straight as I rushed down a slope until I found a creek with running water. With just a few handfuls, it began to break down the frothy layers that had built up in my esophagus.

Panic soon subsided and my vision widened from its tunnel. The mishap had made me lose the vague trail I had traced from where I came, so I decided to follow the creek downstream to find its resting place. The trees that made up the canopy shifted from common conifer and sugar maple and was replaced with a light-dulling black oak. The bitter, dense air altered as well to a noticeable increase in humidity.

The floor was covered in a layer of foliage, but what poked through I couldn’t comprehend. Flora unidentifiable to anything I had ever read. Bushels of what I could only imagine as a cousin of Switch and Indian Grass only, its leaves warped light and color as I stepped, like every angle shewed something different. And its Panicle, impossibly complex, with every branching raceme split into another in some kind of fractalesque defiance to the possible. Its mere sight began to sore my eyes. Even something as simple as the underbrush here defies common knowledge.

What little sunlight that peered through the black oak’s impenetrable shield started to fade as I neared the creek’s end. The sound of waved water grew closer and closer, but without light there was no use in continuing. Nearby was a caved collection of rock that provided overhead to the wind and wear of the forest. It was there where I set up camp, hoping that the following day would bring to me that which I desired.

It felt like I had fallen asleep for months, only to awaken afterward. Every part of my body ached as if atrophied as I arose. My legs warbled like jelly, trying to hold my weight, and my back felt as stiff as lumber. When I finally had the time to wipe away the buildup upon my eyes, I noticed that it was still dark, like that sun had just set. I didn’t get the time to ponder on how this could’ve happened because I was not surrounded in pitch dark. Rather, there was light peeking through the end of the forest, a flickering aura, one that allured me.

I was dizzy, aching with drowsiness, but still was sound of mind to open the case holding my mechanical eye. I trudged out from my encampment down to the edge of the forest. At the end, the last of the soil passed into a narrow sandy beach. A perfect mirror reflected the bejeweled nebulae of the sky, and the moon, a waning crescent, as its diamond. Its reflection reached as far as I could see, until it met at the far end of the horizon, creating a perfect refracting parallel. The hypnotic view was accentuated by the cacophonic, caterwauling, clang and clatter of the forest. Low droning melodies of cicadas, katydids, seed bugs, and whatever unknown creatures hummed a nauseating rhythm, which didn’t aid my psyche along with the miserable rest I had gotten.

The light I had seen before flickered down the left hand of the beach, growing dimmer. I followed, trying not to raise attention to whatever could be watching. Its dimness subsided as I approached, exposing structures in its sheen. Skeletons and ruins of wigwams and longhouses appeared, revealing a society, disappeared, overtaken by the driftless flora. The dim glow from the light only referenced the shapes of the hamlet. Upon touching one, I realized these structures were far older than I suspected. These ruins were made of stone and alloy, which explains how the enclave had not been fully lost to time, but raises far more questions. The West’s rejection of native esoterica and myth has horribly simplified the truth about man’s origin on this continent.

I ran film of the city along with my reaction to the revelation, stopping to ensure what faint light there was, illuminated the structures properly. The mysterious light grew brighter upon my continued approach. It was towards the city’s center where I was struck with a stench that could only be described as terrifying. One that nearly sent me to my knees. It was surely the same aroma my father described in his journal. At this point, the light was close, and its shape could be seen. One standing pillar of fire, a torch burning ceaselessly beyond the settlement near the water.

Every natural sense in my body attempted to repel me. The hairs of my neck heightened as a shiver slithered down my spine. The torch began burning through its structure, engulfing the base in flame. It stood out over the water, at the end of a rotted, waterlogged pier. I tore a piece of cloth and wrapped it around a fallen branch and stuck it into the fire. It transferred over as the last of its structure reduced to ash and coal.

I stood atop the rickety base of the pier, quietly processing, and searching for any sense of reason for these happenings. I looked down into the water, illuminating it with my flame. What I saw, I still fear to remember. I shuddered and yelped, stumbling backwards. It was a writhing mass of flesh and scale, with an impossible pattern of perpetuity. With a design repeating ad infinitum like the plants I had witnessed prior. A serpent carcass of sempiternity. The sight was wholly engrossing, not even my peripheral could escape its aura. My lips shaped together, and I spoke without thought,

“Meshekenabek.” Not a moment passed when the mirror the lake held warped and rippled. From beyond the horizon, the reflection blurred and rose. Clangs like gunfire echoed through the trees, bouncing in every direction. The lake was rising. The echoed gunshots morphed into deafening blasts like dynamite, bursting the water of the lake into the night sky. I held my lens in front of me as I stumbled backward towards the sand.

When I looked up again, the painted sky had disappeared, and before I reached land, the floor burst beneath me, and I was torn down under. I ripped around a maelstrom of violent current until I lost all sensation of force and gravity. I opened my eyes again only to recognize no shape, color or dimension, like the angel that opened the shaft of the abyss, a serpentine vortex roared behind the eye-piercingly bright, fulgurating sky.

I keened and shrieked at the vociferous hell gouging my hearing, and as my body gashed and flung around its funnel. I saw no majesty in the void, but rather the ultimate antithesis, which still reduces me to pure terror presently. I could feel its hatred. I could taste the gurgling primordial malevolence it rang ceaselessly. A hatred of all, its entirety, was is and will, indiscriminately.

There is a hell, and I bore witness to its discharge; surely cursed to share fate with the betrayer and his nephilim. I couldn’t bear its terror. The image of the Driftless Horror singed itself into my very senses. Out of some form of twisted instinct, I clawed at my eyes, goring them until my grip allowed me to free them of their sockets. Once I stripped myself of them, the burning stopped, and all I could hear were the sounds of my own wailing. With a brief reclaim of composure, I felt my feet on a slope, and my hand on a brace. The brushing of trees in the distance filled the silence, as I recognized the shape of my coach. I had not two steps inside the Driftless Region.

Years after my journey, despite my experience, I remained miserably blue, pitying myself for my foolishness, and my bygone dreams. The shock and torment ate at me in my solitude. Voices whispering from beyond. Their words ring strong and prevalent, as sound remains my strongest sense. It is now as I write this that I recognize the folly of my zeal. In my age, and with my sight, I have full certainty my discovery shall remain mine. Though, that old Eyemo hasn’t left my possession, lost I’m sure in the myriad of my collection.

I tuned in to a rather queer broadcast that captured my intrigue. It spoke of our world watched from intelligences greater than man’s, and their meddling of society. The more I listened, the more I smiled. It’s unraveling, masterfully painted of surely divine intellect. And I laughed, roaring in guffaw as society melted over the War of the Worlds.

I suffered for years pining for that day, the day where I could stun the world, like those did before me. I now, however, am quenched. I released my morbid curiosity, like a sigh one takes after a large meal. Despite my greatest efforts, the world spins madly on.