Outwitting Savagery

-------------------------------------------_Outwitting Savagery_--------------------------------------------

I wrote this a couple years back for school, the entire project was completed over the course of one night and I never bothered to review it. It’s got more clichés than a movie on the sci-fi channel and more holes than a sponge. So please, go easy on the criticism.

Isaac panted heavily as he ran down an alleyway, chasing a shadowy figure in the moonlight. The toll taken from running on his small frame as he became exhausted, the panic that clouded his mind during a chase, the constant resisting of the temptation to just shoot him right there, it was all included in his line of work as a private investigator. His pace, as well as his rate of panting quickened as the figure he was pursuing made a sharp turn down a corner. Life was now all in a blur, exhausted, confused, and disorientated; Isaac sat down and began his everyday futile attempts at collecting his thoughts, completely forgetting about the dangerous criminal that still roamed the streets of Arkham Massachusetts because of his own confused outlook on the world. He was in an intersection of dark back alleys whose walls shone a sickening silver-gray in the moonlight. Sitting in a puddle of food waste and drainage, he slung one arm around the trash bags next to him, to whom he felt a stronger connection with than any person in his life. Lighting his cigarette, he looked up at the sky and began to sing, and for that brief moment in his life, he felt at home.
It wasn’t long before the slower policemen caught-up with him and began to squat around him each in an attempt to catch ones breath. The chief, a short, fat, bald man that showed tell tale signs of a mid-life crisis, approached Isaac with a look of disdain and sorrow on his face. “Now why’d you go and do that? Huh? Right in front of you is the leader of the most dangerous cult that this town’s ever faced and you just let him slip away!” turning red in the face as he yelled this. Isaac looked up with an apathetic expression plastered across his face and continued to smoke away while the irate cop scolded him. “ Do you have any idea how dangerous that man is? How many people he’s killed? How many people he’s talked into killing for him!” he continued as if Isaac had no idea of what was going on, “Just earlier today we found three bodies, yesterday, two, day before that, four, these killings have been going on for several weeks now and the only chance of ending it ended with you!” Isaac’s calm composure turned violent as he bolted up to face the officer, his coat dripping from the water of the deep puddle he sat in.
“Listen here you son of a bitch! I’m a detective! Not a mercenary! My job is to examine crimes, take pictures, and provide my rational when trying to answer problems. My job does not consist of crowd-control, armed combat, or chasing drug-addled lunatics, I even saved your sorry asses from the media! How’s the title “lazy pigs make lone detective do all of the work” sound to you? I surprised I didn’t suggest that title to them. After all, I’m only here to protect the interests of my client. Not the interest of you, or the city.” The police chief stroked his thick mustache as if contemplating on what he said. “You have a point there, but sometimes a man’s civil duties come before his job, we were all busy, you just had to do all of those things! By the way, who is this client?” he inquired. “Dead now, but he was the owner of that shop that was raided by cultists the other day.” Isaac said staring at the ground. “So that mean you’re doing this case for free?” The chief addressed sharply. “ It was just to damn interesting to give up. But that gives you even less of a reason to use me as the workhorse of this investigation!” A long period of silence followed this as they all pondered the intentions of the cult, why the bodies that they found were always mutilated, their blood forming strange symbols on the walls of the shacks that they died in, none of it was like anything they had ever seen before, it just didn’t tie together, there was nothing to offer rational on. “There was something strange about the way he walked…” muttered Isaac. “What?” a hint of alarm in the police chief’s voice. “The cultist, the one that I was following, there was something, strange… something unnatural in his step. No, not unnatural but a bit too natural, a beast-like quality in a man. And the aura, that aura of confusion that surrounded him, what made me fall behind, what made me loose him?” The police chief looked up at him with an almost sympathetic look in his eyes. “Well then boys, we’ll continue this investigation in the morning, and Isaac, get some sleep for once it’ll do you good, trust me.” Somehow, even after everybody had left, nothing felt concluded.
Isaac bolted up in his bed, waking up from a disturbing dream. He raced for his pencil and legal pad and began to sketch the last fleeting images from the late night vision. Once he had finished, he sat down and stared at what he had drawn, for the entire dream was gone now. Setting aside the macabre drawings in his dream journal, he grabbed the tools of the trade; his gun, his coat, and his coffee. He proceeded in a cautious manner to his car where he began to drive to the edges of the town. He stopped once he reached the woods on one side of Arkham. The woods had a cliché dark, ominous feeling to it that sent shivers up his spine. He had no idea why he had gone to these woods in search of a cult but he followed his hunch without question, as every great detective does. There were no direct clues, just intuition. Arkham was a strange town for strange people. It had a long history of cults, and witch covens assembling in it since the days of it’s founding. He never spent much time reviewing the unresolved case files dealing with these strange occurrences that were so often shut off by skeptics. So with the feeling of knowledge brimming in his head, Isaac walked on through the woods, relying off of that old gumshoe wisdom that kept him alive through so many dangerous exploits. As he descended into the woods he staggered through bush and bramble until he stumbled across a metal door in the ground. “I wonder if I should call for back up?” he thought aloud. He made up his mind, shrugged his shoulders and dived into the cult lair feeling like a pulp fiction hero charging headfirst into a dungeon to save the scantily clad virgins held captive by the cult, though that was also not included in his job as much as he wanted it to be. He landed on the “dungeon” floor and looked around. It was a typical cult hideaway, plain, barren, torch lit, and covered with strange engravings of their alien gods. Now the groggy feeling of his everyday life was gone, he was thinking clear now, he was feeling emotion now, moments like these made the entire job worthwhile, they were his cocaine and he craved every last spec. Feeling the adrenaline, he kicked down a door and bolted into the room, brandishing his gun. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks, petrified by the room’s contents. There were pictures, pictures of him. The entire room was just a darkroom made for the purpose of processing pictures taken of him. He could hear his own heart now, beating like an infernal drum in the panic of uncertainty. Trying desperately to set aside the contents of the stalker’s photo lab, he ran into the hallway knowing that he would be doing battle with crazed biting lunatics soon.
Perhaps he was wrong about what he had said about armed combat not being part of the job; it was part of the job, probably the best part sometimes. The itch on his trigger finger was relieved as two cultists with shotguns charged him and he squeezed the trigger and ended their lives. Sometimes he worried himself with his cool attitude when it came to killing, he didn’t even flinch as he walked over the bleeding carcasses that lay on the floor. Now, the age-old ritual of combat had begun, there would be screams there would be blood, and there was no ending it, but then again, he didn’t want for it to end. He paced frantically down the halls and into a large chamber filled with an assortment of depraved blasphemies, such as skinned human beings and tortured animals. In the center, rising above the hideous remains, was a podium, adorned with an impressive leather bound volume that seemed to be the basis of the cult. He stepped cautiously over the sickening remains and approached the book. He now realized that his client’s body was never found, and the man himself, was a taxidermist. “What if this was the reason for his odd behavior? I knew he was weird but not this weird.” Isaac thought. He cringed as he looked into the pages of the volume and with each page he turned; the details became more and more horrifying detailing ancient Arabic mythology and anatomy of daemons. He froze when came to an area of the book filled with pictures of animals and mutations involving humans with extra layers of skin, transforming them into beasts. Looking around himself, he finally realized the cult’s intentions, and the identity of their leader. His good old friend, Paul the taxidermist, was a madman bent on slaying anyone in order to promote his strange beliefs, even if it meant skinning human prey. He was about to turn the page when he threw the book on the ground recoiled in terror, he could not stop panicking and repeatedly looked at his hands to make sure that they were still a human’s hands, not a beast’s paws. He backed away, reassuring himself that it was only the contents of a book, none of it actually real, just a lunatic’s perception of the universe. He moved silently out of the room and proceeded down a hallway pondering the connections between the pictures of him and the book’s bizarre contents. The only way that he could reassure himself now was to kill the man who intended to use him in their dark rituals detailed in that horrid tome that he was so anxious to get away from. “Fascinating how I can solve all of my problems by killing, am I so different from the cultists who dwell in the dungeon like structure?” he tried to shake these thoughts from his head and focused on the one thing that mattered, the fact that he was in danger. Inching his way along the wall, he finally reached the central room in the complex; the altar room, the one commonly used for sacrifices. It had to be the altar room, for the voices of mad jittering and chanting filled his ears, a tell tale sign that a sacrifice or some other depraved ritual was being eagerly awaited by the cultists that scuttled around on the floor on a sick parody of mankind. Feeling like a member of the inquisition he bolted directly into the room, brandishing his gun, negotiation was never an option for him, that was his gun’s job. A tall gaunt man came into view, wearing the hides and skins of animals he looked like a beastly abomination. Isaac stopped in the entryway, his gun still in front of him. Feeling the adrenaline, a thousand possibilities raced through his mind and it was amazing on how fast he decided on one of them. He pulled the trigger and felt the force of the shot send waves through his hands as the fiery discharge struck the man’s shoulder. As the cult leader looked up it became clear that the madman clothed in skins of beasts, was indeed his friend, and client, Paul. Isaac tried to move but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot or even speak, his personal life generally stayed out of his cases, he was just not prepared for it. Raising his hands and seemingly unbothered by the bullet in his shoulder, Paul muttered an eldritch incantation that echoed across the walls of the chamber, the horrid sound of his friend’s voice answered by the jittering cries of his new cult brethren. Isaac panicked and darted from one place to another as all of the scuttling cultists that he had seen earlier rushed up around him, clawing and biting him, bearing their bestial features. Isaac tried to squeeze off as many shots as possible but the moment was too much for him, he fell to the ground where he began kick, flail and moan in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Searing pain rushed through him as one of the creatures rammed its claws through his arm nailing it to the ground. A defiant kick from Isaac sent one of them flying back with a bloody jaw. One ran up from behind Isaac and slammed its arm against his head. Isaac saw the rest of the creatures through the hazy vision of his dying eyes, dragging him across the floor to the main altar where the disfigured form of his friend laughed in a cold voice.
Isaac found himself lying on the altar in the center room, held in place by an unseen force. A feral hand reached out of the shadows and came to rest on Isaac’s violently heaving chest. He had lost sight in one eye and his vision in the other was still hazy from blood loss. Summoning all of his remaining strength, he lifted his head and peered down his chest where a graft of animal flesh had been sewed onto his human form. Paul, now undistinguishable from the robe that he wore, had his hands over him, chanting and mumbling some unintelligible curse or blessing, at this point who could tell the difference between the two. Cthulhu…Azathoth…Shub-Niggurath…Y’golnac, it seemed like it would take a lifetime to understand these words if he didn’t give up on learning how to spell them first. Suddenly, all of the fatigue and weariness that filled his body left him only to be replaced with horrible pain. He screamed, a mixture of agony and terror on his face as he felt his soul depart for some ungodly realm. Paul’s laughter grew more and more intense as he fell into the sweet embrace of madness.
A whole week passed as Isaac lay on the altar, waiting to die. He had every right in the world to die, he was injured, immobile, ill, starved, and had the flesh of some creature sewn onto his chest. Every day he lay on that altar moaning and experiencing strange convulsions as his insides churned and hair sprouted across his skin. Not a day passed where he didn’t wonder if he was in hell.
Then, one day he felt strength not present before. He lifted himself from the altar and began to walk. He staggered at first, as he had not stood in over a week. But then to his surprise, he looked down at his feet, which had mutated into a strange form of paw. He had also become shorter, yet stronger, an animalistic quality indeed. It was only when he looked at his clawed hands that he realized what a hideous transformation he had undergone. Panic ensued as he quickly looked for tell tale signs of humanity on his body and was relived to feel his face, hairier than normal but still human. The relief that followed lasted for a brief moment before reality reared its ugly head and instead of fear, he felt deep hatred, for his mad captors, for his treacherous friend Paul, and for god. With a mad howl of his own, he ran with newfound speed down the dark hallways of the complex. Soon the scuttling shapes of the cultists came into view, looking amazed as well as terrified. Isaac did not hesitate to attack them head on, using his claws to rend them apart in a mad whirlwind of blood. He broke through the wall of cultists leaving behind a trail of tattered carcasses. His freedom was won with blood, by the new blood that pumped through his veins, and by the blood that spilled from the bodies that lie behind him. Raising his claws into the light of the full moon, he stared at the blood that twinkled and shined in the moonlight. He feared his madness.
Staggering his way back to his car, the thought crossed his mind that he had no thumbs, just claws. The transformation that he had slowly undergone left him for the most part human, but with obvious anthropomorphic qualities that were certain to impede his re-entry into normal society. Even though his change was so sudden, he knew exactly what to do. Arkham was filled with weird recluses and surely one more couldn’t do any harm to the city. He would make it back to his house that night and from there he would handle whatever life could throw at him. With this plan in mind, he began to walk back to the edge of the town. Suddenly, a weakness overcame him and he fell to the ground coughing out blood. He stared at his reflection in the crimson pool and the fact of his appearance finally struck him. He was hardly human, short, hairy, wrinkly skin, paws, and other features clearly set him apart from the humans. But certainly, if he had inherited all of these physical qualities, it would only be a matter of time before primal urge and instinct took over his mind. He had felt it once before, when he slaughtered the cultists and won his bloody freedom. He had always trusted his human instincts, maybe this was the reason that the cult chose him in the first place, they knew him, he had been on their trail ever since they first showed themselves. Finally, he pulled his gaze from the pool of blood that lay beneath him, and accepted reality.
Deciding that he had always, as a detective, relied on instinct, one little piece of advice from his subconscious couldn’t hurt at all. He immediately gave in to his primal urge and began to dig with the powerful claws that had replaced his hands. Going underneath the town, he continued to burrow franticly, as he feared a cave in. Bursting through an underground wall, he discovered himself in one of Arkham’s old style sewers. They were large enough for him to get around in but he knew nothing of the town’s layout and spent over half a day climbing up pipes and poking his head around the various storm drains to see if he recognized anything. Though he had already found a way to transverse the city, he worried by the spasmodic bursts of violent coughing in which he vomited blood and felt virulent churning sensations inside of him. By the time he found his home, and entered it through the poorly locked door, he had lost a great deal of blood and was beginning to feel the affects. The blurred vision, confusion, faintness of breath, it all made sense that he was experiencing these affects but why was he loosing so much blood in the first place and why wasn’t he dead already? He pulled himself into his bed for his first rest in days.
Halfway into the night, he awoke screaming. Pulling himself up in his bed, the vomiting began again, blood coating the walls as he writhed and contorted in agony. Pain surged through every point in his body as his bones reshaped themselves in a new image. He had no hope, no remorse, no sadness, no anger, nothing but pain filled his body. Staggering across the floor, he made his way to the bathroom where his legs gave way and he fell on the cold hard ground, covering it with blood. Then, carnage, liquid carnage poured from his mouth and before his very eyes, he saw his vital organs strewn out across the floor, he had lost his life force, as well as his sanity. The worst part came next as his skin became as paper and began to fall off. He wanted to stop it from happening, everything that he had admired and adored in his life as a human was leaving him but he was too weak to stop it. Helpless, he fell into the bathtub and let death’s cold embrace take him to far off realms.
He awoke to find himself alive, but not in any way he would like to be. Though grateful for surviving his experience the previous night, his new form was, less than desirable. It took him about an hour to muster up the courage to advance beyond his horrid remains on the floor. Leaving the ghastly contents of the bathroom behind him, he found it increasingly hard to stand. He eventually fell on the floor and began to trot on four legs, once again saved by instinct. Turning his head, he saw his reflection in the mirror. Instead of Isaac looking back at him, he saw a badger. Nothing special, just a big ole’ badger. Confused and disoriented he quickly paced about his room and tried to keep himself from panicking, which he already had begun to do. The cult may have taken his human body, but they would never take his human soul, he reassured himself. He tried to speak but all he could get out of himself was a growl. He repeated this exercise many times before he accepted the fact hat he could not speak and would have to learn to appreciate the value of the snarl and the growl. He walked around the house for the next couple of days always keeping two of his paws on the wall. He stacked some objects on the ground to get up onto his chair where he browsed the contents of his desk. While pushing through his notes, case files and issues of playboy, he stumbled across his dream journal, a yellow legal pad containing all of the sketches of his fleeting memories of fear. He flipped through it and suddenly, a subconscious terror built up to a point where he flung it across the room and fell back onto the floor. If there was any link between his previous life and his transformation it was in his dreams, but if it was there, he didn’t want to find it.
He eventually decided that it was time to seek an alternative to life as a beast. Fashioning a walker out of the pieces of a broken stool, he gathered the things that he was going to take with him in his bold venture into the world: a hat, a copy of The Golden Age Of Science Fiction, a photo album, all of his money, a tape player, and a small coat to stuff it in. Dragging a can of kerosene into the bathroom, he coated the festering pile of human remains with a layer of it before he used his mouth to light a match and with a quick turn of the head, he sent it all to hell in a fiery burst that would animate and then extinguish his previous life.
The firemen arrived at the scene of his home long after he had left. Mistaking the burnt human remains for his corpse, the end of Isaac Candaros was announced officially. He made his way down the back alleys, using his superior sense of smell to find food. In a desperate attempt to stay human, he made sure to spend some time each day to read a little and keep the beast at bay. He thought about pursuing Paul and killing him for revenge, but then, he remembered how he slaughtered the cultists and how they did nothing but gape in awe. Paul was sure to have plans for Isaac’s new badger form and he was intent on disrupting those plans. He remembered a case that he read about a couple years ago where an eccentric doctor by the name of Herbert West was performing deranged experiments on human beings where he would alter their bodies, change the functions of organs, and supposedly, resurrection of the dead, a true doctor Frankenstein indeed and Isaac looked forward to meeting him.
The one flaw with his plan was only realized after weeks of wandering looking for this crazed miracle worker. Falling into despair on the side of an alleyway he reached for a cigarette that he didn’t have and as he searched the garbage outside of a police station for some half-eaten doughnuts, he stumbled across a recently printed record of all of the releases from the Arkham sanitarium and their current residence and among al of the names on there, was Herbert West. He let out a yip of excitement and at that same moment, a bag of fresh, barley touched Shipley’s doughnuts was thrown out of the back door, heralding a victory feast for Isaac.
He cleverly used the alleyways to move unnoticed by the majority of the town towards Dr. West’s house. When he made it there he rapped on the door to no affect. Knowing that Dr. west was not going to admit him willingly, Isaac sat aside his walker and began to dig. Coming up through a tile in the middle of the floor, and dragging his walker up with him, he walked over to Herbert and looked him directly in the eye. The sight of a badger in a walker staring directly at you is enough to drive most men insane but Herbert West had seen things far more disturbing in his lifetime and was not easily shaken. The moment of eye contact lasted for a while until Isaac fiddled about in his books to use his mouth to draw out the photo album and chuck it across the room. Herbert West studied it inventively, as it contained the entire story of Isaac’s life within its pages. It was amazing for how long this silent communication lasted between man and badger as Herbert continued to study the album occasionally glancing up from its pages at Isaac with a somber expression in his eyes. He bent down to where he was at eye level with Isaac “Do you want to become human again? That is a fool’s errand, for you have transcended that stage, but I can understand how you cannot cope with your new body. I will warn you, you may live after this operation, do you really want to go through with that?” Realizing that he was speaking with a madman, Isaac merely nodded his head. Herbert West pulled out a large syringe full of sedative and as it pierced Isaac’s skin, he fell into his first peaceful slumber in months.
The operation passed without his knowledge and within a week Isaac was able to walk without aid, speak, and perform any tactile task with his new clawed hands. As he was leaving West’s house he spoke his first words from his new vocal chords. “Dr. West, I cannot thank you enough. I am leaving now but I must ask one final favor, do you have a gun I can borrow? I’m going hunting.” he said with a spiteful sneer on his face.
His vengeance was almost complete; he triumphed over the cult, over the transformation, over the beast and next he moved to secure victory over Paul. He made his way the same dark woods and the same dark lair within them. Navigating with a delightful insanity that allowed him to view the place in a comical manner, he found the center room where he proceeded to tear apart the book that had caused him all of this trouble in the first place. Then, as he walked forward, Uzi in hand, hummed a delightful little tune that echoed throughout the walls of the hideout, a mockery of his own to further insult the cult that had cursed him. When he found the center room, he fell to the ground in despair as he saw the mutilated body of Paul, the same symbol that was above the bodies of the victims of all of the other killings, a star surrounding a burning eye, drawn the victim’s blood. This was not suicide; some one other than Isaac was on the hunt for the mad.
Making his way back to Herbert West’s house he arrived to find his friend Herbert laying in a pool of blood dying, the sign frightening sign drawn across Herbert’s wall. The man that gave Isaac the gift of humanity was dying, lying there dying and there was noting Isaac could do. Infuriated, he ran outside fueled by primal urge as he looked up into the sky and followed the scent of his friend’s killer. His mad chase lead him to the glowing walls of the church, whose stained glass windows bore many scars of repair. Isaac did not hesitate to charge inward brandishing his weapon. The scent ended at a confessional booth that Isaac tore apart in anger. Outward jumped a middle-aged man in dark clothes and a heavy sword slung about his shoulder. Isaac dashed at him only to realize the fault of his actions halfway through his charge and pull away to the cover of a nearby column. The man charged Isaac with a barbaric frenzy of his own, swinging his sword madly. Isaac promptly let loose a volley from his Uzi that shattered the man’s blade and wounded his thigh. The man pulled out a gun of his own and fired at the area around Isaac, knocking over a candle and igniting a tapestry. The gunfight carried on for several more minutes until the entire church was in flames. Both warriors had exhausted their ammunition and set upon each other with tooth and claw. Completely ignoring the human pat of him, Isaac charged in a snarling frenzy, biting and ripping at the air around him. The man then drew forth one more pistol and with the words “And they shall know that I am the lord…” shot Isaac through the lung spraying badger blood all over the floor of the church. “When I lay my wrath upon them.” he continued as he stared at the dying body of the badger. Isaac looked up at the diorama of damned souls falling into hell and muttered his last words “Lucifer, you better be ready.” And with an astounding push of strength he locked his badger jaws into the man’s arm, crushing the bones in it, and for those last few fading moments in this world, the taste of blood, the searing pain, and the sound of screaming could not be heard from him and for that last dying minute, he felt at home.