Cruddleberry part 3. Read the previous articles here: Part 1, Part 2.
Skroom Tattlewink
Oh, salutations and tribulations dear reader.
Things have changed. Cruddleberry season is over.
A whole 305 made it out alive this season. Only ten of you got it right to the digit. Congrabulations to you! Moolah will soon rest in your dusty pockets.
The Cruddle survivors greyed as usual, starting their migration out of lake Heinous and into the river Ganglia. This year, a terrible plan manifested itself into my mind, almost like the Cruddle itself possessed my rational mind. I followed the survivors, the drifters, as they propelled like sentient floatsam.
I must have followed them for ten kilometres, so high is my dedication to you. Endless. I crawled through the restricted zone, past the illy clad Cruddle high-priests and into the thick of the forest. Oh, what a forest it is. Dense as night; a silent vacuum void of chirps and chatter. It was only me there together with untouched and neglected flora. Have you ever had those dreams of unspoken, unknowing fear? The ones that stick like morose glue through the morning, and day, stirring in your mind until the gloaming arrives and you decide to smoke krahash instead? The silent forest echoed with those dreams.
I continued, following the river, keeping a keen eye on the drifters, their lips red and swollen from the berries. I went where no one sane has ever been. I went to the eroded dam.
Smirking is bad for you, yet that is what I did. Jackpot, I thought, no one has ever seen this dam and come back alive to tell it. I went close to study the grey, rocky formations. Oh, what comes next is seat-gripping material.
The dam was alive – yes, alive. It rattled with the solidified corpuses of the drifters; thousands, maybe even a million. Generations of people, through hundreds of Cruddleberry seasons, all forming the dam with their masses, moulding into their neighbours. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t.
I took a shard, someone’s encrusted elbow skin. Would be nice memorabilia, I thought, or a trinket to sell on the markets in Crink Street (You’ve all been there. Don’t deny the ingrained debauchery of man). But, hold your breath dear reader – one does not take from the eroded dam. I learnt the hard way.
The ground shook as the dam erupted in the moans of the masses, all alive and conglomerated into an aggregated entity. They flailed, using hardened hands and bit with crumbling, bleeding teeth. The sight was enough to frighten Zebropyth himself, and needless to say, it frightened me too. I did what any respectable and upstanding citizen would do and I ran.
I ran like the roughest rivers, through brambles and thick copses. The ground rumbled in sinister hunger and my mind opened and saw the big Beaver as if the thoughts forced themselves upon me. For the slightest of moments I was only a vessel to receive this nightmarish imagery. Oh, and what imagery! I will not describe him, because no words can ever do it justice, but I can tell you this: I don’t think that was a beaver.
Oh, do not trespass the boundaries of the unseen, they say, because they are left unseen by archaic laws that triumphs our reasoning. Bullsplats, I say – it is our deafening roars against boundaries and the revolt against creation itself that wakes us up to roam another day, may our bones be sore or our minds filled with carnage. We do not go quietly below the crust of the earth.
The slick cold-sweat and mindless tremble left me after I entered Ardnard, like the embrace of an absent, yet caring mother. I tried to visit the botanical garden for a calm-down, and perhaps get my hands on some of that sweet, hidden barakki (It is in the east wing, next to those orange melon-like things. Thank me later), but they told me to fuck off and write something useful for a change. I hope you are reading this now, Mr. Botanical garden man, and no, the Institute didn’t catch me. May the big Beaver enter your dull, pompous mind.
As always, I will be back with more intriguing news of Ardnard as soon as I can. For now, I am hiding from the Liquescent Institute in a rather grim place. Luckily, a generous reader sent me some krahash. I will smoke it as I watch the gloaming, slowly forgetting what lurks beyond lake Heinous.