Dopecentury XXXV --- The grassland
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The route steadily dwindles; from a dirt road, to a two-track lane with a knee-high grassy median, to a single track of mud that cut through the tall grasses on either side; finally it peters out entirely, fading away to a thin dirt trail that ends at a clearing with a large rock in the center.
He scrambles up the rock and stands atop the highest point; from here he can see the extent of the grassland: it goes on for an eternity, right out to the horizon in all directions except the one he had come from in following the track; back that way, far off in the distance were the black smoking towers of the city, shrunk down until they resembled nothing so much as an array of paleolithic standing stones whose purpose and meaning had long been lost to the culture that lived among them.
In the opposite direction, the grasslands spread over the horizon towards a high mountain range: black, jagged cutting teeth biting up through the grass; a thin plume of blue smoke drifting up between two sharp peaks and rising high into the atmosphere: his destination lies at the source of that smoke.
He has long had a fear of this grassland, dreading this day of this crossing that he now faces. Something in the sound disturbs him to the root of his soul: having grown up among trees and the sounds they make — rustling and creaking and clapping in the wind — he had come to think of the sound of trees as the sound of comfort and home; the near-silence of the grassland, interspersed with the soft brushing when the wind blew, feels alien and wrong, a different environment, a wholly different planet on which he did not belong; the grassland did not welcome him, did not want him there, did not want him moving across it; ultimately, he would prefer to be crossing any other landscape — forests, mountains, taiga, or ocean — rather than cross this compressed, perfectly flat blanket of grass.
But this journey had long been necessary, the requirement for it building slowly but surely until it could no longer be put off; now he has to cross the grassland or perish.
He slips his way down off the rock and staring ahead at the smoke in the sky in the far distance, he parts the edge of the grass with his hands and moves forward; there is no longer any track or path or landmarks to act as waypoints, it is just straight on across the grass until the mountains break through and end the dominion of grass.
The real fear of the grassland is not the sound, discomfiting as it may be, but the monsters that live there; he has prepared himself with the best equipment he could find: high boots of leather, thick woolen trousers and socks, long-sleeved canvas jacket, a head-net; but almost immediately he can sense that the equipment is of little use; he can feel the tiny clawing, crawling legs making their way up his socks, under the cuffs, up his legs; he is still within sight of the rock when he stops to lift his trouser leg and see the ticks already biting in — their tiny saw-mouths cutting his flesh — while other scurried further up, clearly targeting the soft fleshy area behind his knee.
He brushes off the loose ticks, and carefully pulls the ones that had already begun the process of embedding; but he sighed with the futility of it: he had come such a short distance, and had so far yet to go; there would only be so much he could do to keep the ticks at bay; he thought of stories he had heard of large animals in the north — moose and elk and the like — done in by hundreds of thousands of ticks, vampirically removing the blood of the animals until they were desiccated husks of fur.
He trudges on; the ground under the grass is soft and rich and damp; his boots regularly sink down to the heels, just enough to slow him and make him an easier target for the ticks to latch onto; this, he thinks, is certainly some kind of hell.
The sun climbs up into the sky and the day warms; the wind blows one final gust, rippling the grass in a kaleidoscope of yellows and greens, and then dies slowly away; the air grows hot and lifts the moisture off the grass making it extremely humid.
Gnat rise up from the grass and swarm his head, the gaps in the netting are not fine enough to keep the gnats out, and they soon number in the hundreds inside the netting, and in the thousands outside; he continually waves them away, but it does little good.
Meanwhile, the ticks work their way farther up his body, he knows they are biting into his groin, his stomach, his back, his armpits; his hand under the netting finds some crawling up his neck; he pulls them off and flicks them away.
It becomes part of the rhythm of his trudging; take a few steps, then wave at the gnats, then brush at the ticks, then slog on a few more steps.
Hours pass without change, break, or relief; the sun lowers itself toward the mountains; the air cools, but the wind doesn’t return.
Now is the time of the beast that kills more humans than any other.
Thick, black clouds of mosquitoes rise up, vocalizing their threatening hum above the silent grass. He thinks of stories he has heard of the days of the gulag, when prisoners were executed by tying them and leaving them “to the mosquitoes.” A hundred-thousand pin-pricks of death; the threatening hum is a mortal threat.
He tries to move more quickly to generate his own wind; a mosquito move against even a modest wind; but the soft earth limits his ability to keep up any kind of speed; he inevitably settles back into a trudge, and the mosquitoes regroup and dive-bomb any spot they can sense his warm skin in the cooling air.
Night falls; and with it come the cooler air that slows and disperses the mosquitoes; with the darkness he loses his ability to move towards his destination, so he is forced to stop and rest.
He lays down on the grass, which is comfortable enough; and he gives thanks for the departure of the mosquitoes; but there’s nothing to stop the ticks; in the morning, he will have to spend some time removing them before he begins, he thinks to himself; but unless there’s a strong wind in the morning, that will be a time of yet more mosquitoes; he will be pulling ticks and swatting at mosquitoes at the same time, and maybe dealing with gnats too.
This, he thinks to himself, is why no one lives on these grasslands; this land is defended by monsters and beasts that consume human flesh in their millions; it would be best to leave these lands be, to not ever have any humans here; certainly, if he survives, he will never return.