The Morning Star

      My husband lies in the hallway as a mangled corpse, and only I would ever know why. It is with this morbid knowledge that I am sitting here now, against the wall, preparing to blow out my own brains, out of fear that I should meet the same fate as him.

           It was April 8^th, the day of the solar eclipse. My husband – John – myself, and our dog, Edgar, sat on the hill behind our house. Edgar chewed happily at a stick he found while John and I sat on two lawn chairs we brought to this secluded hill in our backyard. It was one of the things that made it so nice living so remote – the stark lack of other people around made our little eclipse party that much more special as if it were a private phenomenon where the only invites were sent to us three here.

           John sighed and let out a short raspberry. “Well,” he said coolly as he took off his eclipse glasses, “I’m gonna get started on some burgers. Think I’ll grab a beer, too – you want one, babe?”

           I didn’t turn to face him, but instead kept the glasses over my eyes as I said, “I’m fine, thanks.” I leaned my head back with a content smile on my face as I heard the familiar sound of an aluminum can being cracked open, shortly followed by the smell of charcoal on the portable grill John brought with us. “Ya know you should give your peepers a break. Even with those glasses, I don’t think you should look up there for more than a few minutes at a time,” my husband crooned. I waved a hand carelessly in his direction. “I’ll be fine, grill boy,” I mused, “you just worry about getting my lunch going.”

           He chuckled then asked Edgar, “What about you, bud? You want a beer? A burger?” In response, the dog made his stereotypical sound that indicated both mild excitement and contentment – a mellow “Arunf,” and a handful of little wags of his tail. I turned my head around and flicked my glasses down to look at my husband. “If you give my dog beer, I’ll turn you into a burger!” I said in a jeer. He laughed and shrugged at me, and I couldn’t help but smile at him before turning back to return my lean into the lawn chair.

           As I resituated myself and leaned back in my chair. I noticed something extraordinary in the sky besides the total eclipse. “Babe, look – there’s something in the sky!” I excitedly cried to my husband. I didn’t realize the effect this would have on John as he looked up at the sky – I knew instantly he had temporarily blinded himself by looking up at the eclipse without the glasses. He then stumbled and stuck his hand on the heated grill. “Fuck!” he yelled out.

           I stood up and rushed to his side, “Babe!” I yelled. I rushed to his side. John was holding his right hand with its reddish skin up while using his left hand to massage his eyes. “It’s fine,” he said with a pained chuckle, “I just messed myself up a little.”

           I softly grabbed his right wrist and pulled the hand to me. “It doesn’t look too bad,” I said, “but it’s going to need to be iced ASAP!” I looked up at him. He was looking at me, blinking rapidly. “I think I’m okay,” he mumbled through a grin, “Sight’s coming back. I know they said not to look at an eclipse, but I didn’t know it would be that quick. Thank gosh I looked away, huh?” I laughed and hugged him. He hugged me back, saying, “So, what did you see, anyway-?” but as he finished his sentence, there was a loud crash behind him, causing tremors in the ground all around us. He whirled on his heel to face the direction of the crash, his arm instinctively held out in front of me.

           Still frantically blinking his eyes, John moved towards a small crater that was not there mere moments before. He leaned over the edge, almost whispering, “Well, holy shit…”

           Tentatively, I moved to his side and looked down. There sat a small rock, glowing a strange ominous emerald green as smoke rose from the heated, porous stone. Edgar growled hesitantly at it as John leaned forward towards it. “What are you doing?” I hissed at him, “Get away from it!”

           Before my words registered to him, John had already reached out – oddly, with his already burnt hand – and touched it. He instantly pulled it back with a disgruntled yipe and stuck his fingers in his mouth. “It’s hot,” he said around his fingers. “No shit, it’s hot, John!” I scolded him, “I’m pretty sure it just plummeted through the atmosphere so yes, it’s fucking hot!”

           John only chuckled again like he almost always does, as he backed away from the rock in the small crater. “you said… Ah, you said, what, you saw something else in the sky?”

           I followed him away and said, “Yeah, it looked like a meteor or something.”

           John twisted his face in a thoughtful look, already ignorant of the burning sensation in his hand. “Oh yeah, I think I read something about a rare comet that’s visible at the same time as this eclipse. Comet 12 Pons Brooks, I think. Also called the Devil’s Comet, because it looks like it has horns.”

           I looked down at the rock in the crater and asked, “Did this… Did this come from the Devil’s Comet?” I looked up at him, my eyes clearly worried. “It’s possible, but unlikely,” he said with a shrug, “comets are mostly ice. Not like meteors, full of rock, ya know?”

           Pulling at his shoulder, I said, “Well whatever it is, let’s get you back home to ice your hand. We’ll have burgers for dinner.”

***

           John’s hand had been iced with a healing ointment generously lathered all about it. We had those burgers we talked about for dinner, and now we lay in our bed. “It’s just a cut,” John muttered as he inspected his hand. Though the entire bottom side of his hand had been scorched, he was focused on one small cut on the tip of his pointer finger where he had touched the fallen rock from space, “but it burns,” he said this last word with an irritated growl.

           I was happily enjoying partway through Dean Koontz’ ‘The Watchers’, and eagerly wanted to finish this paragraph at least, but my husband’s constant going-on about his hand disturbed my reading. I put the book down with a sigh. “Well,” I said heatedly, “Maybe you shouldn’t have touched the meteor.”

           “Comet,” he corrected, then, with a frown, added, “I think. Besides, I still hold that it’s your fault I put my hand on the entire grill.”

           “It’s not,” I retorted, “but even if it was, you’re not complaining about the full burn, are you? It’s just that little cut on your finger – the finger that touched the comet – which was entirely your fault.”

           John made to give some smart remark back – I could tell from the grin spreading on his face – but I leaned in and kissed him before a word could escape. “But I think we should get some sleep. I think it would do you, and your healing hand, some good.” I looked up and smiled at him, and his grin grew wider before he kissed me in return. “That’s a good idea,” he mused.

           He turned over to turn off the lamp on his nightstand and rolled back over to hold me in his arms, as we do every night, as the most comfortable for both of us. Not long after, we were both asleep.

           I don’t know how much time had passed after that. All I knew was I woke up in pitch blackness, and I saw the light underneath the bathroom door, and I heard the sink running. “Baby?” I said in a dreamy state, “Are you okay?”

           Silence for a while. Then the sink turned off, and John said in a groggy, scratchy voice, “It’s just a cut, but it burns.”

           I got out of bed and walked towards the bathroom door. The door swung open by John’s hand, and when I saw him I screamed. I screamed, and howled, and sobbed at the sight before me.

           There John stood in the doorway. The small cut on the finger of his hand had swelled to at least four times his finger width and had spread up his arm, growing thicker as it went up. It overlapped his bicep, until it flooded his neck, the swollen and pustuled meat throbbing almost a foot into the air, forcing his head to crook to the side in an unnatural state as he looked at me almost upside-down.

           His right eye had become milky, almost ethereal. That side of his face throbbed with aggressive tendrils of blood-poisoned veins. Through the horror of it all, John smiled at me – that same ‘it’s all good’ smile he had given me for five years of marriage. “Babe,” he said in that same scratchy voice which still held his usual calm demeanor, “I think I’m unwell.”

           He reached his swollen, pus-dripping arm towards me, and I howled in fear again. In my panic, I turned and ran from our master bedroom, down the hall, and towards John’s personal office. I slammed the door of the study behind me.

           “Honey?” John said as he gently rapped on the door. “I think we should talk.”

           I dragged John’s chair across the floor and shoved it under the door handle. I didn’t know if it would really work, but it was the best solution I could think of.

           Not that I would ever know. The door handle never rattled. The pounding on the door became more rapid and more intense until it sounded as if John was punching the door, with all of his might, over and over. Bang! Bang! BANG!

           Yet his voice kept that same, sweet, calming tone. “Honey,” BANG! “I think something’s wrong,” BANG! “I think we should talk about this, babe.” BANG!

           BANG!

           BANG!

           BANG!

           “HONEY!” John yelled. Now the sweetness from his voice had gone. Now, he sounded like something hungry. Something furious. Something that wanted to hurt me.

           “Open the door, babe!” still the door knob never rattled, though the door had begun to splinter. BANG!

           Frantically I tore through John’s various drawers of his desk until I found what I was looking for – his six-shooter revolver. I pulled it, “Babe! What are you doing in there?!” John yelled. I checked the chamber and saw it was fully loaded with all six rounds.

           As I closed the chamber, the banging and the yelling abruptly stopped. I stood motionless, listening and waiting, but nothing followed. Gingerly I moved the chair from the door, and waited again. Still nothing. I opened the door, slowly with soft creaks.

           I looked down and was reminded of a scene not too long before John and I went to our bedroom. Before even when I put the cream on John’s hands. I was reminded of when John held Edgar’s head between his hands, and with the hand with the little burning cut, he rubbed Edgar’s head a little closer to his mouth, which Edgar then licked fiercely while John told Edgar what a good boy he was.

           Now I saw John lying motionless on the floor, his chest not rising or slowing with breath, but sitting completely still. His face held the same ‘it’s all good’ smile, while his eyes – both the still good one and the seemingly dead one – felt as if they were locked directly on me. Below this face, however, was Edgar, who was eagerly chewing through the abdomen of John. I saw around the hallway that wherever John’s blood had been sprayed or spilled, a hideous green fungus grew strikingly fast from the spilled fluid and reached greedily toward the sky, growing at a noticeably fast rate.

           “Ed…Eddie?” I said in a weak, softened voice. The dog ceased its elated chewing in my husband’s chest, lifted its head, and turned to face me.

           Getting a fuller image of Edgar, I saw that the side of the skin on his belly had fallen away, revealing the circuitous organs within his own stomach that thrummed systematically when a chunk of John’s flesh moved downward through the organic material. Edgar’s head looked up at me, and he acted in such a way that was so casual, so in the norm, for the creature, that he said, “Arunf,” and gave the same handful of little wags of his tail. As his body vibrated with this mildly excited wag, Edgar’s right eye popped out of its socket and hung haphazardly from the slim bit of tendon that still held its connection to the brain.

           A choked sob escaped my throat, and with trembling hands, I raised the six-shot.

           “Oh, babe, don’t.” John’s corpse said. It was then I learned that his dead – dead, for which they were – eyes, were actually following me. “Don’t hurt our baby.”

           I wish I would’ve something – anything at all, in case there was anything left of my husband in there. But I said nothing, I could think of nothing to say. I saw the gaping chasm in my husband’s chest, and I knew that whatever was speaking was not John. I fired.

           The round hit John in the forehead, leaving a clear circle but exploding a cryptid green matter from the back of his head which I knew was not natural. The spatter of blood from the back of his head twisted and contorted, and the backward parts of my brain were reminded of a YouTube video I saw once where someone was showing basic science and held a magnet towards liquid mercury and made it dance. John’s blood looked like that, though to what external pull the blood was reaching toward I could not say.

           John’s head slumped back, retaining its innocent, pure grin. But at this, Edgar turned his head once more to me and began to snarl. “Eddy,” I whimpered, “Eddy, no.”

           Edgar leaped at me, jaws snapping wildly like a wounded animal which, I suppose he was.

           He dropped me to my back with my forearm held against his throat, keeping his wild snapping from tearing apart my face. Edgar’s zombified claw scratched my forearm, and I fired the revolver two times.

           The first shot missed, penetrating the hallway wall, but the second shot hit his temple. Edgar slumped lifelessly against my body.

           I rolled the dead dog off myself and sat up. I pressed my face close to my knees and began to weep. Then I began to hear a strange creaking as if something were slowly moving towards me. I looked up and saw that same creeping fungus from my husband’s brain, though now it was all around me, quickly growing closer across the floorboards and along the walls, closer to me. I fired a shot at the fungus, only after seeing it explode to witness it grow faster than before. Again I shot at it, and again it regenerated faster than it was originally spreading across the room towards me.

           I don’t know if it was some divine providence or the force of some twisted malice, but I was able to recall just then that the gun had only one round left in it.

           I watched as this creeping green fungus reached ever closer towards me. I heard them, as they grew closer; I heard my husband, John, calling for me to come and check out something cool he just found. I heard my dog Edgar yowling for food, or whining for pets and companionship. I heard every word by John and every distinctive sound by Edgar in the fungus. I looked at the cut on my forearm.

           “It’s just a cut,” I said with a defeated snarl.                       

           I looked at the laceration on my forearm from Edgar and felt its sting. The horribly, gruesome sting from just this small cut in my skin, and how it could feel so otherworldly wrong – the pain in it was growing, it was a pain I had never felt before in my life, the intense heat and fire of it.

           I pulled the hammer back on the revolver.

           “But it burns.”