The Rot

a horror story

For a long time I thought I was going insane.

There was a brick wall, very tall and very thick. Trees bulged from the top, vines climbed down from the branches and over the wall descending along the brick lines, covering the whole top half, and poised to take it over completely. I passed by that abandoned manor as I walked to my part time job every morning. It was the last of its kind in the area, all around it were warehouses and department stores, and around them apartment buildings, which all looked the same, except for the colors, which varied for each neighborhood. I think that’s why I noticed it, because that house, and that wall, and those trees, seemed so out of place. I had never seen anyone coming in or out, the gate was on the other side, but everyone more or less knew that many people slept there permanently, and many more came and went. That first time, the disease wasn’t yet advanced enough to make me stop, I wasn’t going to be late for work on account of what could only be some sort of hallucination.

I was walking on the other side of the street, and from there the wall just seemed to be very slightly out of focus, then as I slowed my pace and focused my eyes, it seemed to be trembling, shimmering with an eerie and diseased sort of light. Like when you have a fever, you glow in a sickly way, that’s what it was like, although I remember thinking too that it appeared to be boiling, or about to start melting. I promptly ignored it and continued walking. It was early, my mind was still half asleep, that must have been it. In the afternoons I returned by bus directly from college, so I never saw it then. My parents used to say that it was dangerous crossing that street, along that wall, not a place for a young woman to go alone, but funnily enough, as time went on, they stopped saying it. I think it was three days after, three days of noticing it on my morning walk to work, when I could no longer ignore what I was seeing, and that I was seeing it in that specific place and nowhere else, and so I had to examine it more closely.

It wasn’t just an appearance. Before I got near enough to touch it, my nostrils caught a scent coming from the wall, and it was unmistakable, the stink of rotten flesh. For a second I contemplated not touching it, but I had to make sure I wasn’t imagining it all. When I put the palm of my hand against the brick there was a thick slime oozing out from it. I resisted the urge to remove my hand right away and instead dug my fingers. Although pulsating, the wall seemed to be slightly shriveled, or shriveling. I remember thinking that it felt like touching a giant wound, throbbing with sick. That’s still the best way to describe it.

And it wasn’t just the wall. The vines were suffering from the same disease, and so were the canopies of the trees. Instinctively I stepped back to see how far it had spread. Vertically it was down to my knees, and it covered almost the entire wall horizontally, on the left it seemed to have already turned the corner. The three senses together gave a single answer, but my mind wasn’t ready to even conceive, much less understand it. The whole thing was rotting. Rotting as if it was a piece of meat. I knew that what I was seeing and touching and smelling was impossible, so I did not believe it. I understand now, after all that’s passed, that we trust our senses much less than we trust our ideas, that when the eyes and the mind disagree, the eyes are the ones who are usually made to yield. As a regular person who did not believe in extraordinary things, the only explanation I could accept was that the problem was not in front of me but within me, it was not one I could touch or smell or see, it was in my head, that’s what needed fixing.

The next day was a friday and I took the bus to work. The weekend I spent home without ever going out, I told my parents I needed to study. The next week too I always took the bus and by sunday the whole thing was out of my mind, at least enough that I could walk again to work. Still, I was taking some precautions, I did not want to be insane, and I did not want it to be true. The idea that not looking at it would make it go away is quite childish, of course, but at the time it seemed completely reasonable. And so it was that I walked on the other side of the street from the wall, I kept my head down, and as I approached the place I hid it further in my coat, but just as I thought victory was assured, and my peripheral vision could no longer catch any sight of the wall, I saw ahead of my feet a small patch of the rot. It was spreading. I stood there for a minute or two, staring at it before I had the courage to raise my head and look at the wall. It was now completely covered, and it had started to spread into the sidewalk. Still it struck me as strange at the time, before I came to know how it worked, because the little patch wasn’t directly connected to the rest. I hoped it didn’t rain, that was my first thought. Can you imagine, the rot falling from the sky.

But that wasn’t it. It soon did start to rain, but it was just plain water. I welcomed it, as if it could wash away the filth, but all it did was slightly dilute and spread the rot onto the pavement. I had been standing there for a handful of minutes, quite a few people walked past me and didn’t seem to notice anything, one even trampled the puddle of rot. A few also walked right by the wall without noticing anything. It just confirmed my insanity. Obviously it couldn’t be true. First of all, because it went against every natural law, it was unseen, and for whatever reason, unthinkable. Second of all, and this was even more important, no one else saw it. Those people walking past the wall, if the rot really was there, they would have noticed it, at least one. But no, they just kept walking. Yet how could I deny what I was seeing, what I smelled and had touched. If this was an hallucination, it was the most powerful and immersive hallucination in the history of hallucinations. But then again, wasn’t every schizophrenic convinced of the same, swearing it was true, when everybody else could see nothing was there. If I was in the presence of such a person, I would not take their stories seriously. I’d pity them, but not believe them. Now I was the one to be pitied and disbelieved.

This feeling of paranoia and confusion lasted about three months. I resisted the idea of going to a doctor for a few weeks, and I had spoken to no one about it precisely to avoid that fate, thinking that the best thing to do was to forget about it all. Most days I took the bus, yet every once in a while I had the courage to walk to work. I never turned my head, I continued walking as if I had seen nothing, just like everybody else. Until one day my mother and I went shopping in the city center. We were crossing the street, my mother was just ahead of me, when I saw a drop of rot fall on her from the sky and I could not contain the scream. At the time I was far from imagining that it had been, in fact, a bird, unable to fly, finally succumbing to the rot. When I explained what I’d seen, my mother said she felt nothing, turned around to show me the back of her head, where the drop had supposedly fallen, and there it was, a drop of rot, gravity had spread it thinly over the neck. I touched it, and it was just as the wall and the vines, a wound, the smell of sick, rotten flesh. But my mother couldn’t see it on the shop window when I asked her to turn and look, she couldn’t smell anything and when she touched it she felt nothing out of the ordinary. Here was the final verdict, insanity. It is one thing to have a slight visual distortion, or even an obsession that you see in every corner, the mind plays tricks on you, everybody knows that, but it has to be faint, I think that’s the key. If it’s faint you know you’re not losing your mind. If you can see every detail of your nightmare up close, you know you’re in trouble. And I could not only see it, but smell it and feel it. And my own mother could not. This was not like the random strangers on the street failing to notice the wall. This was someone I knew and that knew me, telling me to my face I was insane.

I could have easily spent months going to the therapist to talk about it as if it was all in my mind, before I could see it out the window, causing real destruction. I have imagined it sometimes, going to the therapist, talking it out, and then, one day, the rot breaks through the window, or kicks in the door. I suppose I would have been terrified, and then completely puzzled, because no matter what, the doctor wouldn’t notice it. He could be injured, visibly, and still he would attribute it to any cause other than the rot. This is what happened to my parents. About a month and a half after my first sight of the rot, it appeared in our house. One night as I was washing the dishes, I heard a creak, I looked down to where the sound had come from, and there it was, the rot. It was a small spot on our floor, and it seemed to be bubbling from below. My mother, who was beside me, noticed I had stopped washing dishes, and this is where it gets really strange. She asked, Are you seeing the thing, that’s what she called it. I lied, No, nothing. And then she said, You know, there does seem to be something there. My heart raced with excitement, Really do you see it, but it didn’t last long. She said, Well I see something, but it’s not like you describe, it’s barely visible, oh well, I’m sure it’s nothing. We got back to the dishes. The next day it was bigger and it had started to smell. My father said, Yep, it’s spreading alright, and my mother said, Maybe it’s coming from the neighbors, there are so many cooped up in there. We didn’t really know the neighbors, so it was my father who went to knock on their door. He came back a few minutes later and said, It’s coming from there, on their ceiling, but I could barely see it, and they of course denied it, there’s not much we can do, as your mother said, it’s nothing. I was very confused, was I insane or not. If I was, how come they saw something, and if I was not, why didn’t they see the horror I saw, but something vague and irrelevant. Now, looking back, I think everyone could see it, they just couldn’t believe it.

Where was I. Ah yes, the accident. The rot continued to spread on our kitchen floor. It took about a month to cover it completely, and soon after it did, the floor caved in. My father was standing there, precisely examining the floor, saying, Yes, it’s spreading, but I still think it’s nothing to worry about, the neighbors have it much worse and they’re still fine. He hit his head against a cupboard door as he was falling and died instantly. Two neighbors were crushed to death, which was a small miracle, given how many lived in that small apartment. My mother, perhaps due to shock, could only say, What on earth could have caused this, that’s all she said, over and over, first shouting, then crying, then whispering. From then on we stayed with family, just two blocks from our building, I would come home at least once a week to see if the rot had spread, and it had. I now knew I was not insane, and that everyone else was.

Eventually it reached my uncle’s house too, only a drop at first, of course, and no one else seemed worried, but I did not feel safe there anymore, so I spent as much time as possible out, at work, in college, with friends, in the park, wherever there was no rot. But it always found me eventually, and still no one else could see it. Once, I think I saw a man who was noticing it, he was staring intently at a rotting movie theater, and the expression on his face was not of one who was seeing the movies on offer, but one of disgust, which is the correct feeling to have with regards to the rot, except when it’s fear. I remember feeling a strong and sudden urge to talk to him, but just as quickly I froze, I could be mistaken, it wasn’t worth the risk. This is what happens when you see something that no one else around you sees, you cannot help closing yourself up. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had said anything, would it have made a difference, being still so early. I don’t know. Maybe not. And maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have met you. And if that’s the case, I’m glad I didn’t.

I think it took about a year for the rot to spread everywhere, or rather, for the effects to be undeniable, even if they denied everything else but them. Even when life or limb or livelihood was lost, as was the case with my father and soon after with other people around me, the matter was shrugged off, the most absurd explanations and discussions then took place, it was like someone trying to explain a car crash, but without ever acknowledging the presence of the vehicles. Only much, much later, when basic services and basic order started to fail, there were protests, but to tell you the truth I still think that most of them did not know exactly what they were protesting. Until then the effects of the rot were rarely talked about on television, and after it they became commonplace, but still no one could say what it was, there was no name that could be used. Those who fought back, even in some small way, were considered criminals, and insane. The first high profile case was of a farmer who saw it spread from one of his barns into his citrus orchard. To contain it the man had set both on fire, and it worked, the before and after pictures left me no doubt, before there was a rotten barn and rotten orchard, after there was no building and no trees, and no rot. Yet all most could see was destruction by fire, and for no reason. He was interviewed as he left the courtroom and made a plea to everyone to fight this plague, but to most he merely seemed insane, he was imprisoned and never heard from again. Of course by then prisons were all contaminated as well, to such a degree that soon their walls were starting to crumble, allowing those inside to escape. I also remember another man who went around shooting animals who were visibly infected and would eventually come to spread the disease, then burning their carcasses, or throwing them to the sea. He too was imprisoned. Then there was this woman. She was being... No, I’m not going to tell you this. How insane everyone was. I remember a colleague at work, showing her pictures and videos, and it was always the same. An animal being consumed by rot was merely sick, a house crumbling from the rot was mere disrepair, a forest dying from the disease was pollution. And she was not the exception, everyone was like this. My family, unfortunately, was too.

I finally got out of my uncle’s house. I rented a room, for that was all I could afford, but in a neighborhood that was still rot free. I remember distinctly being full of hope when I realized why the prices were so high. It was not just because it was rot free, it was because other people saw what I saw, they knew it was rot free and that’s why they wanted to go there. Eventually I found out that I was wrong, that most people who moved there also could not see the truth, or they didn’t want to, some were clearly lying to avoid the charges of insanity, others were lying to themselves, but by then it didn’t matter anymore, because the rot had gotten there too, and everywhere.

I came to know quite a few things about the rot but I really don’t remember exactly when or where I learned most of the facts, except for one. Soon after moving out, I went back to visit my mother in that rot infested house, and building, and neighborhood. I got out of the bus two stops before the house, I wanted to see the wall, as maybe there had been some important development, and there had been. The wall had crumbled, and the rubble was a giant, rotten, throbbing wound. I was about to turn my head and continue walking when I saw a creature climb over the rubble from the inside. I was sure even then, before I saw every stage of the transformation occur, that below the rot there was a human, or there used to be.

Except for the appearance, the touch and the smell, the rot did not affect all things equally. First of all, water, and anything that was submerged in water, was not affected at all. The rot touched it and advanced no more, and it could also be used to remove the rot from items, if the contamination was not too far advanced, which after a certain point proved to be essential for food, as most every item in the grocery store was at least partially contaminated. Buildings, walls, rocks, glass, metal, wood, trees, plants and soil were as if conquered territory, for a while they retained their shapes and sizes and placements, but all was slowly crumbling and joining the endless slop of rot, serving as a base for the disease to spread in a steady and incremental manner. Animals that came in contact with the disease ended up like the buildings and the trees, rotting statues, until there was only rot and no statue. The process took several days, the bigger the creature the longer the wait, so the final resting place, or rather rotting place, of an animal was rarely the place it had become infected, which was another clever way for the disease to spread. And of course, humans, that’s the strangest and most horrible part. The first strange thing is that not every human that came into contact with it was consumed by it. I was exposed to it many times after that first touch of the wall, and it never transformed me. My mother, too, was never infected. That droplet of filth that had fallen on her head had disappeared with a shower, and the rot around her in the house, on the bus, at work, did not contaminate her. I would say that more than half the population, in fact, never became sick with it. But many were transformed, in a manner similar to the animals, except they would still be able to move when their consciousness finally gave way. What they did become after that was not human, and not animal, but something in between. Except of course, their bodies would be of rotting flesh. The classic zombie is a fair approximation, and I confess the thought crossed my mind many times, especially in the beginning. But first of all, they didn’t seem particularly interested in eating our brains or biting our arms, although there were rumors of cannibalism, if it can be called that in this case. Beyond that, as they increased in number, it soon became clear that there was some type of intelligence left, but not necessarily in each individual creature. No, it was a collective intelligence, directed from above, and only to inhuman goals, and the creatures obeyed with no thought of consequence, though they could still be killed. And furthermore, they could speak, and it was clearly human language, although it was always screamed and very hard to understand, though they seemed to understand each other. Looking back I think the way they behaved was exactly how a person would behave if their human form was to disappear.

Still, at first, they could only be found where the rot had taken over completely, and this was still, as far as I could tell, around the original wall, which the last time I saw it had ceased to be a wall at all, and so had the trees and the vines, and beyond it the house and the garden, it was all and only rot. The little old neighborhood where I lived was still rot free, and although now it seems so obvious that it would only be a matter of time, I couldn’t allow myself to believe it enough to act, as if I was suffering from a milder version of the blindness that affected everyone else. From my little room I could see a pretty little park, with wooden benches and a fountain and a handful of trees, and I was finally at ease, the home was safe, and I dared not ask for more, or think about the future. The apartment had six rooms, and all but one of them were occupied by college students, mostly girls. The other room was occupied by a couple and their child. And this is how I came to know you. You were just a baby then, six months I think. Your parents were the first people I met who could see the same as I did, the truth, and perhaps because they had you, and unlike me, they were already planning for the future. They had moved there not only because it was rot free, but because the small room cost less than the whole apartment they rented in an already infested area. Their plan was to save enough money, and then emigrate somewhere where the rot was not. They never got around to it. Things progressed much too fast.

One day as I was staring at the rot on the wall of the college cafeteria, while everyone else walked by without noticing, I was approached by another student, I didn’t know him at all. He came up behind me, and whispered, I can see it too. It didn’t take long for us to become friends, and soon, as our city descended more and more into chaos from the rot, we came to share the room at the apartment. It was more or less at this time that the rot finally appeared just outside our neighborhood, and also that I saw on the news that the building where my mother and my uncles lived in had collapsed, killing everyone inside, no mention of the rot, it all felt so unreal that I couldn’t even cry. Or maybe it was because I was worried. I knew we had, at best, six months before our neighborhood was completely infected and it all went to hell, but most likely much less than that, because the more it spread the faster it spread.

Soon after that it became dangerous to leave the house for more than anything essential, and then even for that. Everyone in the house stopped going to work, or college, or anywhere except to buy food. Every day we saw on television, another building, another bridge, another church, collapse from the rot. Why didn’t we leave, I asked myself later many times, and I think we were all paralyzed, clinging to some irrational hope that it would go away on its own. Then basic services began to fail, the water would sometimes come out brown, and other times not at all, the gas stopped feeding the stove reliably, and the lights were out more often than not. We were watching a news broadcast when the electricity went out for the last time. I don’t know anymore if it was really so or if it was a dream, everything seemed more or less like a dream then, but I think the news were about power shortages. The irony. But again, I don’t know if it really happened anymore. After that we would eat in the dark, even during the day because we kept the blinders closed, listening to the destruction, the screams, the hell outside. During the day we went out, got as many supplies as we were able to carry and came back home as quickly as we could. Most of the people in the apartment disappeared with time. One or two would go out and never come back, I think they still weren’t completely aware of the danger. Until there were only five of us, my boyfriend and myself, your father, your mother and you. At first we volunteered to go to the next neighborhood, which was still not fully contaminated, and buy food, which always seemed to run out too quickly, what once seemed like a massive storage had lasted the blink of an eye. But soon your father said, You can’t keep sacrificing yourselves, it isn’t fair, just because we have a baby, I know where I can get a car, unfortunately it isn’t that close, but I’ll be back before midnight, and then we can all escape, But escape to where, It doesn’t matter, anything is better than staying here. Your mother said right away, I’ll go with you. He protested but she gave him no chance, You’re not going out there alone, and then handing you over to us, she said, Take care of him, and then to you, Don’t cry honey, mama will be back soon. Your father kissed you on the forehead, your mother hugged you three times, and then they left. We waited for them to turn up until we ran out of food, which was two days later, and then we couldn’t wait any longer, the apartment was starting to rot, there was no gas, no electricity, no water and no food. We had to leave but we didn’t know where to go. This was the first time I prayed since I was a child, just before we left the apartment for the last time. I suppose someone could argue that the horror should have proven to me that there was no God, but I remember thinking that these were the thoughts of the blind, which was almost everyone now. I think it was because of you, too. I looked at your little face and I was sure there was a God, looking over us as I was looking over you. And I was sure that humanity was made in His image, because I saw what we could become when God’s image started to disappear from us.

The prayers worked. Somehow we made it through many infested neighborhoods unharmed. We came across several people in the process of being taken over by the rot, but none attacked us, and we came across none that was fully human, and more importantly none that was fully rot. I thanked God for what I judged to be a miracle. The neighborhood gave way to a single winding road through fields, and then we were handed another miracle, an abandoned car, keys on the ignition, and drove away, first through roads going by large warehouses, then massive fields of grain and vine and olive, then smaller and smaller farms and finally, the open country, where there was no rot to be found at all, perhaps because there was a river running alongside us. We were traveling inland. After four hours, and still with gas on the tank, the car broke down. You slept in my arms during the whole trip, probably too weak to stay awake. Luckily, and although the place where the car stopped seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, a ten minute walk away, just over the hill, there was a small town, still rot free. We spent a lot of our money on food and water, bread and cheese and sausages and canned sardines, some milk for you of course, as much as we could carry, and then we got back to the car, to eat and sleep. The next day, fed and rested, even if not well because we had to ration our supplies, we could make plans.

I woke up first and opened the door of the car. A few paces away there was a dog going through our leftovers. He was light brown in color but very dirty so he appeared quite a few shades darker, medium sized but very thin, just like us he wasn’t getting enough to eat or had a clean place to sleep. But he was obviously smart. I can’t even remember the last time I had seen a dog or a cat, most of them were consumed by the rot. He seemed afraid, but not aggressive. I threw one of the leftover sausages his way. He advanced carefully, then devoured it at once, and then looked at me in expectation of more. I felt bad so I gave in. And that’s how we got the dog.

It didn’t take long to conclude that the small town would suffer the same fate as everywhere else. Even though the news showed the rot everywhere, no one seemed to notice it. We asked some people about it, and though they all commented on the craziness going on in the cities, they couldn’t quite see what it was, only its effects, and they all seemed convinced that it would never come there, that they were somehow immune. But we knew it would only be a matter of time until it came to that small town, and every small town. I’m glad I was not alone, without your father we wouldn’t be alive right now. How funny, this is the first time I said it out loud, yes, of course he is your father, my husband, and I am your mother. He convinced me that we needed to take extreme measures, we couldn’t wait for the inevitable fate as had happened in the apartment. That very same day we went towards the river and eventually we found the perfect place, a small, rocky island that seemed to be floating on the water. I stayed behind while your father swam there. The dog wanted to go with him but had been told to stay with us and protect us, and so he did, taking his job very seriously, inspecting the perimeter at regular intervals, and even when sitting or lying down, he didn’t close his eyes once. I think it took about half an hour for your father to swim there. Then another half to explore it, and then another half to get back. It would be safe, but there was little if any food there. We would always have to get food from the mainland, but this was still safer than staying there, so it was decided. It was dark when we got back to the car. The next day we got the supplies we needed and that we could carry, and spent the last of the money we had brought with us, the cards didn’t work anymore, it wouldn’t be long until it was all worth nothing. We swam to the island in the afternoon, while you, as well as the supplies, crossed the river on a plastic raft. And that’s how we came to live here, in this cave. It was the only place safe from the rain and the wind.

***

She knew the boy was still too young to understand most of what she had told him, and how much younger still was the the child growing inside of her, but the man and the dog had been gone for more than a week, and she was starting to lose hope that they would ever return. She was feeling very weak, and very soon wouldn’t be able to speak at all, not having eaten for two days so that the boy wouldn’t starve, but she decided to eat something now, just a little, not for herself, but for her unborn child. She broke the last piece of bread in two, gave the boy the bigger half and they both chewed in silence. The boy was thirsty afterward and so she went to the river to get some water. Looking over to both sides and from that distance it was hard for the eyes to tell what it was, but she knew it was the rot, it had spread almost to the banks. She returned with a bucketful of water, immersed a plastic cup in it and gave the boy a drink. He drank it and then said, I’m hungry, already falling asleep, he had stopped asking when his daddy would come home. There was no more food and it was too dangerous to cross the river, and besides she wouldn’t leave the boy behind. All she could do was wait. The fire would last a few more hours, and the little food she had eaten was enough to bring a deep slumber over her. Weak, tired, she laid down beside the boy and as her eyes were closing she saw the dog return, skinnier than ever, and alone.