Where Darkness Dwells (4 page)

When he reached the last uphill leading to the cave's opening, he threw himself up the incline. The limestone floor transitioning to mud as he hit top soil. He shoved through the grass veil shielding the world from the unholy hell he had encountered below. Not knowing his location in relation to his house, he simply ran. The fog had burned off and the sky was warm with the rising sun. Before he lost sight of the cavern, he glanced back.

The unwounded third man appeared. Once clear of the small opening, another man's arm emerged from inside. Another man pulled free. The man had no face. Blood and clots of brain matter soaked his denim shirt. Once on his feet, the third man reached the opening, and he too climbed out, the mortal wound in his chest exposing his insides to the morning air.

The over/under had its .30 caliber round, but these men still chased him after being shot point-blank with a shotgun. There was no point in using the last round. George tossed the deadweight aside. He'd go back later for it. If he lived through this.

"You're never gonna see another sunset, shitheel!" said the unwounded man. "Don't worry, we'll make it go right-quick!"

The man's shrill voice didn't create an echo. The air was alive with birdsong, buzzing insects, a lush blowing breeze. It was maddening after the cavern's compressed, blunted air. George ran, his adrenaline fighting the mounting fatigue from a sleepless and a seemingly endless night of fear.

In no time, the clamor of pursuit intensified. Glancing back, he couldn't believe his eyes. Loping through clumsy strides, they were still somehow lightning-quick. But their skin… it had begun to sag, having turned to pulp. All three had started to disintegrate, even the man he hadn't shot. Lesions rioted across their exposed skin, gravity pulling the wounds wide. George turned away and crested a small hill, heading toward wetter terrain. The swamps. At least now he knew where he was. He darted down the trail, through wispy trees and rutted ground, unsure of his sanity after seeing such sights.

Behind him, the men kicked through the underbrush, picking up their pace, gaining on him with every stride.

2.

Heat waves danced above the rail ties, blurring anything more than twenty feet down the center. Road dust stained his dungarees a permanent earthen color. His threadbare knees and frayed cuffs looked like diseased wounds trying to heal and not quite succeeding. Cooper's face was leathery brown with sunburn gathered under each eye. He walked the center rail with little fear of oncoming trains, having not seen or heard a locomotive in over a day.

For the better part of a year he had been riding the rails, starting off from Chicago, tramping down to Dallas, and then out west, for an extended stay in California. He was now heading back toward Chicago, to home and family and his journey's end. Other people--typically traveling alone or in pairs--populated the rails along the way. Most tramps were men looking for work. Cooper had seen a few runaway children along the way as well. Judging the other tramps' haggard yet wary expressions, they were running from their past more than searching for their future.

Cooper tramped for other reasons, reasons he still didn't fully understand. He had little need for money, and even at thirty-eight, didn't have a family to support. When he set out, his lone reason for traveling was simply because he could. Long after quenching his desire for travel, a greater motive compelled him to continue. His grandmother's dying words. He'd known her for such a short while, yet she'd used her dying words to placate him at a time when he felt his world becoming unhinged. With the end of his travels in sight, he wondered if he'd failed her.

He adjusted his canvas pack higher on his gaunt shoulders. It would take an extended stay of eating steaming stews and gravy-dipped breads before he felt human again. In the next town he would check around, see if someone needed an extra hand. Chicago wasn't going anywhere. Besides, he didn't enjoy the prospect of arriving on his parents' doorstep looking emaciated and lacking the answers he had been so desperately seeking.

Not long into his journey he learned he needed to find a job upon entering a new town. If he needed to rest a few nights in a real bed and eat food cooked in a kitchen instead of over a campfire, he would take on an odd job. People didn't understand or respect a man traveling alone without the need or desire for employment. Sweeping a storeroom or some other trifling job would get the stares off his back for the duration of his stay.

Signs of settlement started filtering through a canopy of two hundred year-old oak trees. Some fields looked tended, some long fallow and overgrown. Many homesteads had boundary marker tree stands that doubled as windbreaks during the winter months. To Cooper, they looked like bony fifty-foot fingers bursting from the earth.

He contemplated such a boundary between two farms. Without question one property was worked and occupied, while the other hadn't seen a plow's heavy blade in a generation or longer. Weedy trees taller than a grown man grew sporadically throughout the property. Thick wheat grass grew waist-high, heavy with ripe seed.

The untended property was nearly clear from view when something caught his attention--the only unnatural color for as far as the eye could see. Everything was earthy brown or lush green, but a small red splash lurked within a copse of green growth. Cooper left the relative safety of the rails to investigate, cutting through the thinner undergrowth along a narrow animal trail. The land cleared, revealing a brightly painted water pump.

The pump stood near an abandoned farmhouse hidden away by trees and thorny brambles. He eased his pack from his shoulders and stretched his aching back.

With the home appearing abandoned, Cooper thought it wouldn't hurt anyone to see if the pump still worked. He grabbed the three foot arm and worked it for a good minute or two before it started to sputter and wheeze. Soon enough, water trickled from the wide spout, becoming a short-lived flow. He alternated pumping the arm and splashing his face with the cold water. He then filled his two canteens.

Cooper removed his straight razor from his pack and began to shave off his facial hair. He'd receive a warmer reception in town if he could mirror more the townsfolk's appearance than a man who had been on the road for a year. As he shaved, he surveyed the homestead. It was a nice scrap of land. The farmhouse looked as old as the surrounding trees, and in its neglected state, seemed to sulk like a kicked dog. The former farm patch was hairy with sapling oak and dark green bushes drooping with succulent wild berries.

Checking the sun's declination, he noted he had an hour or so before he needed to start worrying about getting camp ready. This property was as good a place as any to stay the night, he figured. Now that he'd shaved and washed, a good night's sleep would have him rested and presentable come morning.

After serving up bland corn mush for supper, Cooper set up his bedding near the front porch. Sleeping under the overhang would keep him dry, but for some reason, the vacant windows and large brass-hoop knocker made him uneasy. Instead, he situated his blankets on a slight rise twenty feet away. He faced the house, his back to the untended fields.

As the sun arched behind the trees, he wondered why the house was abandoned. Did the economic collapse bankrupt these people? He figured not. The land had grown wild for some time, long before the tenuous times they were currently facing. No, some other reason caused the farmers to shirk their land. Which was odd. People just didn't up and leave rich cropland. No, it had to be something else, some other reasonable explanation.

As was often the case after a day without catching a freighter, Cooper was bushed. With heavy eyes, his thoughts mingled incoherently. His mind drifted from increasingly improbable theories about the people who once farmed this land, to thoughts of his family, before eventually settling on the certainty that he would soon be home. Before his eyes closed for the night, his last cogent thought concerned the library. He wondered if they had held his position as they had promised. He missed the library. Things would be different when he returned, no doubt. After all, he was a different man than when he started his trek. Still, he missed the musty aisles and retreating into the stacks and into the written word, where the world seemed so much more cut and dry than reality. His eyes fluttered, easing shut with the pull of sleep.

Night darkened the house's interior, as if a long ago fire had left behind a charred, empty shell. In the quiet upper hallway, where no living person had ventured in eighty years, a gauzy spark snicked alive, shimmered and expanded under a glass globe, igniting a frayed wick. The lamp glowed golden, banishing the night beyond its ethereal reach. The lamp floated silently from room to room, pausing for a minute or more in each, plaintively pacing the house, as if the flame's bearer was searching for something long lost.

3.

It was a noise straight from one of Greta's stories. Metal striking stone. The tolling clang of a pickaxe methodically chipping away. At least that's what Betty Harris figured it sounded like. She had no practical knowledge, being sixteen, and not nearly old enough to remember the clattering of the former mines. No, she didn't know what could be making such a racket, but what else could it be?

"Junior?"

Her little brother didn't stir. Normally, she hated sharing a room with an obnoxious, always filthy, six-year-old. She looked forward to winter nights when she could escape by sleeping on a mat by the cook stove. Warmed by the dying embers from supper, she would enjoy her quiet nights alone. Snug under blankets, wedged between the stove and the short distance to the back wall, it felt like having a room all to herself. But now she was grateful for his presence, even if he was sleeping like the dead.

"
Junior?
" she whispered, sitting up in bed. "Wake up."

"Hmm?"

"You hear that?"

More chipping sounds. Loud enough now to create an echo.

Junior buried his face under his pillow, began snoring.

For an instant, she wished George Banyon were here. The sudden thought surprised her. With his lanky goofiness, his good-hearted nature--if he could only be here to put his arm around her, tell her nothing bad was going to happen.

Why did she think of him, of all people? Even though she wanted him to actually court her instead of acting like a fool, they'd rarely spoken in any depth. No, George Banyon wasn't here, and Junior was off sawing logs. Betty was on her own.

She stood, slipping on her house shoes. She padded over to the bedroom door, pressing her ear against it to listen.

She couldn't hear her parents stirring. But the sound. Digging. Grating metal on stone. Why weren't they awake?

She stepped out into the hall. Then, beneath the chipping sounds, there was something else. A whimper, full of sadness. She followed her ear, tracking it down the hall, the whimper becoming wracking sobs.

Mom.

Betty entered the kitchen. Her mom sat at the table. Standing, her dad held her teary-eyed face against his paunchy stomach. His chest heaved as he tried to hold back spasms brought on by blacklung.

"You shouldn't be here."

He looked so old. They had been late parents, but even so, his wrinkles seemed too deep for his age. His lip quivered for a moment, then calmed. Along with the rest of his skin, his lips were cadaverous gray.

"But I heard--"

"Go to bed, and don't come back out again. Go on."

"Daddy…? Mom, what's going on? What's that sound?"

"Betty! Do what I say, girl!" he said, then seethed through a coughing fit.

Her mother's eyes brimmed with pain and the weight of an unexplained misery. She didn't say a word.

"Please, Betty-Mae." The intensity drained from him. He looked wasted away, the final snow melting in springtime.

Reluctantly, she turned away.

Digging, chipping, shoveling. The sounds were malicious, cold. She looked at the closed door across from her bedroom. The cellar. She could no longer deny it. There was no other place it could be coming from.

But why?

She shut the bedroom door, and of course, that lunkhead Junior was snoring even louder, oblivious to the night's bizarre events.

The digging quieted, and after a short silence, was replaced by heavy-footed strides. Multiple people, from the sound. She tried to distinguish how many, but did it really matter? Who were these people?

Maybe Greta's stories were true, after all.

She opened her bedroom door a crack, just as wide as her pupil, waiting to see whatever had entered their house.