Earthly Powers: The Adventure Begins

by DC Alexander

  “No, I got this, give Carl his day off. He needs it, he’s been there the whole time and I don’t want to burn him out.” I didn’t say it but I didn’t want to have to look out for anybody but me down in the hole.

  I got a good flashlight, a work light that put out a roomful of light and it had the flashlight built into it. I got my best tennis shoes out, I didn’t have any boots fit for walking in that stuff, and I walked over there.

  The fire department had put the yellow tape up around it like they always do, the kids had taken it to play with like they always did.

  The place stunk like old fire. The floor was almost gone, just the old blocks the floor used to sit on were left; so I walked on the dirt that used to be under the house among the little towers of blocks and the fallen wooden beams and boards.

  I could step right into the side of the stairs that went down to the cellar. The light was better with some of the house out of the way. I could see down there. Some of the boards had burned up and the bottom was covered with ashes and pieces of trash, I couldn’t tell the nails from the trash. I walked real slow and careful and I fired up my light.

  That was a good light. It had a lot of little LED bulbs that didn’t drain the battery and it brightened up that place like daylight. I went into the second room where the bed had been. Most of the clothes were just scorched on the outer layers. The stuff on the inside didn’t burn any at all. I got a piece of stick to use to poke with and stake a vampire if there was another one in there. I started looking through the trash.

  I hung the light on the old light fixture overhead. The stuff in the floor was a mixed variety of shoes and pants and socks and shirts in all colors and sizes. Underwear in every color and size intermingled with it. There were five main heaps of the stuff and more on the floor. I saw a little brighter color in the floor close to the hide-a-bed and went over to look, it was a brassiere. At least the corpse of the vampire, if that’s what it was, burned good. There was nothing but bone left of it.

  I wondered if there was furniture under the piles, I could check one of them. I raked clothes down, got past the burned stuff and got into some stuff that pulled out easy, then near the bottom was some really old rotten stuff all stuck together.

  The bottom of the pile was a layer of yellow sticks pressed down into the rot. It looked like a little platform built to keep the stuff off the floor and out of the damp. They were funny looking sticks, somehow familiar. I’d seen stuff like this before. I kicked them a little and it hit me, they were bones. I spotted arm bones and leg bones and parts of a ribcage. There were too many arms and legs for that one ribcage. The whole damn floor under the pile was littered with bones.

  I went to the next pile and dug down, I didn’t get as far and found bones. The stench was still overpowering and I was getting sick from it, trying not to breathe through my nose, trying not to breathe through my mouth because it was so thick I was swallowing it.

  I kept on looking, there were wallets and purses in some of the clothes. There might be a little money in some of them but it couldn’t be enough to make it worth looking for it. I tried to keep track of how many people’s bones there were but there was no way to tell for sure, they were all mixed up. I didn’t move them any more than I could help, they were mired in stuff that I don’t want to know what it was.

  There were a few bones in the bed, it had that boy in the bed snacking on him and when he finished he would have put the body under some clothes and covered it up. I still hadn’t found a skull.

  The other doorway showed clearly in the light. I guess I had to go look in there. That room was the last one;’ there weren’t any more rooms. At least I hadn’t seen any and I really hoped there weren’t.

  In that last room was a table with a stub of a candle stuck to it and some cardboard boxes jumbled against the wall, a kitchen chair was pulled up to the table.

  A box of matches sat by the candle and some burnt matches were lying on the table. The boxes against the wall had the skulls in them. There were three boxes about the size of a crate of oranges. All but one of them was jammed full of skulls. I didn’t touch them, they were pretty bad off with stuff stuck to them. They weren’t the nice clean shiny skulls that everybody is familiar with. Just looking I guessed there were about fifteen of them. The smell in there suddenly went past what I could live with and I staggered back out of that room gagging.

  I had trouble stopping to look any more. I just wanted to go as fast as I could and get out of the smell, I was heaving and tried not to breathe at all. I got dizzy from holding my breath.

  When I got back out in front of the house I sat down and caught my breath. I didn’t know if I should tell the law, maybe they could tell who the people were and how long they had been there. There might be people looking for some of them.

  Setting on the ground I got a sense of pressure, somebody wanted to talk. I took my rock in my hand, and Dirt said ‘more’ and I saw the blank spot. It was hard to tell how many there were, maybe just one

  ‘is this just lettin me know, or they comin here?’

  I got a real clear image like a snapshot of me sitting on the ground with my arms around my knees just like I was doing, and there was a blank spot behind me, and two of something else back by the house behind me. Oh. They were here. “Thanks!”

  I didn’t have anything I could use to stick them. I had thrown my stick down inside, and strong as they were I couldn’t do all three before they grabbed me anyway. I needed to get the hell out of there but they had me trapped. I sat real still, I figured if I moved they would run in on me.

  I requested the earth give under the closest one and it sank, struggling, swimming through the dirt and making agitated grunts and wheezes. It wasn’t giving up. I thought about the earth becoming solid, holding it still, and it moved slower and slower till it stopped, frozen in place but still struggling.

  I tried to bind it but it was naked and it wouldn’t work on naked skin. “Not allowed.” That was just shit, I sunk them but I couldn’t bind them? “Not allowed.” There were a lot of rules in that message, I didn’t have time to spread them out, I moved on, it was all I could do. Damn vampire though, shouldn’t have to follow the rules when it was vampires.

  The one I stuck wasn’t going to get out anytime soon, I checked the others and one had run off. The other was still there watching. The one watching was a vampire, it was blank. The sunk one and the one that ran off were something different.

  I got the earth to soften under the watcher. Soon as it started to sink it bounced up and ran, the thing could move. It was out of my area in a couple seconds and I lost it.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the one sunk in the earth. Its head was all that was showing. I softened the earth under it and it sank down, I let it go about fifteen feet and had the earth set up hard again, locking it down. I asked “Will it die from lack of air?”

  “Yes”

  “How long can you keep it down there?”

  “Long time” I examined that, a week or a month wouldn’t do, I didn’t want it coming back unexpectedly and attacking me. Oh. A month registered with Dirt but wasn’t very important, it was part of a season and a season was part of a year and so on, Dirt’s long time looked like a few eons. I unfolded the rules, if something died from asphyxiation, or falling, or something like that, it was ok, most things died at some point. I could harden the earth to make a spear and run it through the thing; that was acceptable. If I diddled with the internal workings using Dirt as though I were healing and killed it, ‘Poof.’ The thing was alive and I couldn’t use Dirt to directly kill it. There were some implications there…If I had screwed up working on the girls or Earl, if they died from the healing, it would have been bad.

  “Dissolution.” Damn. That was quite a penalty for a mistake.

  I didn’t feel good about smothering anything. That would be awful. I went and got a good sized board from the burned out house and lay it on the ground, “Can you make a weapon from this?�
�� and imaged what I wanted.

  The board warped and twisted and there was a sword lying there just like I pictured. I wished it were metal, it would do a better job and last longer.

  “Request aid from [one whose domain is metal]”

  I rolled that out. It was getting easier to communicate. The alter ego had the information almost as fast as it came in. There was a different entity associated with metal, as I looked I realized there were many entities, maybe one for each element?

  I thought hard about metal, hard grains in the earth, guns and knives and belt buckles and nails. There was a twitch, a sense of presence, questioning, “Who?”

  I described myself and thought about what I needed and gave Dirt as a reference. Seemed like the thing to do.

  I got a sense of ‘why?’

  Dirt chimed in ‘food’” and included a sense of the fetish I had sunk into the ground; apparently the new one had eaten something from it.

  “Approval, good, gratitude, delight, agreement!”

  The wooden sword began to change color, going dark, I leaned over to look closer, it was getting dusty. As I watched the wood was replaced with metal, down to the smallest wood grain and chip.

  “Done.”

  “thank you, appreciate that.”

  I lifted the sword, it was about right for me I guess, I never held a sword before. Guess it was too late to ask for a pistol. The sword was about four feet long and tapered to a sharp point. The blade was wide as my hand, I guess four inches or so, the sharp edge…wasn’t sharp. It was about like a pencil. The entire blade was the same thickness.

  “Can you do this” I showed the edge tapering down to nothing on both sides, I guess that’s how swords are done.

  I put the sword down on the ground – or started to, the agreement and the action took place as I bent; the edge of the blade got fuzzy, I got ‘yes’, and it was sharp.

  I touched the edge of the blade. It was fairly sharp. The end of my finger and half my right index fingernail fell to the ground, where it had been didn’t even bleed for a moment. I stood there in shock a second, then said “Oh shit!” with great feeling. I kneeled down, dropped the sword and put my fingertip back on, I willed the connections and it was stuck. Still tender, but it would get better fast.

  I picked up the sword ‘Fantastic, really nice job! Can you do a cover for it?’ I wasn’t sure I was thinking at the right one but it must have gotten through, the sword slimmed a little and was covered with a sheath. I pulled the sword out of the cover and put it back and it worked. It was pretty sharp but nothing like the blade so I just projected gratitude and went to work on the thing in the ground. I really needed names for these things so I could keep them in order.

  ‘Ghoul’. Thanks! And no, I didn’t know who had answered but I thought it was Dirt.

  I got Dirt to push the first one up to the surface till the head was sticking out. Its mouth gaped, and had dirt in it. It shook its head furiously and dirt and slobber flew, it growled and snapped. I went close to it and squatted down, if I could reason with it I might be able to work something out.

  It growled louder pulled its lips back, exposing some ferocious teeth. They weren’t the same as the thing in the cellar, these looked like something a dog or a bear should be wearing. It struck at me snake fast and snapped, slobbering, and growling in eagerness to get a bite of me. Its neck let the head go a lot further than I would have guessed it could move, it came way to close for comfort. I shoved it back away from me with the sword in reaction, the sword pushed it away without cutting it and I fell over.

  I stood and tilted the sword, the sheath slid off. I stepped up to the ghoul, I said “Just this once, if you can think, stop the damn growling and listen.” I wanted to reason with it; and find out what the hell it was.

  It went into a higher gear and snapped a couple more times. I squatted and swung the sword sideways and sliced the head off it with no resistance at all. It jerked and twitched and jetted blood way up in the air, then it went mostly still. I looked at the blade of the sword; the blood ran off it like water off greased paper. I carefully put the sheath back on the blade and had Dirt push the ghoul out of the ground. I wanted to see it.

  It was totally different from the thing down in the cellar. Gray and skinny and naked, covered with skin in good shape, just funny colored. The hands were large, with thick fingernails. The jaws looked almost normal; big and strong, with big sharp teeth, there was stuff in the teeth, and it stank.

  I sank the parts way down deep and smoothed the earth over it, there was no disturbed ground showing. I wondered how many kinds of things there were, it would be nice to have some notice what was about to try to eat me.

  On the way home I wondered about that whole day off thing. It seemed pretty stressful; but maybe it was a good thing to get out of the old rut and do something different once in a while.

  Chapter Eleven

  C arl was driving me to the store. I should get my driver’s license, I hated being dependent on somebody else, at some point he might not be there. I didn’t want to give him the idea that I didn’t trust him because I mostly did. It’s just that life goes where it goes and if you depend on somebody and their life changes it might change your life too. It’s best to be ready.

  I said “Carl, I want to learn to drive and get my license. It just aint right that I can’t drive a car; plus you aint got no style.” He was so sensitive I couldn’t resist yanking his chain.

  He was wounded “I aint got no style? I aint believin you said that. What you talkin about?”

  “I aint bein mean or nothin. But look, when you drive you sit up straight. You got the seat up almost straight so you can see out the windshield. I bet you can see the hood of the car from where you set, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, I see the hood. What’s that got to do with anything?” He was wounded, he couldn’t even trash talk me.

  “Why you want to see the hood? You can see the hood when the car parked, it don’t change, they aint no reason to look at the hood at all is there? If we go a different way does the hood look different?”

  “The way the hood looks don’t change. I aint lookin at the hood when I’m drivin, I’m lookin at the road and behind me and in front and to both sides so I can see anybody comin at me.”

  “Do you see the hood when you drivin?”

  “Yeah I can see the hood but that don’t have nothin to do with drivin” he was stopped at a light and he turned to me earnestly to give me a driving lesson.

  “What you gotta watch is the mirrors, they’re important. I adjust them so I can see from where I sit. If I move I change where the mirrors point at. I don’t pay no mind to the hood of the car at all, I stay on them mirrors all the time.”

  I pointed out the little item he was overlooking “Can you see the light from where you sittin?”

  He leaned up a little and looked up “yeah I can see it, it’s red. When it change I wait just a second to make sure they aint nobody runnin it from the other way.”

  “I notice you leaned up to look at that light when I ask you about it, you can’t see it without moving?” I had him, I was about to prove my point.

  “Yeah, I might have pulled up just a little too close, we was talkin.”

  “When you lean up do you see right outta them mirrors?”

  “I aint lookin out of the mirrors when I lean up to see the light, we settin still and we got to see the light so we know when it change so we can go.” He was real careful to explain so my feeble mind could grasp the concepts, they were way out of my league but he would do his best to get them across.

  “If you set right you could see the mirrors and the light at the same time without moving and having to be dangerous; you settin wrong, it not just style, it safety you missin out on.”

  Exasperated, he said “Ok, How do you think I oughta be setting?”

  “I’m glad you asked. The right way to set is to lean that seat back. Aint no need to be watchin the hood all the time. If
you lean the seat back right you can see other cars and the mirror and you be stylin. That’s the way I’ll drive when I get that license.”

  He reached down and turned the seat loose and leaned way back “There, is that what you talkin about? I can just barely see over the steerin wheel, see?”

  “Can you see the light?”

  “Yeah, I can see the light from here.” The light changed, he pulled out.

  “Aight, you can see the light from there, now you adjust your mirrors and you lookin a lot better like that and it’s all good. Almost.”

  He was givin it a try, he got his mirror adjusted and glanced at the mirror on my side, said “Can you move that a little so I can see?” I moved it, he reached up and moved the rearview like he wanted it. “I feel like a dumbass like this. It’s gonna be hard to get in and out. People aint gone be able to see me, it look like the car aint got no driver.” He was just whining on and on. Some people got no sense of style and we got to help them, they are less fortunate.

  “That’s because you sittin all straight up, you need to lean a little, put your head on the window.”

  “I know what you goin for, here, I’ll go on and do this. I hope we don’t get pulled over.” He pulled over to the curb and put the car in park, then put his foot up beside the wheel on the dash, scooted down till he could just peek over the wheel, and leaned his head against the window. He slid the seat back as far as it would go and wiggled to get settled in.

  “That what you lookin for?”

  “Yeah, man you stylin now, you look like you know what you doin and you bad wid it. Aint nobody gone shoot you through the winder now and they know you somebody when they see you comin like this.”