Blowing away in a rising wind.
Subsequently revealing--
The black seed of a thorn tree.
That had been secreted in its belly.
More spooked than ever despite a desperate desire to believe someone was only having a cruel bit of sport of him, he palmed the charred black seed as he passed by the overgrown garden, heading hurriedly back to the small stone cottage with that cold drizzly rain beginning to fall harder now, the black clouds growing blacker still. Perhaps it was only that cold drizzly rain falling harder beneath that ever-darkening sky, or maybe just the thick swirling black fog itself, but Oliver didn’t realize he’d gone off-course and somehow stepped over that low crumbling stone wall right into that wild garden until the thorny things inhabiting it began to grab at him, pricking and scratching.
He stopped. Blinking heavily.
His yellow boots sinking.
Sinking into the foul-stinking muck.
Amongst a tangle of black flowers.
With deep crimson stamens.
Swaying lazily in that rising wind.
Almost as if in silent greeting.
Appearing velvety to the touch.
But being anything but.
He blinked again and found himself staring at the base of this tangle of black flowers. At its stalk, for lack of a better word, securing the thorny flowery bush at root level into the muddy ground, or what should have been its root level. For at closer glance there was no evidence of any root structure. Rather, the all of it seemed to push out from the foul-stinking muck not unlike a thin splintered finger full of claws.
Claws that were actually larger thorns.
Guarding pussy milky fruit sacs.
Housing large black seeds.
Perhaps this was the reason.
The reason he grabbed the hoe.
The reason he grabbed the shovel.
Hauling them out from the barn.
And began to hack. To dig.
At that strange thorny root.
That really wasn’t a root at all.
For the further he unearthed this peculiar stalk, heaving aside the heavy wet foul-stinking muck, the more alarm he felt as he discovered the thorny fruit-bearing tuber was actually thickening rather than tapering-off. Moreover, he also found it to be snaking beneath the muck and the low crumbling stone wall to the small stone cottage itself, vanishing beneath the small stone cottage’s stone foundation. Then again, he still had it completely backward.
As he tried to wrap his mind around it.
For it was actually snaking out.
Out from beneath the small stone cottage.
From beneath its stone foundation.
Moments later, in a rather jagged disorienting step forward in time, shivering, and yet feeling too warm all over as if feverish, Oliver found himself standing on the earthen floor of the cellar in the red incandescence of the popping and hissing black boiler.
Reckoning the far stone column. Its carvings.
The cryptic runes. The giant thorn tree.
And the moon in its four stages.
Waxing. Full. Waning. Dark.
Oliver frowned as he realized the carving of the full moon appeared rather larger than the other moon renderings. Perhaps it had always been, he reflected now, as it absorbed-reflected the popping and hissing and dancing and merrily flickering boiler flames. Glowing red in the dimness. That rendering of the full moon.
Turning it into a blood moon.
Using the shovel blade, as the morning slipped into afternoon, the outside world growing ever darker and darker still, and thunder beginning to rumble uneasily in the near distance, Oliver pried between the faded column stones, loosening the dusty mortar.
The stones gave away easily.
Quite rather too easily, perhaps.
Exposing a narrow chamber.
The rising wind whispering.
Between the rumbles of thunder.
Finding the odd little cracks.
In the aged foundation.
Encouraging him.
Oliver worked faster still, sweat beading on his face, dampening the back of his shirt under his coat he’d not thought to remove, a coat that became covered in a thick layer of mortar dust, the mortar dust sticking to his sweaty face, too, gritty in his eyes.
After the stones had fallen away--
Oliver inched forward. Warily.
Breathing hard. Gasping.
Choking out the mortar dust.
Allowing the dancing and flickering fiery red light of the boiler to reveal the interior of that narrow chamber in the wall.
And gasping yet again.
As he leaned into that chamber.
Gasping at what he saw there.
Rising from the chamber floor.
The trunk of a thorn tree.
Its thorny limbs rising up within the stone walls of the small stone cottage, branching out into every nook, cranny, and dark shadowy crevice.
But there was even more besides.
Much to his everlasting horror.
For the thorn tree also rose from--
Nestled in its nest of knotted roots--
As if the thorn tree were somehow born of it--
The brittle ashen bones of what could only be described as a small woman who’d been hammered down into that black earth by long rusted iron spikes. A sharp crumbling stone driven between her broken teeth and lodged deeply into her throat beyond a badly fractured jaw bone. Her eyes hollow. Leering.
And within her. More bones.
A child. A skull. Malformed.
With odd calcified appendages.
Not unlike horns.
Oliver staggered back.
The boiler flames jumping higher.
The thunder rumbling louder.
And that cold rising wind whispering in the odd cracks of that aged foundation taking on Caleb’s raspy voice -- and his translation of these cryptic runes now lying on the earthen floor:
It commands her charred remains be buried twelve feet deep below ground without coffin or shroud. To hammer down those charred remains with thirteen nails so that she may not rise from the dead.
And then to hammer seven nails into her jaw and shove a stone deep into her throat so that she may never again utter any conjurations.
To bury her in cold darkness.
Where nothing will ever grow again.
Save that of a thorn tree.
The naked bulb hanging over the narrow cellar staircase began to sway, slowly, back and forth, throwing out its too-dim light that nevertheless managed to paint in haunting stark relief with its every slowly-swaying pass the contents of that narrow chamber.
Removing any possible doubt.
Any possible doubt about what lay there.
Before suddenly blinking out.
That too-dim naked swaying bulb.
Casting the cellar in blackness.
But for those red boiler flames.
Jumping, crackling, spitting.
The cold rising wind shrieking now.
In that red-flickering blackness.
Once again imitating Caleb’s voice:
From that night at the farmhouse:
Before that large crackling fire:
The flames dancing on his grizzled face:
At sundown, the townsfolk then did watch her burn.
With the unborn child still in her womb.
A damnation. That unborn child.
A most cursed thing, surely.
She was then buried in the manner of a witch where nothing would ever grow again save that of a thorn tree. ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,’ they said over her. ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,’ the townsfolk said.
Oliver thought he heard screams.
Thought maybe they were his own.
These most dreadful screams.
Before realizing, quite horrifyingly--
They belonged to his wife.
They belonged to his Abby.
31.
ABBY SLEPT MOST OF that day just as she’d slept most of every day during the third trimester. She felt not unlike a grass snake that had somehow managed to swallow down a giant prize-winning county fair watermelon. Furthermore, Braxton-Hicks contractions had become an almost hourly torment. Painful spasms simulating labor during which her already quite tender uterine muscles tightened as if in a terrible muscle cramp for minutes at a time. Oliver suggested it afforded her the opportunity to practice her breathing method. She suggested she could shove a watermelon up-his-whatever and they could practice her breathing method together. But it wasn’t just the disagreeable bloated weight or the false contractions that would all too soon be all too very real.
It was the shooting pains in her lower back.
And the same radiating out to her hips.
The body preparing the birth canal.
Causing her to waddle like a penguin.
It was easier to just stay in bed.
For she was also increasingly experiencing, suffering really, the more her uterus was stretched, pressing-up against her rib cage and diaphragm, a distressing shortness of breath, leaving her head spinning and the ground moving beneath her swollen feet.
Threatening to send her tumbling.
Tumbling head over bottom.
And quite nauseous besides.
With no real appetite to speak of.
No real appetite for days now.
Still, she tried her best to eat.
If only for the unborn child.
It was growing restless in there. Keen.
There inside of her. Kicking. Biting.
Fully baked. Sensing its time was nigh.
Perhaps because of the coming storm.
The black clouds rolling of the sea.
The distant rumbling of the thunder.
Growing ever closer. Ever closer.
The cold drizzly rain falling again.
Falling in this foreboding black fog.
As if the storm were a harbinger.
A harbinger of its imminent arrival.
The unborn child inside of her.
Come to greet it into this world.
Into this world gone ever so dark.
Perhaps Oliver sensed this, too.
Explaining his odd behavior.
Per usual, he had assisted her down the narrow staircase to the bathroom first thing that morning, then helped her back up to bed. Only to then forget her breakfast. Not that she had any real appetite after all. Still, he usually insisted she eat something. Anything. But not this morning -- this morning he’d simply disappeared and she’d fallen back to sleep and had very strange dreams, indeed.
Strange and tattered dreams.
Of Oliver out there in the garden.
Out there in the cold drizzly rain.
In the swirling mists of black fog.
Beneath the thickening black clouds.
Digging like a man possessed.
Leaving him filthy and wet.
And then digging beneath the small stone cottage, too, digging somewhere below the double-hung bedroom window. The edge of the shovel blade banging against the old stone foundation.
Banging. Digging. Scraping.
To what ends she could not guess.
Only to have it all move inside.
His strange activities. Noises.
In a disjointed jump forward in time.
Inside the small stone cottage itself.
If coming from far below her.
Down in the stone cellar, perhaps.
Or so she dreamt, tossing and turning.
Tossing and turning in her bed.
In her strange and tattered dreams.
Before it all went very quiet.
All suddenly much too very quiet.
With just the sound of the wind.
The cold rising wind in the eaves.
Whispering and moaning softly.
And the cold drizzly rain on the window.
Tapping roughly now against the glass.
And the thunder rumbling louder.
As this storm grew ever closer.
The world growing blacker.
Blacker and blacker still.
And yet, as she tossed and turned in her bed in a world growing blacker and blacker still, she found herself entertaining the very slippery, if not altogether malignant notion that this was all, all of it, only just a creation of her strange and tattered dreams, and nothing more. And even more so, that she might even somehow wake from such dark fanciful meanderings of the fragile sleeping mind to find herself back in London of all things. A beautiful warm summer day with perhaps a blanket and picnic and a bottle of fizz awaiting her in a leafy park with maybe a go on a pedalo or a stroll up Primrose Hill for a sweeping view of the London skyline just after dusk and this dark isle in the middle of this black sea just a fading figment of her such strange and tattered dreams, and nothing more.
But when her eyes popped open--
They revealed to her, instead--
The spare bedroom door agape.
The nursery in shadows beyond it.
And small muddy footprints besides.
Small muddy footprints on the floor.
Leading from that shadowy nursery.
And across the short dark hall.
Into her own bedroom.
To a boy crouching in the corner.
The far corner of her bedroom.
Thin knees pushed to his chin.
A long muddy shirt and trousers.
Mud-soaked hair hanging in his face.
Over large sunken black eyes.
The boy rose in a most odd, uneven, hitching, and rather dreamlike manner. His bones soft and malleable, shifting about most unnaturally.
Creaking damply. Resettling.
Large sunken black eyes blinking.
Blinking slowly. Languidly.
As the boy slowly shuffled forward.
From that dark shadowy corner.
Into the dusky storm light.
Revealing a black leathery skin.
A black leathery mummified skin.
Along with a severely sloped forehead.
And a grimace of small crooked teeth.
Abby had never been so terrified.
Never so terrified in her entire life.
Though she knew it all to be unreal.
Knew it all to be only her fragile mind.
Her fragile mind still quite asleep.
Perhaps even safely back in London.
Ravaged by strange and tattered dreams.
Even as she knew better than that.
Even as she trembled most terribly. The cold dark wet of this most forbidding place sinking. Sinking so very deeply into her.
“God in heaven,” she said.
Her voice a tremulous scratch.
“What the hell are you?” she said.
As if this thing might answer her.
As if there could be any answer.
Any answer to satisfy her.
The mummified boy with the large sunken black eyes then slowly extended a black leathery finger toward her. Abby scrambled back from it only to be rudely halted by the bed’s headboard as the mummified boy continued to shuffle toward her in spastic fits and starts. A wet and squelchy sound now. Of muddy black water. That black leathery finger floating in the dimness. Reaching out. Reaching out for her. For her belly. For her pregnant abdomen.
For the unborn child.
She felt a dark lightning bolt cut into her when that black leathery finger finally touched her skin, her legs thrashing about, her feet skidding about on the mattress, that headboard unwilling to allow her to pass through it.
It was as if she were being sliced in two.
Or rather, ripped open, perhaps.
Not unlike a husk torn of fruit.
Murmuring, her eyes fell closed.
And there was a flash pop.
A flash pop in her dizzy head.
A child in a dark fenn
y water.
Bog peat. Drowning. A boy.
Then another flash pop.
Revealing, moreover--
A large round red moon.
A large round red moon refracting through the swampy bog surface above along with an audience of nightmarish visages as if born of an enchanted forest. Mythical creatures. Monsters. Disfigured and ugly and horrifying.
Greedy eyes. Grisly sneers.
Jagged teeth. Blood-soaked claws.
Chanting in a foreign tongue.
Harsh and yet epodic.
Before a final flash pop.
The constellation of fairy tale devils fading into darkness as the acidic bog turned bone to cardboard. The boy shrinking into himself. Mummifying.
Large sunken eyes rolling back.
Back into his severely sloped head.
As the drowning boy sunk. And sunk.
Sunk down into that fenny darkness.
Only to have those large sunken eyes--
Suddenly blink back to life.
An impossible life after death life.
The boy screaming a black muddy scream.
His clawed hands snatching out.
Snatching out. For her.
Abby screamed, too.
Screamed and screamed.
In the darkness.
32.
YES, OLIVER INITIALLY believed the dreadful screams to very possibly be his own echoing off the thick stone cellar walls. Then believed, instead, for a brief, if most terrible moment that curdled the blood, the dreadful screams to be originating from the dusty pile of brittle ashen bones buried in the nest of knotted roots at the base of the gruesome thorn tree growing in the dark narrow wall chamber exposed before him now in the flickering red light of the boiler flames.
From her. Hammered down.
Hammered down into that black earth.
Hammered down with those long rusted spikes.
Somehow managing such dreadful screams despite the sharp crumbling stone driven between her broken teeth and lodged deeply into her throat beyond that badly fractured jaw bone and below those eternally hollow, if leering eyes.
Or from within her, perhaps.
From that other pile of bones.
The child. A skull. Malformed.
With odd calcified appendages.
Not unlike horns.
Only to come to the realization.
That curdled the blood even more.
They actually belonged to his wife.
To his Abby. Far above him.
These dreadful screams.
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