“I’m trapped, Roman. A prisoner bound by walls of soil. The roots may as well be my steel bars, the dirt my three meals a day. I am shackled by earth and my only companions are sightless worms that aren’t big on conversation.”
There seemed such a tragic note to this admission. I was sad for M. I couldn’t tell if it was genuine emotion or something M wanted me to feel…but regardless, I couldn’t shake the melancholy. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be trapped in such a cold, dark place.
“That’s why I’m so pleased to have you now, Roman. Someone to talk with. Someone to share with. My new and special friend…”
A sigh emerged from the soil, wistful as it echoed up from that gaping darkness.
“Stick with me and you’ll struggle no longer, Roman. The time for clawing and scraping for a meager meal is at an end. My table spills over…and you’ll dine with me now.”
The stale air of the root cellar seemed to crackle with possibilities. I leaned forward over the hole, listening intently.
“I’ll feed you wealth and knowledge, child of flesh and sinew. I’ll feed you pleasure and joy and all things men crave in this life. My whispers are all for you and only you…and they will lead you to great wonders.”
A little shiver was traveling up my spine, warm and tingly. It was like being massaged from the inside, hideously pleasant.
“I want the struggle to be over, M. My family and I have struggled enough…but I have nothing to repay you with. Why do anything for me?” I asked.
“That’s where you’re wrong, child of flesh and sinew.”
The candles began to sputter, the flames growing dim.
“If your mind remains open and your hands unfurl to do my work…then you have much to offer me.”
I could feel the cold returning, M’s voice fading. The sound of his words seemed to be coming from very far away now.
“Consider it a mutually beneficial relationship.”
I felt that warm, slithery sensation departing my body.
“One last thing, Roman…the next time you visit…bring a shovel.”
The little flames seemed to all wink out at once, the candles going dark and sending up little tendrils of smoke as they died. It seemed there was no more to be said for now.
M was gone.
Chapter 16
Roman
I slept badly that night. A hot, sticky sweat clung to my body as I tossed and turned in the bed. I seemed to always be on the edge of restful sleep before the memory of M’s voice brought me back to reality. I felt panicked and excited and completely unsure of what comes next.
At some point I slipped off to fretful sleep. It gave me no comfort. I fell from a world of perspiration and uneasiness into a nest of sharpened dreams. My eyes opened to that other world I’d experienced once before in the dream that befell me in the cemetery. A place where the stars are too bright and the moon is too close.
I was in my own body and looking through my own eyes and I knew instantly that I was dreaming. I was in an ancient forest, the trees towering above me like monoliths. This was a time before man, an era before evolution had taken us from knuckle-dragging apes to the apex predators of planet Earth.
I was nude and using my hands to dig and claw at the dirt of the forest floor. I was smeared in the soil and blackened by it, my face feeling caked by the very ground itself. I could hear the chirps of strange insects all around me and even the distant roar of some animal that sounded horribly large.
My digging was frantic and I could do nothing to stop myself. My fingernails were broken and ragged, the blood from them dripping down into the dirt and giving it a crimson taint. I looked up and realized I was at least twenty feet deep into this hole.
I was tunneling deeper and deeper, the dirt flying out behind my shoulders, the hole becoming impossibly large. My hand seized a mole and squeezed until the very intestines of the rodent burst out from its nostrils. I had to keep digging. Nothing could stop me from getting down there.
It was my destiny lying in this dirt and I meant to claim it.
I was so far below now that no sunshine could penetrate the chasm I’d created. This was a dark hole made for dark things and light had no place within it. My bloody fingers pierced the soil to keep digging…but I touched something that did not yield.
Not rock, not some obstruction. It was warm, seeming to pulsate beneath my touch. It was flesh. The patchwork skin of something buried for millennia and freshly freed by my own hands.
My breath caught in my throat and in the next instant, my entire world exploded as something gargantuan burst out of the soil. I felt myself flying through darkness. When vision finally returned to me I was in a different place at a different time. I could feel it.
The only constant was that I was still buried, still embraced on all sides by gritty earth. But now…I was suspended above the inner confines of a rotten coffin. I seemed to float above the desiccated remains of a long dead corpse.
Even in the dream I could smell it and I struggled not to retch. I caught movements in the eyes and for a moment I mistakenly thought that the corpse was staring at me. I realized a few seconds later that clumps of tubifex worms had taken up residence in the empty hollows where the eyes had once been.
I wanted to wake up now. I wanted to wake up more than anything else in the whole wide world. I stared down at the corpse in the dirty brown suit and I tried to will myself out of that dank coffin, out of that grave, out of those stygian depths.
That’s when the frail hand of the dead thing moved to the inner wall of the coffin. It moved slowly and strangely, the fingers plucking like something from a stop motion animation. It was scratching with fingernails that had grown even longer and sharper in the silence of the grave.
It took great effort from my frazzled mind to understand that the corpse was scratching a message for me. Words were taking shape in the rotten wood, ragged and full of dreadful weight.
The skeletal hand fell back down, the work of the fingernails done for the time being. I squinted through the blackness of the coffin to read what had been left for me there.
It was just a single line.
“He must remain below.”
That’s when the floating feeling left me. The soil around me began to crash down from all sides, pushing me deeper, burying me and cutting off all oxygen. My back was breaking from the weight of it and my nostrils felt full and I couldn’t breathe because there was nothing but filth to fill my lungs.
I opened my mouth to scream and the sour soil poured in and choked me and choked me…and then finally awoke me.
I sat up in my own bed, the sheets plastered to my skin and soaked with sweat. I tore fresh air into my lungs and tried desperately to find even a semblance of composure.
I could still taste dirt on my tongue.
Chapter 17
Roman
The nightmare should have dissuaded me. Any sane, rational man would have laid boards across the little door of that root cellar and nailed it closed forever. A part of me felt like that’s what I should be doing right now. Another part of me whispered that it wouldn’t make any difference now.
Things had come this far. I’d crossed the Rubicon and I’d awakened M. Deep down inside I knew even if I turned away from his influence and tried to deny him he’d find a way to pull me back in. I didn’t have the slightest idea how far M’s reach could span but I’d seen a few examples of his power already. M was like some magical entity from a fairytale that could accomplish feats that men of flesh and bone can only fantasize about.
The corpse in the dirty brown suit was telling me to turn from the path…but I wasn’t ready to do that just yet. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to abandon M and his promises. I was making a conscious decision to do what he wanted in an effort to ensure that this “mutually beneficial relationship” continued to thrive. This was my choice. It would either elevate me to levels I’d never even get close to without M’s help…or it woul
d bury me. I’d deal with those consequences later.
I was fueled by desperation. I was jobless and practically penniless with no hope on the horizon. I had a sick mother at home and a father who was breaking his back just to try and keep us crawling away from the shadow of financial ruin. I knew what waited in front of me if I shut out M’s voice.
A future that involved begging for spare change and sleeping on the streets underneath thin cardboard blankets. I could expect a place in the world as one of the unseen and ignored, homeless and pathetic and dehumanized by poverty.
That was Option A. Listen to a dead man in a dirty brown suit, the ghost that lived only in my dreams…and let him lead me into obscurity.
And then there was Option B. Listen to M. Let the wealth of the world wash over me, let my desires be fulfilled and let my life mean something. It was the far more tempting option and in my mind, it was the only option.
I realized it was a bit greedy, a bit selfish…but I didn’t care. I wanted something better for myself and my family. I was willing to go to whatever drastic lengths were necessary to ensure that our quality of life improved.
I wasn’t content to just let myself fade into the gutters of hopelessness. Fuck that. This was my chance…and I intended to make the most of it.
These were the thoughts that circled through my head as I walked along the sidewalks of Rust Valley’s main street. The town wasn’t all that huge and most of the businesses were here in the town center. The sky was endlessly blue today and the clouds seemed especially white and fluffy, the air carrying that familiar bone-deep chill. My hands were shoved deep into the pockets of my overcoat and my head was lowered, not really paying much attention to my surroundings.
There was a shovel in the little shed at the house but the handle was badly splintered and the blade cracked. It wouldn’t serve for whatever digging M had in mind for me. I needed a proper tool, something that would last.
I’d decided to buy a new one at the hardware store with what little money remained from the last paycheck I got before I lost my job. I didn’t have much to spare, but I felt this investment would pay off in the long run.
I rounded a corner and headed towards the hardware store at the far end of the street when I noticed a familiar figure sitting on the bench along the sidewalk. Her long black hair tousled by the wind, her light gray eyes focused on the book that she held mere inches from her face. She bit her lip just slightly, giving me the idea that she’d gotten to a particularly good part in the story.
She wore all black, as per usual. A wooly black sweater and tattered fishnet beneath a dark plaid skirt. Her combat boots were scuffed and worn, the black polish on her fingernails chipped and picked at. Her glasses were big and the lenses thick, making those gray eyes seem infinitely larger and brimming with curiosity. She was so pale that her skin seemed almost translucent when the hard November sunshine fell down upon it.
Rose Crimshire was the only goth girl in a town that favored camouflage and four wheelers and all things country fried. She stuck out like a sore thumb, the perfect outcast. We weren’t exactly close friends. She always struck me as a very private person, almost unknowable in her own way. We were cordial to one another though and we often talked a little when we saw each other. I guess I’d consider her an acquaintance. Those people that flit in and out of your life from time to time, you enjoy them when they’re around but you don’t really notice when they’re not around.
We went to the same high school together a few years ago and I knew that Rose worked at the library a few streets over. She was often tortured in high school, the bullying so disgusting that it made my blood boil. Her pale arms were scratched and scarred all the time. Rose cut herself…and back in high school she earned the nickname Thorny Rose. Some of the crueler kids in school would taunt and catcall her in the hallways.
“Did you prick yourself today, Thorny Rose?”
“Gross, see her forearms? Trim those thorns!”
These kind of taunts would follow her wherever she went, her pretty little pixielike face concealed by a veil of black hair. One time I’d stepped in and tried to stop it. A fat bully named Lester had Rose backed up into a locker, running grubby hands through her hair and asking her to show him where the thorns got her. I was pretty quiet in high school, mostly kept to myself when not with my little circle of friends, but something came over me at that moment.
It was like a slow burning rage that scorched through my soul and I launched myself at the kid, throwing body shots left and right into his girth while yelling “Leave her alone!” He was stunned, the look of surprise passing across his fleshy face almost comical.
I ended up getting my ass beat in the end because Lester outweighed me by almost 150lbs, but I got a few good shots in. He had a bloody lip when he finally lumbered away and I savored that little victory.
Rose helped me up and showed me something that I’d never seen before. Her smile. It lit up her whole face like a brilliant crescent moon. The little nests of acne on her temples and the dark hollows beneath her eyes didn’t matter. At that moment, smiling at me in that hallway…she was beyond beautiful.
That memory was fresh in my mind even though it happened awhile ago. Years had passed since then and high school was just a piece of the past now. Rose’s head tilted up from her book as I walked closer, and that same little smile appeared across her face. Tiny white teeth and playful upturned lips.
I wasn’t all that surprised to see that her smile had the same effect on me now as it did then.
The passage of time can change many things…but not the beauty of a familiar smile. It’s just a little expression of happiness on someone’s face that provokes the same feeling inside of you when you see it, but it means so much. There’s something eternal about that kind of smile.
Chapter 18
Roman
“Hey, Ro…”
She never used my full name. There was something endearing about that, almost like Ro was something just between us. It was approaching late evening now and the sun was low in the sky, the glare of it catching in the thick lenses of her glasses.
“Good to see you, Rose. Little cold out here for reading, isn’t it?”
Her smile transformed into a little smirk. There was light acne scarring along her cheeks and the dimples that formed there looked delightfully mischievous.
“I don’t mind the cold so much. The library can get a little musty sometimes and the fresh air is nice. I can tolerate discomfort if the reward is worth it.”
She was weird. I liked weird, though. My eyes wandered down to her sleeves for a moment, lighting upon the crisscrossed scars that ran up her wrist and forearms. She must have caught me looking because she self-consciously pulled the material of her sweater down a bit more. Rose had always hated her scars.
“What about you, Ro? Off to the cemetery to trim hedges and commune with the dead?”
I chuckled, shaking my head slowly.
“Not anymore. There’s no more work there now that the season has ended. They let me go…”
She reached up to push a lock of black hair behind her ear, the wind immediately dislodging it and causing it to twirl again. She didn’t bother a second time.
“That blows. The guy who runs the place is a dick anyways. I used to walk by his office on my way home sometimes and I’d catch a glimpse of him through the window rubbing himself through his khaki shorts and watching 1970s porn.”
Rose mimed putting her finger down her throat and retching.
“Hey, don’t knock it…that stuff is gold. Moustaches for days and really awkward close-ups. They were devoted to their craft!”
Rose clamps her book shut and places it down on the bench beside her, a little chortle of laughter flowing out past lips painted a dark crimson. I noticed she was reading Horns by Joe Hill. A good choice.
“Gross. So where are you going then, oh mysterious one?”
I nodded towards the hardware store down the street. I didn’
t want to say too much about what I was going to get there. I liked Rose, but I certainly couldn’t confide in her about M. I felt that I could confide in absolutely no one when it came to M. It was critical that everything about that root cellar and what lived below needed to remain a secret.
“Just running some errands, gonna pick up some stuff for dad.”
“Mmm. Nothing says father and son bonding time like hammering and sawing and all that good shit.”
“For sure. If we end up building an ark together I’ll save you a VIP spot on it.”
That little smirk again, the adorable dimples on full display. I’d always joke with her about Bible-related stuff. Rose was a hardcore atheist and I wasn’t religious one way or the other, so it seemed a funny topic to play around with. Almost everyone in this town was a Christian so we definitely fell into the minority.
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