Dirt Lullabies

by Jeremy Megargee

  I’ll sleep here tonight. I want to be close to the hole. I want to be close to M when he comes so that I can be the first to praise his name. I curl up into the fetal position in the soil and I hold a little ball of Ro’s hair in my hands. I ventured into his house earlier today and collected the hair from the comb in his bathroom. It has his smell. His wonderful, delicious aroma carries me down into satisfied sleep.

  Soon we’ll start our new lives together.

  Soon, my Ro.

  Soon.

  Chapter 54

  Roman

  I stop at a little gas station in Martinsburg, West Virginia. It’s 4am and Rust Valley is just two towns over. Not far now. A light bulb went off in my head and I just had to make a quick stop to get supplies. I purchase a five gallon portable gas can and I fill it to the top with gasoline. I’m standing by the Dodge Charger and pumping the last of the gasoline into the can when I notice a familiar little critter staring at me from the top of the pump.

  It’s that fucking little house centipede. It waves long antennas at me and twitches at least fifteen pairs of legs together. It almost appears to be dancing.

  There’s a little piece of yellowing scroll tied to the segmented body with a black silk thread. I don’t want to touch this revolting thing because I know it’s tied to M somehow, almost like his harbinger of bad omens. I reach forward anyways and pull the thread free to retrieve the note. I unfurl it to see immaculate script written in some sort of red ink. It smells coppery so I assume the ink is blood.

  “You never cease to surprise me, child of flesh and sinew! Tough as fucking NAILS, aren’t you? Just like your momma! Ha ha! I intended for the car crash to kill you instead of just leaving you comatose. I still considered it a win though because you’re not much of a threat to me if you’re a brain-dead cucumber down in Baltimore, right?

  Imagine my shock when you not only wake up, but jump into this gaudy car and start rolling back to my little neck of the woods. I knew you were spirited…but this is just plain ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s brain damage or a death wish that spurs you onward, but I suggest you don’t cross the town line, Roman. All that’s left for you in Rust Valley is pain and ruin between my teeth.

  Don’t come back here, boy. I will eat you up and shit you out without even breaking stride. I’ll rend everything you love until it’s nothing but tattered meat and I’ll piss on the shallow graves of every single human being on this planet with the unfortunate distinction of having Merrick as a surname.

  Long story short: I WILL FUCK YOU UP.

  I’ve met some defiant, overconfidence Homo sapiens in my day but you take the goddamn cake! Stay away. Do not come back here. Turn back now while I’m still willing to place mercy on the table.”

  - Sincerely, your ol’ buddy M

  I stand there for a moment, my teeth gritted. The house centipede is still doing that irritating little dance on the top of the gas pump. I ball my fist up and SLAM it down as hard as I possibly can, squashing the house centipede into ruined mush and relishing the satisfying splat sound. I wipe the gunk off on the back of my jeans and slide behind the wheel of the Dodge Charger.

  I grin while adjusting the rear view mirror.

  Still a few miles to go before I see my “ol’ buddy M” again.

  Chapter 55

  M

  I’ve always been here.

  I can’t recall if I was born or if I hatched or if one day I just popped into existence. There is no memory of the early years. There was no childhood, no larval stage, no adolescence of any kind. I’ve been fully grown as far back as I can remember. I recall when most of the world was water and life started to grow down in the deep depths. I’d wade through the oceans and gobble up the new life as soon as it evolved.

  I think that was back in the Paleozoic Era. I used to catch these big jawless fish by the dozen and swallow them down without chewing. They were armored and plated so I didn’t really like chewing them. They tasted bittersweet.

  I enjoyed just letting my body float in the sea back in those old days. Made me feel weightless and free. I’m the largest entity that has ever walked this earth so that sensation was rare for me. I savored it as much as I could.

  Time just kept on rolling, a never-ending wheel. I do not age. I do not grow infirm and I never die. Mine is the gift-curse of the eternal. I’ve never questioned my immortality, I simply accept it.

  I’m incapable of seeing my own reflection. I don’t know what I look like. I know only what I feel. I know that I have legs like redwoods and more appendages jutting out from my body than I know what to do with. I have eyes all over me and I see from so many different angles. I have many gaping mouths and they’re all inlaid with serrated teeth that spin like a circular saw. My digestive tract is the size of a small country and I have stomachs in just about every part of me. Some of them are tumorous and drag across the ground; others are packed together inside me like many stitched together pockets.

  The earth quakes when I walk across her surface. My footprints turn into deep ponds when the heavy rain comes. During the Jurassic Era I’d lie back between two volcanoes and I’d wait for the huge sauropods to come tramping through the grasslands below. I’d pinch my long fingers together and way down there in the grasslands the little heads of the dinosaurs would pop like overripe grapes on their long necks. That’s how I amused myself back then. I’d laugh and laugh and my laughter always brought the storm clouds.

  I’ve always been telekinetic. I’ve always been able to compel. I have so many powers and abilities that sometimes I lose track of them all. I get bored with most of them. You would too if you’d been using them for millennia.

  My one true drive has always been hunger. I’m always famished and I’m never full. I crave every bit of red, raw flesh that I can bite through. I want all of it inside me. I’ve devoured species after species, creatures that you won’t even find fossil records for because I ate up all the bones and sucked down the marrow.

  I had some of my best meals in the Cretaceous Period. Some formidable competition too. That was new for me. I remember those persistent little Velociraptors that would nip at my toes and I’d have to squash whole packs of them. I’d get my real workouts preying on the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They only came up to about chest level, still the size of children to me…but they fought like devils. They’d bite and tear until the last breath. Even took a few good little chunks outta me before I’d inevitably crush them and tear them up into tiny bite-sized pieces.

  I have a great respect for those giant lizards. I truly miss the days when dinosaurs populated the earth. I ate my way through them far too quickly and sent almost all of them to the brink of extinction. I should have paced myself a bit more. It saddens me to think that I will never taste their like again.

  The last of them died when the flaming asteroid fell from the sky. That left the world scorched for awhile. I laid down for a nap on a field of ash after that. I slept for centuries. I go into a sort of hibernation sometimes and I’m accustomed to waking up in entirely new ages of existence.

  I walked the new world for awhile after that. The world turned cold. It became a spinning ball of ice and everything was blanketed in endless snow. It was the most miserable period of my long, strange life. I hated the cold. Mammals rose to prominence and turned this freshly frozen planet into their haven. I’d spend my time wandering the white wastes and chomping down the occasional saber-toothed cat or giant ground sloth. They tasted bland, more fur than meat.

  One moonless night I stalked a herd of woolly mammoths as they headed towards a distant mountain range. I planned to take them in the valley below, an endless vista of white that would leave them perfectly vulnerable.

  I lumbered towards them, picking up speed. The earth quaked and cracked beneath my feet. I reached out with hundreds of hands all ending in ragged claws to open them up and eat the hot, steaming innards. And then the ground gave way beneath me. I fell through thick layers of ice and down into freezing
cold water. I can breathe in water and withstand the deep pressures, but the cold debilitated me. I felt my body temperature dropping and no matter how hard I fought to slither back up to the surface, I continued to sink down lower and lower. My gargantuan weight worked against me. My thoughts grew sluggish and my limbs were growing numb. I felt myself land against the very bottom of the lake.

  I had no choice but to enter hibernation. It was my only option. I’d sleep the decades and the centuries away and hopefully when I finally woke up, the water above me would have long thawed and evaporated away.

  I closed my thousands of eyes in the murky, frozen depths and slept with my stomachs still gurgling for sustenance.

  Chapter 56

  M

  I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I finally awoke. It felt like thousands of years. I expected to open my many eyes to the sky, either fluffy clouds or bright stars. Instead I opened my eyes to the dim confines of a suffocating prison. The world had grown in around me while I slept. The lower portion of my body was submerged in an underground lake and the upper portion was awkwardly pressed against a cavernous ceiling. I was buried by sediment. Geological formations had formed all around me and if I moved just a few inches in the wrong direction a spiky stalagmite or stalactite would pierce up against my flesh.

  Claustrophobia enveloped me. I beat and scraped and clawed at the earthen walls around me but it had no effect. I was weak and withered from starvation. In all of my existence I have never known what it is to be helpless. That changed the moment I realized the dirt had eaten me up. Talk about ironic.

  I just languished down in the deep for the first few days. I had almost no room to move around down here. Worms would occasionally wriggle down from above me and I’d catch them on my tongues and greedily suck them down. They did nothing but inflame my hunger even more.

  As I stretched my body around I saw one promising opening that cut up through the cavern ceiling. It was rocky and it seemed to lead to upper layers of soil. It was shaped like a small tunnel and if I craned one of my necks around I could just taste a few breaths of fresh air drifting down from at least two miles farther up. I knew that little tunnel opened to the surface. It gave me hope.

  One night a small house centipede crawled along the ceiling of my prison. I watched it with thousands of eyes as it explored every crack and crevice. I reached high up and let it crawl onto one of my long fingers. I knew immediately what needed to be done. I brought the little insectivore to my lips and I gave it a special kiss.

  I imbued it with a fragment of my immortality. I gave it a sliver of my power. It became deathless like me, a creature marked with the gift-curse of the eternal. It became my familiar. It would be my eyes up there. It would show me what the world had become while I slept my frozen sleep.

  I sent it back up through the tunnel and it showed me the surface. I saw through the eyes of my familiar. I gasped in the deep. The world was transformed. I saw vast camps and enslaved horses and all manner of unnatural things that had been erected up there. All I remember of mankind is that they were shivering apes that cowered in caves in the age of ice.

  Not anymore.

  Somewhere along the way, the human race inherited the earth.

  My familiar picked up the language of man and brought it back down to me. Every living thing that walks, crawls, or flies in this world has a language. I speak them all eloquently. I have a tongue for every language, each of them collected in one of the chambers of my parasitic mind. It’s one of the perks of being the biggest, strongest, smartest thing to ever walk the world.

  I learned the hard way that I would not escape this prison without assistance from mankind. I started calling up to them, speaking to them from a voice that echoed through the depths. The Native Americans were the first ones to hear my voice. The Shawnee tribe had a camp not far from my hole. They began to worship me as a spirit of the earth. They formulated a name for me in their language, a guttural word that roughly translated to “Unknowable.”

  Every month they’d force feed thirteen virgins full of bison meat and then sacrifice them to me by tossing them through the mouth of the tunnel. I’d catch them in midair and grind them up with revolving razor teeth. That was the first time I ever tasted human meat. I had never tasted anything like it. It absolutely intoxicated me. There was something underlying the flesh that lit slow, pleasant fire in my stomachs. The taste fluttered inside of me like a butterfly before growing still. I believe it’s the taste of the human soul.

  I’d found my perfect delicacy. I needed more. I was absolutely desperate for more. I’d repay the injuns with little gifts. I’d make their crops grow fertile or I’d laugh and make the storm clouds come to bring fresh rain. I was fed and satiated for a few good years. That changed when the white settlers came and brought disease and death to the injuns. I was forgotten.

  I slept a lot after that. There wasn’t much else to occupy my time. I never slept too long though, just a few decades at a time. I’d learned my lesson about sleeping too long. During my periods of wakefulness I’d spend my time plotting to get out of the hole and scratching at the ceiling of the cavern with the talons that could actually reach up that far. The years passed slowly. Occasionally a human would stumble across the hole and I’d make them my meat puppet for a little while. They’d bring me food and dig from the surface. The sustenance was never enough and the little digging one human could do up there barely ever made a dent in the dirt. Usually these proxies died while in my service. The hole was getting smaller as the earth continued to transform with time. That worried me greatly. I knew if that passageway ever closed, I’d be finished. My familiar would be lost to me and the proxies would have no access to my words. That would lead to endless life and endless darkness and hunger that would drive me mad.

  At some point a town was built on the land above me. A house was erected overtop the hole. Civilization marched on.

  The hole was painfully small when James came along. I convinced him to open it a little more, and it became a narrow crack. I used the vocal cords of his little daughter to make him feed me. He fed me for awhile and then he stumbled across the truth and put an end to himself. That was frustrating.

  I went to sleep after that still frustrated and a few more decades passed. Roman came next. The defiant one. The one that vexed me and questioned me, even managed to use his iron will to shrug off my telekinetic touch. I still can’t fathom how he did that…but he will suffer for it.

  Thorny Rose followed after. My perfect dark flower. Thanks to her, the hole is not just a hole anymore. It’s a pit now, gaping and wide. I can crawl and burrow up just enough to fit a bit of my segmented body into the surface world. She feeds me well. I spoil her because she is my favorite. I feel close to her and perplexed by her all at the same time. She is fiercely loyal but also infinitely strange. Perhaps stranger even than me, in some private, special way.

  Others will be coming here soon and they’ve brought the machines of man with them. They will sink metal buckets into the soil and dig and dig until I’m unearthed. They will drill through the rock and blast away the sediment.

  It’s about time. I’ve waited for far too long. I hate it down here. The underground lake that half my body rests in is polluted with my own shit and urine. Infected sores travel along the length of my partially submerged flesh. Maggots often crawl in these festering openings and I can’t even reach my hundreds of arms around to scratch at them. I loathe my prison.

  I cannot wait to get the fuck outta here…

  There are over seven billion human beings alive on the surface right now. That number grows by the second, new mewling infants coming into the world every moment that I’m locked away.

  As soon as I’m free…

  I think I’ll eat them all.

  Chapter 57

  Roman

  I roll into Rust Valley in the hazy predawn hours of what promises to be a gray, cloudy day. It is incredibly cold and the overcast sky looks to be ha
rboring mountains of snow just waiting to fall. The fog is thicker than ever. Visibility is practically nonexistent as I guide the Dodge Charger down Legion Lane.

  I drive the roaring hot rod past a few sad and drooping mobile homes before turning down a little twisty curve that leads to the last house in the isolated section of Legion Lane. Wilderness surrounds the house in the distance, the dead trees seeming to stand silent vigil as I approach. I navigate right past the driveway and guide the car through the side yard, letting the tires tear furrows into the dewy ground. I park the car just a few yards away from the entrance to the root cellar. I pop the high beams on, letting the headlights blast through the cracks in the root cellar’s walls. I leave the engine on, the powerful V8 not roaring now, but purring in anticipation