Through the floor
Through the dirt
Through the door
Tunnels
Of darkness
And whispers
And screams
Like a choir
Kris kept smiling. She would not let them into her mind. Twenty-seven-year-old Kris was the only person adult Kris could trust. A girl whose back never ached, whose head never bowed, whose knee never bent, bravely firing a flare into the future called Troglodyte that warned her tired, slow, failed adult self that this world was really a prison, and its name was Black Iron Mountain.
On wings
Made of red
Made of yellow
Made of fire
It lands
On my hand
This strange thing
With its wings
As Troglodyte turned the Wheel, a butterfly somehow got into Black Iron Mountain and landed on the back of his hand. He’d never seen one before, and it made him realize that there was more to this world than Black Iron Mountain. There was an escape somewhere, a way out, a Blue Door.
Makes me know
This shadow show
My master’s voice
They are liars
In one smooth movement at this point in the song, Kris would grab the pick from her mouth, and come down hard:
There is a fire.
She ripped into a G power chord on “fire,” then tore into the heavy, shredded ending of “Poincaré’s Butterfly,” chewing up the air, waking everyone up the way Scottie gave his life to wake her up. At the end of “Poincaré’s Butterfly,” after Troglodyte realizes he can break his chains and leave, after he realizes that there is a way to the surface, Kris came in with Scottie Rocket on a hard riff that repeated again and again, getting stronger with each repetition, as Terry sang:
There is more
Beyond the pain
And the shame
And the blood
And the screams
Past the flood
And the fire
And the King
And his choir
Through the torture
And the wire
And the murder
And the gore
Above these dark tunnels…
It was the sound of rage and triumph as Troglodyte shattered his chains and began his long trek to the surface, because metal woke you up. Metal set you free.
There’s a door.
They’d been a band once, they’d been good, they might have even been great. Then the Blind King betrayed them all. No matter how many drugs they gave her, Kris would not forget. Not again.
“When you came to us, you had a strange delusion,” Miranda said at their one-on-one session. “Do you remember what it was?”
Kris smiled softly, looking straight ahead.
“You’re probably embarrassed,” Miranda said. “You thought that people spied on you. You thought Terry Hunt controlled your life. That he kept you down. Do you remember that?”
Kris didn’t change her expression.
“But you know why your life was a mess, don’t you?” Miranda asked.
Kris gave her nothing.
“Because of you,” Miranda said, looking into her eyes. “You’re the only one responsible for your problems. It was never anyone else’s fault. It was only ever you.”
She held Kris’s gaze for a long time, trying to get her to flinch, trying to make her blink. But Kris held steady because now she knew why Troglodyte was a weapon that could shatter chains, she knew why that album scared Terry, she knew why Black Iron Mountain tried to get it erased.
It told the future. She lived in Gurner, chained to the wheel, and Terry’s Hundred Handed Eye watched her. She ate herself to live, but then Scottie showed up with Poincaré’s butterfly on his leg, and he woke her up. Well in the Woods was the Wheel, too. Every day the same, everything in chains.
“Kris,” Miranda said. “I know you can hear me.”
Miranda leaned over and pinched the skin on the back of Kris’s hand between her thumb and forefinger. She twisted it around like a corkscrew, squeezing all the blood out, turning it white, looking for a reaction.
Kris didn’t give Miranda anything. Partly because in her one thousand three hundred and twenty-six shows, in her thousands of rehearsals, in her tens of thousands of hours woodshedding, Kris had done way worse to her hands.
But mostly because she knew the truth: Troglodyte told the future. Scottie asked her to carry the fire. She would not let him down.
And she knew what track came next.
Miranda let go of Kris’s skin, and it throbbed as blood surged back into her torn blood vessels.
“Well,” Miranda said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
The next track on Troglodyte was “Down Where the Worms Squirm.” It was the one about the rain.
Heavy rain and flash flooding is possible in the Clay County area starting as early as tomorrow night as Tropical Storm Stephen arrives off the Atlantic coast. Several inches of rain could fall across Eastern Kentucky in just a few hours, accompanied by severe thunderstorms with damaging winds gusting up to forty-five miles per hour. Hail is expected, lasting into the early hours of Monday morning. Residents are advised to remain indoors.
—162.4 KEC58, National Weather Service Alert
August 10, 2019
ll day the temperature plummeted. Gray clouds scudded over Silent Sunrise Session. At Learning to Listen, Kris’s ears popped as the air pressure dropped. Attendants ran all over the property putting plywood over glass walls and securing doors. At lunch, Miranda announced that a tropical depression was going to make landfall in Virginia, sending high winds and rain into Kentucky, even as far west as Well in the Woods. Sunset Review would be indoors in the Group Awakening room. Afternoon activities were canceled. Everyone got extra Paxator and was sent to bed early.
Now, in the darkness, a bucket of water slammed into her window and Kris woke up. She reached out, found the sconce over her bed, and twisted the switch. It clicked and clicked but the room stayed dark. The window rattled in its frame. Kris stood and the dark room did a merry-go-round. Two fast steps got her to the window without falling down. Outside, flashlights bounced across the grounds. All the landscaping lights were dark. The power was out.
Kris smiled, and this was a real smile. She had trusted Troglodyte and Troglodyte came true. The storm from “Down Where the Worms Squirm” was here.
With shaking hands, Kris dressed fast. All she had were the linen pants and shirt they provided for her, and the soft shoes with their thin rubber soles, but they were better than nothing. She padded to the door, pushed it open, and crept into the hall. Her heart hit thrash metal beats per minute, rabbiting in her chest so hard she thought she’d throw up. Each corner produced bowel-churning terror, but she forced herself around every one until she reached the stairs that disappeared down into the deep darkness of the first floor. She put one foot on the top step.
A flashlight beam landed on the bottom step and started to rise, and Kris backed up and ducked into an open doorway. It was someone’s office, so modern and forward-thinking it didn’t even have a door. Instead of a chair, a yoga ball sat behind the desk. A cell phone sat on the windowsill, plugged into a charger. Leaning in the corner was Kris’s soft case, and she knew that inside it was her guitar, ready to be burned soon. This must be Miranda’s office. As Kris hid behind the desk, she saw the flashlight dust the room, continue down the hall, and disappear.
Kris unplugged the cell phone and shoved it into her pocket, then stepped back into the hall. She started for the steps but froze when, from around the corner, she saw the flashlight beam bobbing back toward her.
“…didn’t even…in the office,” the voice said, t
orn to shreds by the rain. “Windows open…or…”
Next to Kris was a resident’s room belonging to a middle-aged recovering food addict named Gray. Kris turned the knob and stepped inside, closing the door behind her as quietly as she could.
Cold air pinched her nostrils and scraped her throat. It was pitch black. A wet sound filled the room. Kris turned on the phone’s flashlight to see what was leaking, raised it over her head, and the harsh light bounced off a thing on the bed and the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle snapped into place, and Kris remembered what really happened on contract night.
* * *
— — —
Kris stood in the woods behind the Witch House, double-fisting her champagne. It had started to rain and she was cold and wet and pissed off when she came back inside. The first thing she saw were the contracts, four of them lined up on the coffee table, signed by Bill, Tuck, and Scottie Rocket, the last one waiting for her. Stomach acid burned the back of her throat. Her brain gave a deep throb.
Even as she entered the blue door, even as she stormed down the basement steps, she knew something was wrong. It was too quiet. It was too dark. Usually they had the Christmas tree lights on, or the Coleman lantern, and there was always the sound of Scottie talking endlessly, or Tuck noodling on his bass, or Terry indulging in some elaborate fame fantasy, but tonight it was completely silent.
In the dark, she had heard the same soft, rotten, sucking sounds she heard now as she picked up the flashlight hanging halfway down the stairs and clicked it on. At first, she didn’t know what she was looking at. She recognized Bill’s black jeans from the two identical tears he’d made over his knees, the cotton forming pouty lips, but she didn’t understand what he had over the upper half of his body. A pile of towels? A bag of laundry? She swung the flashlight to the beanbag chair and saw a white bag covering Tuck’s upper body and face.
The last place the flashlight stopped was the plaid air mattress against the wall. Scottie was passed out on his back, completely boneless, and in that instant she knew what he would look like dead. The air mattress had deflated, pressed to the floor by the thing that crouched on his chest. The light nailed it to the wall, erasing all shadows, and Kris thought it was a woman because of its long hair and two deflated dugs swinging back and forth.
It was a corpse, emaciated past the point of survival, white as house paint, all its ribs standing out, every knob of its spine pressing painfully through its skin. Its fingernails were black and it bent over Scottie, slobbering up the black foam that came boiling out of his mouth. Kris flipped the light back to the couch, and she saw that the same thing was crouched over Bill, a starved mummy, maggot-white, its skin hanging in loose folds. A skin tag between its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick.
At first, they were so intent on their feeding they didn’t notice her. But then the one crouched on Tuck’s enormous stomach sensed her. It turned its head, blind eyes targeting Kris, and she could not look away. Its gaze was old and cold and hungry and its chin dripped black foam like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its bright yellow tongue vibrating, its gums a vivid red. Kris’s hands went numb and the flashlight slipped through her fingers and spun crazily down the stairs and across the floor, rolling to a rest with its beam shining on an empty patch of basement floor. In the dark, she heard the other two stop feeding. From the darkness came a hungry, chittering hiss.
A white hand planted itself in the middle of the flashlight beam and Kris could not move, because the one that had been on Tuck was crawling toward her, walking on all fours like a spider, and she tried to run but then she saw that its elbows and knees bent backward, and her joints locked. The thing took careful, slow steps on all fours, and then, in a rush, it scurried up the bannister. The railing creaked under its weight and Kris could feel the painful cold radiating from it in waves, and its blind face turned toward her, and then…nothing.
Kris was in the wet woods, time spliced out of her memory, looking up at rain falling into her face. She slid over the cold, wet ground. Sticks and leaves went up the back of her shirt. She raised her head and saw the white creature, on all fours, moving like a spider, dragging her back to the Witch House by one ankle. Her brain short-circuited and she rolled to her right, twisting, and the thing was on her fast, pinning her to the dirt, colder than the rain.
Its mouth was wide and hungry, its fingernails jagged and torn. There was nothing in its eyes except hunger. It pinned her by the shoulders with one hand, then dipped its fingers into her mouth and Kris gagged reflexively, her teeth pressing into its cold knuckles. It scrabbled down her throat, its fingernails grasping the root of her tongue, and panic erupted inside Kris and she moved the only part of her body she could.
Kris bit down. A bitter liquid sprayed the inside of her mouth and trickled down her throat. The thing reared back, yanking its hand free, hunching over its wounded fingers. Kris rolled onto her hands and knees and saw a pile of old lumber from some forgotten renovation project glistening nearby in the rain. She grabbed a two-by-four and she smashed it down on the thing’s skull with all the revulsion and disgust of crushing a roach—once, twice, then the thing was squirming in the mud on its back.
Everyone was still inside, and Kris was running before she even stopped throwing up. She slammed through the kitchen door, crashing down the stairs before her fear could catch up to her. The things were gone, and the beam of the flashlight she’d dropped on the floor was watery and weak, and Kris was slapping their faces and kicking their shoulders and shouting, “Come on, come on, come on, we have to get the fuck out of here!”
She remembered getting them into the van, hitting the highway, lurching in the rain, and seeing not headlights in front of her, not a UPS truck, but a flash of white in the rearview mirror. She turned just as the thing from the woods, its head split open and oozing black blood, scrambled up the back of the moving van, impossibly fast.
“What’s that?” Tuck said, as the thing pounded across the roof. Then its face exploded into the windshield.
Tuck screamed as it banged one bony fist against the glass, eyes ragged holes, mouth a gaping black maw, and Kris slammed on the brakes and pulled the wheel to the right as far as it would go. The thing went flying as she felt two tires leave the road, and the last thing Kris saw before the van rolled was its face, yanked out of her field of vision. Then gravity stopped, and then the violence, and the stillness, and the long, lonely sound of Bill’s unvarying monotone scream. But before she passed out, she heard it coming, picking its way through the wreckage, back to finish its job…
* * *
– – –
The thing squatting on Gray’s chest turned its black dripping chin into the cell phone light, and the twenty years between points A and B disappeared. Wind squeezed the sides of the building as the thing sniffed the air, then dismissed her, turning back to Gray’s mouth, where it continued to lap up the black foam like porridge from a dog’s bowl.
This was what lived in Black Iron Mountain, and Kris knew in a flash that there was us, and there was them. There were human beings, and there was Black Iron Mountain. And it had ignored her, dismissed her like she didn’t matter. Like she wasn’t dangerous.
Kris fell back against the door, shoved it open, stumbled into the hall. She raced into Miranda’s office, crawled behind the desk, unzipped the soft case. She’d forgotten the heft and weight of her guitar. She grabbed it by the neck, its steel strings slicing into her soft hands, and felt strength coursing from it, up her arms like an electric current, as she ran back to Gray’s room.
People call guitars axes because that’s how they’re shaped. A long neck made of mahogany, and the body like a blade. The Gibson Les Paul Melody Maker’s body was a ten-pound slab of maple, about an inch thick, a foot wide at the bell. It was unbalanced in Kris’s hand, wanting to flip from her thin wrist as she gripped its neck and raised it o
ver her right shoulder. She swung it down and across, throwing her body weight into it, going for a home run. The body of her guitar hit the thing with a TONK, and it toppled back against the wall and was on its feet in an instant, hissing at Kris, but she already had her guitar over her head and she brought it down again. It dodged left, but she turned and smacked it again with the full face of her Les Paul. Three metal strings gave comical TWINGs as they snapped and sliced backward in metal curls.
It gathered its limbs to leap at her, and Kris didn’t give a shit. She let her momentum carry her to the right, and at the peak of her arc reversed and brought her guitar slamming back down to the left, smashing into the knobs of the thing’s spine. Something snapped, and the thing collapsed on top of Gray’s abdomen, forcing black foam to fountain from his mouth, spattering the wall over his head. The thing’s limbs twitched in double time as Kris brought her guitar down on it again and again, the remaining D, A, and E strings vibrating as this piece of shit crunched beneath her blows.
She finally stopped, arms aching, tendons shaking, palms burning, out of breath. Then the thing shoved its torso up, one clawed hand reaching for Kris, and she leaned back from the waist and brought her guitar up in a high arc, behind her back, over her head, and crashed it down onto the base of its skull.
This time, it didn’t move.
Kris heard men shouting over the wind outside, voices filtering through the rain. She ran into the hall, damaged guitar in her right hand. She went around the corner, clattered down the stairs, and then she was out the back door in the howling rain, pounding across the deck, and before she knew where she was going, she was running for the Witch House.
Behind her, flashlights danced in windows as they searched for her, while cold rain lashed her chest and face and washed black foam from the body of her battered Les Paul. She ran up the slippery wooden steps and across the back deck of the Witch House and pushed open the door. There was one way out of here that wasn’t protected by a fence or a gate. All Kris had to do was count on the fact that Miranda and Bill were liars. She threw her whole body against the back door and pushed it shut in the face of the roaring wind, and then everything was silent.
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