Whispers From The Dark (10 page)

DIRT DON'T HURT

By the time Todd awoke, he was buried up to his neck with the foul smelling dirt.  He tried to move, but the weight made it impossible.  Besides that, he was pretty sure he felt a rope around his wrists.  He looked around, his mind crawling out from underneath a fog.  He was in a small room, about the size of his living room.  The walls were made of stone, and the entire place was filled with dirt, him buried in one corner with only his head exposed.  A steep staircase led up to a trapdoor.  In the opposite corner, another head protruded from the earth, hanging limply to one side.  It was aging, but not rotted.  The flesh was sick yellow and the short black hair hung in clumps, just reaching the tops of the head's closed eyes.

Panic gripped him as tightly as the dirt and he screamed, his voice echoing off the stone walls.  A few moments later and he calmed himself somewhat.  Then he tried to figure out just what the hell was happening to him.

The last thing he remembered was the bar, and the girl.

A pretty blond thing who said her name was Mary.

They’d danced for a couple of hours, had several drinks, and then…

And then everything went blank.

He knew he could hold his alcohol; someone must have drugged him.

The trapdoor opened and Mary made her way down the stairs, using both hands to carry a five gallon bucket.

She struggled with the weight of it as she approached him.  “God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt,” she said.

“What?”  Todd screamed.  “Let me out of here.”

Mary was silent.

“What the hell is this?”

She smiled.  “Dirt.”

“I know that, goddamn it!  Why am I buried in the shit?”

“God made dirt, dirt don’t hurt,” Mary said.  She looked surprised that he didn’t know that fact.

“What?” 

Mary lifted the bucket and dumped the dirt inside onto Todd’s head.

He shook his head, gagging and spitting to keep the dirt out of his mouth.  It stunk of something dead; a rotting animal or something worse.

“What the fuck are you doing?”  He screamed at her.  He could taste the stink of the dirt as he spoke, resting in the back of his throat.

“God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt,” Mary repeated, and then turned and left, disappearing up the stairs and closing the door.

Todd saw movement from the far corner of the room.  The other head was          twitching.

A moment later and the head exploded like a piñata, no blood from its split cavity.  Instead it birthed forth hundreds of huge insects Todd had never seen before.  They were each the size of a cell phone, bright red in color.  Their segmented bodies looked like ants, only more round.  Instead of two horizontal pinchers, the insects’ mouths were oversized mandibles, gnashing up and down as the charged across the earthen floor towards him, burrowing into the ground as they did.  They left small furrows in the dirt as they approached steadily.

As the bugs rushed towards him, Todd knew that Mary was right.  It really wasn’t the dirt that was going to hurt.  Not at all.

THROWING STONES

Paul stepped onto the deck, taking a deep breath of the mountain air and washing it down with a sip of his scotch.  He’d only been in the house for one week, but he knew throughout every muscle and fiber in his body that he’d made the right choice in moving to the country after the divorce.  It wasn’t just that he was far from Carla and that prick she’d left him for, either.  As soon as he’d gotten away from the concrete hell of Atlanta, his creativity had renewed itself.  He’d already written four new songs--good ones, too-- and even recorded a rough demo of one.       

The sun was disappearing behind the mountains in the distance, and already the sounds of crickets and frogs filled the air.  Paul walked to the deck railing and started to take another sip of whiskey when something caught his eye.

He leaned over the railing, trying in vain to make out what it was.  The second-floor deck looked out onto a gargantuan lawn that stretched out almost three hundred feet from the front of the house, finally giving way to the narrow gravel road that made a two mile loop through the woods before returning to the main highway.  On all other sides, the two story farmhouse was surrounded by deep forests.

A small pale pillar rose up out of the ground just where the lawn met gravel, a few feet from Paul’s driveway.  He’d never seen it before, and couldn’t make out exactly what it was from such a long distance.  Frowning, he left the deck and made his way through the house, past the hallways of still unpacked moving boxes and out into the yard. 

Hurrying against the dimming light, he reached the road nearly out of breath. 

Five stones, each a couple of inches thick and about the diameter of a CD, were stacked atop one another.  Paul stared at the pillar for a moment and then looked up and down the empty road.  The rocks were smooth and glossy, polished by eons in a creek or river.  But the nearest water was Turtle Creek, three miles from his home.  

“What the hell?” He whispered. 

His house was twenty minutes from town and only three other homes were on the road.  He’d noticed a few joggers that used the looping road for their morning runs, but this stack of rocks hadn’t been here a few hours ago, when he’d last stepped onto the deck for some fresh air.  

Paul considered it for a moment, and finally wrote it off to kids playing some odd prank.  Who else would bother with balancing a bunch of stones in his lawn?  He hadn’t yet met any of his neighbors; most likely one of them had a child or two who had nothing better to do.

Satisfied with his assumption, Paul kicked over the rocks and returned to the house.

***

The next morning Paul woke to a heavy rain, the drops falling against the metal roof forming a thunder all its own.  He spent several minutes lying in bed, staring up at the roof and listening to the downpour.  He thought of Carla, and the shitheel she’d left him for, Steve.   

She’d downgraded for sure, Paul thought with a smile.  A year and a half ago she’d been married to one of the brightest up-and-coming new artists in the music industry--now she was sleeping in a shitty apartment with a building contractor.  The constant touring that had garnered Paul so much success, coupled with his fondness for a bottle, were her reasons for leaving. 

I never see you, and when I do you’re a drunk asshole.  Those had been the exact words that opened the letter Paul had found when he came home from his last tour.

And for some reason she hadn’t even wanted any of Paul’s money when they’d separated.  “Stay the hell away from me,” she’d told him.  It was the last thing she’d said to him that hadn’t been relayed through a lawyer.  

It had hurt him, for sure.  But now that he was isolated in the country, he was turning that hurt into a gold record. He'd bought the house for an insanely low price – the previous homeowners had simply stopped making the mortgage payments and disappeared into the great American landscape, running from the housing crisis, their home, and their creditors, or at least that's what the realtor had told him.  The bank was as happy to unload the property as he was to purchase it.  His assistant had done well for him, and he figured that he probably owed her a bit of a bonus just based on how things were turning out.  He chuckled and climbed out of bed, not bothering to even put on clothes as he made his way to the kitchen and fried a plate full of bacon and eggs for breakfast.  He washed it down with a small glass of orange juice, and then washed that down with a scotch.

He walked to the glass doors that opened onto the deck and stared out into the weather.  The rain had brought with it a fog so dense that he couldn’t see past the handrails.  Pouring another drink, he headed back into the bedroom he’d turned into a studio and spent the rest of the day refining the songs he’d written. 

The rain persisted through the night, its drumming on the roof lulling him into a dreamless sleep. 

When he woke, the weather had cleared.  Paul finished his breakfast and poured the last of his scotch into a glass, taking it onto the porch to drink. 

As he reached the handrails, he froze.  Three pillars dotted his lawn, one in the same spot as the one he’d found earlier, the other two closer in to his house and sitting four or five feet from one another.  He hurried back into the house and pulled on a pair of pants and shoes, and then ran outside to the rocks. 

The columns were taller now; they came up to his knees.  Each one was stacked with seven polished river stones, some of them the size of a shoebox.  One of the pillars seemed to be impossibly balanced; the center stone was turned up on its edge, the ones above and below it laid flatways.

Paul stared at the creations, no longer certain that they were the work of bored kids.  These had been built during the rain, or shortly after it had stopped sometime in the early morning hours.  That fact alone meant it was someone with dedication; a kid wouldn’t take the time to brave through a downpour or wake at three a.m. just to carry rocks to his yard and stack them up like this. 

Paul spent the next fifteen minutes carrying the stones to the other side of the gravel road and pitching them into the drainage ditch, pondering over what motivation someone would have for building the pillars on his lawn.

The job done, he returned to the house and jumped into the shower, hoping that the water would wash away the unease that had crept over him as he cleared the rocks from his land. 

Instead, it brought a new realization into his mind. 

What if it was a stalker?  Some crazy fan trying to proclaim their love for his rock and roll songs with a weird-ass display of balancing prowess?  Stranger things had happened, for sure. 

While he was famous compared to most, he wasn’t an international superstar; it was only occasionally that he was even recognized when he went out in public.  He’d never had the need for private bodyguards or elaborate security measures, just a simple alarm system installed in his homes and a couple of loaded handguns at the ready.

But still, it was as likely an explanation as kids playing a practical joke.

Paul shuddered and turned off the shower.  He needed a drink.    

***

The drive into town took twenty minutes, and by the time that he had left the gravel road and began following the highway Paul had managed to somewhat take his mind off of the strange rocks. 

Ashton was small, but not like the tiny two-block sort of town usually on movies and television.  There was a Wal-Mart and Best Buy, a dozen or so fast food joints lining a two mile strip of road.  Just on the edge of town was a small college sporting a few thousand students.  A mile outside of the town the wilderness began to swallow up civilization again; homes were tucked into the mountains along hundreds of back roads.

After the liquor store, Paul stopped by the local grocery store.  He’d been living on frozen pizza and microwavable meals since moving into the house, and was ready to stock his kitchen properly and make himself a real dinner.  Nobody in the store seemed to recognize him at all, and he had his cart filled within thirty minutes. 

“Can I ask you a weird question?” Paul asked the young girl ringing up his groceries. 

“Sure,” she smiled. 

“I’ve been finding stacks of rocks on my property the last couple of days.  Is that a normal thing around here?”

The girl chuckled.  “I’ve seen that down by the river a lot.  I always assumed it was college kids.  I think maybe it’s a hippie thing or something.”

“A hippie thing?”

“Getting back in touch with mother earth or some crap like that, I guess.  I’ve never really thought much about it.”

Paul considered her answer for a moment before finally wondering aloud: “Why the hell would a college kid stack a bunch of rocks up on my lawn?”

She shrugged.  “Why the hell would a college kid stack a bunch of rocks up anywhere?”     

As he drove home, Paul stopped at a small gravel pull off area that overlooked the river.  Just as the girl had said, Paul counted a half dozen rock pillars stacked along the riverbank.  They were smaller than the ones he’d just disposed of, but otherwise were identical.  One was even stacked up in the middle of the water, perched on a large flat stone that rose up above the river. 

It made Paul feel better.  He still didn’t know why someone was bothering to stack them on his property, but at least he knew that it wasn’t just being done at his house. 

When Paul arrived home there were two of the pillars in the middle of his driveway.  Each one was eight rocks high, made using oblong football sized stones and stacked in a more impressive fashion than any of the previous ones.  Every other rock was turned edgeways, so that the pillars alternated between horizontal and vertical stones.  

He sat, staring at the structures and trying to keep calm.  He wasn’t nervous anymore; now he was getting pissed.  Whoever was doing it was playing games with him, mocking him.  Not to mention trespassing.     

Paul drove up the driveway, smiling at the sound of his jeep knocking over the pillars beneath its advance.

“Fucking hippies,” he grunted.

***

Paul cooked a pan seared steak and a baked potato for dinner, every few seconds leaving the kitchen to walk onto the deck and survey his property.  The meal was finished just as the sun vanished behind the distant mountains and he turned on all of the exterior lights and ate at the patio table on the deck, his pistol lying beside his plate.

When he’d finished with his meal he hurried inside and tossed the dishes into the sink, grabbed the fresh bottle of scotch and a glass, and returned to the deck.  He flipped off the lights on the deck, leaving the floodlights that were attached to the corners of his house on.  He pulled a chair close to the railings and poured himself a drink.  The floodlights did a fair job of illuminating the lawn, although beyond their reach the dark seemed foreboding, the sounds of crickets and frogs and the glow of a million fireflies the only thing piercing its blackness.