He remembered little of his father. He wondered if this lack of information was deliberate, and mutual. Sometimes a memory would surface and he’d be seduced into obsessive examination until he managed to bury it again.
Gavin was due to take possession of his father’s estate in early November, but New England had a devastating winter that delayed the move until the following April. He’d never visited his father in Vermont, never considered living there, but he had nowhere else to go. They’d been distant since Gavin Senior left his mother, and exchanged no more than a few letters the past thirty years. As a teenager Gavin searched his mother’s house for a birth certificate, adoption papers, anything to prove this cold man couldn’t have been his father. At the end, neither was familiar with the man the other became. His father’s death brought unexpected opportunity. He had no idea how he was supposed to feel about that. He wasn’t notified of the death until well after the funeral, not that he would have attended. Although he might have obtained some satisfaction in seeing the old stranger lowered into the dirt. He wasn’t informed of the cause of death, nor did he care to inquire.
Gavin nursed his aging gray Toyota wagon over the fog-laden roads of New England, periodically stopping to fill the radiator and add oil, or for a break from the stench coming from the exhaust system. He loved the green stretches, broken up by a web of intricately fitted stone walls. He admired the quaint architecture, the tidiness of the close-together villages, the friendly feel of the region, hoping Disleigh Township would possess some of those same qualities.
The first and only sign for Disleigh was a small wooden plank bearing the name with an arrow, almost obscured by the bushes where the narrow lane joined the main road. The right-of-way was neglected and overgrown, with both dead and living vegetation crowding the ditch lines. A mile in he had to dodge his first dead animal—a small deer. There would be three more—two large dogs and a cow. Each time he stopped and looked—no blood or visible injuries. Numerous trees were scarred with obscure graffiti. Some had been roughly crossed out. The distance between houses was much farther than he’d expected in this part of the country. Many appeared abandoned and overrun with brownish weeds, skeletal bushes, and dead limbs. Inside the door frame of a collapsing structure, a naked couple smeared with mud embraced. Flustered, he quickly turned his head away. He convinced himself he could not have seen this. His mouth was cracked and dry—he wished he had brought some water.
The car became unbearably stuffy, so he rolled down the window despite the vehicle’s noxious smell. A loud explosion of birdsong drove him to shut it again, their raucous noise dismembered. He tried again a half hour later. This time the sounds resembled human voices, still unpleasant, but he found himself straining to understand.
An ornate metal marker announced the Disleigh town limits. More dilapidation followed, a few old buildings torn apart by dying trees, cavernous interiors suggestive of filth and corruption. No one walked the streets or appeared in windows. His father’s house fronted a circular lane in the heart of town. It was much larger than he’d expected, the ashen exterior square and solid, if a bit beaten in by age and weather.
Martinson, the lawyer, waited on the narrow brick walk in front of the house across from a small park and its scatter of iron benches and maples. An elderly man in a floppy blue hat sat on one of the benches staring at the two men.
“That’s Whitby. Your father called him the town watchdog. Apparently he has a good loud voice if he sees something amiss.”
“These other buildings . . . I have neighbors? Some of them look empty.”
“A few businesses, a few residences, a few vacant buildings. A real mix.” He rattled the keys in his hand. “I was going to tell you I’ve got two keys for you. The silver one handles both the front and back doors. The old red one unlocks that gate in the stone wall behind the house, the one that says ‘Blackburn’s Field’ on it. Blackburn was the first owner. He built this house before there was even a town.”
“So I have a field? Like a garden?”
“No, it’s all forest now, like it was in the beginning. Trees so packed inside them low stone walls I don’t know why they haven’t pushed them over. I doubt you could walk more than a few steps before the undergrowth stopped you. I wouldn’t venture inside there, if I was you.”
“No problem there. I’ve never been a nature person.”
The lawyer looked up at him curiously. “Really? Well, you’ll be a long way from any city here. What do you plan to do with yourself?”
The question embarrassed him because he had no answer. “Still trying to figure that out I suppose.”
“Well, whatever—it’s all yours, and here are the keys. Enjoy it.” Martinson shuffled toward his car.
“Wait! How do I reach you if I have questions? Do you live nearby?”
The lawyer turned and sighed. “Phone number is on my card attached to your copy of the will. I live in Connecticut. I visited your father a few times here, but that’s the extent of my familiarity. Some of the shops—” He gestured around the circle. “Well, the owners would know more than I do. Locals. Ask them.”
Gavin forced an awkward smile. He’d never been good talking to people. “Okay. Well, can you at least tell me about the stone walls? I saw so many of them driving in.”
“Oh, they’re everywhere in New England. I have some near me. They even run through the forests. I have no idea why. It really makes no sense.”
After the lawyer left, Gavin looked for Whitby across the street but didn’t see him. Some watchdog . . .
The town was silent but for the sound of running water. It was overcast and hadn’t started raining yet, but multiple rivulets trickled down the patchy grass driveway into the cobbled street. Gavin supposed it might be the last remains of melting snow, although there was no snow visible. He crouched for a better look. There was an unexpected thickness to the stream: sediment and debris, the occasional wooden splinter or twig or tightly curled black leaf, buttons and pieces of cloth, worms and dead insects, what looked like but couldn’t be hair, what looked like rounded and polished slivers of bone.
He heard a meowing, turned to see a number of cats flowing down the cobbled lane in a loose sort of formation. A few of them carried shreds of some sort of skinned carcass in their mouths. One turned and stared at him boldly, a squirrel’s head dangling from its jaws by a narrow band of skin.
The mist transitioned into a needlelike rain. He struggled with the lock at first, and then pushed the heavy door in on the cramped wood-paneled hall, dark with dust and grime. His heart sank at this first glimpse of filth, but he had to get his few belongings inside.
The rain increased in intensity as he struggled with the paper and plastic sacks, the floppy cardboard boxes, dumping them just past the entranceway. Halfway through he stopped and stared past the edge of the house, a large trash bag full of random clothing in his arms. There was a kind of music, one rising sharp note after another. He could see the edge of the woods a short distance behind the house, that rusted iron gate and the unreadable sign, the low walls cobbled together out of large flat stones. The tops of the trees—many of them browned and dead-looking—were bending and separating from some serious wind that somehow had not yet reached him.
The sound of laughter made him turn around. Whitby was across the street, grinning with his hat off and waving some kind of bye-bye, rain running down his face and through his beard as if he were melting.
The low-ceilinged entry led into a dank living room crowded with faded furniture, the light through the clear stained-glass windows illuminating trails of debris winding between the crappy antiques. Glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls, too dirty to see inside. A plume of visible dust preceded him into the largish dining room. Both rooms were full of dust-furred bric-a-brac that he would examine at some point, although for now he couldn’t imagine touching them. The house required cleaning skills well beyond his. The estate came with some money—he hoped it was enough to hire a short-term housekeeper.
He did what he could that first day, wiped out some shelves and drawers, put clothes away, made up his bed, and cleaned the bathroom until it was tolerable. He went to bed as early as possible. He may or may not have heard more of the raucous birdcalls and discordant music, but they just as well might have been dreams.
The next morning, with no instructions for utilities, garbage pickup, or just where to buy groceries, Gavin waited until 10:00 a.m., then went out to find his neighbors.
The first few shops were closed and derelict. He came to another whose door was locked, but a bald man hunched over a desk was visible through the display window. He was busy applying labels to small bottles of dark powder. Gavin knocked on the glass and the man looked up with a smile that suddenly froze. Gavin waved, and the man stared. He knocked again and pointed toward the door. The man remained motionless. Seriously rattled, Gavin moved on.
The next building was church-like, with a cross etched into the stone near its peak. The windows by the entrance were tall, but did not appear to be church windows. Both an OPEN and a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign hung on the door. The elderly couple behind the counter greeted him with eager smiles.
“Hi, I need toothpaste, soap, a few essentials . . . ”
“Of course. We kept, keep that sort of thing for tourists. Not that there ever were any, unfortunately.” The woman led him to a row of shelves.
Gavin felt the awkward need to say something nice. “I’m sorry about your business.”
“Well—businesses, even towns, have a life span. They die out when the people die out. The locals are dying at a rate we can’t compete with. Even when we first opened, few bothered to venture into town. A community of hermits and recluses, I’m afraid. Who knows how many are left out there? Why, I believe you’re the first new resident in ages.”
“How . . . ”
“That lawyer was in here, asking about the town. I told him living here only ten years made us foreigners. We used to have a successful business in New York, but we wanted to spend our last days somewhere more peaceful. A huge mistake I’m afraid. I told him if he wanted the real dirt he’d have to talk to a local, if he could find one. I guess he talked to Whitby, as useless as that was.”
Gavin gathered more than he needed into a small basket. The husband provided him with a few business cards of people who would deliver groceries, haul things, clean, or perform other chores. “A dwindling selection, I’m afraid. Sometimes you call them and their number’s been disconnected.”
A tiny figure appeared to wave to him from a nearby shelf. It was fashioned from dried mud, tiny twisted branches, and tads of trash into somewhat of a face, something of a body. He peered closer. It had a mouth of sorts, full of dirt.
“They’re all like that—a mouth full of mud, like the rest of us in the end. You can have that. Used to be a local craft. Interesting work, but we’ve never sold any. They’re so ugly. I think they give folks the creeps.” Gavin smiled and pocketed it.
“You knew my father?”
The husband glanced at the wife before speaking. “He used to come in all the time to discuss the history of the house, the region. I think he asked the locals lots of questions. Then later, he didn’t speak much. Alice thought he was depressed. That was around the time the town visits from locals fell to almost nothing. There were some funerals for a while. I went to one—your father was there. A sad affair. I didn’t go to any more. Then we stopped hearing about the funerals altogether. But we’re still strangers here—we don’t hear everything.”
“Oh . . . trash pickup? How do I arrange that?”
“They don’t pick up the trash here. We’re on our own. You could drive the twenty-five miles to the dump, or pay somebody. Most just find a place to bury it.”
“Bury it? Isn’t that . . . unsanitary?”
“Hah! Well, it do catch up to you I guess. Bugs and vermin and such tunneling in and out. So much around here is in the ground already. What’s in the ground is a mystery until you dig it up, and we don’t excavate every inch now, do we? Else, where would we stand?” He laughed a bit too loudly.
All the talk of trash and vermin made Gavin eager to get back to the house and clean. But on the way out he stopped. “One more question. All these wonderful stone walls—do you know anything about them?”
Both of them laughed. “You wouldn’t think them so wonderful,” the man said, “if you had to maintain one, or tear it down. Some take the walls to be fences, but they never were. In the 1800s it was all farms around here. Before that it was forest, part of that old forest that once covered everything. So they cut it all down to make their farms, thinking they’d civilized it.
“But the soil around here has rocks. Left from the glaciers, I hear. To clear a field you had to carry the rocks to the edge of your property and stack them. Stack enough of them and you had yourself a wall. They’re about thigh-high because that’s about as far as an average man could lift one of them stones.
“Then come next spring you’d find even more big stones because the frost heaves them up. It happened every year. Can you imagine? Folks said the Devil put the stones in the field. I’ve heard that the locals, they didn’t exactly believe in the Devil, but in something quite like him, not from the Bible, but from somewhere else.
“And after all that work the crops never thrived here, least not decent ones. This county has always been terrible for farming—whatever you plant dies quick no matter what you try. No wonder the locals quit farming and went to the cities to work in the factories. The forest came back in and swallowed up them fields, leaving the walls and the old foundations betwixt them.”
Gavin began by sweeping up the debris covering the rugs, then vacuuming until their faded designs were plainly visible. He cleared surfaces, tossing out accumulated mail, loose reading material, papers, and any worthless bric-a-brac. He didn’t think much about it—he didn’t much care. It was his house now and what that dead man valued no longer mattered. He wiped off all the books and the shelves they were on. In the end he had over twenty bags of trash.
He left most of his father’s wall decor in place, and the objects on the higher shelves, not because he liked any of it, but because he was reluctant to touch them: odd specimens of taxidermy—all teeth and eyes and matted fur; dozens of dried insects in various stages of development; dusty framed displays of flies, butterflies, and moths; worms and reptiles suspended in yellowing liquid; bones and wings and stretched skins; and jars full of unidentifiable organic materials—animal organs, perhaps, with disintegrated floating bits.
He wouldn’t be able to live with such a collection. Was there a market for such sad things? He had no idea how to find out, and at the moment there wasn’t time. For now anything he couldn’t bear to look at, he draped in a sheet or newspaper.
He carried the trash bags out the back of the house and hid them there. If he did have neighbors he didn’t want to offend them. It was his first good look at the backyard, a smooth field of grass leading to the gated wall and the thick woods beyond.
Now and then he thought he heard something. Whatever it was—a sound, or odd change in ear pressure—stopped him in his tracks each time. He never could figure out its nature or its origin.
Gavin worked in the kitchen the rest of the day, washing dish- and cookware, cleaning the floor and cabinets, filling several more bags of trash. When he carried them out back and set them down, a vague unease crept in, queasiness in his stomach and chest. Something was different. He gazed at the large stone sitting on top of the grass—a foot high and at least two feet across. More boulder than stone, really. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it was right in the line of sight between his back door and the iron Blackburn gate.
Frost heave, the storekeeper had called it. Surely it didn’t happen this quickly. He walked over and put his hand on the rough surface—so warm he jerked his hand away. Gingerly he laid his hand back down on the rock and felt a subtle vibration. He looked around—there were no other stones. He pushed against it—it was immovable.
He walked up the slight incline to the gate. The lawyer had not exaggerated—he’d never seen trees so densely packed. Up close their trunks made a giant fence with narrow gaps between. These gaps drew the eye simply because of their scarcity. There was movement between them in several spots—browns and reds and blacks gliding and blurred, animals he supposed, but nothing identifiable.
He went to the gate—it was streaked with rust and slightly ajar, no key necessary. The hinges might be frozen. The wooden [small caps]BLACKBURN’S FIELD[/small caps] sign was splitting and barely attached, the lettering broken and illegible.
When he touched the iron some distant sound leaked up into his body, making him clench his teeth as if electrified. Teeth bit into him, something raked his side, and he fell to the ground.
Sometime later Gavin climbed to his feet and shuffled gingerly back to the house. He looked at the stone again and was relieved to see there were no others. Back in the house he continued to clean, focusing on that single practical activity to the exclusion of everything else. He approached those filthy glass cabinets in the living room with less trepidation now, throwing them open and curiously examining the objects inside. Most of the items had been destroyed, their contents sprayed on the interior of the glass as if they’d exploded. A handful of pieces remained: tiny twisted figures of twigs and trash and mud like the one the shopkeepers had given him. Each of the figures was unique, the materials used and the twisting of them resulting in a variety of tortured poses. All had mouths of some sort, stained or filled with dark earth, straining to speak the inexpressible.
Gavin didn’t retire to his upstairs bedroom until well after midnight. He opened the curtains for a final glimpse of the backyard. The clouds had blown away, leaving the grassy lot visible beneath the full moon. The stone was still there, as dark as the silhouettes of the trees. A light appeared deep within the woods, dancing and flickering, ragged like a burning torch, before going out.
Distant animal cries, growls, and a chorus of mania. Humming and panting and Gavin was awake, staring at the ceiling. Light so bright coming through the windows he imagined at first the house was on fire, and then realized it was simply the day.
Over the next few weeks he didn’t venture out, concentrating on making the house more to his liking. Using his cell phone and the cards the shopkeeper gave him, he had groceries delivered and trash hauled away, a few things repaired. Most of the phone numbers were no longer valid, and one of the handymen stopped answering his phone. After some haggling, he found a man to tow away his old automobile at a ridiculous cost. This left him without transportation, but he had nowhere to go. He supposed at some point he would need to seek employment—he would find a car then. He should have been somewhat anxious about being unemployed, but was not.
He removed the coverings from the things he hadn’t wanted to see. Most of these he carried from the house, stuffed into black bags for the next trash pickup. A couple he kept as curiosities: a stuffed squirrel either attacking or fleeing, and a Christ-on-the-cross wall hanging similar in style to the small figures, with twisted vines plastered with mud for limbs, a piece of red ceramic apple for a torso. Christ’s head was almost entirely mouth, a cavity smeared with black earth and illusory deep.
He carried out several old pieces of decaying furniture and placed them by the bags. If his trash-hauler wouldn’t take them perhaps he could make a bonfire. At one point he stopped and surveyed his collection of refuse. Several bags and some furniture appeared to be missing. He looked around and found no other signs of disturbance. He gazed at the stone in the backyard to make sure it was still there and no others had been added.
To the left of the woods was a vista of gentle hills, tall grass, more trees in the distance, what might or might not have been structures, which might or might not have been occupied. A succession of blurry dark figures crossed his field of vision. They might have been animals—perhaps some of them were—but the shapes appeared to be too vertical, so he assumed they were human, strolling across the fields, entering the distant forest, perhaps even passing into the far side of his own walled-in woods. He presumed these were locals, the scarce Disleigh natives, going about whatever business kept them away from the center of town.
Once things were cleaned and the furniture arranged in a manner suiting him, the trash and the discarded belongings hauled away—whether by haulers he’d hired or by folks stealing his refuse really didn’t matter—Gavin was content to sit in his new home and read, or meditate, or whatever he supposed a modern-day hermit must do.
In the mornings, with the yellow light coming through the vine-veiled windows, he’d find odd insect markings and worm trails in the dust over the floorboards. There shouldn’t have been much dust—he cleaned nearly every day now—but still it reappeared with some frequency. Perhaps he wasn’t doing it correctly.
He supposed a house could die—he’d seen several of those on his way into town. And before they died they’d doubtless become sick. Was his house ill? He supposed so.
The next morning Gavin went out for the first time in weeks. He’d ask that nice elderly couple for advice. On the way he stood in front of the building where he’d seen the bald man working, filling his bottles with powder. Peering through the window he could see the place was now empty. Several of the empty bottles lay scattered on the floor.
The couple’s shop was also dark, however, the door stripped of its OUT OF BUSINESS sign. Of course—the shop had been close to closing, and Gavin hadn’t been back in weeks.
He began to feel an uncontrollable anxiety rising up from his stomach. His hands began to flutter. He’d never experienced a panic attack—was this what one felt like? He walked to the next storefront, and the one following, the houses in between, even the structures appearing near collapse, completing the tour of the circle he’d started his first days here and never completed. Why hadn’t he checked this town out more thoroughly before moving? He knocked on doors, he shouted, he jerked on every doorknob and handle. The only sounds in Disleigh were the desperate ones he made himself.
Whitby came running around a corner, narrowly avoiding a collision. The man was wide-eyed, even crazier-looking without his hat. “Still here? Still?” he cried, jabbing Gavin’s chest with his forefinger. “Sad fool! Sad fool! Sad fool!” he brayed.
Gavin thought it some bizarre rite of self-identification and stepped back to avoid the poking finger. “Where is everyone? Have they all left? Are we here alone?”
Whitby tilted his head. “Sad . . . folks only come here to die.” He grinned and leaped off the sidewalk onto the cobbled street.
The car was a gray blur that became physical when it punched Whitby just below the hips, tossing his broken shape over the hood and bouncing it messily a good twenty feet behind. Gavin recognized his old Toyota wagon from the missing left rear hubcap and the dents on the driver’s side. He didn’t get a good look at the driver. Several people were inside the automobile, the windows full of their pale mashed faces and withered hands.
Gavin heard himself wailing for help, but once again it was the only sound in that too-quiet town. Even the noise of his escaping vehicle had been unaccountably drowned.
Knowing there would be no response he still beat on the doors and shouted, yelling until he was too hoarse to make an intelligible word. He walked back to where Whitby had been thrown. A long smear of blood had darkened the stones, but the old man’s body was nowhere to be found.
He hid in his house the rest of the day, considering if there was any way he could walk out of the town. It was so far, and seemed much too dangerous, and in any case he was too frightened to try. That night Blackburn’s Field—his field—was full of fire and distorted voices engaged in asynchronous song. Periodically he would see shadows entering and leaving the woods from its sides, and some through the gate, but the firelight created so much distortion he couldn’t be sure. The dark itself appeared to have broken down into a variety of either celebrating or suffering shapes.
Gavin crawled out of bed the next morning with a crushing headache, the bitter stench of smoke permeating the house. He went around opening windows to let some fresh air in, avoiding looking outside, not ready to see what might be waiting.
He knew he should do something, call someone. He’d seen a man die right in front of him. But he had no body to show. He had convinced himself this was a dangerous place, but what real evidence did he have? Whitby’s death—as terrible as it was—didn’t mean he himself was in danger, but everything he felt told him he was. He had no friends he could ask to come get him. Besides, it seemed hysterical to run away from his home.
That thing Whitby said—folks only come here to die. Certainly Gavin hadn’t come here for that. He had plenty of reasons to live—he just hadn’t discovered all of them. Whenever he’d felt hopeless, he’d always told himself if he died he might miss something wonderful.
After some time he went back into the bedroom and stared out the windows at his backyard, the path to the gate, the woods—Blackburn’s Field—beyond.
Threads of dark smoke floated through the blackened trees, dissipating into a grayish cloud above. The iron gate was wide open, the ground in front of it disturbed.
He lowered his eyes. The giant stone was gone. In its place several ragged cats furiously dug at the ground. One dropped a bit of bloody cadaver from its mouth as if to focus its efforts.
Without any sort of plan, Gavin bounded down the stairs and out the back door. The cats stepped aside as he marched toward the open gate. He paused to glance at where the stone had been—the ground there looked rusty and chewed. He stopped just inside the gate, this time careful not to touch any of its metal parts.
He peered into the first few feet of the woods. There were signs of fire, but nothing severe. If anything, it had reduced the amount of undergrowth to a manageable path. Or perhaps that passage had always been there and he hadn’t examined the area enough to know. Smoke had darkened the lower trunks of the trees and blackened the ground, although again, it was possible this ground had always been black.
The wooden BLACKBURN’S FIELD sign lay in pieces. Now he might rename this Gavin’s Field without too much consternation from the locals, assuming there were locals left to care.
The wind picked up and blew a fine black mist around him. With it came that odd music he’d been hearing since he’d arrived in Disleigh, like birdsong blended with fragmented human voice, animal grunts and cries, a mixture that somehow sounded both like lament and desperate pleasure. And though it seemed a terrible idea to follow it, it also seemed clearly the right thing to do. He had to know the boundaries of what he’d experienced here in Disleigh, on the possibility it still might be harmless. He focused on that blackened winding path through the dense trees, and followed it.
A scorch line lay low to the ground, but only a foot or so above the vegetation thrived. Lopsided, asymmetrical flowers crowned jagged, ferocious-looking ferns. Patches of a thick, sooty fog clung above the tree roots. A few yards in, a narrow trickle of spring appeared by the path. It moved slowly, thick with rust-colored and greenish debris, as if this area of forest were bleeding.
Gavin came to a tree that appeared to have been blown apart from the inside. Beside it lay some unidentifiable corpse, too small to be human—unless it were a child—mutilated and fed upon by a shimmering blue bird. The bird flew off and the desecrated body began to move. Then Gavin realized it was the insects inside. Beyond this point animal parts were strewn over twenty or so feet of the path. Some appeared to be relatively fresh. Something crossed the path in front of him covered in insects so thoroughly there was no indication what it might be. The constant crawl of the insects was all that was visible.
A strong wind rose again, blowing a deeper reek of burn down the path. Around him the branches warped and cried. Bits of rubbish fell from the sky. He thought these might be leaves, or clusters of twigs and seeds, but when they landed they were mostly dead birds with the occasional broken bat or large moth.
He saw several odd-looking beetles—swollen and lopsided and of a slick green. Their legs were unusually long, more like spiders’ legs than any beetle’s he’d ever seen. They scurried around exposed tree roots as twisty as snakes. A long gray worm crawled out from under the roots and wrapped itself around a beetle like a tiny python. The beetle struggled to escape by climbing the tree with the worm stretched out and still attached. The bark suddenly peeled from the tree and flew away. Gavin fell onto his knees. One large piece of bark was still moving. It was a moth the size of a large bird. It started to fly, then fell onto Gavin’s forearm. He cried out and jumped to his feet, trying to shake it off. It shed so many scales it appeared to completely disintegrate.
Something drifted in the air between the trees, finer than dust and yet somehow more substantial. Although he couldn’t have described it, Gavin found it to be breathtakingly beautiful and attempted to follow it with his eyes. That’s when he first saw the people in the woods, moving quietly among the trees in their animal heads and giant insect masks, their mottled skin paint, and attached strips of fur and feathers. They passed by without bothering him, heading in the same direction as he.
In the next spread of woods he found stone rubble scattered throughout, upright blocks isolated in rows like foundation pilings, others stacked or leaning against exposed roots. He thought it might be the remains of a house or other building. But reaching them he saw that they were worn headstones, most of the names faded to illegibility. He recognized the scattered outlines of sunken graves, but most of this ancient cemetery had been obliterated by decades of natural growth. It seemed outrageous so many deaths should leave such an insubstantial trace.
He heard them before he saw them: the grunts and the muted sufferings of human beings forced to do things against their will. At the center of the wood lay an irregular clearing of black, troubled earth. A dozen feet from its center, several men and women had been forced to their knees, their hands tied behind them. At the back of each stood one of the figures in insect or animal garb.
It took a few moments to assimilate what Gavin was seeing. All of these people were naked, the figures in masks and partial costume naked below their chests, the men and women on the ground wearing nothing at all.
It embarrassed him that he could not look away. It embarrassed him to see his adolescent shame so thoroughly portrayed. He had never been close to a nude woman, had seen few naked men. Even when taking care of his failing mother he had had a female aid to handle the intimate chores.
He’d always felt this lack of experience made him something less than a functioning adult, but he never could imagine how he might repair it.
He recognized one of the bound figures as the lawyer Martinson, who apparently never made it away from Disleigh. The man looked so incongruous, that gray-haired, distinguished-looking face, pressing his legs tightly together to conceal the mortification of his genitalia.
Martinson gazed at him desperately. Something dark and crumbling filled his mouth. With a violent retch he expelled some of it—rich and drooly gobs of dusky mud. He spat furiously. “The locals did everything, but nothing would thrive here. And so, so they accepted it. They embraced it!”
A sudden, blinding pain erased whatever else the lawyer had to say.
From his final vantage point on the ground, Gavin could see most of his still-living companions, and a few whose suffering had ended. The naked lawyer lay on his side, eyes distended and mouth leaking mud. Across the circle the elderly shopkeeper and his wife kneeled, eyes closed and throats struggling to exorcise the dirt that filled them. A pitiful corpse that might have been Whitby lay closer to the center of the circle, where the black earth churned and rose and fell.
Whitby’s body descended into the ground, and the ground brought up a large stone as if in replacement.
Gavin imagined this was where his father had ended, where he also soon would end. He wondered if his father’s house had been a gift in atonement, or a hateful invitation to suffer a similar fate.
Gavin decided not to struggle when the man-sized insect began feeding the muck into his open mouth. It really wasn’t that terrible if he let himself relax and accept what he was being offered. The taste—rich and dark and nourished with death—was not at all unfamiliar.
Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror, edited by Stephen Jones.
