When She Kissed the Earth
Xylophobia Horror
I: Brockengespenst
The forest is completely silent and almost entirely still. The only movement is the occasional peripheral twisting of leaves in an unseen breeze. The sun sits half embedded in the horizon like a hot piece of lead, slowly boring its way into the earth. Darren sits quietly in his car, his face flushed and puffy as if from crying, his hands in a tight grip on the wheel. The knuckles of his left hand are bloodied and in the process of swelling. There are a handful of recently used tissues on the passenger seat. Underneath the tissues lies a weathered road map folded open to an obscure stretch of green somewhere in Pennsylvania. His wife lay in the backseat, silent as the grave. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve and sniffs loudly. The car sits at an out-of-the-way trailhead, with three footpaths leaving the bare stone parking lot. Through the windshield, Darren can see that the familiar path he plans on taking is overgrown and no longer recognizable. He speaks to his unresponsive wife with a slight edge to his voice,
“Why are you making me do this… I don’t want to do this…”
He gets out of the car and screams a violent, throat-rending roar into the quiet of the woods. His wife still sits in the back of the car, dead, forever silent like the trees. Without warning, Darren begins punching his car door as hard as he can. The cadence and repetition of the impacts sounding off in the abandoned lot like the primal war drums of an emotional elegy. After his rabid assault on the car, he leans against the rear door, with his forehead pressed to the cool glass. He is certain that two or more of his fingers are broken. Flexing his hand, he opens the rear door of the car where his dead wife lies. He removes his hiking backpack and sets it on the ground. Then he carefully removes the generic urn that the crematory returned his wife in. He secures the lid, then gently lowers the urn into the backpack. Tears have begun to pool at the bottoms of his eyelids, causing his vision to quiver and warp as they spill softly down his cheeks.
Darren throws a blanket overtop of the urn, so it doesn’t rattle or open. He then gingerly slips into the dusty straps of the backpack, and walks around to the front passenger door. He wipes his eyes on his coat sleeve, then opens the door. For a fleeting moment he smells her shampoo: a eucalyptus mint that he always said smells like wasp killer. He chuckles slightly as he wipes his face again, and then he grabs the map off the seat. He sees a half smoked pack of her cigarettes sitting in the cup holder. His smile fades as he grabs those too, remembering all the fights and problems they caused. Beneath the map is a handwritten note, splotched with the hazy circles of dried teardrops sitting on the seat. Some of the words have been melted into the paper, forever lost to any who had not memorized their places. Midway down the page, a partially blurred line reads,
“I ~~~~~~ love you, Darren. ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Take my ashes to the place you proposed, all those years ago. It was a beautiful ~~~~~”
Slowly, he begins to walk toward the thin dirt path that leads into the towering weeds. He lumbers onward with his back to the sun. His shadow reaches and shifts across the underbrush ahead of him, to the place where the path descends in old wooden stairs. He is reminded of the rickety steps at the rear of their first apartment, barely maintaining their form. For a fleeting moment he is back there on the steps, carrying his wife up them in her pristine white dress. The corners of his mouth are tugged upward ever so slightly as he recalls the steps breaking beneath the two of them when he attempted to carry her into their cramped apartment. His smile quickly bows downward, as if the weight of all that transpired after is hung there on his face. He sighs a heavy breath outward as he realizes his own naïveté. He feels the burden almost physically settle onto his shoulders again as he recalls the eventual dousing of whatever flame first existed in their marriage.
He stops at the top of the worn staircase with the sun at his back, tentatively trying his weight on the top step. Stretched across the gulley below him is his own massive looming shadow; a mock Brocken specter lightly testing the ground with its silhouette foot. The sun is nearly half hidden now and as he takes the stairs down, the world changes. The bright and almost angelic lighting of golden hour is diffused into a dim and crepuscular shade. He knows that this walk will bring many memories to the surface, and he feels ill prepared for it. He halts at the bottom of the steps and removes the pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and stares at them. He opens the pack and pulls out her generic green lighter. Darren lights a cigarette and sucks at the end for the first time in his life, the ember glowing softly. He immediately begins coughing, and sputtering out an effluvia of smoke. He feels sick to his stomach. Darren pockets the cigarettes while he coughs, and drops the unsmoked cigarette into the dirt. He then stares at the path ahead while he steps on the tiny ember, carefully grinding into the soil. With a painful reluctance, he begins the trek toward the rock formation where he once knelt on one knee.
II: Komorebi
The moon begins to show now in the growing dusk, darting in and out of the ubiquitous treetops. Darren looks around, then down at the map, then back at the imposing forest. The sun still quibbles with the horizon. He stops walking and stares at his map, then he yells and hurls the map into the woods. Its pages flutter and flap limply, like an injured bird, and it lands softly 20 feet away in the brush. He flexes his hand and winces slightly as the pain settles comfortably in for a long stay. His outburst sends some unseen critters skittering off deeper into the woods. The lighting in this gorge is dim and makes everything appear faded. Staring at the glowing white map hanging in the underbrush, he sighs an exasperated breath and sulks over to where it hangs. He picks it up and stands in place. Overhead, the sun yawns forth its last golden beams over the treetops. He looks at the map which seems to glow and he is briefly transported into a memory of his wife. She walks ahead of him on this same path, the underbrush cut back and staved off to form a perfect propylaeum around her. In the memory, his soon-to-be fiancé looks back and smiles at him, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail with a daisy patterned scrunchie. She has a pure and adoring smile, unadulterated by life’s later hardships, and her perfect white teeth seem to glow in the dusky lighting. Then he is back, looking at the nearly luminescent map.
There’s a faint snap sound, almost certainly not natural, from somewhere ahead. Several distant black birds fly from the branches above. Darren looks around while remaining completely still, except for the slight quiver of his heart. He waits, frozen, until he’s sure no other sound is coming. As he begins to move carefully back toward the overgrown path, sidestepping roots and dodging reaching branches, he hears another sound. This sound is continuous and is growing steadily in proximity. It sounds like something or someone hurriedly running through the dead leaves toward his location. His heartbeat quickens as he calls out to the harried noise, but the only response is an increase of the rustling. He steps back onto the path as the noise crescendos. Suddenly a bloody and headless chicken bursts out of the underbrush and runs past him crazily.
Nonplussed and a little frightened, Darren looks after the decapitated bird as it runs through the woods until it gets caught in a thorn bush. It hangs, stultified, with its legs still twitching out their pyrrhic flight in terrible paroxysms. He looks in the direction the headless fowl charged from. Through the thicket, he can perhaps make out the straight unnatural lines of a man made structure. In his sudden fright he accidentally flung the map aside. He stoops and pries the map out of the grasp of the twigs and thorns, then begins walking toward the structure in the woods. The closer he gets to the building, the more he smells something rotting: a horrid and olid stench that can only be brought forth by the deceased. The trees part their spindly arms to reveal a cabin set deep into a clearing. There are several ghostly white shapes that reveal themselves as people, all motionless. Approaching, Darren hails them and asks,
“Hey. I’m a little turned around - do you know where Eagle Rock is?”
His call to the people dies away into a whisper, as his eyes begin to delineate the shapes ahead. His louder words are swallowed by the woods and he feels a stronger taste of the fear and shock that surfaced with the headless chicken. On the porch of the cabin are three pale white people; one sitting in a chair and the other two standing. The two standing figures are naked, though the foremost figure wears a discordant black glove. As he squints and draws cautiously closer, the standing figures are revealed to be wearing white long Johns. Darren walks slower now, hesitantly assessing the situation. The closer he gets, the more unnerving the scene, accentuated by the total silence of the three figures. All three appear pale beyond account, and they are gaunt to the point of near emaciation. Yellow sweat stains and copper blemishes bloom in mildewy circles all up and down the long Johns. The three figures have less than two dozen teeth between them, some pointing off in lurid angles. The sitting figure has two milky white eyes that stare blankly in disagreeing vantages, and he possesses only three of the allotted teeth. A glint from the gloved hand of the standing man reveals a short hatchet, covered in rust. No, not rust - and not a glove either - both the hatchet and the hand are covered in blood. That’s when Darren notices the dripping and hollow carcass of a deer, strung-up between two thin trees next to the cabin. There are more gutted deer hanging in at least half a dozen trees. Hanging around the entirety of the porch are headless chickens, some still twitching minutely. There is a small sign that reads simply Cartwrights.
Darren stops his advance completely, and now begins to move very slowly backward. The figure bearing the hatchet breaks the vacuous silence with a drawl,
“You shouln’t be here. This here’s private land.”
Darren answers meekly, “I’m sorry, I got confused and lost the trail, it’s all overgrown.”
The man holding the hatchet simply repeats, “You shouln’t be here.”
Darren turns and notices the familiar shadowed outline of Eagle Rock, and begins to walk hastily that way. The only salient movements or sounds are perpetrated by Darren as he rustles leaves in his timid retreat. The figure on the porch, still
unmoving, calls after him as he slinks back into the increasingly dark woods,
“Storms a’comin’. You ain’t gonna wanna be goin’ up there jus’ now. Them rocks are a dangerous place.”
But Darren doesn’t care to listen, moving quickly away from that terrible cabin and it’s ghostly occupants. Those horrible chickens hanging like convicted criminals, damned to forever preside over the butchery there. Suddenly he has a strange thought that feels ominous: why would three skinny old men need that many deer? Now he feels like the trees themselves are watching him with unseen eyes. Despite himself, a memory plays out in his mind: a nearly decapitated rat, the spine and sinews leaving the job uncompleted. Darren sees himself holding it by the tail and taunting his wife. She’s furious and crying and swearing. He says something about her being like a little girl, and she screams something about him being like his father. Suddenly the joke isn’t so funny and Darren wants to force the rat on her, just to prove a point. Then he’s brought back to himself by a slight trip on a rock, and he pauses to rub his eyes with his good hand. He looks back to ensure he isn’t being followed. When he looks backward, he sees something moving - or nothing at all, it is impossible to tell. He dissects every detail of the forest behind him but cannot find any fault or cause for concern. He still cannot shake the feeling that something is out there, staring back at him.
III: Saudade
Through a gap in the trees ahead, the black silhouette of Eagle Rock lay superimposed onto the near dark sky. At the base of the rocks, a mangled corpse of rotten and splintered wood lay in a heap. The vague semblance of steps can be faintly made out amidst the pile of old lumber. Against the limned inference of stairs lies an incredibly large fallen tree. Darren looks at the wreckage and sighs. He gently adjusts his backpack higher onto his back, then begins navigating the wreckage of stairs. He still has the strangest feeling: like someone, or something, is following and watching him. He attributes his unease to the strange cabin and its spectral tenants, but it feels more palpable than that. He glances over his shoulder and sees the dark indiscernible shapes of trees, then turns to continue up the steep incline. A memory seems to shove its way to the forefront of his mind, unbidden. He can see the floating debris in their flooded basement: the flotsam of their failing marriage.
He can hear himself yelling at his wife as she demurely stands by, analyzing the ground. The smells of mud and moldy insulation permeate the scene. All of the neighbors are out assessing the damage to their own basements, but they have functioning sump-pumps. There’s a large tree down across the sidewalk. After a short bout of yelling at her, he becomes silent and begins picking through the carnage. All she can manage to say is that she’s sorry, she fell asleep, and she forgot to check. His silence is a simmering boil and he seethes at her useless apologies. The final straw is when she accidentally hits him in the head with a long piece of trim. He slaps her so fast and so hard that before she even apologizes she is sprawled onto her elbows in several inches of water, a large red flower blooming prettily across her left cheek. Darren looks at her then, on the ground and in shock, and he finds himself more angry and revolted with her than before.
The memory itself smacks with a soundless and vivid sting. He pauses on a mostly intact stair and massages his eyes with the meat of his calloused palms. A strong cool breeze plays with the worm straps of his backpack. He looks up at the storm clouds that seem to have blown in from his memory, and he speaks toward them,
“It wasn’t all bad… we had good times too. Didn’t we?”
The question flits away on the stormy breeze and he waits as if for an answer, but only the storm comes. The storm and an all too detailed recall of the words she left him with,
“I tried to love you, Darren. Despite it all. Take my ashes to the place you proposed, all those years ago. It was a beautiful mistake.”
Small drops of rain begin to make soft pattering sounds off his backpack. The sky mirrors his memories of reading the note after finding her body: his tears dappling the blue-lined notebook paper and dissolving some of the words, but none of the pain. He kneads his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, trying not to think about those moments. The rain begins to pick up, coming down in earnest, so that the pattering becomes a solid drone. Darren pulls his hood over his head and begins to scale the debris and weeds more quickly. He reaches the place where the first plateau would have been if the stairs remained intact. He is already thoroughly soaked and is hardly able to see. He backs up against the base of the rock formation, seeking shelter from the downpour. He bumps backward into the rock and wonders how long the storm will last. Then a strong cool breeze raises the hair on the back of his neck and he is almost certain he hears a whisper.
When he turns slightly, he sees an opening in the rock formation, something he doesn’t remember from his previous visit. It’s large enough that he can fit inside, but both his backpack and his chest touch the walls of the opening. He squeezes into the hole and ceases to feel the heavy impact of raindrops. The sound of the heavy shower warps slightly and dulls as he inches farther back and enters the small cave in the rock face. Squeezing through the narrow opening, he again hears a faint whisper, distinctly human, and a cool breeze. In the dregs of the breeze there is the faint smell of rot. The tight aperture of the rock face opens into a sizable cave, where Darren sits down. While he tries to dry off, he is given another painful reminder of his wife.
They are in their car while the rain pounds away at the windows outside, desiring entry. His wife covers a black eye with thick makeup, calling attention to the area more than concealing. In front of the car is a maternal fetal medicine office. They make it inside, soaked to the bone. Neither Darren nor his wife speak through the whole appointment. His wife doesn’t even cry, she just sits and occasionally nods; a husk bearing no internal life. The most prevalent sound is the steady drip of rainwater off Darren’s jacket onto the outdated tile floor of the examining room. As he sits on the cave floor and listens to the soporific buzz of distant rain, he hears the very same dripping sound off his jacket: the totemic sound of time leeching away to pool at his feet like spilled blood.
IV: Ya’aburnee
There is a scant amount of moonlight shining through grommets in the cave ceiling, like spears of muted white light. Inside the small cave, everything is diffused into grayscale. The chiaroscuro of the moonlight on the cave floor creates unwieldy patterns in the puddles that seem sinister in nature: like small shadow parasites that twist and wriggle. Darren sits slumped on the ground, passed out from physical and emotional wear. The rain has ceased and the full moon bathes the landscape in a hollow white sheen. The incandescent glow reflects from the newly doused world: each drop of water, an impossible star, fallen from the firmament. Darren wakes in a cold sweat with a gasp and feels his heart pounding away on his chest wall: the only vestige of his own internal life. He dreamed the strangest thing, and remembers being frightened. As he attempts to recall it from those drowsy moments, he can feel it almost tangibly slip away, as if an ethereal force draped a shroud over it just as he woke. He pulls his phone from his pocket and checks the time. He stands up and stretches his sore muscles, then digs through his backpack for his headlamp.
Darren clicks the headlamp on and looks for the narrow entrance to the cave. Each section of cave wall that he shines his light on is whole, with no exits anywhere he can see. His light passes over a dark red spot but a glint of white catches his attention. When he returns his gaze to the spot he isn’t sure what he is seeing. There are thin white tines poking out from a pile of dirt, but the longer he looks, the more he discerns: it is a pile of moldering deer carcasses, with ribs and antlers jutting out in strange, almost artistic, angles. He gasps and feels a strong revulsion: the ribs and gleaming bones, a poignant reminder of that sinister cabin. Then he notices the darkened drag marks on the ground. He looks around again for the small entrance but sees only the wide path that leads deeper into the cave. There are more vulgar dragging marks leading into the dark interior depths. There must be an exit down that way since the drag marks must go somewhere. He picks up his backpack but the strap rips loose, falling to the floor and spilling the urn out into the damp cave. Horrified, Darren stoops and attempts to scoop the ashes back into the urn, but it is a futile gesture. As he claws the amalgam substance into the urn, his hands grasp something solid and cylindrical. What could possibly have been inside the urn? He raises it up and brushes it with his thumb but he already knows what the glowing orange plastic is. He holds in his hand the pill bottle his wife overdosed with.
Darren’s hands are shaking as he brushes the label off and reads the details of his wife’s prescription. His heart is back to thumping heavily as he stares at the plastic bottle. He drops it in shock and recoils from the spilled urn. When he looks around he sees a female figure at the mouth of the path that leads deeper. He shouts in fear but quickly realizes it is an uncanny rock formation. He leans over with his hands on his knees, attempting to breathe and calm his rapid pulse. From deeper in the cave comes a cool breeze and a faint female whisper, perhaps not even there at all. Darren backs himself up against the cave wall and is shaking slightly from fear. He rubs his face and tries to convince himself she couldn’t be whispering to him, because she’s dead.
After some time trying to calm himself, he stands upright and hesitantly ventures further into the cave in hopes of an exit. He walks deeper as the air grows colder and the moonlight no longer reaches its pale fingers into the cave. He looks backward for a moment, thinking he heard something and feeling eyes on him. Suddenly he catches a smell he would know anywhere: eucalyptus mint shampoo, just like wasp killer. When he looks forward again, he walks directly into a curtain of hair that smells strongly of that familiar shampoo. He strikes at the hanging hair and feels his heart thud suddenly with the reaction of shock and fear. He makes a half-shriek as he ducks and bats the hair away, panicking. But when he looks back with his headlamp, he realizes it is only a strange stringy growth of lichen moss, hanging from the cave ceiling. Yet, that smell… He draws closer again and holds a section in his hand to sniff it: it just smells of mildew and dirt. Letting go of the moss, he notices something that causes him to look again. There in the midst of the pale green lichen, wrapped impossibly around the length, is a daisy patterned scrunchie.
The heavy drum of his heart sends the blood pulsing in his ears, and he panics as he stares at the moss. The cool breeze blows again, raising the hairs on his arms and neck. This time it’s stronger, with a discernible whisper. The voice of his wife calls from deeper in the impossible cave, beckoning. He finds himself walking toward the sound, compelled by the whisper. He walks deeper into the cave, mindlessly shambling forward. He passes more ravaged corpses of deer, but he doesn’t spare them more than a passing glance. He can feel through the soles of his shoes the sudden shift from ragged stone floor to smooth bathroom tile, but when he looks down, he sees rock. He passes by discarded prescription bottles that he sees from the corner of his vision, but when he looks, there is nothing but leaves and bones and moss. Memories begin surfacing from sequestered places - no, not surfacing - they are being dredged up and made to play out. A malicious force runs a reel of every time he hurt his wife. It starts with verbal and emotional abuse, and escalates into physical abuse. He begins crying as he realizes the person in his memories looks a lot like his father. He hears the atavistic whisper, soft and still, and he walks on.
He walks until his headlamp shines on a large stone door flanked by two strange carved shapes. There are etchings in the stone of the door, and the bottom corner seems broken off. The frame that it sits in is made of bones. The need to follow the whisper ebbs and Darren stands emotionless and drained in front of the thing that called in the darkness. There are wet drag marks that disappear underneath, into places unseen and unknown. Darren glances blankly to his left and illuminates rows and rows of terrible unmoving figures: each one an anguished supplicant in this horrible darkness, postured in an ascetic position with dark, viscous tears flowing from the stone. The walls behind them are no longer rock, but bones, reverently placed to create a crude mausoleum. The bones are mostly human, but there are those mixed in that seem to be something else - something unidentifiable. He looks to the right and sees the same thing: rows of silent Qliphoth attending an ossuary of eldritch things.
The ancient door opens inward soundlessly. The light does not penetrate this primordial place. It is as if a rectangle has been cut away from the fabric of the universe to reveal the horrid void behind it. The whisper comes again from inside the black space. There is a subtle shifting in Darren's peripheral vision and when he looks over to the stone figures, there are none to be seen. He looks back to the door and standing in the darkness, suspended in blank space, is his wife. She is a denizen of that featureless place. Her form holds a luster, bearing every injury he ever gave her, and she raises her broken arm to point at him. He feels a crushing weight of guilt and shame at the sight. His wife's gaunt hand turns over and beckons him into the dark. From somewhere within the darkness a cacophony of abhorrent chittering and febrile buzzing grows louder and louder. He takes shambling steps forward while tears once again stream down his face. The unmoving mouth of his wife whispers his sins into his ear as he steps into the impenetrable black void. The discordant hum of other-worldly sounds cuts off abruptly as he enters that place and all is silent. The door closes behind him without a sound.
WHEN SHE KISSED THE EARTH,
Anthology of Hidden Places, 3/5
Haunting heartbreaking and sad 💗 beautiful!
Wow that was incredible, such a rich sensory landscape as well as emotional.