By Graham Swanson
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| Two Satyrs, 1619 |
“The Conjurer
The land kills.
Bite the black granite.
Do not wake what sleeps beneath.
Dawn is when it hungers.”
In the mist of early morning, the ungodly hour,
A long time ago, but not too long, before vaccines, before the secret of the telephone, before hell rose up, there lived an immigrant named Otto Strauhus and his beautiful wife Ella. He worked in the desolate fields of Dagan, a forbidden and cursed land known for its wealth of gems, but infamous for its everlasting curses and brutal murders. One day a farmer named Osmond Hok hired him to work in his field but not for farmwork. Osmond showed Otto a fist full of soil.
“This here is the most fertile soil on the planet. The only other places like this are in China.”
“But nothing grows.” Otto, smart and stalwart, had seen this kind of problem before across Nebraska and Iowa back before he fled.
“Nothing THEY will plant. The land here cost a fortune, but I bought it rather cheaply. See those?”
Osmond pointed to a rock in the dirt. Blue, sharped, but incredibly light for its size. He picked it up to show Otto.
“These are bones. Fossils. There used to be cities here made of this material. They are magic.”
“Magic?” Otto cackled, reached for the chain on his neck. A Lutheran cross dangled under his shirt.
“Yes. I need them removed. Once they are all picked up, what I want will grow here.”
“All 400 acres?”
“I will pay you enough to go back east or west, buy yourself a castle by the sea. What do you say?”
Otto took the offer and told Ella in the tent that night.
“He wants me to collect rocks. Says he’ll pay me 2000$ for each acre we complete.”
“To collect stones?”
“Ja, stones. Then we can leave this horrible place.”
Ella crossed her arms, one large shoulder covered in long blonde hair, her fat breasts exposed in the lantern light. Her face reddened by the sun, one eye blinded by an infection.
“Ich vertrause diesem Mann nicht.” She told him, afraid that someone may be listening.
“My Sweetheart, we will only be here for a few days. Then we will leave.”
She gave him a mirror to shave with. His long simmering black hair hung in a perfect frame. Once his beard was gone, his bright silver eyes came out, long dark eye lashes dashed his pale eyelids.
Only it didn’t work out that way he promised her it would.
Indeed after a nonstop day from the frigid early morning when only Venus is up in the dark sky, to the fatal hours when the sun falls beyond the black mountains, Otto cleared the rocks and put them in a wagon. He dumped the wagon out in the river. With no animals, and no assistance, he had to haul the wagon himself through the gravel, shrapnel, and sand to the grassy shore. Hawks screamed in the sky, and wild growls followed him through the wooded reeds. Each haul took him longer than he imagined. Rust covered the axels, the wheels got jammed in cracks in the ground, even with one misstep, he fell into a hole covered in dead stalks and patches of fur. His promise of a few days didn’t come true, and Ella became dissatisfied with her time living in a tent in the stormy ruins of rural Dagan. Giant spiders, strange eyes that slurp in the night, clapping of hands just outside the firelight. She had no normal humans to talk to. The men who resided in those barren outskirts hid their faces in masks and screamed into the moon. She tried to talk to the women who went to the creek for laundry. Except they couldn’t talk. Their jaws, teeth, gums were so malformed that tongues hung out, or their cheeks sagged into the shape of a horses face. At best they could moan when they saw her, and hiss when she got too close to them. One time a girl got bit by a fish. Her finger turned blue as it bled. Ella sealed the cut. That’s when the girl warned her that the men around these parts each has committed a heinous sin, and must reside away from protected circles of delicate society.
After a week, she asked him to quit, and take what money he could get, so they may leave once and for all.
“Any place, my love, it doesn’ have to be a palace in California. Let us be gone from his land.”
Otto went back to Osmond’s land to talk with him about collecting payment. But everything seemed overgrown. The cows moaned, their unmilked utters taut and firm. Despite the frosty powder blowing in the wind, no smoke rose from the chimney of the Osmond house. He stepped up to the porch and found the front door ajar. A bloody hand pint pressed over the marble paint. Inside he found the maid nailed to the ceiling. The youngest children lay chewed to death in a cradle. Heaps of debris obstructed Otto’s passage from room to room. Drawers blocked door ways, holes in the walls created cracks that reached the ceiling. After some searching he discovered a hole in a thin layer of wood under the second story stairs. Inside the hole he discovered an open safe. He found some envelopes with letters, but no gold, no silver, no guns in the house at all. From an open window he noticed the trail of dried blood on the grass. First Otto fed the animals, milked the cows, then he grabbed an axe, and followed the trail of blood into the field.
Fierce wind blew his clothes open and slowed his march. The wind didn' t just blow but it circled around him and collapsed, blowing over dead trees and whipping flails of root and stone high overhead to rain down on Otto’s head. He came closer, he heard the wind. It didn’t just scour the countryside, it whistled and moaned, blowing out from a wide gap in the middle of the field. It’s edges crawled with worms. The angles conjoined and bent in a way no animal he ever knew about could dig. A human would just dig a tunnel straight down, but this one seemed to corkscrew up from the deep clay beneath his feet. Smoke lifted from the bottom of the hole. Blood along the edge glistened. Bails of flies amassed over the blood, bussing, biting, some eating greedy flies that swelled up with blood and drowned on their own spit up. He looked down the hole, braving smoke and heat, and saw a narrow chute carved into the rock surface with a guiding rope leading the way down. Inside he heard the echoes of scowls.
“Osmond! Anyone!” Otto cried into the hole.
Something hurried up the tunnel. Breathing hard, gasps of pain, muffled nonsense, as a shadow entered the chute. The rope tensed up as dust rattled down the tunnel, almond someone covered in gray earth, covered in bruises, their lips torn, their eyes red and laced in yellow glaucoma. An emaciated form appeared, with tattered ribbons for clothes and a layer of clay covering their skin. Skin broken by bruises and lacerations. Otto wasn’t sure if it was Osmond or some random soul. He reached down to take hold of their arm.
A face emerged into the light. So black with dirt and muzzled with hair, Otto wasn’t even sure if who appeared was a human. With their eyes fused shut by goo, and their cheeks pulled apart, but Otto held on anyway. The man or creature screamed and kicked but the tunnel was too narrow. The man or creature clearly couldn’t breath and pulling him up the tunnel snapped their ribs and bent their joints around sharp angles of the tunnel.
Otto had never seen a man so sullied by the filth of the earth. So compacted with thickened layers in recesses of the human body, he thought he saw a heap of tires set ablaze in the hole. Yet it unfolded more. An eye, a tongue, fingers! Otto pulled until he heard an elastic snap from the arm he held. The person inside squeezed them against rocks and fuzz barren roots.
More limbs unfolded from the ground rot in the hole. Some belonged to the man emerging from the fumes and burning oil. Some were just extras. He took a hold of Otto’s shirt and tore off the fabric. He tried to grip the man but his hands slid on the wet clay and blood.. The man from the hole reached out and kept a firm grasp on Otto’s suspender belt, his tight grip on left deep imprints.
An orange oil dripped down Otto’s cheek. The fluid left a stain that burned the pores of his flesh until they no longer produced color.
Stiff layers of brown oil soaked through his clothes. The fabric peeled off in fibers as Otto trie to scrape the material from the man’s face.
“Osmond!” Otto tried “How many fingers? What time of day is it?”
The clay and mud on his body did not scrape oof with his hands, or even finger nails. At first Otto didn’t panic, until he noticed the raw slime of the ground slowly shifting in the sunlight. Like a snake shedding its skin, it moved back into the man’s eyes and mouth. His nostrils were already swollen. His ears were packed. He coughed until he choked, and finally spat out not dirt, but what looked like a red, beating beast heart.
The more Otto tried to clean him off but his own fingernails dissolved in the oils from the cave material. In the air floated metal powder. Deep in the grains of the cave stone it smelled like pennies. One by one they broke off, and his finger tips bled too much to keep scraping it off. It felt like running his fingers through a deep fat fryer.
Otto took a shovel and started stabbing the mud with it. The mud absorbed the blade’s irons and melted it like egg yolk. Otto stood frozen. The nearest town is probably a day away. The nearest doctor, god knows where. It began to get foggy and rain. At first it was just a gentle shower. The fog climbed higher, and voices chanted in the trees. The rain picked up, and the fields began to fill up. And then the cold came.
Water and sediment began pooling up as Otto shoveled hard. Sirens droned in dark clouds. Shadows of trees emerged from flashes from lightning. Scoop by scoop he dumped raw ground into the hole. The body of the man lay there trembling in the mud. Trying hard to breath, laboring to breath, as the blood from his compound fractures leaked from the scales of muck growing fuzz on his neck. Tiny roots hooked the fresh flakes of skin. The rain beat his face. He remembered being a child and how the rain would wash his face. Deafed and blinded, no relief came for him. The moisture only turned the sludge to wet, hairy leeches sucking on his capillaries, and producing the toxic compound that covered his body like ashes and raw tree pulp. It looked a lot like manure to Otto but it felt more like the limestone of a grave.
“Get… away.” He told Otto.
Otto noticed beyond the rain, that shadows moved amid the fog. Creatures unlike any animal he saw. They stood on their hind legs, they carried spears and forks, they howled like baboons, with the body of a large man, but the horned head of some animal from the desert. Not only did the fog move, but so did the branches of the trees. Roots fluttered over the mist as the leafs bounced off. The branches shook as they tightened around the horizon. The ground under Otto trembled. He saw the roots burrough beneath his feet.
Otto took one look at the man drenched in toxic sediment. Slowly, the ground had reclaimed him. He sank into the ground tilled up by the moving roots and the beats hoofs of creatures speeding by. He tried to pull the man up, but he made no sound, no effort to escape. He just sank like a bag of potatoes, until the arm broke off. Otto then felt the pain on his palm. He looked and saw a layer of orange fluid under the dirt leaving his palm pocked with tiny holes that opened and closed as if breathing. It hurt bad enough to reach his spine.
Otto hurried off, leaving the arm behind him, as the man sank into the dirt. The creatures darted past him. The trees scraped his face with their branches. He heard echoes in the wind. Angry chants, unspeakable words, threats and promises made by forces unseen. He hurried to his camp area.
Otto hurried to the tent and began tearing through the wet canvas, calling her name. Her clothes were still there. Her shoes. The little mirror she had given him. Her wedding ring sat in the mud beside the lantern, perfectly clean. There were no footprints around the tent except his own. He looked toward the field. The rain had flattened everything, but beneath the water he could see something moving through the earth. It traveled slowly beneath the grass, making a long raised line toward him. Otto stepped backward. The line stopped. Then another appeared. And another. Soon there were dozens of them, all coming from the field, all stopping at the edge of the ruined tent. From somewhere beneath his feet came a muffled sound. At first he thought it was the wind. Then he heard Ella.
“Otto?”
He dropped to his knees. Her voice came again, directly beneath the earth.
“Otto, I’m cold.”
He began digging with his hands. The mud was warm. Beneath it he found her hair. Then her face. Her eyes were open, but she did not blink. Her mouth moved.
“Don't pull me out.”
Otto froze.
Ella smiled at him from beneath the mud.
“You'll only wake them.”
Behind him, in the darkness beyond the field, hundreds of voices whispered his name.
