Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (10 page)

The tray held a covered bowl, wooden spoon, mealy biscuit. There was a cup too, steaming and smelling of rooty tea. 

"They found your car," the girl said. She was college age, though her hands looked older. "It was where you said." She backed into the hall, but didn't leave. "You seem honest. That's why they say you can eat." She smiled, revealing the kind of teeth that came from wearing braces. "Go on. It's honest food."

He knelt beside the tray, lifted the lid and smelled the steam. When he looked up again, she was gone.

*****

He carried the tray to the cot and studied the contents of the bowl: cabbage, carrots, turnips, squash. There was meat too--slow boiled pieces that came apart beneath the spoon. And there was other stuff, coarse-cut herbs and leaves. He tasted it: sweet and rich, but with a wildness that must have come from the herbs. He spooned up the pieces, then tipped the bowl to drink the broth. After that, he used the biscuit to wipe up the rest before starting on the tea. It was all good.

When he finished, he set the tray aside and drew his feet under the quilt. He felt warm, relaxed. He closed his eyes, lay back. A bitter taste clung to his throat. Not unpleasant, just strange.

For a while, he slept.

*****

Pain woke him. 

He lunged for one of the buckets, hugged it, vomited hard. Everything came up. Then he collapsed, hugging the floor as the pain moved to his lower tract, forcing him to drop his pants and straddle the second bucket. His bowels let loose, venting with a single blast that seemed to go on forever. Then he collapsed again, exhausted, shivering. 

The stove glower brighter now, almost molten with heat, but he was cold...chilled to the core. He forced himself back under the quilt. It didn't help. The cold was inside him. He rolled into ball, closed his eyes, convulsed.

And then someone else was in the room. It was the pimple-faced boy who'd worked the pick in the clearing. "You'll be all right." He said it without l's:
Yaw be awright
. Unlike the others, this kid sounded local. He walked to the buckets, peeked inside. "We're simple people." He picked them up, grabbing the handles with gloved hands. "We're not ignorant, though. We know what companies are making now days, interfaces and such, apps and nannies."

Kevin didn't have the strength to ask what the kid was talking about. He just closed his eyes, plunging into icy sleep that broke when he realized someone new was sitting beside him. It was a woman with a three-string dulcimer, sitting in a chair that hadn't been there the last he'd looked. The floor around the chair had been cleaned. A tray of fresh food lay where the buckets had been. 

"You had a rough night," she said. "Breakfast will set you right." She had eyes like stones, cold and blind.

"Not hungry," he said. It was barely a whisper.

"But you are." Her hair was gray, pulled back, coiled like rope at the back of her head.

He looked at the food: slice of fruit, cup of steaming milk.

"They call me Mother," she said. "You can call me that too, if you like. If it feels right." Morning sun glowed through the plastic window, forming a nimbus behind her head. "It's not what I am. Just what they call me." Like most of the others, she didn't sound indigenous to the mountains. "I was a teacher once," she said. "College professor, actually. When I left that life, some of my students followed. Since then, others have come, locals mostly...and a few are pilgrims like yourself." She reached for the tray on the floor beside her. Didn't grope for it the way a blind person would, but grabbed it as surely as if she could see. "Take this." She held the tray toward him. "Sit and eat. Fill your terrible hollows."

He sat up, both legs moving freely beneath the quilt. The manacle was gone.

She fingered the dulcimer. "It was never our intention to harm you, only to cleanse you of the terrible things you brought with you. We can't be around them. We've come too far to let such things back into our lives."

"What're you talking about?"

"Why, your phone for one thing. That was the most obvious danger."

"And my clothes?"

"A not-so obvious danger. You might not even be aware of what's being woven into fabrics these days. Even before I left the university, designers were already including magnetics in their weaves, supposedly to help detect knockoffs. But there were other motives." She tuned the dulcimer, plucking softly, working the pegs. "It's the same with processed food and water, which is why we had to clean you out, for our sake as well as your own."

"The kid who took the buckets said something about nannies."

"Yes. Nano transmitters. The components are microscopic, added to drinking water and processed grains. They assemble over time, lodge in the gut."

"And do what?"

"Transmit data. They're used for tracking people. If we hadn't gotten them out of you, the signals would have led the agents right to us."

"What agents?"

"The ones who are looking for us." She spoke as if it were common knowledge. "We've been eluding them for years. They think they ought to be able to find us in these hills, but there's more land here than you'd think by looking at a map. Take a few acres of mountains and valleys, flatten them out, and you've got miles of country. And there are always places to live, houses and towns abandoned by folks wanting to live closer to the grid. We move in, take up residence for a while, then move on."

"But why?"

"Because they're looking for us."

"But why are they looking for you?"

"Because we're off-grid. Can't have that, you see. Not in a world where everyone must be connected and accounted for." She turned toward the tray of food, seeming to stare with unblinking eyes. "You should eat. It'll all seem clearer when you're not so empty."

He sniffed the slice of fruit.

"It's just food this time. Go on. Trust it. Trust me."

He took a bite. It was cool and sweet, nuanced with earthy tones. He took some more.

"There you go."

He tried the milk: warm and silky, with traces of grass and clover.

"Clean food, Kevin. Filling food. Just what a hollow man needs. We'll teach you to eat right if you stay."

He finished the milk. "Stay?"

"Maybe. If you like."

"And if I don't."

"Then you don't. We aren't about kidnapping."

"So I can go?"

She opened her mouth as if to laugh, but only sighed.  Then she straightened up again, hands braced against the dulcimer. "You don't see it, do you? What brought you here wasn't a desire to take pictures of some old mining town. You might have thought that was it, but there's more. You're a hollow searcher. I knew it the moment I saw you." She tapped her temple as if to indicate a vision behind her dead eyes. "I saw it and knew. And something else. I knew even then that you'd decide not to stay. Not right away. The pull of the hollow world is too strong." 

"Hollow world?"

"The world you came from. A hollow world of hollow people, each one a human hole, drained from years of living on the grid. That's what we fear, Kevin. That hollowness. And although you might not know it yet, it's that same fear that led you to us. The fear of the human abyss, the immeasurable cavern that once held your soul." She moved her hands, sliding one into position on the dulcimer's neck, the other resting on the bridge, perched like a bird claw.

Kevin thought of what she had said about working at a university, about how her students had followed her into the wild. He believed that. There was still something of the academic about her, a quality that reminded him of a poem whose title he couldn't recall.

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played
. . . .

Strange how he remembered the words but not the title. It was like that with so many things these days.

"You've lost your soul, Kevin. That's the sorry truth of it. But we can teach you to grow another. It won't be easy...won't happen at once...but the seed's been planted." She crossed her legs, lifting one moccasined foot from under the hem of her dress. Then she plucked three strings together, sounding a chord. "Part of you thinks I'm crazy. But another part is listening. It's the part that knows you've been empty for too long."

He had finished eating, and now he was sitting, looking toward the open door and the hall beyond.  "You said I could leave if I wanted?"

"That's right." She stuck another chord, slightly different from the first--darker, pensive, unresolved.  "Your choice." Her fingers moved again, striking a chord that completed the sequence, filling his ears, then continuing on to echo in the hollow of his being. "But first there's one thing more." She played the chords again, three-note arpeggios, one after the other. "We've given you food for your stomach." She played the sequence again, slower. "Now here's something for that deeper chasm." 

She sat back and began to play.

*****

He awoke in his parked car. Beyond the hood, footprints stretched through the trees, filling with snow, vanishing. He sat up, thoughts spinning.

He remembered taking pictures of an abandoned town before starting back to the car. It had been dark then, just like now.

What happened?

The keys were in the ignition. He turned them. The radio blasted. He snapped it off, looked at the time: 4:34 PM.

That can't be right.

And there were other things he couldn't account for. His coat for one. It was filthy, smeared with clay. Perhaps he'd fallen, knocked himself out, returned to the car in a daze. But there were no lumps or abrasions on his head, only a terrible, internal ache that suggested something more serious than a fall, a stroke perhaps. 

His backpack lay on the seat beside him, stitching strained and ripped as if the zipper had been forced closed around an oversize load. He didn't remember it being that way before, and the pack did not seem overly full now. He unzipped it and took out his phone. The display showed 21 new photos. That seemed about right. All were dated between late afternoon and early evening--with the last shot taken around 4:21 PM.

Thirteen minutes ago?

He opened the image. It was a wide-angle shot of a derelict town, the one he had snapped while standing on the ridge of an abandoned mine. He enlarged the image, zooming in on a building with gray windows.
Plastic sheeting?
Hands trembling, he panned the image, left to right along the building until he came to a rusted door hanging from broken hinges. He could almost hear it swinging in the breeze.

Whump.  Whump-ump.  Whump!
 

And someone stood in the doorway.

He enlarged again, zooming in on the blurred figure of a woman. Her features were vague, little more than pixilated shadow, suggestions of
braided
hair, a narrow face, stone-cold eyes. It came back to him. He remembered sitting on a bed, listening as she sang a song so achingly beautiful that it unmanned him. That was it. That was the last thing he remembered.

He closed the picture and checked the image menu. The photo's date and time were there. He stared at the numbers.

Yesterday!

He shivered and looked again at the vanishing tracks leading away from his car.

He'd lost an entire day!

*****

He was out of the car now, armed with flashlight and GPS, following his trail back through the forest, his memory returning as night deepened. It was all coming back now, how she had sung to him, filling him with a longing for all he had lost. And he remembered how she looked, thin as a tendril of mist, clothed in a dress that wrapped her like an encroaching shadow. Her head rocked as she sang, rolling with the music. He remembered these things. All of them. But most of all he remembered what he told her when she stopped singing. "I've changed my mind. I don't want to leave. I want to stay."

She set the dulcimer aside and looked at him with eyes that weren't as blind as they seemed. Then she touched his brow, fingers lingering as if probing the depth of the hollow space within. "No," she said. "Your mind hasn't changed. Not yet. It's just moved beyond you for a moment. The real change will take time. Hours maybe. Maybe years. When it does, if you still want to join us, you'll find your way back."

*****

Snow stopped falling by the time he reached the scarred hillside that overlooked the derelict town. He didn't expect to see much from the ridge. Low clouds hid the moon and stars. The valley should have been dark, but instead it was red with dying flames, smoldering buildings. The town had been torched.

We move in, take up residence for a while, then move on.

He shivered, bracing on a tree and looking at the line of hills beyond the valley. Mother's followers had found him once. They would find him again, provided the government agents didn't find him first. Should he risk it? He looked back the way he had come, then he threw down his phone, dropped his pack, and pushed forward along the rim of the glowing valley.