Run to Ground

by Bark, Jasper

  “No.”

  “No, I didn’t imagine you would have. She’s unusual in that, while most goddesses are individual or tripartite, she’s two-fold. She’s similar to the Roman god Janus, who had two faces on either side of his head, but she has two whole fronts on either side of her body, and no back. One side of her was a beautiful, chaste young maid, the other was an evil crone. The Maiden was in love with the sun god, but they could never consummate that love because the sun god can never learn of her sister, an evil crone who spends all her time in darkness plotting.”

  The steps levelled off into a narrow stone walkway. Jim followed Father Powers to the end of it where he produced another key and unlocked an even more ancient door.

  “Both sides of Monanom had their followers,” Father Powers continued. “The crone attracted women and men who craved power, or revenge on those who’ve wronged them. She taught them certain malign crafts. Students of the occult talk of the ‘left hand path,’ the earliest depictions of Monanom always draw her on the left hand side of her sister, hence the origin of the name.”

  “But what does this have to do with those beer-guns?”

  “Byrgen. We’ll get to that in a moment. First I want to talk to you about grave eggs.”

  “Grave eggs?”

  The steps on the other side of the ancient door were even narrower, and curved down in a spiral. Jim had to place his palms against the damp, chilly walls to keep from losing his footing.

  “Yes, this is one of the most difficult and deadly workings that Monanom taught to her followers,” said Father Powers. “It crosses every barrier of the natural order and turns a resting place for the dead into a vessel for unborn life. To create one, you have do some ungodly and unspeakable things, lad. Things no decent, sane human being would ever consider, but that’s what it takes to create any object of immense power.”

  “What do you do with these grave eggs?”

  “You plant them in a grave or a place of burial, and they grow.”

  “Grow?”

  “Yes, grow, just as a normal mammalian egg grows inside its mother, drawing on the same matter she’s composed of to form a foetus, the grave egg draws on everything a grave is composed of to create a blasphemous mockery of life. All it needs to activate it is the right insemination.”

  They reached the bottom of the steps. The ground beneath their feet changed from stone to closely packed earth. Jim felt a cold sickness settle in his gut when Father Powers mentioned ‘insemination’. He suddenly felt anything but safe with the old man, whose mood and attitude had changed both subtly and irrevocably.

  “This is one of the few parts of the tunnel network that isn’t entirely rock,” Father Powers said. “Which makes it ideal for our purposes.”

  Jim suddenly felt a familiar rumbling. It was coming from the soft clay walls now, not the ground. It was faint and distant but gathering momentum, getting closer all the time. They were coming from three directions, possessing the earth around them, twisting it into whatever sickening form they took, then moving on. Leaving the soil spent and violated, even at this depth. Jim was unbelievably far beneath the ground, but he still wasn’t safe.

  He was halfway down the tunnel when he realised the rumbling was coming from behind him. Shit! Jim stood still and listened. They were cutting off his exit, putting themselves between him and the steps back to the surface. He was going to be trapped down here with them if he didn’t do something right now.

  In the brief moment that Jim had stood still, Father Powers had disappeared into the gloom of the tunnel ahead, taking the flashlight with him. The tunnel was thrown into darkness.

  In blind panic Jim raced forward to catch up with Father Powers, but he couldn’t see where he was going. He collided with one of the ancient earthen walls and bounced off it. A sharp pain shot through his temples and his face stung.

  He staggered backwards and his feet went from under him. He landed with a wet thud on his back, the breath knocked out of him. The dry, hard soil of the floor was surprisingly cold. He fought to catch his breath and stop his head reeling. The rumbling built to a frenzy behind him.

  Then it stopped quite suddenly, and transformed into a thick slithering sound. Like wet cement or earth being poured from a great height. A familiar putrid smell flooded the tunnels, stronger now and more acrid. Jim gagged and felt bile burn the back of his throat.

  The things were fully in the tunnel now. Jim could feel they were. He could hear them, but the sounds weren’t like anything Jim had heard before. He couldn’t begin to imagine what they were doing to make that sort of noise and he honestly didn’t want to.

  It was at that point that Father Powers chose to turn around and walk back up the tunnel towards Jim. He let the flashlight travel over the three figures, what had he called them? Byrgen, that was it. He chuckled as the beam revealed them, a bitter, mirthless laugh.

  Jim couldn’t quite recognise what he was seeing, nothing in his life had prepared him for the sight and he had nothing to relate it to. The three Byrgen filled the tunnel, large lumbering forms that had arms and legs but no head and no recognisable human shape.

  They seemed to be comprised of soil. There were also roots and gravel and aged bones, plus rotting human flesh in their makeup. At the top of their bodies, where a head or neck ought to have been, was a gaping orifice filled with tier upon tier of sharpened teeth. The teeth were made from shards of shattered coffin wood or mangled brass fittings, as were the long talons on the end of their many fingers.

  The talons reached out for Jim. The orifices on the tops of their necks pulsed, opening and closing as they ground their sharp little teeth together. In the centre of what passed for their chests were two huge rheumy pits that could have been eyes or some other sense organ. They leaked pus and seemed to gaze right into Jim with recognition and with a desperate need. It was the same need he’d seen in the eyes of his newborn brother looking at their mother.

  Jim pushed himself up and clambered to his feet. He was going to have to run again. He was so close to total exhaustion that his arms and legs were twitching and shaking. These things had chased him round the entire cemetery, and now that he finally saw them, they were worse than anything he could have imagined.

  The only reserves of energy he had left lay in his utter desperation. Jim turned away and started to run past Father Powers. The vicar stepped in front of him with his hands up. He pushed Jim in the chest with more strength than Jim thought possible for a man his age.

  Jim toppled over and landed on his backside. The last ounce of strength drained from Jim’s body and the fight went out of him. He sat there like a discarded rag doll in the jaws of a terrier. The cold of the hard ground crept through his buttocks, down his thighs and up his spine.

  “You don’t get to run away this time, lad.” Father Powers said. “You have to be a man now and face up to your responsibilities. They’re your children, lad, and they need you.”

  Children? My children? Jim’s mind was fighting against the possibility, but his gut had already accepted it.

  He understood what Father Powers had planted in those graves and why they had swollen with life. Worse yet, Jim knew he was the one who had actually caused this.

  9:

  Four months ago . . .

  The moon was at its lowest ebb and this was a secluded corner of the cemetery. The night sky was cloudless but it was still very dark. Jim stood for a moment, letting his eyes get used to the gloom. All the better to see the grave, to admire its beauty.

  It was the third one he’d chosen and he knew it was going to be the last. He was a loyal person, after all, and he didn’t want to spread himself too thinly. It was the headstone that attracted him, it always was. He liked a well kept and perfectly shaped plot, but it was the headstone that really did it for him.

  The headstone had to be ornate and quite unique, without too much ageing or wear. He wasn’t interested in anything too weathered, or utterly dull. If there was another li
ke it, anywhere in the cemetery, then you could forget it. And it had to have a carved angel on it. Some men liked blonde hair, big butts or long legs, Jim liked angels.

  He’d been flirting with the grave for a while, taking any opportunity he could to drop by. He’d mown its grass and weeded its plot, until it was the prettiest little grave in that part of the cemetery.

  On their first date he brought a bottle of wine and they just cuddled. When he’d finished the wine and it was time for him to go, Jim couldn’t resist leaning forward and placing a long kiss on the alabaster toes of the angel. He hadn’t meant to be so forward and he didn’t intend to rush things, but he just couldn’t resist.

  On their second date things had gotten a bit more intimate. Jim had kissed every inch of the headstone, breathing in its mineral scents. Then he’d licked and stroked practically every blade of grass that grew on the grave. His mouth and chin were stained green and brown when he left.

  Tonight was the third date. Jim intended to get lucky.

  It was Fiona who woke this urge in Jim. Towards the end of their relationship he’d tired of her. The only thing he still found exciting was the graveyard sex. Then he realised it wasn’t Fiona that turned him on, it was the graves.

  This first hit Jim in the ‘out of town cemetery’ they liked to break into. It could even have been the night he got her pregnant. He was finding it hard to come. He was rock hard inside Fiona and she was loving it, but Jim couldn’t seem to find the vinegar strokes to take him over the edge.

  He tried to turn himself on thinking about how disrespectful it was to thrust himself deep into Fiona on top of someone’s final resting place. Then he thought about the soft earth of that resting place and the hard gravestone thrusting out of the ground. He started to imagine what it would be like if Fiona wasn’t there, if it was just him and the grave and he was penetrating the warm soil instead of her.

  This made Jim come so deep and so hard it was like an out of body experience. The next few times they did it in graveyards, Jim tried to get closer to the grave than to Fiona, and that’s when she might have guessed about the impulses growing in him. For Jim, that was the moment the relationship ended. When she told him she was pregnant, it only confirmed his need to leave and never see her again.

  Jim knew his new urges couldn’t remain a fantasy for long. Sooner or later he was going to act on them. That was his main motivation for taking the job at the cemetery. He would have his pick of eligible graves.

  He’d had two so far, and now he intended to take a third. Jim decided to dispense with foreplay, he was already hard from the anticipation. He knelt down and ran his fingers over the grave’s turf, fondling and probing until he found the sweet soft spot.

  Every grave has that perfect place for penetration, where the soil gives the most. He took out a trowel and cut through the turf, removing a core sample and leaving a hole just large enough for him to enter. A little water from a bottle in his other pocket turned the earth to mud, a perfect lubricant.

  Jim pulled down his jeans and freed his erection. Then he eased himself into the hole. Something was wrong though. He wasn’t feeling it like he usually did. It wasn’t the grave, it was Jim. He’d had a lot on his mind recently and he was starting to wonder what would happen if anyone caught him at this.

  He was pretty sure it wasn’t illegal, well not much anyway. He’d probably just get off with a fine. What worried him was what other people would think of him if he did get caught. These things were important to Jim.

  He wasn’t a pervert or a kiddy fiddler. He wasn’t hurting anyone with his passion. But he still didn’t know how he’d justify what he was doing if anyone did find out. He knew that very few people would understand, unless he made them, and he didn’t have the words for that.

  A grave was the perfect lover because it could never conceive. It was a vessel for the dead, not the living. It represented death in all its forms because it was where all the living end up. When Jim had his cock in a grave he was fucking death itself, denying it had any power over him. It was the ultimate affirmation of life.

  This thought stirred Jim and he began to thrust harder into the grave. The French call orgasms ‘the tiny death’. He didn’t know why, but he was struck with the certainty that this tiny death would break the hold any larger death had over him.

  For some reason, as he came, he was reminded of the fantasy he used to have about being back inside his mother’s womb. He would beat death and return to the womb and no baby would ever steal a woman from him again.

  Jim lay panting on the cool earth. He was spent and flushed with a happy afterglow. His satisfied high was short lived. As he lay pressed to the grass, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart, he heard something in the ground beneath him. It was the faintest of rumbles, but it caused his balls and his cock to shrivel up inside him with a sudden chill.

  It felt, for the briefest moment, like something had opened up within the ground to catch what he’d left there. The thought of this terrified Jim, as though it was the worst thing that could be done to him.

  10:

  For a longtime, Jim tried to deny the enormity of what the Byrgen had done to him. He felt certain they were going to kill him when they fell on him in the tunnel. After they were done, Jim almost wished they had.

  As they’d advanced on him, Jim saw they were carrying trophies from their other kills. They had the skins of all three victims, at least one of which they must have collected after Jim found the remains. He also saw Fiona’s umbilical cord and some of Cundle’s organs.

  Jim looked to Father Powers in silent appeal but the old man’s face was grim and implacable. “It’s no use trying to get out of it now, lad,” he’d said. “The Bible tells us, ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap.’ Your children have brought you what they reaped from their labours of love. I know you may not think it, but they killed those poor souls out of love for you. You don’t have to worry about looking after these children, they’re going to look after you. It was a shame those innocent people had to die, but they had certain things the Byrgen need to look after you. That’s why I arranged for them to come here and then padlocked the gates.”

  The Byrgen had looked after him, but Jim didn’t care for their idea of filial devotion. They’d torn open his stomach and inserted the umbilical cord, sealing up the wound with the pus that leaked from the holes in their chests. The pus formed huge green scabs of cadaveric matter and held the cord in place, but the pain and discomfort this caused Jim was unbearable.

  To stop his screams they sealed up his mouth with the same pus, knitting his lips together with the stinking bitter substance, then his eyes, and nostrils. Jim panicked at this, he tried to claw at his face to break the pustular scabs, but they restrained him. He was terrified he was going to suffocate, but for some reason the umbilical cord meant he didn’t.

  The Byrgen surrounded him and their bodies began to meld and flow together. They formed themselves into a giant ovoid shape all around Jim. It was lined with the skins of their three other victims. They’d fashioned them into a single sac. Jim felt and heard all of this happen because he could no longer see.

  Jim was glad of the scabs that filled his nostrils when the sac began to fill with a thick viscose liquid. Jim knew what the liquid was from the greasy, almost fibrous texture that flowed over his naked skin. It flooded the sac until he was floating in it.

  From his work in the cemetery, attending to coffins that sometimes had to be moved, he knew what happened to a corpse after more than a month in a sealed container. The inner organs, the muscles and eventually even the skin, start to liquefy and form a thick rancid soup. That’s what Jim was now suspended in, liquefied human remains.

  He was back in the womb, just like he’d always fantasised. Only this womb wasn’t like anything he’d longed for, it wasn’t a place where life began, it was a hellish abomination filled with the products of the grave.

  Jim had no idea how long he’d been in this womb, his o
nly measure of time was the way things changed. The umbilical cord had grown and mutated over time, it was longer now, fatter and gnarled like a rotting vine. All manner of toxic things slid down it and were pumped into Jim’s stomach. Things that writhed and thrashed inside him, squirming maggot-like things that nibbled away at his insides and made him curl up and spasm with the pain.

  They were changing him, too. His body felt different, his skin had hardened and his arms and legs had grown and twisted themselves into new shapes. He was becoming something else inside this womb, something that would live much longer than a human being.

  Jim heard a sharp rapping sound. He hadn’t heard anything in a long time, except for the soft slithering of his surroundings. He realised someone was banging on the hardened earth on the outside of the womb.

  There was more rapping, then he heard Father Powers’ voice. “Jim, I know you can hear me, lad.” Father Powers was talking to him in the womb, just like Duncan had done to his brother. His mother was wrong; you can be heard.

  “Jim, just thought you’d like to know that the police have gone. They’ve attributed all three murders to you. Your photo’s on the cover of all the tabloids. It took a lot of money, but we managed to keep St. Dunstan’s name out of this. There’s a nationwide manhunt going on. Don’t worry, they’ll never find you down here, and by the time you come out you’ll have changed beyond recognition.

  “You’re growing into something else entirely, that’s what the Byrgen were for. You see, times are changing, it’s getting harder to keep secrets these days, what with the internet and mobile technology. More and more people have heard the rumours about the heresy and some of them come snooping around here, asking about the scrolls. That’s why we need another Byrfling to guard the tunnels. They’ve been too long without one. That’s where you come in. That’s what you’re becoming.

  “Say goodbye to your old self, lad. Jim Mcleod must die, so he can be reborn as something truly monstrous. Something that can guard ancient secrets. Something I’d be proud to have as a member of the family, not the cowardly scum you were before. I never had any sons. My wife died giving birth to our only child, a little girl. You were nearly a member of my family, only you weren’t man enough to face up to your responsibilities. I lost my daughter when she left home and took her mother’s maiden name. I never had a chance to make up with her because you drove my little girl to suicide when you ran out on her.