Dirt Lullabies

by Jeremy Megargee

  Dirt Lullabies

  jeremy megargee

  For my family and my friends. For everyone who believed in me and supported me along the way. Thank you for helping to make my dream a reality.

  “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

  - H. P. Lovecraft

  Part I: Beneath

  Chapter 1

  Roman

  I guess it all started with a promise.

  A sweet whisper, seductive and full of possibilities.

  I never should have listened. The trajectory of my life would have been very different if I had simply toned it out and ignored it. Pass it off on a vivid imagination and my own sense of morbid curiosity.

  I could have let it fall on deaf ears. I could have crawled back out of that dark, musty root cellar and let the hard November rain fall upon my face and wash away any thoughts of what might be lurking beneath. That would have been the sensible thing to do…

  But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. It was like invisible serpents twisting and twirling from that hole in the earth, embracing me, pulling me close…cupping my chin and flitting forked tongues against my naive ears. Willpower wasn’t an option. Turning my back on the promise seemed akin to shutting the ancient stone doors of something so valuable, so precious…a once in a lifetime opportunity.

  It spoke to me of things unknowable, a bitter breath coming from that cracked and forgotten place beneath my old house in rural West Virginia. I still remember the scent of it curling into my nostrils. The stink of sour soil…and beneath that? Something older. Something stranger. Something worse.

  I didn’t comprehend the lies spewing up from that dark place. At that time I didn’t even realize they were lies. I didn’t understand the nature of what lived down there. I knew only that the promise seemed like my salvation…and the salvation of my family.

  For me…what came out of that hole was hope.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

  Every story should have a beginning.

  My name is Roman Merrick.

  And this story is mine.

  Chapter 2

  Roman

  We never starved, that’s the important thing to remember. Regardless though, life was tough. It was a meager paycheck to paycheck existence. My mother never graduated high school and suffered from dystonia so she wasn’t able to work. My father was a determined man, but his ambitions never rose beyond manual labor. He labored long and difficult hours to keep food on the table, rather it be via the pushing of a lawnmower or the swirling of a mop on a dirty barroom floor.

  To be perfectly honest, we were pretty damn poor. We took what joy we could from the companionship of one another and we drew our strength from the bond of a tight-knit family. We struggled daily…sometimes we stumbled and faltered…but it was our shared strength that kept us from falling for good.

  I was born into this kind of lifestyle and rather than attempt to rise above it, I allowed myself to settle into the grim reality of it all. I came to accept that my future would be very similar to that of my father’s future. There was no shame in that for me.

  Mine is a soul that soars when lost in fiction, so rather than set out on a path of higher education…I chose to pour myself into every thick book the library could offer me. I read because I enjoyed reading. To me, opening the binding of a book was like opening a door to entirely different worlds.

  My library card was the key to these mysterious doors and in many ways it empowered me, made me feel like a gatekeeper with access to places few ever get the chance to visit.

  Best of all? It was free.

  I’d lived most of my childhood on the edge of desolation, tipping dangerously close towards the abyss of life on the streets and the loss of a roof atop my head, so when granted the promise of an escape? Rather it be via mythical odysseys or modern tales of terror…I was eager to capture that.

  I realize now that it’s been a theme in my life.

  Promises.

  The promises held in books, sometimes the pages crisp and new, other times yellowed and dusty…offering you a wealth of knowledge. The seductive pull takes hold and you just let yourself become lost. You like how it feels…you let the stories carry you away.

  I loved books.

  I loved my family.

  I was content.

  But even so…the bills were piling up. The calls from the debt collectors were coming more and more frequently. New lines of worry furrowed my father’s brow…and a terrible sense of escalation glimmered in my mother’s eyes whenever I met them with my own.

  We’d stumbled before, but always managed to catch ourselves before it was too late. This time was different. I could feel it in my bones. The beast of destitution was close, gnawing and slavering at the walls…threatening to leave nothing but ragged ruin at my family’s feet.

  Dark times looming.

  Bad days coming.

  We needed a paying promise now more than ever before.

  Chapter 3

  Roman

  I was in my early twenties then. I worked at a local cemetery, mostly doing landscaping. It was seasonal work and the season was winding down as the cold weather became more prevalent. Gone were the days of summer when I’d navigate an aging push mower around lines of tombstones, my battered secondhand iPod strapped to my hip and some melodic rock blazing through my ears.

  Those moments were peaceful. The tombstones were like a maze that I was exploring, the mower engine churning and the thrum of it felt through my fingertips as I moved onward and onward. There was no real destination, no purpose to the maze. Just the tranquility of the exploration was enough for me.

  Sometimes I’d stop and read the names on the stones or wonder about the dates. I think the oldest headstones interested me the most, the ones so worn and eroded that nothing was left to memorialize the person that dwelled in the box below. Those made me a little sad too.

  All things fade with time…and headstones are a perfect example of this. The years go on and on and the past is pushed deeper and deeper into the shadows. I thought about who these people were, the things they did in life…the legacies they left behind. Did they have families? Or were they just lonely footnotes planted into the earth and then forgotten?

  That’s the mystique of the cemetery and these old stones.

  I enjoyed the mystique much more than I enjoyed the minimum wage pay. I usually worked late evenings, my little tin lunch pail resting on a stone as the sun slowly faded on the horizon. There was some rusty fencing on the edge of the cemetery and beyond that a thick pine forest…and the sun always set behind that forest, painting the pines with reddish vibrancy, setting the forest ablaze with color.

  I’d eat my bologna and cheese sandwich and think during times like this. I’d twist and turn ideas around in my mind…struggling to come up with a solution to the financial situation my family and I found ourselves in. I’m a dreamer at heart and most of my ideas seemed too broad, too ambitious…not concrete enough to yield actual results.

  When you’re dirt poor and rock bottom is dangerously close…you start to realize why criminals resort to certain choices out of pure desperation. It doesn’t matter if it’s to feed addictions or to feed a growing family, sometimes the taboo path seems like the easiest shortcut.

  Should I turn to thievery?

  Nah. The consequences far outweighed the reward if something went wrong. Plus I don’t think I’d be a very successful bank robber. Those kind of jobs require teamwork and collusion…and I’d always been kind of a loner.

  Twilight was approaching and I was barely fifteen minutes away from getting off work when I must have just dozed off. I was lying
back on one of the large tombstones, my lunch pail beside me. I’d heard that it’s disrespectful to walk across or linger on a tombstone…but I never looked at it that way.

  I always figured the dead would appreciate all the company they could get.

  I awoke, or thought I awoke…but everything was wrong.

  The stars seemed too close, like bright little pinpricks in the sea of darkness that was the sky. The moon was leering and bone-colored…close enough to reach out and touch. A bitter wind traveled around me, dead leaves swirling and swirling and never seeming to touch the ground, almost like they were caught in slow motion.

  That’s when I noticed the old man in the filthy brown suit.

  It had been black once but the soil of his grave had ruined that, giving it a mottled and dirt-encrusted veneer. Most of his face was draped in shadow…and I’m thankful for that. All that I could see was his mouth, the flesh of his lips rotten and black, his teeth seeming too long thanks to the receding gum line.

  He was speaking, whispering…but I heard nothing.

  Finally I saw his hand moving downward, a bony finger pointing. I marveled in horror at the maggots wriggling and dropping from the sleeve of his suit to hit the ground in mesmerizing slow motion.

  He was pointing at one of those old, worn stones…the ones I found so interesting.

  New words had formed on this stone, etched fresh and ragged, as though the old man had dug them in recently with what remained of his broken fingernails.

  “DO NOT LISTEN TO IT.”

  “DO NOT FEED IT.”

  “BURY IT DEEPER AND SALT THE EARTH.”

  “IF YOU LET IT SPEAK…IT WILL BE YOUR RUIN.”

  I was trying to comprehend this when the old man’s mouth stretched open, wider and wider, the jaw seeming to come unhinged as bits of tattered flesh fell to the ground. I heard him then. I heard him scream…the sound mixing in with something like the buzzing of a thousand flies.

  And then I awoke for real.

  Chapter 4

  Roman

  The dream stayed with me throughout the night. Even after I got home and watched some television, my mind couldn’t focus on any of the flashing images on the screen. I kept seeing the hollow curve of the old man’s mouth, the maggots falling from his sleeve…and the message scrawled on that tombstone.

  A warning?

  A threat?

  I didn’t know. I’d had vivid dreams before, but this one seemed somehow pivotal…like I remembered every detail of it because I was supposed to. Just when my mind didn’t need anymore to weigh it down, entirely new and unpleasant thoughts have entered into the playing field like vultures circling carrion.

  Even when I tried to follow the threads of the dream it just gave birth to entirely new questions.

  Who shouldn’t I listen to? Who shouldn’t I feed? Bury it deep and salt the earth…none of it made any sense. And maybe that’s the point. Dreams aren’t necessarily supposed to make sense. They’re just a cosmic bowl of colorful soup regurgitated from the subconscious, full of random images and half-formed concepts. I shouldn’t obsess on a dream. It’s fruitless and pointless and it gets me nowhere.

  I tried to just shut it out and forget about it. I found myself wandering out to the cracked, sagging porch steps beyond the threshold of the back door. I sat there and let the cold sink into my bones a bit. I lit up a cigarette, inhaling deeply, the tendrils of smoke curling up into the night air.

  The bulb that once illuminated the porch had burnt out and nobody had replaced it yet, so the only light to be found was the burning ember of my cigarette. Weak light…especially when up against a darkness as strong as a moonless night in the countryside.

  Something stirred in the bushes beyond the steps. Something was watching me. I couldn’t make out any sort of form in the shadows, but I felt it regardless.

  It was getting closer, the dead leaves crunching underfoot.

  I could see it now emerging from the gloom, staring at me with bright, attentive eyes. A little stray kitten. One of many that called my yard home, a litter of four lived beneath a ratty overturned couch near the side of the house if memory served. This one was all white with a touch of black along the nose, and probably the most curious one of the bunch.

  I reached down to stroke it behind the ears and it responded to my touch with a warm little purr, so throaty and reassuring.

  Few sounds in this world are as pleasant as the sound of a content cat purring for affection. It’s a little joy…but one worth savoring.

  So I smoked and I gave the little cat all the affection that it craved, making sure to rub its little white belly as it rolled happily across the blanket of dead leaves on the ground.

  I let all thoughts of the dream fade.

  And fade they did, although reluctantly.

  Chapter 5

  Roman

  It had been about a week since that night in the cemetery. It wasn’t fresh in my mind anymore and once you get into the routine of everyday life, even something as bizarre as that dream starts to drift out of your thoughts. I was concerned with more pressing problems.

  My father was driving me down the same back road we’d taken for years to get into town. I knew every field, every house and seemingly every tree along the way. Even the cows looked familiar, their breath pluming out past lolling tongues. It was a quiet drive and I found myself studying the remnants of a man-made rock wall at the edge of a cornfield.

  The corn stalks were long dead, brown and lifeless, the wind tearing through them mercilessly. The heater in the family Buick wasn’t much competition for wind like that, and even though all the windows were wound up a few gusts of that sharp cold still managed to seep into the car with us.

  We were bundled up tight, my father in his favorite denim jacket and a Marlboro hat pulled down low across his face. His black eyes, studious and observant as ever, were focused solely on the asphalt ahead of him.

  Braham Merrick never spoke much. One might call him the strong silent type, and it seemed that I’d inherited that same mindset from my dad. We spoke when we had something worth saying, and every word was chosen carefully.

  The silences between us occurred often…but they were comfortable silences. We understood each other. We never bothered with meaningless small talk simply for the sake of it.

  So on the rare occasions when my father does speak I make it a point to listen.

  “Electric bill is past due. We’re on the payment plan…but we still owe on last month’s bill too. I’m trying to make it work, son…but it’s getting harder and harder.”

  I’d overheard my folks talking about this before but I feigned surprise.

  “We’ll figure it out, dad. We always do. We’ll sell something, or maybe I can pick up a few more shifts…”

  Braham nodded, his hands tightening on the steering wheel, but the sigh that escaped his mouth sounded so bleak, the effect heightened by the fog of the cold air expelling past his bearded lips. It hurt me seeing him like that. A proud, hard working man…reduced to making that kind of sound.

  “I’m not gonna lie to you, Roman. We’re in it pretty deep this time. Car insurance is about to lapse. I just…don’t have the money to keep up with it anymore. We barely covered rent this month, and I got no idea what we’re gonna be able to do for next month. There ain’t much left to sell, son…”

  He pauses, a calloused hand scrubbing against one gray, scruff-covered cheek.

  “What little I’m making at the American Legion helps, but mopping floors and scrubbing tables don’t necessarily lead you to a life of fame and fortune. And your job is winding down…warm weather ain’t nothing but a memory now. Supposed to be even colder next month…”

  I struggled to find a glimmer of light in a dark situation.

  “They might keep me on a bit longer to clean up old floral arrangements and help with grave digging. I’ll find another job soon…”

  Dad looked at me out the corner of his eye, the brakes screeching
and crying a bit as we rounded an especially sharp corner. The pads needed to be replaced, but who has the money for that?

  “It’s gonna be a scrape…but we’ve scraped before. We always come out on the other side of it. Everything we been through, seems we’re due for some good luck pretty damn soon, don’t it?”

  He smiles. Even though he’s never been to a dentist a day in his life, my dad’s teeth are practically perfect. I’ve always been amazed by that.

  I smile back and I’m seconds away from replying when the front passenger tire blows out. There’s the sound of dragging tread and the smell of burnt rubber as my father struggles to guide the Buick over onto the road’s shoulder.