Dirt Lullabies

by Jeremy Megargee

  Suddenly I’m very tired of this. I don’t want to be in this dream with this stupid corpse anymore. This is my head the revenant is infiltrating. It’s my head, my world, my dream. All mine to mold.

  I start to concentrate very hard on the dreamscape around me. I bring my hands up in front of me and mime what I want the world to do, twisting them and squeezing them together. The reality of the dream contorts. The snow flies away. The ice melts. The lake vanishes underfoot right along with the thing that dwells below.

  The corpse in the dirty brown suit looks around, perplexed as he takes in his new surroundings. He’s in a vast great room lit by many blazing torches. My old tormentors from school howl all around the big room, all of them trapped in unforgiving torture devices. Some of them claw and reach through gibbets. Some hang nailed to the walls, crucified and disemboweled. Others hang from the ceiling from nooses, twirling and blue-faced. The centerpiece of the room is a rectangular pool of noxious green acid. Most of the former bullies swim and suffer in this pool, their flesh slowly sloughing off as their bodies become nothing but red and ruined gloop.

  I sit on a throne built of picked bones, some animal, some human. I wear a flowing black latex gown with a vulture skull broach between my cleavage. My long black hair moves through the air, reaching and questing like tentacle strands. There is sprawling scarlet drapery behind me that never seems to end.

  I gaze down at the corpse from my throne, a smile pulling back my lips. My teeth are all filed down to points and my tongue is forked through the middle. I speak to him with thunder; I punctuate my point with lightning.

  “He will rise.”

  The corpse in the dirty brown suit hangs his head. His expression conveys defeat and disappointment. Even through the thin and mummified flesh, I can read the look on his face.

  He sees me as a lost cause.

  He turns and walks away, leaving dirty footprints on the floor of my great room. He brings his finger up and twirls it as he goes, wispy white words forming in the very air before my throne.

  “You are too far gone.”

  I seethe. I hate him. I want to rip his dead body open and eat his decomposed heart. His words are shit. He is nothing, he is dead and forgotten and I want to bring him back to life just so that I can kill him all over again.

  I scream and I scream and the eardrums of all of my tormentors burst simultaneously.

  I awaken.

  Chapter 47

  Thorny Rose

  I guess that dream was meant to dissuade me. That stupid, worthless dead man was trying to turn me away from my chosen path. He failed. If anything he sent me blazing in the opposite direction. I’m more motivated than ever before now and I’ll scrape at the pit with my bare hands until my fingernails crack and bleed and snap off if that’s what it takes to free M from the bowels of the earth.

  I got another three this week. I barely even remember their faces. Just grimy homeless scumbags pulled up from the gutters of society and thrown down into the hole. M chewed them all up and belched out a few bits of their broken bones.

  They followed me back to the root cellar like lost lambs eager to be herded by a shepherd. I delivered them to the dirt king and now they suffer forever in his castle of everlasting soil. I’m a good little hunter. M tells me that often. He praises me. Filth never praised me. She never appreciated me or respected me.

  Fuck her. I hope she’s being split wide open by devil cock in the deepest, hottest part of Hell. I’m destined for big things. There is nothing and no one that can stop me now. If the cops ever sniff me out and find out what I’ve done I’ll cut them and kill them and cast them down into the darkness where many rows of teeth will be waiting for them.

  My count stands at six…but I want more. I hunt and I search and I locate the perfect seventh. I find him sitting in the back of a local soup kitchen and slurping charity noodles through his lips and down into his blubbery stomach. He is a huge, bulbous man, easily weighing in at three hundred pounds. His hair is long and greasy and there are disgusting lesions that decorate his face.

  I sit with him and I weave my lies, each one more promising than the last. I tell him there’s a fully stocked bomb shelter beneath my house and he can stay there for as long as he likes. He’ll have a roof over his head and all the surplus food he can possibly eat. His little piggy eyes brighten immediately, a wet tongue slipping out to lick sore-covered lips. He gobbles up the remainder of his noodles and then tilts the bowl back to let the broth rain down his throat. He wipes a meaty forearm across his mouth and lifts one glazed ham of an ass cheek and honks out the loudest fart I’ve ever heard in my lifetime.

  That’s all the signal I need. We leave together after that, the little goth girl and the corpulent hog lumbering along beside her. Such an odd couple. We could star in our own sitcom if I wasn’t planning on feeding the fat man to something with an appetite far greater than his own.

  There was one worrying moment when I thought the fat man wouldn’t fit through the root cellar’s door, but he worked hard to push his girth through the threshold, his flab dragging up against crumbling plaster siding. He goggled around the room while picking at his sores.

  “Where’s the food?” His voice is nasally, choked with phlegm and half-digested chicken noodle soup.

  He’s totally ignorant of the fact that he’s standing with his back inches away from the edge of the pit. I step towards him softly while pulling my straight razor from my back pocket. I’m very close to him now, smiling up into his pockmarked moon of a face. He dwarfs me in both weight and height.

  “You’re the food.”

  I swing my left fist up into an arching uppercut that catches the shelf of the fat man’s jaw. Under normal circumstances his blubber would probably absorb the blow and I’d likely break my hand. These are not normal circumstances. The uppercut shatters the fat man’s jaw instantly. The crack of it is like a pistol going off in the cramped confines of the root cellar.

  I’m pretty fucking strong now. M spoils me with these little gifts. I have the reflexes of a jungle cat and the strength to smash a human skull into bone dust.

  I feel thick sausage fingers close around my throat and a muddled “Bishtchhh” exits the broken mush of the fat man’s mouth. This game just keeps getting more exciting. He’s good sport!

  His shit-brown eyes widen in shock when I flick the straight razor out from behind my back. I bury it deeply into the meat of his abdomen and I twist oh so sweetly back and forth. Blood bubbles pop in his nostrils and his grip on my neck weakens. I withdraw the razor, the blade slick with plasma and little chunks of his internal organs. Next I reach into the wound with my bare hand and dig around like a little girl searching for a treat…and oh goodness, I find one!

  My hand closes around a slithery rope of intestine and I yank it out in one good pull, little dribbles of fecal matter and bile splashing out across my wrist. The malodorous giant moans and stumbles backward. I let him fall…but I don’t release the length of intestine. He plummets like a deflating zeppelin and his guts unfurl out of him with each twist and turn he makes now that he’s picking up speed. His rotund mass slams up against the earthen walls of the hole and finally his girth becomes lodged somewhere down in the pit.

  He brays at me like a mutilated mule. I can just barely see the sweat glistening on his shiny moon face somewhere down in the darkness. I can’t help but chuckle, the long rope of intestine trailing down into the pit like a red and dripping life preserver. Finally I just toss the length of guts down there with the rest of him. I flick the slime from my palm and wipe it off on the back of my pants.

  I’ve never seen one of the lost ones actually get stuck in the hole before. I have absolutely no idea what happens next. My answer comes in the form of an impossibly long and spindly arm that bursts up through the fat man’s unseen anus and out of his screaming mouth, the long pale fingers closing around the face and body of the prey before dragging it down into the blackness beyond the scope of my visio
n. Little pieces of the fat man’s body glisten on the tunnel walls after he gets pulled down into oblivion.

  M takes his time with this particular meal. It’s one of the biggest he’s had in a long time. I assume he starts with the legs because I can still hear the weak and dying screams from somewhere below. They are symphonies of suffering.

  My count stands at seven now. I can’t help but feel proud of myself.

  I’m doing this for me and my Ro.

  I’m doing this for us.

  He’ll understand when he wakes up.

  Part III:

  Dirty Secrets

  Chapter 48

  Roman

  I’ve been floating in a dark sea for what seems like a long time now. It’s warm and inky and it’s not really such a bad place. I’m comforted by the constant nothingness and the weight of the silence that blankets me. I understand on some deep, instinctual level that I’ve been hurt very badly and I’m trapped in the empty depths that lie between life and death. I’m not cut off from the world of the living completely. Occasionally I’ll hear snippets of conversation drift down to me from somewhere far away and far above.

  My mother’s voice. My father’s voice. The voices of unfamiliar nurses and doctors. I’ve been able to glean that my parents aren’t staying at the house in Rust Valley right now. They’ve temporarily moved in with my aunt in Baltimore, Maryland. She lives near the Inner Harbor. They’re staying with her so that they can be closer to me. I picked up enough little bits and pieces of distant conversation to know that my broken body has been transported to Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore.

  I’m very happy about the fact that my folks aren’t staying at the house in Rust Valley. I want them to be very far away from that house and outside of the town limits. I’m not exactly sure why, my memories seem fragmented now and it’s hard to put the jigsaw pieces together. All I know for certain is that there’s something very bad beneath Rust Valley. Something that infects the very ground of the town and makes my haunted head flash with images of centipedes and blood running down into fissures in the dirt.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been down here in the dark. Time has no meaning in a place like this. I just swim through the endless emptiness and I never break the surface. I’m not even sure that there is a surface to break.

  I keep trying, though. There’s the nagging thought that I have unfinished work to do beyond the blackness. Something incredibly important. Something pivotal that is calling me back from death’s final door. I can’t remember what it is. I can’t remember much of anything now.

  I think I see something out there in the void that surrounds me. That cannot be. This is a nothing place. There cannot be something in a nothing place. But there is something. There’s a figure floating towards me through space and time and the umbilical cord that connects the living to the dead. I’ve seen him before. He holds a special place somewhere in the fragmented remnants of my memory.

  He floats close to me and then he stops. He left a trail of dust through the nothingness behind him. His suit is very dirty and befouled, the material seeming to rot right off of his gaunt form. He is a dead thing, all dried up with worms where his eyes should be. He opens his mouth to speak but he cannot speak. There’s a big hole in the back of his head and I can see right through it. His tongue is nonexistent, vaporized by whatever trauma put the hole in his head and killed him.

  He is reaching for me. His hands are bony and his fingernails have grown long and sharp due to his long stint in the grave. He grips my cheeks gently with those mummified hands and immediately the memories flood in. I was empty and broken but I’m being filled up again, I’m being fixed. He gives me back what I lost.

  I remember everything.

  I remember the crash, I remember the root cellar…and I remember the hungry fiend that lives below. I remember threats and lies and a single letter that brings fresh fury into my resurrected heart.

  M.

  The corpse in the dirty brown suit is very close now, inches away from my face. I can see that his skin is peeling off from the bone like chipped paint from an abandoned house. His lips move but no words come out. Even though I cannot hear his message to me, I’m able to see the worms squirming down from his eye sockets to take up residence on his frail and sunken chest. The worms are linking together and spelling out letters, forming words.

  I gaze down at the message the corpse has crafted for me. Just three slimy worm-words that leave me deeply curious.

  “See through me.”

  I’m not sure what any of this means but I get the sense that the corpse wants my permission to do something. I nod my affirmation to him. The dead thing draws me closer and presses his forehead against my own. I gaze into the hollow sockets where his eyes used to be. I gaze long and I gaze deep.

  I see through him…

  Chapter 49

  Gentleman James (Dreamscape)

  It was the summer of 1968 in Rust Valley, West Virginia. The sun was like a furnace hanging low in the sky and sending out heat waves the likes of which the town had never seen before. You could barely walk a few steps down Main Street without sweat dripping down your brow and stains forming beneath your armpits. It was hellish, muggy weather…and for me it was a hellish, muggy year.

  I’d lost my little daughter Maggie earlier that spring. She was only seven, the apple of my eye. She was swinging high and enjoying the smell of honeysuckles in the air when she fell off the swing and just laid there still. My wife and I ran across the playground and grabbed her up and loaded her in the back of my Dodge Charger and tore down to the hospital as fast as we possibly could.

  She was already dead and cold by the time we got her through the doors. The doctors told us it was a brain aneurysm, very sudden and totally unpredictable.

  It devastated us. She was our only child. They buried her in a little open coffin in her prettiest sundress with a bouquet of yellow daffodils in her tiny cold hands. Maggie always loved daffodils. I remember shaking hands at that funeral and being looked at with such stark pity in the eyes of my friends and my family. They looked at me like I was a dog run down on the highway, a dog that didn’t know how badly he was torn up yet.

  I felt like I’d been gutted. Some essential part of me had been removed by the loss of Maggie and I knew in my heart nothing would ever fill that hole up again. I tried to make it work with Carol. I tried to be the rock that she needed. She became distant and morose. Our marriage became loveless and the arguments reigned. Maggie was the sweet yellow daffodil that brightened our lives and now that it had been uprooted there wasn’t much brightness left for us.

  We divorced a few months after her death. Carol moved back to her hometown in Boston and I remained there in Rust Valley. I worked as a carpenter in those days. I made good money. The locals knew me because I’d always come to their door wearing a crisp brown suit of the finest suede with my toolbox in hand and my midnight black Dodge Charger idling in the driveway.

  I poured myself into my work after my daughter died and my wife left me. I labored long hours and focused purely on the task at hand. I didn’t want to think about that hole in my heart. If I hammered the nails in loud enough it would drive my grief away, if only for a little while. I’d taken to drinking in my spare time. I’d drown my thoughts with whiskey and I’d lie there in my empty cabin and think about taking a length of rope and putting an end to things. I’d think about going to see my Maggie.

  I don’t even remember how the job came to me. It was just one of those contracts that came down the pipeline and landed in front of me. It was a ramshackle house on Legion Lane that had been rebuilt and halfway remodeled time and time again. It was an ugly ol’ mutt of a place and I didn’t hold out much hope for it the first time I saw it. The company I worked under just wanted me to take stock of what needed fixing and do what I could before the owners put it up for rent again.

  I did a walkthrough in early June. Couple faucets needed replacing in the kitchen. The roof neede
d to be shingled and patched in a few spots. One of the bedroom doors was hanging off the hinges and that would need to be dealt with too. There wasn’t anything all that remarkable about the interior of the place. Looked about like any other old house I’d seen on the job. I made some notations in my little notebook and moved on to get a look at the outside.

  The foundation of the place seemed decent enough. The yard was overgrown and the grass desperately in need of some mowing. There was only one section of the property that seemed a bit odd to me. It was a swampy patch of land near the back of the house, the whole area shrouded in low hanging willow trees and gnarled thorn bushes. I didn’t think there was much of anything back there but I checked it out anyway.