Dirt Lullabies

by Jeremy Megargee

  I came across a little door that lead down into the earth. I hadn’t been told about any basement so I assumed this was a root cellar. The door was made up of old, rotten wood and a few lazy green flies buzzed around the entrance. I opened her up and pushed my way inside.

  There wasn’t much to be seen in the dark little confines. Couple ragged support beams and walls that had seen much better days. The floor was hard-packed dirt and there was a powerful stink down here that I couldn’t place. Smelled kinda like something sweet that had gone ripe and sour. I took a few more notes and was about to head out when my daughter’s voice called up to me.

  “Daddy?”

  I dropped my toolbox and it landed with a clatter. I must have imagined that.

  It came again, just as sweet and innocent. There was no mistaking my Maggie’s voice.

  “Is it you up there, Daddy?”

  I was feeling terribly confused. Beads of sweat were popping out on my brow and my heart couldn’t seem to settle into a normal pace. I looked down at the dirt to try and find an explanation for this. All I saw was a tiny hole there at my feet, circular and about the size of a penny. The slightest draft of cold, dank air wafted up from the little hole. My daughter’s voice followed the draft.

  “Please talk to me, Daddy. I’m so alone down here. It’s dark and cold and there ain’t no sun for the daffodils.”

  Tears were cutting down through the lines of my face. None of this made any damn sense, but I couldn’t deny the longing in her voice. She needed her father. She was hurting and she was cold and she needed Daddy to protect her just like I’d always done for her.

  “Maggie…is that you, baby girl? Is that really you?”

  I crouched down by that tiny hole and I stay crouched down for a long time. Maggie’s voice echoed up to me from somewhere deep underground. She told me she was dead and locked away in a forgotten place. She said God couldn’t take her up to heaven because her little soul got stuck down in the dirt. She told me it hurts so much to be dead. She told me she was so hungry. She told me she was starving.

  I cried and I listened, my tears dripping down into the little hole as she spoke to me. She told me she was suffering and the pain was unbearable. She asked me to help her. My Maggie told me that there was a way for her to come back to the land of the living again. She said I’d have to bring her people to eat. She said the only way for the dead to rise is if they eat the flesh and the spirits of the living.

  She said I’d need to kill for her if I wanted us to be a family again. I’d never killed a person in my whole life. The whole idea seemed insane…but I wasn’t thinking clearly. My heart was hammering and seemed fit to burst with love for my little dead daughter. She was my whole world and I wanted her to come back to me more than anything else in life.

  I told her I’d need to think about this. I told her I’m not a killer and I don’t think I can do this. It broke my heart even more to tell her these things when she was down there in the earth hurting and begging me to bring her back to life again.

  Something happened that made my mind up for me. She pushed a few bright yellow daffodils up through the tiny hole. I never saw her little hand and I don’t know how she reached up that far…but somehow she did. I brought them up to my nose and I inhaled deeply. The scent of my only daughter. The little blonde beauty that I’d move mountains for.

  Her voice followed the flowers.

  “Please, Daddy…”

  I kept on smelling the flowers. I kept on thinking about my daughter’s face.

  “I love you.”

  My fist tightened around the stems. My resolve hardened. My tears dried up and my decision was made. I would need to be strong for Maggie. I would need to make sacrifices and do dirty, awful work to resurrect my little girl.

  That was the moment James Silver died.

  That was the moment Gentleman James was born.

  Chapter 50

  Gentleman James (Dreamscape)

  I started cruising through the bad parts of town late at night. The working girls would get a look at me, a man with a nice car and a ruggedly handsome face, and they’d push their breasts out as far as they could and wave at me as I passed. I’d never picked up a prostitute before. I didn’t even know what the hell I was doing until I finally pulled over and the first girl came up to my open window. She had bottle blonde hair with dark roots starting to show through and her lips were glazed with candy apple gloss. It didn’t take much talking to get her in the passenger seat. She had a deep country twang in her voice and she whispered all the dirty things she was gonna do to me in my ear as I drove down dark and wooded roads.

  I told her to close her eyes and wait for the surprise as I lead her into the root cellar. She was giggly and expectant, wouldn’t stop running her hands across my chest. She didn’t even seem to notice when her high heels sank down into the soil. I didn’t want her to look at me so I spun her gently around and had her face the wall, her hands still clamped playfully over her eyes.

  I swallowed and fought deeply against my conscience. It kept telling me not to do this. Kept saying it’s not too late to turn back. The memory of Maggie picking daffodils in a beautiful wild field is what finally made me swing the claw hammer and bash the whore’s brains out. She fell with a hollow plop sound, not totally dead but broken beyond all repair. I felt sick to my stomach after doing it. She was convulsing there on the dirt floor when something hideous happened to her.

  Her flesh got sucked down into that tiny little hole. That’s the only way I can describe it. I guess Maggie managed to snag a little piece of her skin and just yank and pull the whore downward. Her skin was stripped off like tape and it vanished into the dirt right along with her muscle tissue and everything else. All that remained was a steaming wet skeleton.

  The sight made me feel like I’d been riding a rollercoaster all day, my stomach leaping up and down and tying itself into knots. Maggie thanked me afterwards. She said it made her feel a little better. She told me it took away some of the pain of being dead.

  It was only the beginning. I repeated this act with four more prostitutes. Over the course of that summer I picked them up and drove them back to the root cellar and hit them with the hammer and fed them all to my little dead daughter. At one point she asked me to take a pick to the hole and make it a little bigger so she could eat the bones too. I did that for her. I’d do just about anything for her.

  I asked all the whores to strip down first and then I’d burn their clothes in the wood stove back at my cabin. I started to hate myself for what I was doing. I knew it was wrong. I knew I was being selfish and evil and I was ending lives but I loved my daughter immensely and I understood the price going into this.

  The more she ate, the more a lingering doubt was eating at me. My daughter was a kind, innocent creature in life. She loved animals and she hated the idea of harming anything. I tested her one night while gathering up clothes after she had just fed. I asked her what color dress she wanted me to buy her when she’s alive and well again. She told me purple, her favorite color.

  Purple was not Maggie’s favorite color. It was yellow. That fueled into my doubt even more. She told me for the next meal, I would need to get something special for her. She told me to volunteer my time as a substitute bus driver at South Woods Elementary School and then drive the busload of children back to the hole. She wanted me to feed her children. She promised that would make her all better and she’d rise up and be herself again after that.

  I did as I was asked. I got the gig as a substitute bus driver with South Woods and one evening I drove the busload of kids down Legion Lane, all of them chattering and excited to be going home. I caught a glimpse of my own eyes in the rear view mirror. They were haunted with dark hollows beneath them.

  I stopped the bus halfway down Legion Lane. I looked back at the kids, so many young, innocent lives. Young and innocent…just like Maggie used to be. My little daughter would never ask me to do this. My Maggie’s favorite col
or was yellow, not purple. Everything was wrong. I understood that I’d been lead astray.

  I called the school and told them the bus had broken down, asked them to send another bus to get the kids. I left the bus and took my satchel with me. I had a sawed-off shotgun in the satchel. Maggie thought it would be best if I used it on the kids before I sent the meat down to her.

  I walked aimlessly into someone’s yard and opened up the door of their rusty Ford truck. I found the keys still in the ignition. I got behind the wheel and I drove the old truck down to Flaggwood Bridge and parked it there. Flaggwood Bridge never got much traffic and I just sat there for most of the evening and watched the sun set in a beautiful blue sky. I spent most of that evening thinking and writing in my notepad.

  As the last rays of sunshine vanished over the mountains I put the sawed-off shotgun into my mouth and I pulled the trigger. The shrapnel tore all my thoughts away and forged my place as a Rust Valley legend for all the years to come. The last sound I heard before the blackness took me was my own blood pattering down against the note on my chest.

  “I have done terrible things. I am sorry for all of it. My sins can never be washed away and I’ve earned my place in Hell. The guilt I feel down there will burn me deeper than the flames ever will.

  I thought I was doing this for my daughter. I thought I was helping her. I was deceived. I do not know what lives beneath that house on Legion Lane. I know only that it is malevolent and insatiable and it will never stop until it gets what it wants. It has used me as a marionette and now I’ve been forced to cut the strings.

  It is not my daughter.

  It is not my Maggie.”

  - James Silver, 1968

  They buried me in my best suede suit.

  Chapter 51

  Roman

  I see it all through the eyes of Gentleman James. I see how M manipulated him and subsequently destroyed him. I see the last few months of his life in darkly vibrant detail. I can practically feel it when the shotgun blasts goes off in his mouth and kills him. I die with him. I feel what he feels in his grave. I feel his thirst for vengeance.

  When the images stop flashing I float a few feet away and see James in an entirely new light. I’m no longer staring at a corpse in a dirty brown suit. I see a handsome man with slick black hair combed back from his forehead. His sharp suede suit looks impeccably clean. I actually hear him when he speaks to me, his tongue whole in his mouth.

  “You have to go back, Roman. You’re the only one that can finish this.”

  I want to go back. I want to punish M for all the ugly things he’s done.

  “I know what M is, Roman. The moment I died the truth of M was revealed to me. He is the voracious one, the eater of all things that live and breathe. M the Unknowable, M the Old Glutton King in the Dirt.”

  I float and I listen. James’s eyes are very blue and very wise.

  “He has your friend in his thrall now. She cannot be saved. M compels, as he did with you and I. But Rose is not just compelled. Rose is doing M’s work because she likes it. She is the perfect proxy…and even now they plot to bring the heavy machinery to Legion Lane. M is tired of his prison. M wants to be dug out. He wants to rise.”

  Rose is involved in this? That fucking MONSTER has his claws in her too?

  “If they start digging with the heavy machines it will never stop until they break through the walls of M’s prison. That’s the end for everyone, Roman. That will mark the extinction of the human race. There’s still time to stop them…but you have to hurry.”

  James is reaching towards me, his hands splaying out to grab the sides of my head as he once again presses his forehead up against my own.

  “I’ll help you as much as I can. Take my strength. Take my energy. Take my vengeance.”

  The dark sea is flickering all around us. I see flashes of fluorescent lights and beeping medical equipment.

  “Take through me.”

  “Awake through me.”

  James uses all of his force to fling me upwards at a phenomenal speed, almost like he’s giving me a boost. The dark sea flies back on all sides and I finally see the surface in the distance.

  I’m about to break through it.

  Chapter 52

  Roman

  My eyes snap open. I tear breath back into dormant lungs. Everything is sore. My whole body feels like it’s filled with pins and needles. There’s a cast on my left wrist and my ribs are heavily taped up. My right leg is suspended and splinted. Most of the visible flesh on my arms is tattooed with deep purple bruising. I understand immediately that my injuries were much worse but something Gentleman James sacrificed has given me a real chance here.

  I’m beaten and battered, but I’m still whole. I’m not a comatose husk languishing in bed while M plots his escape. I wiggle the toes of my right foot and realize that I should be able to walk. I pull the IV out of my forearm in one quick motion, a little droplet of blood appearing along the crease of my elbow. I gingerly sit up in the hospital bed and start to brush the electrodes off my chest.

  I bring my bare feet down to the floor and test them. I haven’t been comatose long enough for my limbs to atrophy and they manage to support my weight. I lean heavily against the wall and catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror near my bedside. My face is pale, ashen…and I’ve lost quite a bit of weight. I’m still alive though. That’s all that matters.

  Night has fallen outside; I can see the starlit sky through my window. Judging by the height of my hospital room I estimate that I’m probably on the sixth floor. Already I’m shrugging out of the thin hospital gown and grabbing my clothes from the little room’s closet. I pull on my mud-stained jeans and buckle my boots. I push my arms through the wrinkly t-shirt and wrap my overcoat around my shoulders.

  Thankfully my folks are nowhere in sight. I assume they’ve gone back to my aunt’s house for the night. I poke my head out the door and see exactly what I want to see, a deserted hallway. I stumble and stagger my way to the elevator and stab the button until the doors slide open.

  I ride it down to the bottom floor. I have one tense moment where I have to hide behind a laundry bin while waiting for two nurses to pass around the corner. Once they’re out of sight I dart towards the blinking red of the emergency exit at the end of the corridor and I emerge out into the cold, foggy night.

  I have absolutely no plan for transportation back to Rust Valley.

  I realize now that I won’t need a plan. There’s a midnight black 1968 Dodge Charger idling right outside the door. The key is in the ignition and the engine is a beast beneath the hood just waiting to roar. I open the driver’s side door and I slide behind the wheel, my foot smashing down on the gas pedal as I burn rubber out of that parking lot.

  I catch the turnpike to I-70 and I start heading west in the direction of Rust Valley. The radio automatically clicks into life and “Don’t Fear The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult pounds out of the speakers to compete with the sound of the engine. I push down harder on the gas pedal and I drive the dead man’s car as fast as she’ll go.

  My headlights cut into the fog as the speedometer passes beyond 80mph.

  I push down harder on the gas pedal.

  I let the beast roar.

  Chapter 53

  Thorny Rose

  Big things are happening now. There’s a darkening on the horizon. There’s inevitability in the atmosphere. M is stronger than ever now. He shifts constantly underground and the whole root cellar shakes and trembles. Deep, ragged fissures have opened up around the pit and they snake all across the soil. M is scraping and clawing down in the deep. He’s doing his part. He’s closer to the surface than he’s ever been before. Soon he’ll be able to lift all of himself out of the pit, not just a little fragment of himself.

  I’m doing my part too. I called Greystone Construction and contracted them to start digging a deep quarry here where the root cellar now stands. They’ll knock down the walls and use the heavy machines to dig down into the d
irt and get to M. They brought the machines out here already. Bulldozers and excavators and rock trucks all sit outside the root cellar, just waiting for the operators to start the excavation process. The construction crew left the property earlier in a few company cars. They’ll be returning in the morning and the digging will commence. They think I own the house and the land it sits on. M compelled them to think that. They’ll be paid handsomely too. I have a backpack stored in one corner of the root cellar. It’s full of sapphires, rubies, diamonds…so many precious stones from below. The backpack is worth a veritable fortune, the contents equating to millions of dollars.

  This is my last night as a hunter. Never again will I track down flesh to feed my dirt king in his castle of everlasting soil. He’ll walk the world again very soon. He’ll do his own hunting then. I will take my place as a queen, an empress, a goddess that will inherit all the riches and pleasures the human world has to offer. I’ll sing with the voice of an angelic choir and I’ll fuck with the fury of an entire pride of lionesses.