Carry Me to My Grave

Chapter 1

Old roots coiled around the torso of the thing under the oak tree in Bill Swickard’s cornfield. When there were leaves on the tree, it offered shade and company, but in November, the oak’s bare branches clawed at the sky, offering nothing but a reminder that all things die.

The thing under the tree had been there longer than the farm.

Longer than the oak. If Bill Swickard had uprooted that tree, he’d have thought the thing dead.

Perhaps, in nearly every way imaginable, it was dead.

But when Swickard came to rest in the shade, or when his wife, Ruth, brought him a picnic and they held one another on a summer afternoon beneath those branches, the thing wrapped in the roots felt them there.

It had long since ceased to think, or even to dream, but there remained some awareness.

The thing might feel the weight of a squirrel traveling the branches of the oak and had sensed the presence of generations of laughing Swickard children as they climbed that tree.

Yet it had never moved.

Today, despite the roots that bound it and the earth packed around it, the thing twitched.

If it could have been said to have shifted, then it shifted toward the west. Something had changed.

Without thought, without dreams as yet, its body felt anticipation.

Its bones ached with a history of pain. Beneath sunken lids, its eyes moved.

Without truly knowing, it knew—she was dying.

It felt hunger.

The music of a child’s laughter carried across the cornfield.

Benjy Swickard raced through the ragged, postharvest remains of the crop, pursued by his mother.

Ruth chased her boy with arms outstretched, and she snarled, a pretend monster.

With agility born of long practice, he dashed to the base of the oak tree and scrambled into the bare branches, daring his mother to follow.

At eight years old, he knew that Ruth could easily have climbed the oak, but this was their game.

Buried among the roots, the thing sensed the child’s every movement in that tree, but it remained motionless save for that single twitch. It remained as dead as its nature would allow. But hunger had returned to the thing for the first time since before the tree grew.

And now it began to dream.