Come Sing for the Harrowing #2
In the end he doesn’t have to. She’s the one who speaks.
“I like what you’ve done there.” She points with her litter picker at the wooden star. “Looks pretty sturdy. Take you long?”
He shrugs, as nonchalant as he can manage. His stomach is churning.
“A while. It was hard…kind of hard work. Kept falling down. But the big branches there, the beams? They bear the weight of the rest of it, see.”
As he says it, he knows that the finer points of stick-structure engineering are of little interest to her, but he doesn’t know what else to say and so his mouth runs and runs. He thinks he might need to visit the bathroom.
“Uh-huh,” she replies, looking at it properly now, testing it with her hand. “Pretty sturdy. Big, too. I have an idea—” she says this like it has only just occurred to her, but he senses this is where her mind was going all along, “—why don’t I tie you to it? Might be fun?”
Oh god. It’s almost certainly some kind of joke.
Her friends must be just around the corner, waiting to laugh at the gullible idiot…
But if it isn’t? There’s a tiny chance she might actually want to do this, and that’s all his brain fixates on, the hot girl in front of him who’s paying him attention for the first time in his life.
Maybe she liked him all along, but was too embarrassed to show it in front of her friends. Maybe his moment has finally come.
“Umm. Okay?” he says. “Just don’t tie it too tight, please? I get eczema really bad.”
The star, it turns out, is exactly the right size for him.
She binds his wrists and ankles far too close to the frame, the rope cutting into his skin—where she found it, he doesn’t know—but he doesn’t complain.
If he did, she might stop, and he doesn’t want that.
This close he can smell the coconut shampoo on her hair.
“I’m going to take your clothes off now,” she says, as he tries not to cry. The moment is already beginning to spiral beyond his control. “Don’t wriggle. I don’t want to cut you.”
From somewhere inside her robe, she pulls a knife, crude but keen.
The cutting edge shines where it’s been sharpened recently.
It makes a loud ripping noise as she runs it through the sackcloth.
When she pulls it away, he’s left in his briefs, half aroused and half petrified.
There’s no backing out now, though. He couldn’t if he wanted to; he can barely move his fingers.
With a deft slice she removes his underwear, too.
Jack doesn’t know what he’d hoped for, but it wasn’t this. She looks uninterested in him, occupied with wiping the knife on the rags of his clothes and replacing it inside her robe. There’s a brutal efficiency to her movements that kills any sexual thoughts.
“He’s ready,” she calls.
Her dark-haired friend is the first to enter the stables, and a procession follows her.
Jack lowers his head in shame before they reach the end of the line.
He recognizes Miles from the gift shop, and Sharon the ice cream lady, and Big Mike.
They’re chatting among themselves as if he isn’t there, although some of the girls are laughing and pointing. A few of them have brought snacks.
He’s only aware that he’s started to cry when the sobs rack his body, pulling tight against the ropes on his wrists.
His cheeks are wet. He tries to turn away, hide his exposure from the crowd of onlookers, but there’s no give, no respite.
He wishes he could shrink inside his skin, hide himself within this shameful frame of flesh and bone.
A cold trail of sweat runs down his belly and along his inner thigh.
A hand reaches out with a napkin to dry his eyes, and he looks up into his mother’s face. She’s smiling at him in a way that he wants to interpret as compassion, but actually looks more like excitement.
“Here you go, sweetie. No need for that. This is all for the best, you’ll see.”
“Mom?” He can’t think what else to say, so he says it again: “Mom?”
“Don’t worry now,” she says, throwing the wet napkin into the dust at his feet.
“I’m sure this isn’t what you expected, but it’s for the good of everyone.
I’m so proud of you, sweetie, really I am.
Everyone is. Look at you! The changes you’re going through—it’s a gift.
We’re all here for you, to witness what you’re doing for us. ”
She doesn’t use the word “sacrifice,” but he hears it hovering in the air between them, implied but unspoken.
“Mom? I don’t understand…?”
Then she’s walking back into the crowd, joining them as they eat their pretzels and laugh and joke, as if he isn’t tied there, naked and already aching.
The party lasts for an hour. The sun is dipping as the last of them leave, and the shadows stretch across the stable floor.
Jack wishes he could relax, but his muscles are screaming as he hangs from the wooden frame.
Out in the darkness, he feels the Watcher’s presence, waiting, observing.
He squints to see it better, but his eyes are still filled with tears.
Once or twice, he thinks he hears a labored breath.
It’s only later, as he stands shivering in the middle of the night, that he recalls his mother using the word “changes,” and wonders what she meant.
* * *
They take turns visiting him. Big Mike lifts a dirty straw to his lips, gives him a few sips of brackish, stale water. Julia and her friends avoid looking too closely when it’s their turn. If he’s grateful for their discretion it’s immediately swallowed by a new wave of shame.
His mom comes once a day with a bucket and cloth, wiping his body down, scooping up the excrement beneath him with a shovel.
He can’t bear to watch. He’d like to think she does it out of kindness, but it seems more like a chore.
She barely speaks to him. When she does, it’s all greetings-card platitudes, impersonal and trite.
Hang on in there. You’re stronger than you imagine. Your time will come.
Time runs in fits and starts, darkness the only measure of the days as they pass.
Jack exists on the edge of sleep, not quite conscious; unable to find rest, strung up as he is on a giant star of wood.
Sometimes he screams and shouts for help, testing the capacity of his lungs, but it makes no difference.
They must have closed the park. There are no tourists to hear him.
After a while, he starts to think of the Watcher as a friend.
The others spend as little time as possible in his company—even his mom hurries out once her duties are done.
But the dark shape in the woods sits with him all night, never showing itself fully but present all the same, the black within the black.
He hears it shuffle and move, his ear attuned to its ragged breathing.
Once, he thinks he hears it whisper—but he can’t make out the words, or whether there are words at all.
* * *
The flesh shrinks as his body consumes itself.
Soon he can see his ribs standing tight against the skin, his hipbones jutting like scythes.
He feels his mind shriveling, too, only a tiny flame remaining of who he was, guttering, before it is snuffed out.
He is more animal than man now, but still man enough to recognize the horror of it.
The splinters of wood and hay that have worked their way under his skin itch and weep, the flesh around them angry and raised.
His failing body is too weak to reject them. He can’t move to scratch.
He doesn’t know how long it has been when he first notices.
Two weeks, maybe? Three? It’s a wood splinter in his shin, one of the most troubling.
It itches and itches until he feels his skin will catch fire; then suddenly, unexpectedly, there’s relief.
Tipping his chin to his chest, he’s able to see down past his hollowed-out belly, the raised ridges of his ribs.
The wood is growing in him. What was barely more than a pencil line beneath his skin has divided and spread, a tracery of black threads buried beneath the surface.
From the open wound where it entered there stretches a single white fiber, tapering to a hairy point.
It must be three or four inches long, almost reaching the ground.
A root.
He watches it for any change, a sign that it’s growing.
Nothing. Eventually his head nods and he loses consciousness; when he wakes, the first thing he does is check it again.
Now it’s touching the dirt. He’s able to move his foot ever so slightly, and when he does, the tip of the root stays fixed.
It’s already worked its way into the soil.
A hay splinter in his arm is next, its root snaking down from where he’s tied in place, twining around the sticks that support him; the rest come too fast to note them individually, a hundred tiny tendrils descending from his body.
There’s relief from the itching at least. As more of them work their way into the dirt he’d swear he feels stronger for it, like they’re feeding him, drawing nutrients from the earth and dripping it into his veins.
After all he’s been through, it’s almost a balm, this new source of sustenance. It floods his head with green light.
More than once, in his lucid moments, he wonders what they put in the water they fed him.
The Watcher’s behavior changes, too. It draws closer at night, snuffling around him like a pig after truffles.
It’s near enough for him to see now, but in the darkness his eyes struggle to make out more than its hulking shape, seven feet high and strangely formless.
He can smell it, though. Its musk is rich and earthy like leaf mold, the black gold of fertile soil.
It smells like it lives in the ground—or more than that, is part of the earth itself, a creature of peat and loam.
Tentatively it touches his roots and a shudder ripples through his body.
His mom and the others tend to the roots like any other part of him.
Occasionally Big Mike will appear with a spray bottle and mist them with fine droplets, like he’s a rare orchid or fern.
They appear unfazed, as if this was what they expected all along.
If anything, he senses a growing excitement.
There’s a change in the season, the night air turning colder and raising pimples on his skin, when Julia comes to him with something cradled in her hands.
He can tell by the way she holds it that it has meaning.
She lifts it in front of his face, and he sees a tiara of holly branches, the supple stems woven together into a circlet.
“Here,” she says, standing on tiptoe to place it on his head. “This is yours.”
The leaves prickle his forehead but he doesn’t mind. He laughs and smiles for her, whoops of joy coloring the air as she steps back and curtseys before him.
* * *
One by one they come, the crowd gathering as the day wears on.
Each of them is singing the same song, though he cannot make out the words, or what language it is in.
They all carry gifts and lay them where his roots kiss the ground, a semicircle of plenty at his feet: gourds and pumpkins, a bag of plums, five turnips bunched together with twine.
Big Mike brings an entire sack of potatoes, laying it on its side so the tubers spill out across the dusty earth; his singing voice is surprisingly sweet.
Jack’s mom carries a basket of apples, each one with a thread tied delicately through its stalk, the other end tied to a fishhook.
With care, she pushes the hooks into the withered flesh of his arms.
As the sun dips to the horizon, they stick torches into the ground at regular intervals around the shed, lighting them with Miles’s Zippo.
The leaping flames bathe the crowd in flickering orange.
Jack smiles at them all the while, his head floating with a kind of euphoria he has never experienced before: a sense of oneness, of belonging.
Noises escape his lips that may be laughter or might be him singing along with the chorus that swells as the daylight fades.
Once the light has disappeared, and the torches have died down to a steady glow, the song changes.
Some of them are ululating now, raising shrill warbles into the night.
Their arms wave in the air like reeds. They part down the middle like a field of wheat and Jack senses its presence, actually seeing it now in the torchlight as it shuffles down the aisle toward him.
The Watcher.
The sackcloth draped over its body is blackened with mold and dirt, crusted in places with what might be scabs of dried blood.
The form beneath it holds Jack entranced: heavy and shapeless, some ancient thing dug up from beneath the ground.
That smell washes over him, dirt and rot, so heady it overwhelms all the other senses.
Jack feels sick and dizzy and filled with an inexplicable joy.
Then a clawed hand, its nails like giant thorns, emerges from beneath the sackcloth and lifts it, the shroud falling to the floor as the Watcher stands before them, unclothed and magnificent. Some of the crowd fall to their knees. Jack searches for his mom but she’s nowhere to be seen.
He doesn’t know what he’s seeing. Not really—his mind is too far gone to process this creature made of dirt and leaves, twigs and burrs.
The worms crawling from its eyes as it bears down on him with its huge, stinking bulk.
He hears its teeth like river stones crunching down on their offerings: the gourds and the plums, the potatoes and pumpkins.
In three bites they’re gone. Swallowed inside of it, to be digested by the bugs and the microbes, broken down and shit out again as all life must be.
Then the Watcher steps forward and the feasting begins.