From the Earth #2
Her memories of the well are only vague, although she knows it sits at the top of the hill.
The family used to cut the grass on the hilltop once a week, place rings of flowers around its stone lip.
She imagines they still do. She’d play there sometimes when she was very little, as her mothers wove the flowers into ropes.
You must never drink from the well, they said.
Nobody knew how deep it drilled into the earth, or what lay at the bottom.
But it was a sacred place, a holy place.
Sometimes the grown-ups would dance and sing up there, although she was too young to be a part of that.
She stayed back at the farm with Christie or one of the other women.
After the dancing they would always be happy. She remembered those times the most.
Her excitement is such that she struggles to sleep at night, and the ghost’s voice floods in to fill the darkness.
She knows he is not her friend, but she has heard him for so long that she curls into the soft rumble of his words.
It’s as if he shares in her excitement, as impatient as she is for what’s coming.
Buried me they did but I cannot rest cannot sleep for now my eyes are opened and full of grit.
Half the time she can’t make sense of what he’s saying.
Sometimes it’s just words, not even a sentence, and she struggles to string together any kind of meaning.
She thinks he’s angry, in the way that ghosts often are in books.
Angry that he’s dead, banished to a life under the ground. Angry that the world has forgotten him.
When they talk, Christie always refers to him as a god, but Arwen knows he isn’t that.
A god wouldn’t be this petty, or this frustrated.
He’s just a man, albeit one unlike the petty, angry men she has known in her secluded life.
She can feel his past when he speaks to her, the rumble of ancient stones.
Like her, there was a time when he was free, when he walked the hills and breathed the air.
The loss pains him, and it is this suffering that she feels most of all.
She has lost things too, locked away in her room all these years.
His yearning for the open sky might almost be her own.
She wonders if she has dreamed him up, just like the bird.
The caves are filling again the strata fold and rise rise rise for the sun.
Sometimes she falls asleep to his voice.
Then she dreams. She is buried beneath the earth, alive but unable to breathe, the weight of rock and soil pushing down on her chest like a tombstone.
The worms and millipedes crawl into her ears, the ants build a home in the marrow of her bones.
She tries to scream but her mouth is filled with dirt.
Those nights she wakes screaming and they come into her room, calming her down until they can abandon her in solitude again. But still she smiles. Just like her dream, even this isolation will reach its end.
* * *
Christie arrives on the chosen day with eight others.
Arwen has been awake through the darkness, imagining what it will be like to set foot outside this room, outside this house.
Two of the men are banging small hand drums and she wishes she could tell them to stop, but she endures it. Nothing can ruin this special day.
I come little one I come and the world will be new and we will breathe the sun together.
Even the ghost has woken up. His voice is clearer in her head now than it has ever been. He sounds different. Closer to her, more alive.
My time is almost upon us.
When they lead her out through the doorway of the bedroom, Arwen gasps.
In her memory, her room is part of a large, rambling house, almost akin to a mansion.
A tiny dungeon hidden away beneath an opulent castle.
She has often imagined the rest of the family living in luxury, gorging on lavish roast dinners at a long table in the kitchen.
The reality is more squalid. The corridor they’re in smells of damp, and appears to have been thrown together from large sheets of chipboard and a few dull gray cinderblocks.
Through the solitary window she can see a muddy patch of ground sown with vegetables, the tomato plants brown-stemmed and succumbing to black mold, tangles of beans erupting from cane teepees.
A lone chicken struts and pecks at the stony soil, its feathers patchy and lackluster.
They follow one of the men, the eldest, along the corridor to a door.
His long gray beard reminds Arwen of a story she used to love, back when she was allowed her books.
The illustration was of a little man named Rumpelstiltskin, and she had been fascinated with that picture, the way he seemed so mischievous and yet so mysterious, an imp that might arrive in her life at any moment and turn it upside down.
She had craved that, back then—the chaos of change.
She wonders if she wished all this upon herself.
The old man turns the door handle and they step outside.
This door, thankfully, faces away from the compound, and as they step out into ankle-high grass Arwen takes a deep breath in through her nose.
The green countryside smell almost makes her sneeze; there’s an undercurrent of manure and the pungent stink of animals too, but she savors that almost as much.
The sky is high above them, dotted with puffy white clouds, and she watches a flock of birds bustle through the air to roost in a large gnarled tree by the fence.
She feels almost giddy, like all this has been created especially for her.
“Come along,” Christie says, placing her hand on Arwen’s arm and leaving it there, her fingers tightening as she guides her along the path to a gate in the fence. “We’re going to the well, remember? The elders have approved. You’re so very lucky.”
Arwen spots something in the grass, and as they walk up the incline, she cranes her neck to get a better look.
At first she thinks it is her red bird, her morning caller, and she almost shouts for joy.
But then she can see it is not that at all.
It’s a bird, yes, but its neck is twisted, its body lumpen and unmoving in the grass.
Something has been at it, its breast feathers dotted nearby.
She can see a deep red slit across its belly, its innards spilling out brown and purple onto the dirt. The flies circle it in the sunlight.
As they pass through the gate, she looks back.
They’ve already started to ascend the hill, and the elevation allows her a better view of the place she has called home for all her life.
From a distance it looks small and unimpressive: a farmhouse with a number of lean-tos built haphazardly around its edges, a dilapidated barn with the roof half caved in.
She sees something large and metallic through the open barn doors, and with a jolt she remembers it’s a car.
They used it sometimes when she was small, taking trips to the local town for supplies.
They had bought her books in a little shop filled with other people’s old junk, from clothes to stained boxes filled with puzzles. It had felt like a treasure trove.
“Pick your feet up.”
Christie pulls harder on Arwen’s arm and she stumbles, turning to face forward again. The ground here is studded with stones, some as large as her head. It would be too easy to trip on one and fall.
If you fall I will lift you up into my arms and you will never fall again.
The ghost’s voice is so loud that she gasps, her legs giving way beneath her. She feels like she might be sick. The procession has stopped with her, although the drums are still beating, and when she looks up it’s into nine faces staring at her, stern and unforgiving.
“What’s wrong?” Christie asks, and Arwen hears the impatience in her tone.
“Nothing,” she replies. “The ghost. It’s just he…he’s louder out here. It took me by surprise, that’s all. I didn’t expect him to be so loud.”
There’s muttering among the group, and the old man strokes his beard and says, “She is closer to God now,” as if that means something important. A few of the others nod, and Christie helps her back to her feet.
“Can you walk?” she asks, as Arwen brushes herself down.
“I think so.”
I shall walk again and the earth will tremble beneath my step as I claim this kingdom from all the abusers of my name.
She expects his voice this time. While it makes her wince, she can keep moving.
They are nearing the crest of the hill, and she is pleased to see they have kept it as she remembered.
The grass here is mown short. As they draw close to the well, she can see the rings of flowers around its edges, yellow and purple and red, a splash of color as she adapts to the great sea of green that surrounds them.
She wants to sit and enjoy the view, but Christie is propelling her forward with purpose toward the well.
The others fan out to form a circle around them.
Arwen doesn’t like being so close to the edge; the hole of the well is as black as anything she has seen, and she senses a musty, dark smell rising from it like the depths of the earth.
“She’s ready,” Christie says, holding out her hand to one of the men in the circle.
He reaches into his belt and passes her a knife.
Arwen realizes now that Christie is not her friend.
This was never meant as a treat to reward her, a pleasant jaunt in the sunshine.
She has been played for a fool, and the tale of Abraham and his son springs to her mind.
Is that what she is, a sacrifice? The drums are swelling louder and faster, and a wailing song rises from the mouths of those family gathered around her, the old man leading them with his open arms raised above his head.
Christie holds the knife in front of her.