From the Earth #3
“This is best for all of us, kittlin,” she says, her words not entirely masking the look of excitement on her face.
“God makes His demands. We must never drink from the well, it is only here so He can slake His thirst. Your sisters have bled before you and filled his belly. You’re special, dear. He has chosen you.”
She continues speaking but Arwen cannot hear her any longer. The blood is rushing through her ears, and in its pulsing she hears the ghost’s voice, as loud and clear as if he were standing right beside her.
You are special in a way they are not.
Arwen sags in Christie’s grasp, her knees almost touching the ground.
You are not your sisters.
She looks at Christie above her, the knife shining brightly in the sun. She looks around at the hilltop with its well, and the ridge that runs back down, past the farm, before splitting into two smaller ridges that straddle a bend in the river.
Your blood will not fall on this my land and your life will not be lost but all those who seek to use you shall fall on their knees and feed my hunger.
I am come.
And suddenly she understands that the well is not a hole.
It is not a well at all. It is a mouth. And the hill is more than a hill, and the ridge is a body that is slowly breathing itself back into life after—how long?
Millennia? Longer than man can remember, despite the songs and legends to remind them.
Long enough that we forgot what was buried here and what it would take to awaken it, or what it might do once it was no longer slumbering.
She also understands that he needs her, just as she needs him. He is drowsy and out of place here; she anchors him to this world. As he will protect her, so she will sit on his shoulder and whisper their way over the horizon.
I am come , he says as the earth starts to tremble.
Christie has released her at last. All her captors are looking elsewhere, their hands clasped on their heads or pushed together in prayer, as the well cracks open and lets forth a bellow of noise that reeks of dirt and closed-up spaces.
She sees the ridge ripple as something massive moves beneath it, stones skittering from its back like water.
She sees a crack widen at their feet and the wet, burning stare of a giant eyeball beneath.
“He is come,” she says.
* * *
Arwen cannot watch all that follows, but she does her best to bear witness.
She worries that she should feel more than she does as the ghost rises from the earth, rocks tumbling from his shoulders like dust, the well a gasping mouth as he sucks in hurricanes of fresh air.
There is a hand that steadies her, as large as a house. Places her on his tufted shoulder.
She expects there to be blood as he crushes her tormentors, but he is surprisingly clean in his work.
The men are flattened beneath the boulders of his foot, the crunch of their bones nothing more than a whisper in the cacophony that surrounds them.
Christie is lifted to his crusted lips and swallowed whole.
The old man is one of the last to die, pushed into the soil with a single finger like a gardener planting a seed.
Arwen suspects nothing will grow there, but if it does, she knows it will be as stunted and ugly as he was.
Only the jagged end of a broken bone marks the spot.
Once the ghost is on his feet, and the family are all dead, he starts his work of leveling the farmhouse.
From where she is perched, high on his shoulder, Arwen struggles to see him.
He is so enormous that she can’t take him all in.
It’s like trying to paint a picture of an entire continent—she can only survey him one rock at a time.
His ear, a gaping cave in the side of his head, dark and deep.
His shoulder beneath her, a rocky hillside that sways with each teetering step.
The hand that keeps her from falling, steep like a cliff at her side; the fingers grinding together with the roar of a landslide.
His body makes so much noise that she barely hears the bricks of the farmhouse crumble beneath his heel.
Now I am woken and I must feed. Where to, little one?
She’s shocked to hear his voice again, resonating through her like she’s a tuning fork. She looks at his lips but they haven’t moved.
“I don’t know,” she shouts, the wind so sharp up here that she catches a mouthful, has to take a breath. “I haven’t—I haven’t been outside in years.”
We shall explore together then. I too have been slumbering. It has been too long.
“What should I call you?” She says it without thinking, her brain giddy and free.
The gigantic face turns toward her, dirt tumbling from its cheeks. She sees that his eyes burn from within, like two fires lit at the bottom of deep holes.
What did you call me while I slept?
“Ghost,” she replies, without hesitation. “I called you my ghost.”
Then Ghost is my name.
With a jolt of earth and a quaking of rocks, Ghost starts to move across the landscape.
* * *
They travel through the day. She grows hungry as the sun climbs down from the sky, but there is nothing to eat on Ghost’s shoulders so she swallows her pangs. It’s cold up there too. The wind bites her face. Arwen feels free, though, in a way she never has before. She senses that he feels it too.
None of it looks familiar to her. There are fields and more fields and then roads, a tangle of roads packed with more cars than she has ever seen, like a rash across the countryside.
Ghost sweeps them away with a swing of his foot, but then more come, and more, as if he’s kicked an ants’ nest. She feels his pain as the twisted wreckage knifes into his feet.
What are these things that sting and bite? he yells, his voice unbearably loud in her head, a clanging gong above the squeals and screams below.
“They’re cars,” Arwen shouts back, hoping he can hear her. “People ride in them? I don’t know why there are so many.”
Little cars. He pronounces the word oddly, like he has something stuck in his throat. They should leave me alone.
When the cars stop coming the planes begin, but Ghost swats them away with his fist, a stone hammer used to squash a fly.
They stop after a while, too, and then it’s quiet at last. Arwen looks back the way they came and sees a furrow through the earth, Ghost’s feet leaving craters in their wake, a churn of soil and tangled metal.
When they reach the sea, they rest. The sun is wallowing on the horizon, fat and lazy, its light dying as it plunges into the waves.
Ghost lies down, cradling Arwen in his palm until she can step onto solid ground again.
From here she can see the wreckage they’ve left behind them, smell the smoke of burning diesel.
She spots two figures in the distance, running away.
Otherwise, only the dead keep them company.
She feels she should say something, but the words will not come.
In all the time she was locked in her room, she never imagined the outside was like this.
The world as she knew it was circumscribed by the four walls of a tiny room, in a farmhouse that is now little more than a smear of rubble on the fields.
Everything she owned, everything she knew, is scattered like fossils in the soil.
All her memories were a child’s; she realizes that now.
Na?ve and golden like the fairy tales she used to read.
All her dreams of escape had implied a prince coming to rescue her, a future life that would be easy and free, a bed strewn with rose petals.
The reality she has found is harsher, though, indelibly stained with the blood of violent men.
She doesn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t this.
It is as if she has landed on the surface of an alien planet.
This is not my world .
Ghost’s voice reaches her as a croak, almost indistinguishable from the stones rolling in the surf. He sounds tired in a way she hasn’t heard before. As she watches, he tumbles to his side with a roar of rock upon rock. His eyes are level with her, the light in them dimming.
I have slept too long. I do not belong here.
Arwen wishes she could disagree with him, haul him back to his feet again.
He is the only true friend she has ever had.
But she feels it too, the weariness. This is not her world either.
Her years as a prisoner pale next to his centuries beneath the earth, but in many ways they are the same, the two of them.
Her dreams have faded, blown away like wisps of mist on the breeze.
Where she finds herself is no place she calls home.
Ghost’s eyes close slowly, their twin flames flickering then extinguishing as his gargantuan body grows still. His arms become rocky ridges again, his mouth an empty well. Long before that happens, Arwen folds herself into his body, swathed in stone and dirt, and together they sleep.