Shores of the Marrow Read online

Cal sobbed.

  “Shut up! It doesn’t matter, Hank. Just shut up.”

  Hank’s back suddenly tensed, and Cal felt more blood from the wound cover his arms.

  “No, don’t move! You can’t move—you’re bleeding.”

  Hank closed his eyes again, and he took a hitched breath.

  “Cal, Stacey was wrong. You don’t think you are better than us, better than Mooreshead, but you are. You’re destined for greater things than this.”

  Cal ignored his friend’s comment, and he quickly turned his eyes back up the slope.

  Stacey…

  Lightning struck then, a pitchfork schism of brilliance in the sky.

  And that’s when he saw her, staring at him with something akin to loathing, or fear, or both.

  Or something else entirely.

  “Stacey!” he yelled, his voice already hoarse from trying to be heard over the torrential downpour. “Go get help! Please!”

  She remained frozen in place.

  “Stacey!”

  But she still didn’t reply.

  Hank sighed, and Cal turned back to him.

  “No, no, no! Open your fucking eyes, Hank. You’re not going anywhere.”

  And to his surprise, Hank listened to him.

  Only his eyes were cloudy now, lacking the lucidity of even a moment ago.

  Cal wiped the water from his face, but nothing changed; Hank’s eyes were dark, the pupils enormous, inexplicably occupying all of the white.

  And in the center of those pupils were flecks of sand, flecks that grew and grew and grew, until Cal realized he was staring at some sort of surf.

  A surf… inside my friend’s eyes… what is happening?

  It struck him that whatever drugs or mold spores that had altered his mind back in the library must still be messing with his senses.

  “This is not—” possible, he meant to say, but another voice cut him off mid-sentence.

  “You have a story to write, Cal… an important story, more important than Mooreshead, although this is where it started, and this is the place you will return,” someone whispered—Hank, it had to be Hank, who else could it be?—but Cal couldn’t draw his gaze away from his friend’s eyes to look at his mouth and lips to confirm.

  And if it wasn’t Hank, Cal wasn’t sure he would be able to deal with the implications.

  “Please,” Cal whispered. “Oh, please, God, don’t let him die.”

  But Hank and whatever Lord presided over The Pit pleaded ignorance or defiance and failed to intervene.

  Hank’s back arched once more, and then he fell completely still.

  “No! Plea—”

  But the words were cut from his throat as the sky suddenly opened and the sun—my god it’s near midnight, where did the sun come from—beat down on Cal warming him in a way he never thought possible.

  Chapter 14

  Euphoria.

  Cal drank every now and then in this very gravel pit with his friends, and twice had tried smoking pot. But while these influences always left him with a sense of calm, a thankful reprieve from the constant flood of thoughts, he had never felt anything like this.

  It was as if every one of his neurons had fired at once, budding neurotransmitters of Dopamine bridging every gap, every synapse. If he hadn’t been a virgin, he might have compared the feeling to that very first orgasm.

  For once in his entire life, Cal felt complete, whole.

  And he also felt something else… a gentle tug on his very essence, teasing him not toward the sun that shone on him with near blinding fury, but toward the pit bottom.

  Like the allure of the sea, staring out over its infinite brilliance, calmed by its lulling and hypnotic surface, Cal felt a need to go down into the basin, which continued to froth and boil with unrepentant febrility.

  The Leporidae burrow was right there, right beneath the pool of churning water that suddenly smelled more of salty brine than of silt-laden rain.

  Cal’s jaw went slack, and in that moment the sun blinked out again, and he was transported back to his present reality, his arms wrapped around his friend’s dead body. At some point, he had lowered his head to Hank’s chest.

  You will make a sacrifice, they all do, Seth Parsons had said. The Leporidae burrow is long and deep…

  Cal straightened, and looked down at himself, curiously, as if what he was seeing was all new to him, as if this body wasn’t the same one he had inhabited for the past fifteen plus years. He had ejaculated in his jeans, he realized with abject horror.

  No matter how pleasurable the experience of a few moments ago had been, he was now overcome with a sense of foreboding.

  And guilt.

  Still crying, he tried to push himself to his feet, but found himself unable. His knees had sunk deep into the thick mud as he had cradled his friend, and now it reached almost to his crotch.

  Cal grunted as he drove his fists downward, but this only served to bury his hands and wrists in the mud.

  In that moment, the sky opened up, and it seemed to Cal as if an entire ocean was spilling down on him now, sending a deluge into the basin as if it were the lowest point on Earth.

  Cal started to scream, and he scanned the ridge where he had seen Stacey standing only moments ago.

  Only she wasn’t there anymore.

  His eyes whipped all the way around the perimeter of The Pit, moving so quickly that he felt dizzy.

  “Stacey! Stacey!” he shouted.

  It was no use. Thunder seemed to coincide with every time he opened his mouth, drowning his words with their celestial bravado.

  The water flow was so strong that in moments, not only was Cal still sinking, but he was moving, too, sliding toward the trough basin.

  “Fuck!” he swore, still holding onto Hank’s arm with his left hand. He somehow managed to turn his body so that he was facing out of the pit, and he grasped the mud, intending on pulling both of them toward the surface.

  His fingers closed on nothing but water.

  Cal slipped onto his stomach and water splashed his face, causing him to sputter. The flow was so powerful that it tried to force his head down, to push it into the mud, to drown him.

  He wouldn’t let it.

  Cal drove his neck up, finally breaking the surface.

  A quick glance showed that he had slipped closer to the bottom of the pit, with Hank leading the way.

  “I won’t let you go!” he cried. “Hank, I won’t fucking let you go!”

  Hank’s body was mostly covered in water now, and while he appeared to be floating, no matter how hard Cal tugged, he wouldn’t budge.

  It was as if something was holding Hank there, and Cal too, rooting them in place.

  Something that desperately wanted them—needed them—to enter to the simmering basin.

  Cal swallowed hard and tried to claw his way out of the gravel pit.

  It was no use. With one hand on Hank, he just kept slipping lower.

  Hank was dragging him down.

  Sobbing uncontrollably now, he turned back to the pool, which was only six or eight feet from Hank’s head.

  Even though water was pouring down the slopes from all sides in thick torrents, the pool was frothing more than it should be.

  More than was natural.

  And then Cal saw it.

  A hand, black as tar, broke the surface. Only the fingertips at first, which was why Cal’s initial instinct was that it was only some other discarded machinery that had been long buried.

  But when he saw the familiar shape of a palm, and then a wrist, he knew that this was no machine.

  When a second hand broke the surface, and then a third, followed quickly by others, so many that he couldn’t count, all desperately grasping at the air, Cal knew that this was no illusion.

  And he also knew what happened to those workers, all those years ago.

  “No, please,” he sobbed. “Oh, please, God, save me.”

  But there was no God; or if there was one, he wasn’t
here, he wasn’t in The Pit.

  And he wasn’t listening.

  There was only Cal and his story, which now included Hank’s dead body.

  He tried once more to yank Hank up the slope, but his efforts were futile.

  One of the grasping hands finally grabbed hold of Hank’s hair, and it pulled.

  The yank was fierce, dragging Hank’s entire face and shoulders beneath the water, which caused Cal, who was still holding his friend’s arm, to slip in the mud.

  After feeling his knees slide, an idea, a horrible, terrible idea, formed in his mind.

  Hank’s head resurfaced, his black eyes still wide.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered as a second hand, this time wrapping itself around Hank’s nose and mouth, joined the first.

  Cal waited, and when they yanked again, he allowed himself to be pulled with it. The top half of Hank’s body was dragged beneath the water, and just when Cal felt the pull relent, he planted his foot on Hank’s hip and pushed.

  He hesitated just long enough to see his friend’s body completely submerge, leaving in its wake a series of small bubbles.

  And that was it.

  Hank Harper, his best friend, had been reduced to a memory and a series of bubbles in less than the time it took to tie a shoelace.

  Cal shouted once more, something unintelligible this time, and then turned his back on the rabbit hole.

  He started to scramble up the side of The Pit, fighting both water and temptation until he eventually made it to the top.

  Chapter 15

  Cal slammed the heel of his hand against the large wooden door.

  “Open the door!” he yelled at the top of his lungs as he pounded. “Open the fucking door!”

  Thunder rolled and Cal turned his head skyward as he continued to thump until his hands went numb. Rain filled his eyes, and he closed them, and then spat it from his mouth.

  He saw Hank’s face, his black eyes, then remembered the fleeting euphoria.

  What happened down there? What the fuck just happened?

  Hank’s own words whispered in his mind: A passage to Hell, Cal. They say that the men had unearthed a passage to Hell.

  There was a click, and the next time his fist moved forward, he stumbled with it.

  “H-h-hello?” a woman stuttered, sliding out of the way to avoid Cal as he careened through the doorway.

  “We’re closed, sir!”

  Cal regained his footing and then blinked the tears and rain from his eyes. When they finally focused, he found himself staring at a woman in her late sixties, her face etched with thick lines. She had brown hair that was pulled into a ponytail that was so tight it gave her paper-thin eyebrows a perpetual optimistic expression, which was very likely her intention.

  “What?” Cal stammered, trying hard to catch his breath. “Where is he? Where’s Seth?”

  The woman eyed him suspiciously.

  “Are you on some sort of drugs?”

  “What? No! What are you talking about?” Cal grit his teeth, trying to bury his frustration. “Where’s Seth? I need to talk to Seth! He needs to tell me where they took him.”

  The woman, clearly concerned now, took a small step backward.

  “Listen, I’m not sure what’s going on here, or what you’re on, but my second cousin is friends with the Sheriff. I think you should get out of here and sober up before I give him a call.”

  Cal felt his face go red. After all that had happened, he couldn’t believe that this woman was doing this to him now. He reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Tell me where Seth is! I need to talk to him!”

  The woman’s eyes went wide.

  “You’re hurting me,” she whispered and Cal, finally realizing what he was doing let go and backed away. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, but the intensity in his words didn’t change.

  “Seth Parsons… I need to speak to him. Please, if he’s here, I need to speak to him right away.”

  The woman wasn’t bothering to hide her fear now, and moved closer to the desk at the back of the room as she spoke.

  “I don’t know a Seth Parsons. Never heard of him.”

  “What? He was here earlier.”

  The woman was nearly at the desk now.

  “Is he… a student, like you?”

  Cal shook his head and looked about the room. It was as hazy as it had been earlier, and just as empty.

  Where the fuck is he?

  “No, not a student. He’s the… the…” he racked his mind, trying to come up with the word that Seth had used.

  Cultivator? Cremator? What the fuck is it?

  And then it came to him.

  “The Curator!” he exclaimed. “He’s the Curator!”

  Cal was expecting recognition to flash over the woman’s features, and was sorely disappointed when none came.

  She had no idea who or what he was talking about.

  Cal strode forward, and the woman cowered. His shame was only outweighed by his confusion and frustration.

  But the librarian wasn’t his target. Instead, he went toward the door off to the left, the one that Seth had emerged from after taking a piss.

  Only, there was no door; at least not one that Cal could see.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he whispered, running his pruned fingertips across the wall, searching for a seam. “Where’s the fucking door? Where’s the bathroom?”

  Somewhere behind him, he heard the woman rise and scramble toward the telephone on the desk.

  Cal didn’t pay her any mind.

  Tears were filling his vision now, threatening to spill over.

  “Where are you?”

  A few more desperate seconds of searching and Cal gave up. With renewed determination, he moved away from the wall, and instead focused on the bookcase. Someone had moved the ladder since Cal had been there earlier in the day, and now it was blocking the area he had leaned down and placed the book with the green cover.

  His book.

  Cal shoved the ladder out of the way, the wheels whirring on the track as it slid along the rail.

  Then he dropped to his hands and knees and started to scan the lowest row of books. He ran his fingers over their bindings, searching for a particular spine.

  But, like his search for the door, he came up empty.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” he said softly. A sudden sharp pain erupted behind his eyes, and he squeezed them tightly, gritting his teeth.

  Cal collapsed to a seated position, and tried to slow his racing heart by taking several deep breaths.

  It didn’t help.

  Every breath reminded him of Hank’s last, when his body had tensed, then finally gone slack.

  And Hank’s image reminded him of the euphoria, of the sun beating down on him, his ejaculation.

  And for that moment onward, he knew that any pleasure he may experience would be forever linked to pain, to that instant of loss.

  Cal’s eyes snapped open, and he saw red.

  He grabbed the first book he saw and ripped it from the shelf, tossing it behind him. Then he grabbed the next, and threw it as well.

  Then the next, and the next after that.

  In less than a minute, Cal had torn out the entire row of books, at least fifty, maybe more, and had littered them behind him as if preparing for his version of the Bonfire of the Vanities.

  “Where the fuck is it!” he screamed. And then, with every word, he pulled out another book and tossed it into the pile with the others. “Where—the—fuck—is—it?”

  Only then did he realize that he could hear the faint, yet distinct sound of sirens coming from somewhere outside.

  Cal stopped pulling out books and stood. Every one of his movements now was slow, labored, as if someone had sucked the library air out and replaced it with a thin taffy.

  He turned to the woman, who was now huddling below the desk, the phone still clutched to her ear.

  She didn’t even look up a
t him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  There was no specific target for this apology, although there could have been many.

  The librarian.

  Stacey.

  Brent.

  His parents.

  And, of course, Hank.

  Cal staggered toward the door. When his hands smashed against it, it flung open with greater ease than its size would suggest possible.

  A second later, he was outside in the rain again, and a second after that, he was on the run, putting Mooreshead behind him as fast as he possibly could.

  Callum Godfrey was desperate for excitement in his life, but he had never dreamed that it would come like this.

  Mooreshead, which was boring with a capital B, had suddenly changed into something worse.

  Something much, much worse.

  PART II- Sight of the Marrow

  Chapter 16

  PRESENT DAY

  Robert Watts knew he was dreaming, but for some reason this didn’t seem to matter to him. It should have mattered, it should have mattered a great deal, but it didn’t.

  Maybe dreams are part of the Marrow, too… remnants of the quiddity of others… of the Sea, he thought absently. Maybe there are hints in these dreams, hints to make this all go away. To go back to how things were before…

  There was a man on the bed, lying on his back, the pale bottoms of his feet pointed towards Robert. Just above the man’s knees, his gaze was drawn upward, following another body now, one with smooth, bare buttocks, and an arched back.

  It was a back he recognized well. His eyes continued upward, passing her smooth shoulder blades, and then the gentle curve of her neck. The woman’s dark hair was twisted to one side, cascading over the front of one shoulder and out of sight. She was rocking rhythmically, sliding back and forth on the man with the pale feet, who all the while remained deathly still.

  Robert found that not only could he see in this dream, but he could hear as well; he could here the soft sound of a woman moaning, the mews coinciding with every shift of her hips.

  Wendy, he thought, a pang of guilt and anger striking him simultaneously in the solar plexus.