The Splendor of Fear Read online

  We thought we knew. Beneath that dry soil—perhaps deep down in it—there was likely a corpse. The corpse of that infamous witch who'd single-handedly cleared out the town of Newsom's Landing with her wrath. For over a century her restless bones had been hidden here; what would come of our revealing them? Would the very air we breathed be similarly corrupted by unearthing them?

  I was every bit as desperate to bring this nightmare to a close as Jared was, but as I watched him pick at the clearing, I began having second thoughts. “We shouldn't be here,” I mumbled. Nothing in particular had convinced me; rather, as we lingered in this tableaux of decay, the feeling had come on suddenly. With wide eyes, I turned and surveyed the woods—woods whose nooks and crannies shimmered with inhospitable blackness.

  Jared wasn't listening. He was focused on digging. He drew out his pocket knife and opened it with a flick of his wrist. Then, brushing his hands against his pant legs, he took firm hold of the handle and drove the blade down into the soil.

  Suddenly, he let go of the knife and reared back, clutching his hand as though he'd burnt it.

  “What's the matter?” I asked.

  His eyes were fixed on the blade. I squinted in the dim night, wondering at his seeming terror. The knife had been buried to its handle in the earth, and there he'd left it. I'd expected him to try and dig with it, to rake the sturdy blade across the soil and burrow deeper, but he backed away from it instead.

  I'd gotten to the cusp of the clearing when I realized why he'd reacted in such a way; and then I, too, stepped back.

  A dark liquid had begun to gurgle up from the puncture he'd made—dark and thick, like oil. It bubbled up against the handle of the knife as though highly pressurized, and then it began to trickle freely through the cracks in the soil. The flow soon became vigorous; so vigorous, in fact, that the knife wobbled in its resting place. The stuff gushed—sprayed—in every direction, and as the wind caught it, the air held onto a mist that shone red in the moonlight.

  It was blood. The ground was bleeding profusely where Jared had stuck the knife.

  Within moments, the entire clearing smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  The two of us watched in abject horror as the concavity was filled with blood. Such was the intensity of the flow that it took only minutes for the liquid to reach the very edges of the clearing and to slosh over the side, into the grass. The handle of the knife disappeared completely into the puddle of red, and the moonlight lent the quivering pool an almost metallic shimmer.

  Jared swallowed hard. “I know this isn't real,” he said, voice breaking. “It doesn't reflect reality—our reality. She's playing tricks on us again, trying to horrify us.”

  I stood before the pool of blood, stared down into its gurgling face. It certainly looked real, and the pungent tang of blood mingling with soil that presently accosted my nostrils struck me as real enough, too. “It's not real,” I echoed, waiting for the flow to stop. Blood was slowly flooding into the grass now. I supposed that, if this hole wasn't eventually plugged up, the entire forest would run red. I bent down and extended a finger, dipping it in the rising pool.

  “Don't,” he warned. “Don't go near it.”

  I touched the blood and then worked it between my fingertips. It was sticky, and it stained my skin an angry pink as I worked it in. It certainly felt like the genuine article. “She's trying to scare us,” I began. “Trying to scare us away from here. She knows we've found her grave, and—”

  The breath was stolen from my lungs. I watched Jared's eyes shoot open, and then looked back at the pool of blood. Something had soundlessly surfaced in it. A bone white arm. With incredible force, a skeletal hand took hold of my wrist. Before I had a chance to yank myself free, to dig my heels in or reach out to Jared, I found myself being pulled into the sea of blood.

  And it really was a sea. I met the surface with a splash, the bony hand locked around my wrist, and where I should have met solid ground, I began immediately to sink. The ivory arm drew me further and further down—several feet down. I felt the cold, syrupy liquid enter my ears and nose; it flowed into my mouth. The concave portion of the clearing had only been a few inches deep, but here I was plummeting into a pool of red that had no end. The hand on my wrist didn't loosen its hold even as I began to kick and struggle.

  The stuff was viscous, had more resistance to it than water.

  And it was every bit as impossible to breathe in.

  Gradually, my combativeness waned and I gave in to the darkness. Choking on this foreign blood, I surrendered myself to the depths.

  Twenty-Two

  I was wrapped up in cold so punishing that any associations with my own body faded nearly to nothingness. It was as if my limbs detached from my trunk and dissolved into the ether, leaving only a kernel of awareness at the bottom of this blood-filled ditch.

  And as I floated there, suspended, I dreamt; or, I should say, I was visited by something not unlike a dream. It came on very gradually, and at its clearest it was like a film viewed through a dirty lens—like a scene watched through a foggy peephole. Grainy scenes from life—a life not my own—played on before my eyes.

  The first such scene took place in a room so shadow-crowded it may as well have been a cave. The warm hues of a fire toiled feebly in one corner, and it was by this dimness that a woman—thin, silver-haired and aged beyond her ears—sat and read. The book she clutched in her skeletal hands was not an unfamiliar one to me. It was bound in a thin, metal cover, and the flowing, foreign script across its pages squirmed as though alive. I watched her run a jagged fingernail across the title page, watched her lick her lips as she uttered the tome's title—Carte de Umbra Lungi—with an orgiastic shudder. For untold hours she sat and rocked in her chair, bent over that old volume, until finally she was hinged at the waist and had practically wrapped herself around its crisp pages. Eyes wide and trembling, she held the book close like a constrictor fawning over a meal in its coils.

  Next, I watched this same woman, in the same dim hovel, kneel upon the ground before a hastily-sewn mannequin made from sack cloth and stuffed with detritus. She had propped up its featureless bulk in a chair, and as though it were her king she genuflected before it. Peeling away the thin garb she wore and casting it aside, the kneeling woman began to bow before the effigy with great speed and vigor. Her nose nearly touched the floor with every repetition, and her spine flexed and its sickly outline protruded from her papery skin. On the way down, the figure in the chair remained a featureless mannequin. But in the space between each frantic bow, when the woman raised her eyes and drew in a labored breath, she saw—as did I, by extension—something else seated in the chair. It was a dark shape, only vaguely anthropoid, and its form was made up of an almost indescribable blackness. At rest, this pitch-black figure twitched and moved subtly; its very existence was kinetic.

  Imagine a human-shaped figure made up of black insect wings that never ceased flapping—or an anthropomorphic coil of writhing black snakes united under the command of a single consciousness—and you'll have some idea of what I mean, without, of course, capturing so much as a hundredth of the disgust it stirred in me.

  I watched this woman, seated at her table by the smalling light in the hearth, as she clutched at birds—large, black specimens—and carved into them with knives. I witnessed her rummaging through their organs, even sampling some of them, and placing their feathers in her sparse hair. Those parts of the birds she did not consume, she cast into the fire, and as they burned, the crow's feathers produced strange and wondrous colors. The fire went from green, to blue; red to indigo.

  The next scene took place outdoors, but was hardly brighter. Ambling through the fogbound woods, the woman approached a man outside her abode. I watched her stand beside him, a lurid smile setting her lips a-quivering. She whispered into the man's ear, let her tongue—unnaturally long and pale—graze his earlobe as she spoke. And then, without warning, he set off into the woods with a vacant expression, like his brain
had been scrambled and his mind returned to a blank slate.

  Once again, the scene changed—but this time, things were different.

  The door of the tottering house was kicked in, and unwelcome torchlight poured in through the entrance, bringing to light so many of the horrors with which she'd filled her time. A mass of men marched in through the door, and without warning they raised their rifles and fired upon her. I watched her crumple as she was struck in the stomach—and I felt it in my own guts as well. Foreign hands reached out to grab her; some by the arms, others by the hair. She was dragged from the place, out into the field, while her captors dropped their torches and set the abode ablaze.

  But she did not die. Not at once.

  The wound in her abdomen exploded with gore as they dragged her limp body deeper into the woods. The sight of the house eventually faded until only the orange-yellow glow of the pyre could be seen stretching over the tops of the trees and mingling with the night sky. They hauled her, dropped her, began to dig hastily, and all the while she cursed them.

  A rough hand clasped her quaking mouth shut, and from both sides came men with hammers. Clumsily, they drove nails into her—two on each side. She felt—as did I—the searing pain as the steel entered her skin, pulverized her mandible. Blood spilled from the seam of her lips, but no longer could she speak.

  Even so, she cursed them still. She cursed them in her mind, with the whole of her fading will. She cursed them even as they rolled her into a rickety pine box, face-down, and began hammering on its lid. And she cursed them, too, as they worked in double-quick time to fill in the makeshift grave with dirt. All the while, life had not left her. It clung to her with incredible stubbornness, allowing her to savor every ounce of pain.

  And it allowed her to fear.

  The floor of the box ran thick with her blood. She felt it all over her as she squirmed in her death throes. The pains relented somewhat when she realized what was becoming of her, what lay ahead. Oblivion. Eternal darkness. Whatever her pain, the terror consumed all in those final moments. She would have screamed had her lips not been sealed; would have pushed at the lid of the box had her body not been sapped of strength.

  Fear. She perished at the height of her fear.

  It was not until the grave had mostly been covered that she finally died, and at the moment that her vital energies were exhausted, a pale light—the light of day—wormed its way into the coffin from a crack in the lid. She had died with the rising of the sun she'd shunned all her life.

  The grainy scene faded out and I was left again in the icy darkness. Only vaguely aware of what I'd just witnessed—the final days of a woman's life—I felt nothing. There was no terror for me, no pain. Only an amniotic peace.

  That is, until something intruded.

  Twenty-Three

  I was pulled out of the freezing pool. A hand—Jared's—had caught the collar of my jacket, and he strained at the edge of the clearing to haul my sodden form onto dry land. Grunting, he hooked an arm under mine and finally brought me into the grass. “Penny! You all right?” He fell silent as he looked down at me.

  I gasped and coughed, struggled to sit upright. Wiping the blood from my eyes and mouth, I spat onto the ground and took a few moments to catch my breath. “H-How long was I under there?” I asked.

  Jared shook his head and wiped his hands off on the grass. “Uh, I dunno. Maybe fifteen, twenty seconds? I reached in after you the minute you sank, but somehow, it was really deep... It took me a bit to find you, and then pulling you out was tough.”

  I'd been submerged for seconds? I could hardly believe it. As I shuddered in the grass, my mind revisiting all I'd been shown while beneath the surface, it felt more like days—months—to me. “Thanks for grabbing me,” I managed.

  Whatever reply he'd had in store dropped from his lips the moment he turned and looked back at the pool of blood. His eyes widened, his shoulders tensed, as something surfaced in the crimson slough. A frail, stiff body floated to the top—and somehow, though it rested in a puddle of blood at least several feet deep, it remained completely clean.

  Ellie Pomeroy's body floated like a freshly-fallen leaf.

  “It's her...” muttered Jared, tugging on my blood-slick jacket and trying to pull me away from the clearing.

  I resisted, though.

  The specter had her eyes open, and she was looking at me.

  Weeping.

  Those dark, wretched eyes that had haunted me all night long were now softer and flowing with tears. The witch's lips wriggled as she wept, the sobs held in place by the rusted nails that still forced her mouth shut.

  I leaned forward and reached out to her, helping her to drift to the edge of the pool.

  “Penny, what the hell are you doing?” blurted Jared, giving me another tug.

  “Stop, Jared.” Looking down at the cadaverous witch, I cleared my throat. “I saw everything, Ellie. I know what you went through.”

  Ellie Pomeroy shuddered, and a dry rasp issued from between her pursed lips. Her eyes were stony and large now; tear-slick, they reflected the light of the moon.

  “I saw what they did to you—I felt it.” Reaching out towards the nails in her jaw, I fixed my fingers around the head of one and began to ease it out. The thing slid out with surprising ease, and I dropped it into the pool when I was done, moving onto the next. One-by-one, I removed all four. The raw holes they left behind were the color of rust, and they spasmed in their emptiness, expanded and contracted as the witch drew in a deep breath. “There's nothing to be scared of anymore. You're free now, Ellie. Let go of your fear and move on.”

  Jared hovered behind me warily. “Let go of her,” he whispered. “Don't touch her, babe. This isn't safe. Let's... let's get out of here.”

  “No,” I replied. “That's why this curse has persisted all this time.” I studied the feeble, ivory face staring up at me. “Ellie Pomeroy was not a good person. She did awful things—all the things she was accused of. For that, she met a terrible end—an end she likely deserved—but the fear she felt in those final moments has persisted ever since.” I glanced at him in my periphery and tapped at my breast. “I felt that fear firsthand. And if we don't convince her to let go of it, it'll remain. The curse will continue.”

  “She got what she deserved, didn't she?” asked Jared.

  “Maybe,” I admitted, “but we're not holding a trial here. We aren't even dealing with Ellie Pomeroy anymore.” I turned back to the witch, combed the gossamer strands of hair from her brow. “She isn't here. The only thing left is her fear. When she died in that state, her fear kept on in this grave, like an echo. With nowhere else to go, it spread throughout the woods.”

  “How do you know?” Jared stood, staring down at the specter incredulously.

  “Because while I was down there, drowning, I experienced all of it. I saw what she did in life, how she died, and I shared in that final, terrible fright. She didn't die right away. It was a slow, painful death. You know how we thought the curse would be lifted on the fifteenth? We were on the right track, but we didn't have all of the details. She was still alive as they buried her, and she didn't actually go until the sun started to rise.” I glanced up at the sky and caught a dull shine in the east. “Right about now.”

  The witch shuddered once more, and strained to speak. Her throat bulged as she fought to use her atrophied mouth. I leaned in to listen. When her jumbled jaw finally clicked into place and her lips fell open, I saw something emerge from between them. It clawed its way up her throat, reared its ebony head and stared up at me with beady eyes before loosing a deafening caw.

  A fat crow climbed out of her mouth, perched momentarily on the witch's lower jaw, and then took flight, disappearing into the trees. Almost immediately, Ellie Pomeroy's body began to sink; within moments it was gone completely from view. Gradually, the basin full of blood began to empty as well, and over the course of several minutes, while the sun cast off the last vestiges of night, the liquid disappeared i
nto the parched earth. Jared and I sat, staring at the bare ground. When the last of the blood had been drained, there was no sign of the witch; nothing but cracked, dusty soil.

  The two of us were silent for a long, long time. Neither of us spoke until the sun had fully risen, in fact, and we sat in the putrescent glade for ages, basking in the warmth of day.

  “Is it over, you think?” asked Jared, helping me to my feet.

  I peeled off my clotted jacket and left it in the clearing. “I don't know,” I admitted. “But I do know that it's over for now.” I spared him a smile—my first in a long time. “I don't plan to come back next September 14th to find out, at any rate.”

  Twenty-Four

  The remainder of our stay felt very much like a walk in the park.

  Despite all we'd weathered there, the light of day served as a shot in the arm, and we made the slow trek back to our campsite without having to look over our shoulders. The morning proved warm, and the sun banished the lingering mist that had grown up between the trees. Jared and I took our time crossing the creek, and upon getting back to camp, we packed up our essentials and left the rest. For all I know, there's still a blue tent set up in site M.

  We stopped in the restrooms, which weren't nearly so off-putting by day, and I rinsed off before changing into fresh clothes. Jared joined me, and the two of us shivered in the cold spray before taking a short walk in the sun to warm back up. Feeling reasonably clean, we hobbled down the footpath, listened to the birdsong and made our way out to the parking lot.

  “Oh, baby, am I ever glad to see you,” said Jared as we approached the Jeep. He patted the hood and tossed our bags in the back with a grin.

  The two of us were seated, we buckled up and Jared stuck the key in the ignition. The sound of the engine starting was surreal to me; the sensation of rolling through the lot, exiting the park grounds and merging onto the highway was even more so. I almost cried at the sight of a McDonald's billboard.