Chris Holm - The Big Reap

I shushed him then, but I didn’t have to. Even in the dim firelight, I could see the sound of his own voice reflecting back at him was enough to silence him, and ratchet up his own anxiety. The smile died on his face, replaced by worry lines as deep and well-worn as the crags of rock around us.

I plucked up my mallet and my stake. The priest collected his pry bar and his torch, and then we set out together down the narrow stone passage, headed toward the castle keep.

The ground beneath our feet was damp dirt, packed hard by centuries of travel. The walls, though natural rock, held brackets meant for torches, and at alternating intervals on either side were the rotted remains of some kind of wall hanging — a series of royal flags, perhaps, or tapestries meant to convey tales of heroic derring-do. Each was rendered in gold thread against a backdrop of crimson. Each was damaged to near inscrutability. From what little survived of them, I pieced together countless scenes of death and dismemberment, some depicting the castle surrounded by vanquished foes impaled on spikes, while others displayed the town below awash with blood, the bodies of men and children being feasted upon by fanged, ghoulish women in gowns beneath a gleaming moon.

“What can you tell me of this place?” I asked Yefi.

“Nothing I’ve not already,” he replied. “It seems we’re both off the edge of the map at this point.”

“‘Beyond here be dragons,’” I said.

“Let’s hope not,” he replied.

Inside the cave, the sound of water was all around. Countless drops and drips, falling from the stone spikes that hung above. Stalagmites or stalactites, whichever ones they are. What was that fucking mnemonic? Mites crawl up, tights fall down. Stalactites, dripping from the stalactites. But there was another water sound, as well. The low, cool rumble, felt as much as heard, of water falling from a height in volume. A waterfall.

Must be an underground stream, I thought, or else a spring, either way feeding into the shallow, rock-churned waters of the river on which Nevazut was built.

What I didn’t expect was a goddamn lake.

I so very didn’t expect it, I damn near fell in.

We followed the passageway on a gently curving downslope, me in front, holding my hammer and mallet ready, and Father Yefi just behind, carrying the torch. The fact that we were headed downward made no sense to me. The castle was some unknown hundreds of feet above our heads, and by all accounts, this passageway was supposed to take us there. Which meant our trajectory did not compute.

Until I saw the lake. And the boat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at first, I saw none of those things. See, I wound up a few paces ahead of Yefi as we stumbled through the distorted space of the flame-lit cavern, which meant that as the corridor jagged, my monstrous shadow seemed to consume the view in front of me whole, such that all that stood before me was a gaping blackness. My borrowed heart quickened as I realized I’d strayed beyond the fire’s protective glare, and my mind cast itself unbidden back toward a time in which I’d experienced the choking, awful Nothingness that stretched both infinite and membrane-thin between the lands of the of the living and the dead, between heaven and hell, between Paradise and the Inferno. The In-Between. The Great Nothing over which Charon reigned.

The memory of my brief imprisonment in the Nothingness was enough to make my skin crawl, and left my mind a world away from where I stood, and so I didn’t notice the shadows deepening, the echoed static of rushing water amplifying.

If Yefi hadn’t grabbed a handful of my jacket, I might’ve fallen in.

He’d come around the corner in a hurried shuffle, realizing he’d lagged behind. The sudden light reflected bright across the black, still surface of a lake four football fields across. It was then I realized I stood with one foot poised to step clean off a narrow rock shelf that stretched like a dock out over the water.

In my startlement I flailed, trying in vain to regain my balance. My stake and mallet sailed into the darkness, arcing across the water in slow motion it seemed, as if taunting me, before they disappeared into the water with twin rippling plops. Yefi’s grip twisted at the small of my back, bunching fabric and pulling me back from the stone precipice. Granted, the water was but three feet below where we stood, but Lord knew how deep it was, or how cold, or how sharp the rocks beneath might be.

That’s really what went through my mind in the moment; deep and cold and rocks. Given what I now know about what those still, dark waters hid, such paltry fears seem to me a giant fucking failure of imagination.

At the far left corner of the massive chamber, a waterfall spouted iridescent in the firelight from a narrow hole some thirty feet above, its disruption of the lake’s surface negligible at such a distance. To the far right was an arch that stood out by virtue of the fact that it had clearly been carved by human hands. It framed a narrow alcove — a second stone dock jutting from it like a tongue from a lolling mouth — and a hollow patch of deeper dark to one side of it suggested the presence of a passageway, or a staircase perhaps, leading upward from it to the castle. It was the only entry point to the enormous cavern I could see save for the cave through which we’d come.

As I regained my balance — my lead foot settling to the ground once more, my arms no longer pinwheeling — I heard a knock from just below and to the right. My gaze travelled automatically to the source of the noise. It was a rowboat tied to an iron cleat, its heavy figure-eighted rope frayed to a tangle of horsehair frizz at the dock end.

“Thanks, Padre, you saved my bacon. Or at least kept me from needing a good blow-dry.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Yefi replied.

“Why’s that?” I asked, or tried.

But before the second word could clear my mouth, the motherfucker smacked me upside the head with the goddamn torch.

For a split second, my world was the painful, searing glare of hellfire, white-hot fading to orange around the edges, and haloed in sparks of falling ember.

Then my eyelids came crashing down, and it was bedtime for ol’ Sam.

And as any kid’ll tell you, bedtime is when the monsters come out to play.

Sometimes I can’t believe we lie and tell them that there’s no such thing.

I woke in throbbing darkness. A subtle lessening as I opened my eyes, black shifting to orange-black. The effort hurt like you would not fucking believe. Like my lids had weights attached, and not with fucking glue, either. Barbed hooks, more like. Plus, the left side of my face felt like I took a sideways header into a fry-o-lator. I raised my hands to touch it. Meant to raise just one, but it turns out they were bound together with a leather strap. Hard to tell how many knots there were in the dark. But what I can say is my attempts to untie it with my teeth resulted in one fewer knot, and no greater mobility. The rest of the knots — two or three or ten, for all I knew — were pulled too tight to make any headway.

When I flexed my legs to make sure they were still working, I noticed they were bound as well.

I prodded at my meat-suit’s cheek and temple, wincing as I did. The skin was cracked and blistered and stung like a motherfucker. Plus it smelled like burned hair and under-seasoned pork. The realization of the latter made me queasy.

Then again, maybe that was the fact the world was rocking.

I closed my eyes, drank deep of the cool, subterranean air. Took stock of my situation.

It wasn’t the world that was rocking, I realized, just the boat.

I was lying face-up in the rowboat. The goddamn motherfucking no-good bitch-ass rowboat.