We ate the dark a novel, p.1
We Ate the Dark: A Novel, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2024 by Mallory Pearson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
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Excerpt from “Possession” from the collection At the Gate © 1995 by Martha Rhodes. Reprinted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9781662515408 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662515392 (digital)
Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson
Cover image: © Victor Habbick / Arcangel
For my family, blood and found, chosen and bound.
We make magic together.
Contents
Start Reading
Prologue THE HOUSE HAS A MOUTH
1 THE BIRD HAS A WAY WITH WORDS
2 TO HAVE MORE THAN ONE HEART
3 YELLOW AS AN EAR OF CORN
4 MOUNTAINS WITH DEEP POCKETS
5 THE HEN HOUSE AND ITS UNSTEADY LEGS
6 ROTTEN LIKE FALLEN FRUIT
7 CELLAR, PIT, GRAVE FOR A WITCH
8 PEACH, PEAR, PLUM
9 AND I BEG FOR SLEEP
10 BUT RECEIVE ONLY LIFE
11 FAMILIAR AS HER OWN FACE
12 A CAVERN SHAPED LIKE A HEAD
13 THE RATTLED LINES OF ROTTED WOOD
14 FLAME WITH FLAME, PIOUS WITH PROFANE
15 HALTED BY COMING WIND
16 TRAMPLED UNDERGROUND LIKE SWEET SILK
17 DROOPING, ALL THE BIRCHES
18 LET THEM ARM AND LET THEM TUMBLE
19 SILVER MOON SLIVERS
20 SPLIT-STRING PUPPET
21 THE REEDY PROMISE OF A BROKEN JAW
22 SONECHKA AND HER LIKABLE BIRDS
23 NAMES AND THEIR MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS
24 WORSHIPPED ONE DAY ON ETERNAL ALTARS
25 MASHENKA, MASTER MASK MAKER
26 A HEART FOR A HEART, ENTRAILS FOR ENTRAILS
27 DRIVE FROM MY HEART THIS TENDER TERROR
28 ANYTHING CRACKED WILL SHATTER AT A TOUCH
29 UNSPOILED BY THE AXE
30 WHOM YOU PROMISED DOMINION
31 CONCEIVE OF A VILE HOPE
32 EVEN THE BEASTS COULD BARELY FIND IT
33 UPROOTED SOIL THEN AT LAST GLIMPSED THE SUN
34 LONGING IS THE DREAM KILLER
35 THE ANCIENTS CALLED HER CHAOS
36 THE STARS SUNK BENEATH THE EARTH
37 THE SWEET BLINK OF VERTIGO
38 EVERYTHING IMAGINARY, EVEN IF LOVED
39 HER HEART BOUND WITH IVY
40 PRELUDE TO THE CRASH
41 A WOMAN WILL BUILD A NEW WORLD
42 SECRETS SEWN IN FRAYING CLOTH
43 THE CRUX OF THE WORLD
44 TREE-BOUND, STAR-CLUTCHED
45 ARCHAIC MEMORIES OF THE DAISY FIELD
46 THE HEART BEATING BENEATH THE FLOOR
47 PANG AND PANG AND PANG AND PANG
48 THE CROOKED MASTER OF THE DARKEST CORNER
49 MOUNTAINS TO MOVE, MILES TO EAT
50 SALT THE EARTH, LICK THE PALM CLEAN
51 SÉANCE FOR WISHING
52 LURE THE VOICE DIVINE
53 HER HAIR FALLING DOWN HER BACK
54 THE SPIRIT RIOTS AND THE BODY GLOWS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Show her you’ve discovered
all her holy spots
and watch her try to find another,
deeper forest. Everything she’s kept from you
is yours now: these frilly private things,
this tiny book of screams.
Possession, Martha Rhodes
Prologue
THE HOUSE HAS A MOUTH
Between two rolling mountains, split like a lip, a dirt road snakes its way through the trees to a leering house.
Something has knocked the windows from their panes, leaving behind black-eyed shells against rotten gray siding. The house’s lovely peaks and spires crumble into suggestions. Black holes pock the roof and leave room for birds to nest. The fractured foundation bows, a slumped animal, a hunted thing caught with an arrow in its back. Wood peels away from the framework like curls of bark from a dead tree.
Once, someone swept the porch and its threshold, hung wreaths in doorways and star-colored lights from the eaves to banish the dark. Now the ceilings sag swollen with water. Floorboards buck like teeth in a freshly punched jaw. Whole rooms cave into rubble, green growth reclaiming the structure where it can cut its way through the remnants. Empty. Abandoned.
Down the black road comes a boyish call, tossed between the mouths of men like howling wolves. Shoes eat up gravel and trample grass thirsty for rain. A great crack echoes acres away when a stone lofts through a remaining pane of glass, the sound of a tree felled by lightning.
Miles from the house someone might hear the boom and think thunder, might watch murky clouds roll in behind their eyes. But the night remains clear of tapering spring rain. Wisps of condensation cling to the moon. A warm breeze overturns the leaves and promises coming summer, sage bellies cast upward toward the midnight glow.
Down the road an old church’s bell tolls, shakes off its sleep. Its steeple is poised high and mighty; a crooked little cross atop it bends like an acrobat prepared to fly. Even the fireflies hold their breath and extinguish their lights, as if waiting to be found out. But at this time of night the town sleeps on with shutters buttoned up and doors latched shut.
Awake and alive, the group falls upon the house. If watched from that leaning cross, high above the world where the tops of trees shine dark and oily, they would scuttle and crawl, innumerable beetles upon a corpse.
“This place creeps me the fuck out,” one of them says, neatly stepping into a rotten section of the porch and yelping when his ankle almost catches, the sound of his fear bird-shrill. Against intentional self-determination his mind recalls the last time the house bit someone, and the gnawed meat of the leg as flesh plunged through boards. He watches Tommy walk before him with a limp that hasn’t faded, even after all this time.
Alex steps into a room full of sheet-ghost apparitions—and exhales when his brain makes sense of it, the specters just covered furniture jutting like white mountains. Some of the sheets have been tugged away or shredded into nests. Others are stained after years of rain dripping through the pocked roof. The ceiling bows close where it hasn’t already collapsed, and every still-standing doorway is a gaping mouth.
The rest of the group piles in behind them. The house rocks with their disturbance. Their casual jeers make Alex feel self-conscious, overtly aware of the years the rest of the guys have on him—time they’ve spent engaging in familiar rowdiness, together, buoyed by Loring and its enduring nostalgia. But if his memory is correct, it’s been nearly five years since this house’s last visitor, when they boarded it up in the sheriff’s final walk-through. Now it shudders with the weight of their life, overstimulated by their laughter, their spitting, their swallowing, the ravenous way they tear open boarded entryways.
“Watch it,” Tommy calls, and Alex looks down at the place where the floor slopes away from them. Black splintered stars wait in the pockets where rot claims the old construction.
Alex was never afraid of the dark, not even as a kid, but anxiety strikes hard at the sight. A vision of being chewed up by the wooden teeth of the house races through him, a new pulse. His mind betrays him again—Tommy’s calf torn to shreds that final innocent summer, blood coating his pant leg so thoroughly that Alex thought the denim might be red. He remembers the anguished gasp of Tommy’s open mouth as it looked like the crumbling house itself cleanly snapped the bone. Up until that moment, Tommy and his best friend, Lucas Glasswell, had been invincible stars in Alex’s sky, with the kind of golden popularity Alex always eagerly hoped they might pass down to a keen kid.
“Thanks,” Alex says, when his voice finally crawls its way back into his mouth.
He hadn’t wanted to come. The last time he saw the house was enough of a scar to convince him to turn down the invitation, repeatedly. But Tommy had asked him more than once, and Tommy never asks for anything.
“No one has been brave enough to go inside that house in years. If I can do it, you can grow the hell up and join,” he had rallied, cuffing Alex on the shoulder and favoring his left leg with the swing. “Besides, what else are you going to do? Sit on your ass at home?”
Alex had planned on sitting on his ass at home. In two weeks, he’ll graduate high school, and the late Loring spring is already warming in a way that makes Alex lazy with contentment. By June his time will be his again—long days spent swimming until he’s so thirsty he considers drinking lake water, nights stretched out by getting drunk in Tommy’s basement while the others pass controllers around to play something loud and violent, sleepy afternoons working at the gas station, where the only customers are truckers looking for something hot to eat and respite from the baking sun. The air-conditioning churning everything slow and dormant, katydids a
At home, things were safe and comfortable, and he could eat his shitty food and watch his shitty TV and avoid the copper tang that clung to Loring in the form of faded missing posters stapled to telephone poles. He could turn from the face of his childhood pinned to coffee shop notice boards, ignore abandoned cars left to die in overgrown fields, sleep without seeing things in crepuscular corners. He could leave the cornfields dry and brown, nodding under pale sun.
If he pretended the house no longer existed, there was peace. It lived on only through folklore—Once, it held a family. No, once it held the sick and the dying. No, once it was home to a witch, and she was so hungry for a heart. She cooked the first person she saw. She split them down the middle and ate the splintered mess it made.
Could a house hold that? It was all just energy—clinging, sticky, material. Could the shape of a structure remember the hurt administered within it?
Logic said no. But Alex had seen the place fester—watched it unfold in front of him at a bonfire, years ago, when the fight erupted and his sister looked at him across rising flames like it was his fault the night had gone to shit. How was he supposed to know that someone would get hurt? That the house would moan like a dying animal? That they’d go running through the trees, flying fast enough to steal the breath from their chests before whatever hunted them could catch up? That his sister’s friend would disappear—just like that, never to be seen again?
It was all in the past, just like the memory. Just like Alex’s chances of a lazy summer before he left Loring behind for good.
Outside, frogs croak rich, low sounds. The noise drifts in through the punched-out windows and settles over the dusty remains of the house. Down a hallway someone whoops again. Alex rolls his shoulders to pretend he didn’t jump.
“Holy shit,” Tommy calls. Alex sidesteps a crouching end table with a cracked leg and a painting of sunflowers that someone spray-painted over. Now it’s a painting of sunflowers and the words SSATANN WAS HHEREE in furious, violent red. Alex wonders how long the words have been there—he can’t recall them in the glassy memories of the house his younger mind clings to, all clouded by the posturing . . . Five years since he was thirteen and attempting to prove his bravery by standing in front of that bonfire, the last place he should have been. Five years since they taped the house off and stationed a patrol on the weekends to keep boys like him away from it. He inhales, smells distant smoke.
“C’mere and look at this,” Tommy calls. “I knew there was something in here.”
There’s a dim doorway at the end of the hall. Jagged spears of wood, appearing to have once been the upstairs floor, now block the entrance. Alex picks his way through the mess and wishes his phone wasn’t dead, wishes he didn’t have to rely so much on the dim white beam coming from Tommy’s. The gloom makes animals out of every penumbral corner, amplifies every crack and groan and pop. He thinks about the hole he nearly stepped into. Panic seizes his heart all over again.
Tommy turns. “Help me move this. I want to go in.”
Alex fights the urge to make a rude gesture behind Tommy’s back as he hoists moldy boards away. The ceiling is close enough that Alex has to duck as he follows. Beyond the black doorway, something moves—an animal maybe, or the cast shape of his body making shadow puppets on the wall. He focuses on the ground instead and obeys Tommy’s grunts for help. They kick aside a pile of debris, centipedes scrambling away and the house wheezing with their effort.
Alex steps over detritus into what was once a kitchen. Beer cans make dioramas of Appalachia across the floor, gleaming blue and white under the pale glow of Tommy’s phone. Tommy bends low to peer at something and Alex gingerly steps closer, nearly sliding out of his skin when he catches someone staring back at him in the dusk—but it’s just a mirror, cracked and dirty, leaned up against the wall.
“It’s like a museum for every pre-disaster party,” Tommy says. “I’d bet anything that no one’s been in here since I fucked up my leg.” His beam jumps around the room, landing on countertops collapsing beneath settled dirt. The light stops on someone standing in the middle of the room.
Alex almost humiliates himself with a scream, but he’s already embarrassed enough, so he kills the sound in his throat as his eyes adjust. Not someone. Not skin but bark, gnarled and textured, thick and old. A tree, growing in the middle of the house, warped like a hunching body.
“How?” Alex whispers.
“This is wild,” Tommy says, laughing. He kicks a pile of cans and Alex flinches at the metallic sound, a shrapnel echo. He spins to look over his shoulder, suddenly feeling someone’s eyes on his back, but finds only the empty doorway again.
“We should head home,” he says, hating himself for his meekness. “Clearly this place is about to collapse.”
But against his own will Alex keeps moving, too afraid to be left behind. Roots twist through the floor in jagged outlines where they splintered the boards. He wonders if Tommy heard him.
The light flickers again as Tommy circles the tree. Alex watches his grin fall away.
Down the hall someone screams, “Light it up, Briggs!” A resulting crash echoes around them, followed by swelling laughter. Alex flinches. Tommy’s mouth drops open, then presses shut again, a marionette tugged alive by his brain.
Alex doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to see it, but as Tommy calls his name, his voice shatters around the sound of it. Alex steps over roots. He tries not to think about the reverberation of footsteps behind him, like something else is trying to glimpse past the space he takes up.
There is a gouge in the tree where the bark hollows out and gives way to indistinct darkness. The cavern’s edges are stained with a thick, sap-like liquid, black as blood. Deep slices in the trunk almost shimmer, coagulating, and the marks slide all the way down to the floor where there are—
Petals? Candle stubs? Black slashes like wounds in the bark, like someone had come at it with an axe and failed to fell it? Sickness rises in him. He swallows a few times and feels air lodge in his throat.
“Is that—” Alex starts, the words clipping their own wings.
In the shell of the tree, a skeleton stands. Stands is the wrong word, but Alex can’t quite figure out what his brain is trying to tell him, a misalignment of neurons. There a skeleton stands. Cowers. Sleeps. Rots.
The tree snuggles up against the corpse with curling bark and new branches. It’s just the natural progression of growth, really, but something about it is more than alive, cognizant of what the trunk holds. The bones are stark and white with snaking black patterns, like the sap just kept dripping, sickly and putrid. With horror, he recognizes the crumbling connections between delicate foot bones tucked underneath where the skeleton tried to curl up, fetal and afraid. Tattered remnants of a pocked shirt cling to the bones. Part of the skull is cracked like the thin veneer of an eggshell, and its dirty white sheen blends into the wood.
Alex sees spots at the corners of his vision. He blinks them into motes of gray.
“Jesus—we need to tell Lucas.” Tommy’s voice sounds a step behind his own thoughts. “Do you think it’s her?”
Alex can still picture the missing posters around town, but now the girl’s smiling face is replaced by that splintered skull, the collar of her shirt torn and bloody. He turns away, exhales hard through his nose.
When he looks again the skull is nearly smiling at him with straight and shattered teeth. Down the hall someone swears again and the chorus erupts in laughter, background music in the skipping track of Alex’s mind.
The floor creaks beneath him and his heart doubles its speed. He steps back on trembling legs, reaching for anything to hold on to. He needs to get away. Away from Tommy, away from the tree, away from the skeleton.
His lungs swell, preparing to cry for help, and in the dun of the room something exhales against his cheek.
Across the moon-bleached fields of corn, the church bell thrums. The crooked cross tilts another inch toward its demise.
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