Nanowrimo Day 5
Nov. 6th, 2019 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unknownfateStill lurking about! I couldn't resist the name.
Kahl refused to go back underground, but he kept careful track of who did. He had managed to figure out who all the members of the recovery team had been. There were six of them. The one that had come to town and led them back like an addled collie dog was the older of the Hudd brothers. The younger Hudd was down there too. There was Tom Whitaker whose wife had come to see him a few days after Maggie had told her the news.
Maggie reported that Ruthann Whitaker had swung straight from heartbreak to hysteria. Maggie had had to put her to bed and left the oldest daughters in charge. Charity was fourteen and Molly was eleven and they were better able to grasp the concept of tragedy becoming a much stranger fairy tale with more ease than their overwrought mother. Maggie swore the girls to secrecy, even from their little brothers until their pa could come home. They loved that too, and agreed.
Once Ruthann had gotten her head around it and her feet back under her, she had gone up with Maggie and Junie to see for herself. The men didn’t come out everyday, but the rest of the town was careful to keep a rotating skeleton crew at the sinkhole to feed and tend to them when they did.
Ruthann burst into tears when she saw her Tom climb out of the hole. She had fallen to the ground and been hysterical all over again, but the men went by her and fell to eating without seeming to notice. Maggie got her calmed down again and made her come over to sit him him.
It was Junie that did the talking. She talked to all the men, telling them about what was happening in town, what the bosses were doing, what everyone was saying. She was the one that told Tom his wife had come to see him and encouraged Ruthie to talk to him. It was like opening a floodgate.
Ruthann poured out her heart to the filthy man chewing slowly through a wedge of cornbread. She couldn’t hold back the tears and clung to his bandaged arms as she talked, begging him to come back, to come home.
“It doesn’t hurt, Ruthie,” Tom said, getting everyone’s attention except for his fellow diggers. They went on eating. Maggie thought the Hudd brothers might’ve looked up between bites. Maybe there was hope for them. Tom hadn’t looked at his wife, though. He was still empty-eyed.
“I can’t stop now,” Tom said. “None of us can.”
“Why?” Junie asked.
“Has to be done,” he said.
“The children-“ Ruthann tried to say, but he interrupted her.
“They should see it,” he said. “When they’re old enough. Bring them when they’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” Ruthann squeaked. She was terrified and fighting the weird mix of confusion and hope to keep herself together.
“Ready to see,” Tom said. “Ready to KNOW.”
And that’s how it went for awhile. The Hudds slowly became more clear-headed over time as well, but the other three never spoke or responded. Kahl did his best to figure out by Whitaker and the Hudds recovered but the others didn’t. Any understanding he might’ve gained was thrown out the window, when the Hudds came to tell him that they were going under again. They were going to lay hands on the chain again, they said.
“What?” Kahl hadn’t any idea what they were talking about. Josef, the oldest, tried to explain that it was like lightning. That it could flow through you and fill you up. Gregor nodded eagerly until he got a chance to speak.
“If we can draw off enough of it,” he said. “Then it will be fine again. It will be what it is supposed to be.”
“Used to be,” added Josef.
“What do you mean?” Kahl asked, prickling with unease. “What do you know about it?
“The chain isn’t it,” Josef said. “The chain is just holding it.”
“Holding what?” Kahl said, sharper than he meant to sound, but this was what he had been afraid of from the moment he had seen the chain. He just hadn’t put it together yet.
“You’ll see,” Gregor said. “When it’s ready.” It didn’t sound like a threat, but Kahl couldn’t help but translate it as such. He made note of the account and couldn’t help but notice that after that, the Hudds were mindless slaves again. Whatever they did in the hole had eaten away whatever parts of themselves they had regained.
Once Charity Whitaker was sixteen, she decided she was old enough to go with her father and see the thing in the ground. Tom came to his old house regularly enough that Ruthann was pregnant again. Maybe the thought of letting Charity go was soothed by the knowledge that a replacement was coming, Kahl thought bitterly. He hadn’t been back underground since the first time and had filled up several ledgers with what he could find out.
More people had been hired on and were going into the mine. More accidents were happening all the time. Strange things and stranger rumors, but insurance paid everything so far. Ruthann was still getting her pension since Tom was officially dead.
It was Charity that brought a bizarre fervor to the whole thing, as if it hadn’t been bizarre enough. Whoever she saw underground hadn’t mind wiped her and put her to work. She had come back filled to bursting with strange ecstasies and rambling stories that would have to be completely disassembled and put back together to make any sense at all. The good news was that she came back. The bad news was that now more people wanted to see it.
All Kahl could do was try to keep a tally. Of those who went under, some starting digging, some went screaming insane and usually died in the next few days, some just never came out again. What they were doing underground was anybody’s guess. Tom wasn’t much help when asked. It did seem like it was mostly the townspeople who hadn’t worked in the mine were the worst affected.
Maybe Al was right about them soaking it up little by little, Kahl thought. Maybe they didn’t go barking insane or drop dead because it was already in their systems. He and the other blackbirds talked about it often, trying to reason some sense out of it, but they had no way of knowing for sure without going back under themselves, and none of them was willing to do that.
One night, when all the others were asleep, scattered around their home, Kahl let himself have a moment of despair. He had done his best to keep being in charge if that’s what they needed, but he didn’t understand this any more than any of them did and it wore at him. It wasn’t a crisis of religious faith as much as a crisis of his faith in himself. He had no idea what to do to keep the people around him safe.
That was when he noticed that there was someone else awake. And it wasn’t a someone he knew. There was a man over by the fireplace, sitting so still and quietly that it was only intuition that had Kahl looking towards him. How had he gotten in? How long had he been there? He was looking in at the fire, holding the black iron poker loosely in one hand.
“Who are you?” Kahl said. He kept his voice low. No need to wake anybody up unless he had to. The stranger paused, only tilting his head a fraction to show that he had heard.
“Russell,” he said after a moment too long.
“The name or the noise?” Kahl asked and the stranger laughed very softly.
“You people are so preoccupied with names,” he said.
“A man with no name is a man no one speaks to,” Kahl said. It was exactly what he meant. It had gotten tangled up on the way off his tongue, but the man by the fire seemed to understand it by the way he smiled over his shoulder. Kahl took a breath and tried again.
“Next you’ll be telling me the one about entertaining angels unawares,” he said. The stranger’s smile shifted to the baring of teeth.
“No,” he said, and the softness had gone out of his voice even though it stayed just above a whisper. “But you might be digging one up.”
Just the matter of factness of that statement sent chills through Kahl. This was something new and horrifying. Whoever this Russell was, he knew. He was as certain as Tom and Charity and something about the way he spoke made Kahl believe him without the questions he had had for the Whitakers.
An angel. Why? Why would an angel be chained beneath a mountain? Why would it be buried at the bottom of a coal mine. That sounded more like something that would happen to a demon. But the devil had been an angel once too, hadn’t he? Was that what they were digging out? Satan, himself?
“No,” said Russell again, even though Kahl hadn’t said any of that out loud. “A Fallen angel wouldn’t need to be chained. So. Not Fallen. Bound. Punished. But not damned. That I know of.”
“And how would you know?” Kahl asked. The old family Bible was on the mantle. He would have to pass Russell to get to it. There was an iron horseshoe over the door, but he didn’t know if that would do any good.
“I’ve been here almost as long as the Sleeper,” Russell said.
“You’re that Mazza boy,” Maggie said. Her arm was still looped around Kahl’s waist but he had no idea how long she had been awake. “The one that had that fall. The one they thought was dead for awhile, but woke up and hasn’t been the same. No one blames him. It’s a miracle he’s alive, they say. Speaking of falling.”
“I am not and have never been named Mazza,” Russell said.
“But you can wear him like a Sunday suit,” Maggie said. Russell raised his eyebrows at her.
“The kid was already dead,” he said. “Dead and gone. I was tired of not being heard. In the old days there was always someone who could hear me, but it seemed like that trait is dying out.”
“Demon,” Maggie said.
“Guess again,” Russell said. That wasn’t a denial. They all knew it. Maggie’s Irish grandparents had taught her enough faerie stories to make her suspicious of vague answers. The recent craziness had only given her more to be suspicious of.
“What do you want?” Kahl asked.
“I want to talk,” Russell said. “To someone who can hear me and answer. I want to see how this is going to end. I am patient beyond what you people can comprehend, but there are ways we can help each other get there faster.
“Help each other,” Kahl repeated. “Unless the way it ends means we all die from it.”
“Oh, you will,” Russell said. “And your children and your children’s children on and on until the end does come.”
“Revelations.” Maggie said.
“Not necessarily,” Russell was smiling again. “Everyone thinks that when they go, the world will end without them. Do you have any inkling how many towns and villages and wandering tribes have vanished thinking that surely if it was the end of them, it was the end of all things? Before the Cherokee and the Iroquois and the Malcah and the Oak People and farther back than that, the things that are happening to you, happened to them.”
“And I suppose you helped them too?”
“Oh no,” Russell said. “I couldn’t save them. But I did talk to them.”
Kahl refused to go back underground, but he kept careful track of who did. He had managed to figure out who all the members of the recovery team had been. There were six of them. The one that had come to town and led them back like an addled collie dog was the older of the Hudd brothers. The younger Hudd was down there too. There was Tom Whitaker whose wife had come to see him a few days after Maggie had told her the news.
Maggie reported that Ruthann Whitaker had swung straight from heartbreak to hysteria. Maggie had had to put her to bed and left the oldest daughters in charge. Charity was fourteen and Molly was eleven and they were better able to grasp the concept of tragedy becoming a much stranger fairy tale with more ease than their overwrought mother. Maggie swore the girls to secrecy, even from their little brothers until their pa could come home. They loved that too, and agreed.
Once Ruthann had gotten her head around it and her feet back under her, she had gone up with Maggie and Junie to see for herself. The men didn’t come out everyday, but the rest of the town was careful to keep a rotating skeleton crew at the sinkhole to feed and tend to them when they did.
Ruthann burst into tears when she saw her Tom climb out of the hole. She had fallen to the ground and been hysterical all over again, but the men went by her and fell to eating without seeming to notice. Maggie got her calmed down again and made her come over to sit him him.
It was Junie that did the talking. She talked to all the men, telling them about what was happening in town, what the bosses were doing, what everyone was saying. She was the one that told Tom his wife had come to see him and encouraged Ruthie to talk to him. It was like opening a floodgate.
Ruthann poured out her heart to the filthy man chewing slowly through a wedge of cornbread. She couldn’t hold back the tears and clung to his bandaged arms as she talked, begging him to come back, to come home.
“It doesn’t hurt, Ruthie,” Tom said, getting everyone’s attention except for his fellow diggers. They went on eating. Maggie thought the Hudd brothers might’ve looked up between bites. Maybe there was hope for them. Tom hadn’t looked at his wife, though. He was still empty-eyed.
“I can’t stop now,” Tom said. “None of us can.”
“Why?” Junie asked.
“Has to be done,” he said.
“The children-“ Ruthann tried to say, but he interrupted her.
“They should see it,” he said. “When they’re old enough. Bring them when they’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” Ruthann squeaked. She was terrified and fighting the weird mix of confusion and hope to keep herself together.
“Ready to see,” Tom said. “Ready to KNOW.”
And that’s how it went for awhile. The Hudds slowly became more clear-headed over time as well, but the other three never spoke or responded. Kahl did his best to figure out by Whitaker and the Hudds recovered but the others didn’t. Any understanding he might’ve gained was thrown out the window, when the Hudds came to tell him that they were going under again. They were going to lay hands on the chain again, they said.
“What?” Kahl hadn’t any idea what they were talking about. Josef, the oldest, tried to explain that it was like lightning. That it could flow through you and fill you up. Gregor nodded eagerly until he got a chance to speak.
“If we can draw off enough of it,” he said. “Then it will be fine again. It will be what it is supposed to be.”
“Used to be,” added Josef.
“What do you mean?” Kahl asked, prickling with unease. “What do you know about it?
“The chain isn’t it,” Josef said. “The chain is just holding it.”
“Holding what?” Kahl said, sharper than he meant to sound, but this was what he had been afraid of from the moment he had seen the chain. He just hadn’t put it together yet.
“You’ll see,” Gregor said. “When it’s ready.” It didn’t sound like a threat, but Kahl couldn’t help but translate it as such. He made note of the account and couldn’t help but notice that after that, the Hudds were mindless slaves again. Whatever they did in the hole had eaten away whatever parts of themselves they had regained.
Once Charity Whitaker was sixteen, she decided she was old enough to go with her father and see the thing in the ground. Tom came to his old house regularly enough that Ruthann was pregnant again. Maybe the thought of letting Charity go was soothed by the knowledge that a replacement was coming, Kahl thought bitterly. He hadn’t been back underground since the first time and had filled up several ledgers with what he could find out.
More people had been hired on and were going into the mine. More accidents were happening all the time. Strange things and stranger rumors, but insurance paid everything so far. Ruthann was still getting her pension since Tom was officially dead.
It was Charity that brought a bizarre fervor to the whole thing, as if it hadn’t been bizarre enough. Whoever she saw underground hadn’t mind wiped her and put her to work. She had come back filled to bursting with strange ecstasies and rambling stories that would have to be completely disassembled and put back together to make any sense at all. The good news was that she came back. The bad news was that now more people wanted to see it.
All Kahl could do was try to keep a tally. Of those who went under, some starting digging, some went screaming insane and usually died in the next few days, some just never came out again. What they were doing underground was anybody’s guess. Tom wasn’t much help when asked. It did seem like it was mostly the townspeople who hadn’t worked in the mine were the worst affected.
Maybe Al was right about them soaking it up little by little, Kahl thought. Maybe they didn’t go barking insane or drop dead because it was already in their systems. He and the other blackbirds talked about it often, trying to reason some sense out of it, but they had no way of knowing for sure without going back under themselves, and none of them was willing to do that.
One night, when all the others were asleep, scattered around their home, Kahl let himself have a moment of despair. He had done his best to keep being in charge if that’s what they needed, but he didn’t understand this any more than any of them did and it wore at him. It wasn’t a crisis of religious faith as much as a crisis of his faith in himself. He had no idea what to do to keep the people around him safe.
That was when he noticed that there was someone else awake. And it wasn’t a someone he knew. There was a man over by the fireplace, sitting so still and quietly that it was only intuition that had Kahl looking towards him. How had he gotten in? How long had he been there? He was looking in at the fire, holding the black iron poker loosely in one hand.
“Who are you?” Kahl said. He kept his voice low. No need to wake anybody up unless he had to. The stranger paused, only tilting his head a fraction to show that he had heard.
“Russell,” he said after a moment too long.
“The name or the noise?” Kahl asked and the stranger laughed very softly.
“You people are so preoccupied with names,” he said.
“A man with no name is a man no one speaks to,” Kahl said. It was exactly what he meant. It had gotten tangled up on the way off his tongue, but the man by the fire seemed to understand it by the way he smiled over his shoulder. Kahl took a breath and tried again.
“Next you’ll be telling me the one about entertaining angels unawares,” he said. The stranger’s smile shifted to the baring of teeth.
“No,” he said, and the softness had gone out of his voice even though it stayed just above a whisper. “But you might be digging one up.”
Just the matter of factness of that statement sent chills through Kahl. This was something new and horrifying. Whoever this Russell was, he knew. He was as certain as Tom and Charity and something about the way he spoke made Kahl believe him without the questions he had had for the Whitakers.
An angel. Why? Why would an angel be chained beneath a mountain? Why would it be buried at the bottom of a coal mine. That sounded more like something that would happen to a demon. But the devil had been an angel once too, hadn’t he? Was that what they were digging out? Satan, himself?
“No,” said Russell again, even though Kahl hadn’t said any of that out loud. “A Fallen angel wouldn’t need to be chained. So. Not Fallen. Bound. Punished. But not damned. That I know of.”
“And how would you know?” Kahl asked. The old family Bible was on the mantle. He would have to pass Russell to get to it. There was an iron horseshoe over the door, but he didn’t know if that would do any good.
“I’ve been here almost as long as the Sleeper,” Russell said.
“You’re that Mazza boy,” Maggie said. Her arm was still looped around Kahl’s waist but he had no idea how long she had been awake. “The one that had that fall. The one they thought was dead for awhile, but woke up and hasn’t been the same. No one blames him. It’s a miracle he’s alive, they say. Speaking of falling.”
“I am not and have never been named Mazza,” Russell said.
“But you can wear him like a Sunday suit,” Maggie said. Russell raised his eyebrows at her.
“The kid was already dead,” he said. “Dead and gone. I was tired of not being heard. In the old days there was always someone who could hear me, but it seemed like that trait is dying out.”
“Demon,” Maggie said.
“Guess again,” Russell said. That wasn’t a denial. They all knew it. Maggie’s Irish grandparents had taught her enough faerie stories to make her suspicious of vague answers. The recent craziness had only given her more to be suspicious of.
“What do you want?” Kahl asked.
“I want to talk,” Russell said. “To someone who can hear me and answer. I want to see how this is going to end. I am patient beyond what you people can comprehend, but there are ways we can help each other get there faster.
“Help each other,” Kahl repeated. “Unless the way it ends means we all die from it.”
“Oh, you will,” Russell said. “And your children and your children’s children on and on until the end does come.”
“Revelations.” Maggie said.
“Not necessarily,” Russell was smiling again. “Everyone thinks that when they go, the world will end without them. Do you have any inkling how many towns and villages and wandering tribes have vanished thinking that surely if it was the end of them, it was the end of all things? Before the Cherokee and the Iroquois and the Malcah and the Oak People and farther back than that, the things that are happening to you, happened to them.”
“And I suppose you helped them too?”
“Oh no,” Russell said. “I couldn’t save them. But I did talk to them.”
no subject
Date: 2019-11-07 03:58 am (UTC)gah
wait i asked for this didn’t i
no subject
Date: 2019-11-07 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-07 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-07 09:55 pm (UTC)