The Return (2017)
Featured in a collection of horror stories published by the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal (Issue 2.4 - Fall 2017).
We lived next to a sinkhole. It was over a half-mile in diameter, according to our elders. It spanned the whole hillside north of Old Town. The land had become covered with houses. Tourists came to see it. They wore vibration meter necklaces so they would know the impact of their footsteps across its surface, as if that knowledge would give them an advantage.
Beneath the ground waited a buried stump from the largest tree that ever grew. Now submerged by water and mud hundreds of feet below the surface, it waited. And waited. Tourists increased. Bicycling tourists were frequent sights. Everyone wished they wouldn’t come. Everyone agreed they were foolish.
The day it happened I was sent to take the offering to the shrine. A five-lane intersection now circled it. Somewhere below it was the center of the stump. We pray to it. We know to walk over it is not without risk. We place offerings there in the spring hoping it will appease the spirit and leave us safe for another year. My family cried when I was selected.
That day a group of tourists were posing by the stone doorway, waving arms and smiling into their cameras. Their faces were masked by sunglasses and helmets and bodies armored by tight technical clothing. I stepped lightly, as light as I could, past them. I set the bundle at the steps. Their eyes followed me, egos cast aside for a fleeting moment to witness our humble and solitary ritual. The chatter died away. I looked back at them, unsure what to say. The air quieted. No birds, no dogs. Then it began. The ground shifted. Small ripples at first, a sideways shift like a swaying bridge. I screamed. All the years of warnings and engrained response engulfed me and I ran.
I pushed past the tourists, who were screaming and intertwining themselves in a deadly panic. They reached for me as I passed but I tore their fingers off my arms. The earth began lifting in an impossible arc. I ran up the street, up the hill, into the first house I could. I shoved past the occupants and up the stairs, rushing to the highest window, and leapt. I landed on the rooftop in a collapse of fear. Behind me the ground was opening. Edges were forming around the shrine. An ice blue water burned from below, seeing light for the first time in nearly a thousand years. Through it, the ringed circle of death. The angry and revenge-seeking tree spirit, coming back to life after its murder so many generations ago.
I turned away. To watch was to die. I ran across the roof and jumped to the next. Again and again, up the hill as fast as I could. My fingers dug into the roof tiles, bloodier with each landing. I ran and cried and jumped.
In the end, the hole was larger than any of the legends. It spanned the whole mountainside. The shrine was only a speck in its aftermath. The icy spirit waters drained into the sea, freezing what rubble remained along the edges of the fallen earth. The exposed stump was larger than I could have imagined. It had crystalized during its preservation, becoming petrified into the most beautiful and terrifying reminder of our town’s greatest folly. Its revenge was immeasurable. All I knew was gone. Faces, streets, my whole life erased in minutes.
I live on the other side of the mountain now. They have placed me in charge of the shrine, though I still don’t know why. There are many now, lining the ridge crest between life and death. They are more like towers than monuments. I carry the bundles up to them daily now, climbing up the path between the tree gods. I feel them watch me as I journey through, appraising me. Each day I hope they will share their secrets with me, that they will offer some small explanation for their sibling’s wrath. It never comes. I carry my bundles through their legs and arms in silence, only my labored breath sounding through the slopes. The birds and animals have deserted the upper reaches of our mountain. It is too close to death. From the towers I stop and stare. My homeland a broken expanse and in the center of it a hole, dark and cold. I place my bundle and walk to the next tower. I look again at the devastation, as I do each time. When I return, I go to the library and write my observations in the ledger. Day 400. No change.