Where Darkness Dwells: Prologue and Chapter 1

Where Darkness Dwells

Prologue

Knowing he wouldn't comprehend the weight of her words, Greta spoke to her son.  "People I love are going to suffer."

Kneeling near the kitchen table, Arlen worked a mound of clay against the wooden floor.  Face taut with concentration, he rolled the gray slab into thin bands.  He pulled off smaller pieces and worked these as well, setting aside finished pieces to a larger whole.

She wanted him to more than hear her voice; she wanted him to understand.  She was desperate to share her burden.  But it was her burden and hers alone to bear.  Involving others would ruin any prospect of ending decades of pain and the degradation of human life.  If people had to die to reach this end, it had to play out through its natural course.  Otherwise, nothing would change.

So she voiced her worries to the only person she could.

"Mama, we still gonna be together?" Arlen asked.  He looked up from the floor where his claywork took shape.  Her son was no longer a boy.  He hadn't been a boy in so long, yet he still had a child's mind.  His tangled beard was graying, his scraggly pate thinning.  While he lived with childlike exuberance, time weighed on her heavily, slowing her movements and shrinking her bones.  She was an old woman, near her end.  

Innocence shined in Arlen's eyes.  He minded adults and would never purposely cause anyone grief.  He had such a kind soul.  Given the choice, she wouldn't want him to change.  She wouldn't risk losing who he was for anything.

"We'll always be together," she answered him.  "I will always be in your heart."

Soothed by her words, his mind flitted to other matters.  He picked up a small gray blob and rolled it in his palm.  "I miss picking with the others.  I don't mind my gopher hole, but it ain't the same as the old mine."

Arlen had worked for years as a pile sorter for the Grendal Coal Company.  Picking coal was a job fit for a child, sitting atop a tipple pile all day, sorting valuable ore from the waste rock.  When the company left Coal Hollow seven years ago, Arlen was twenty years older than the other pile sorters.  They'd given him the job, aware he could never advance beyond it.   

"You're doing a good thing for your mom, digging that gopher hole."

Arlen grinned.  The best part of his smile was an aged, yellow ivory.  The rest, empty gaps and decay.

It had been Arlen's idea to open the gopher hole at their property's edge overlooking Tipple Road.  Townsfolk stopped off the main north-south road through Coal Hollow, buying coal Arlen had dug from the swallow mine.  High-grade ore ran in thin, twisting veins just below the topsoil--all he had to do was scratch the surface.  People would procure enough fuel to warm their homes, allowing Arlen to help support his mom.  There were other places to buy fuel--stores and other gopher holes aplenty--but people went out of their way to buy from Arlen.

He pieced together the finished pieces of clay, realizing the image from his muse.

She could tell his thoughts were skittering off to the starry skyscape of his mind.  She continued: "I could point to certain people on the streets of Coal Hollow, say, 'You will be dead by the first frost.'"

Arlen looked up from his claywork, staring out the window as the moon rose above the trees, a beacon cutting softly through the nighttime sky. 

"But it has to be.  Has to be, or nothing will change."

Arlen smiled.  Her voice had always soothed him.

"Sometimes death leads to life.  Sometimes there's a greater good."  She thought back to the visit from the two boys earlier today.  They'd come to her, as all the town's children did at one point or another, to hear her stories.  Looking those boys in the eye, she told her tales, setting them on the path to their end.  "Until the day I die, I will damn my ancestors for cursing me with this supposed gift."