Stories Not Quite Scary Enough To Tell In The Dark, But Still Nearly Chilling

Entre'emanure

No rain, no thunder, no trees moaning in the dead air. Just hot, hellish country in the dark of night. A sliver moon dips down hopelessly outnumbered crowds of stars. Propped up by a shovel, wet with sweat, a man digs. Hungry. Alone.

Driven by the need to survive, faith in the power of God to make a grain of wheat grow, and the promise of a desert rose. The smooth sound of steel cutting into the soft flesh of the virgin earth. The rap rap rap of a pick hindered by root, rock, and clay. Steady scraping fills the night, keeping the crickets silent. They watch him, perched on a thousand blades of sage, a million glints of moon reflecting from a thousand staring eyes. Silent as the old church bell above the graveyard they watch, eternally patient, legs twitching. Night after night holding back their god given song as furrows grow longer, deeper. Their invaded kingdom, a land proclaimed not fit for an ear of corn, now changed by sweat, blood, and cold steel. Once their song ruled the night. The forced silence, at first, only a slight inconvenience to the local symphony grows tiresome.

Summer passes.

Now the frost creeps down the mountains, now it turns the hilltops, now nothing but the constant sound of pick and shovel.

A song still waits to be heard.

This man, and the others like him are not visitors, they have come to conquer. Relentless, the spade continues to slice, widening the wound. Churning, changing, transforming.

Cut, heft, throw, cut heft throw, at every free moment, cut heft throw. Merciless, uncaring, never ceasing, ignorant of nature's silent but pending boar tide. Oblivious to nature's need to play, to speak, to sing.

Muffled, mounting, maddening pressure. Cut, heft, throw, cut, heft, throw, cut heft— somewhere a silent crack, like the rupture of tectonic plates, echoes softly across the horizon as a thousand minds fuse together. With a flick, and a whir of wings one cricket leaps, then another, and another, thousands of tiny damned up souls shattering their silent bonds. The man, looks up confused at the sudden loss of heaven, the moon and the endless stars swallowed whole. He stops his work just long enough to understand, but it is too late for music to save him now. Instead the sound of a million wings fills the night with black horror, descending to devour bare, work-worn shoulders and tired hands. Down they fall, piercing, biting, digging: filling his mouth, nose, lungs, up they come, pouring out of every orifice, bursting every seam.

All is quiet: at last. One by one the devils lite again, each finds his or her preferred perch. Fiddlers stretch, string, and begin to strum, blood still dripping from their faces as each add voice one by one to the eternal song bursting up and over, far and away beyond a field of golden wheat ready for harvest, and shovel, still bathed in moonlight, wet with sweat.