High Strangeness

Chapter Five

Ten years before the children left, he came home. Returning after ninety years, he found a town that forgot. Trees, decades of leaves, and wild growth, fused into an impenetrable mass which buried the scorched remains of the Smarz family estate. He hired a team to locate the grave. Another to dig until they hit the casket. He told them to brush the dirt away, until he read his father's name engraved on a brass plate, nailed to the lid.

"That it?" one of the men in the grave asked.

Their employer walked to the edge, looking in at the two exhausted men, the brass plate, and the exposed portions of the wooden casket lid. After all this time, it remained. He ordered them out. He needed to be alone for the next part.

They hesitated. Should the old man kill himself crawling into the hole, how would they be paid? Everything was cash. They dealt only with him.

"Now boys," he said. "I'm a lot more spry than you think, especially for a seventy-five year old man."

He smiled. Gentle soft eyes, white hair, a modest brown suit. He could be on his way to a grandparent's dinner at the Nobility Elementary School. The men crawled out. He told them to wait for him by the house, they would be paid shortly.

The men nodded. They brushed the clumps of dirt from their knees and legs. They left their tools behind and once the crunch of the brush and grass beneath their feet silenced, and they seemed to fade into the night, he crawled into the hole. The wood crunched as he fell against it. The pain radiated through his arm and shoulder.

He was feeling too much. He needed to work faster.

He gently knocked onto the wood, as if he expected it to open and an old friend to greet him. A fainter knock reverberated from within. He smiled and chuckled. He could hear a voice, a dry and raspy moan, call out. A weak voice, frail and pathetic from a century of neglect.

Satisfied, the old man crawled out of the hole. He called to the men. When they drew close, he reached into his coat pocket and brought out two envelopes.

"I'll throw in a little extra if you fill in the hole. If you please."

The men exchanged looks.

"That's it? Dig it up and bury it again?" One asked, as the other urged him to shut his mouth.

"That's it. You've both performed admirably."

* * *

A house, under construction. A labyrinth of wood and steel and brick, a behemoth of hallways and turrets. Even to the crews working around the clock, the home's layout made little sense. Not that any crew sticks around. He's seen to that. Strict non-disclosures about what they've seen, crews dismissed with generous severance checks as another clocks in. Not a single one could as much as draw what the house will look like.

He's in the lower levels, the bowels of the sprawling estate that seems to sprout rooms and stories like a fungus, spreading out over the acreage. In the lower levels, the only complete section, he's hidden it all away. Everything his journey has accumulated. Everything excavated from Hausman Hill once TexNation, owned through Hart & Sons via a number of shell companies, started construction on a massive fracking well.

All his work, every mile, every dark corner of the world he inhabited, every heinous act committed that scoured and tore at his soul, came to these moments in a quiet room, standing before the mirror. These moments staring into the glass, as his reflection gave away to darkness, cavernous darkness, a world of rock and cold seemingly inches from his face. The glass was jagged and misshapen, a broken shard from another time, buried for a millennium, hidden away, a small piece of a greater truth.

The shape came. The figure that seemed to pull itself from smoke. If he could describe the being before him, he would say smoke and bones. Teeth and worms. Death, rot, and disease. Skeletal, wrapped in black tendrils, pulsating and adhering to the bone, tying the thing together.

The god in the glass. Death.

"You again," the creature hissed.

"Me again."

"Is your request the same?"

"Yes. Life. Forever and unending."

"You have it?" The being leaned in. He could see into the creature's eyes, at the inky orbs that pulsated. The eyes that seemed to slide and slink and curl within the sockets. The skeleton was human, or a close approximation. A prop, a costume of bone. He wondered for who's benefit did the creature wear it?

"I don't. Not yet," he told the being. "I traveled the world for it. Turns out, it never left. It's never been far from Hausman Hill. But it calls to its owner. It called to a family in Marble Springs years ago. I can't take it from him, not yet."

"We have time. There is more to do. Are you still willing to pay my price? Are you still willing to prepare the way for me?"

"Always."

"Next time, I will expect a gift," it said.

"Of course. I will have many for you."

The creature nodded, the smoke dissipated and the mirror cleared.

He felt drained. He dropped to the floor. His heart throbbing off-rhythm, his veins dark and swollen on his arms. Minutes passed and he pulled himself up. He stumbled to the wall, sliding along it as he made his way to the door, leaving behind his library. Outside, one of the crew waited.

"Sir, sun's up in thirty minutes. Should we start packing up?"
"Yes," the old man sighed. "Thank you."

"You're welcome Mr. Hart."