She didn’t mean to kill her, that fact I know.
Like others before her, she was trying to put something else back, or thought she was, at least.
Having worked in the park for a good twenty years, I’ve learned enough about the things that live on and under this land that when I was sent word through my radio that a lady was seen digging in a certain area by night, I had some idea of what I was about to find.
Driving up a dirt road, I recognized her right away. Thin, blonde, Gwyneth Paltrow type, a little mean. Highly strung. Can’t say I know her entire history, but she had her reasons for being so.
Her daughter had gone missing for a few hours on a field trip and wound up in one of the burrows out by Mount Schräg. If she’d been out there for much longer, there wouldn’t have been any getting her back.
As it was, I guess she only bumped her head a bit, and probably saw some things she didn’t understand.
Scares people, if they don’t know the history of the place, of the animals. Sends them a little strange, especially if they’re already soft, to start with. The little girl that tripped down that burrow sure came back different, but she was herself, alright.
I would have kept her down there, if she weren’t.
Sounds callous, but it’s part of the work.
Protecting the visitors, the land, and the wildlife— I’ve done my best at it, over the years, and though I don’t always hit the mark, I’ll keep at it till my body gives out and makes me quit.
Even amongst the rangers, only those of us who’ve been here longer than five years ever learn the reality of what’s going on out here, and it’s up to us old timers to keep it that way.
The cops from Walpurgis Town have a sort of deal with us— they spread rumours as to drug related activity to muddy the waters, and scrub the Web of anything too outlandish that manages to slip through. Stops folks asking any questions we can’t answer, or science types messing around out here and ending up hurt, which has happened, a time or two, over the years.
So when I saw Ms Cameron sitting out by those burrows in the dark I figured one of the younger rangers had tipped her off as to some of the truth, only not all of it, or else she would never have tried dealing with the things that live out here, under the dirt.
Likely the only reason they didn’t take her for trespassing was that they found her grief funnier to watch than anything they’d planned to do with her. They have a sick sense of humour, the burrow people, which some guests learn the hard way.
I don’t mind telling you I got quite the chill, seeing the lady alone out there, in their habitat. It’s healthy to have a fearful respect of the park’s inhabitants; it sure keeps you from overstepping the line, anyway.
But the burrow people are downright frightening, even by park standards. They’re vicious, and they move fast, and the thought of how easily they could have pulled Ms Cameron down under the smothering earth had my heart banging like an engine fault, glad I’d come by when I had.
Anyone who’d seen the things they send up in place of those they steal would be the same. Changers, I call them. Look just like the people they replace, except for the eyes, where you can see them plotting and scheming all the time.
Like crows and magpies they’re savage, and wicked smart, playing sick pranks on the folks that take them in until they lose their minds, or wind up dead and mutilated, with the Changer having run off God knows where afterwards.
As for the people they drag underground— the burrow folk never give them back, and as for reasoning with them, you may as well beg a maelstrom to quit for all the good it’d do. They don’t talk, and though I figure they understand English they’d sooner spit in your eye than bargain.
Or pull it out, most likely.
It was luck I’d been close enough on my night rounds of the park to get to the burrows as quick as I did. They won’t take folks if they’re in twos, or groups; the burrow folk don’t like to be seen, and I’ve only spotted them myself once or twice.
Even sitting in my van I could feel them down there, in the ground, like the hum of a hive. Set my teeth on edge, and sent a sweat down my back I don’t get much anymore, after all these years in service to the park.
Getting out of my vehicle, I shone my flashlight around the area, making sure that there were no other visitors hanging around to cause problems at the scene. The lady was alone, slumped in the grass in a stained dress, sweat soaked in half-suns under her armpits.
The burrow she’d been loitering over had been filled in with loose dirt, and the spade she’d used to do it lay abandoned in the grass a short way off.
There was blood on the blade, caked in bricks of mud.
“Ms Cameron,” I said, as the woman blinked at me, red-eyed, through the night. “You mind telling me what happened out here?”
I could guess at it, but I had to hear it in her own words, for the official records.
Trembling like a run-down hare, Ms Cameron said, “Laney… I was so sure she wasn’t my daughter. Your colleague, Mel— she called me. She told me that there are creatures living in these burrows, that they took her, and gave me one of their own children instead. I wanted to give their thing back, I wanted to bring my little girl home—”
She knew, by then, what she’d done; I could hear it in her voice, a madness coming on in her like the weather.
“Creatures?” I repeated, gently. “Melanie told you that they were fairies, is that right? Maybe she said something about silver, too, or salt, or something like that. Can help keep them down there where they belong, I guess, but wouldn’t do no good in bringing a lost kid home. But Ms Cameron—”
She looked up at me, scrubbing her nose on her sleeve, so close to a sudden hope that it hurt me to break it again.
I’ll never forget the dark that came over her, the dark, and the blankness. I’ve seen the eyes of dead deer look that way, before, gathering flies over their film in the woods.
“Ms Cameron,” I said. “Those things ain’t fairies, though they might look that way, to some people. And though they do take folks down into their tunnels sometimes, they don’t usually send a Changer out top for a day or so.
Guess they need time to start to look like whoever they got ahold of. Hell if I know what they do with them, down there. Maybe they eat people. Maybe something worse. All I know is, they didn’t take your girl. Shook her up, at most. Tormented her, the way they like to do. Or maybe something else was wrong with her, I guess.”
I stared at the dirt, the blood on the spade, the light bit of hair stuck to the end of it, moving in the wind. Sadness knocked through me like a shot put, and I had to turn away, thinking how many nights I’d had like this, how many days, all of them the same.
Ms Cameron mumbled under her breath, still trying to grab at the impossibility that she hadn’t done what she did.
“But… what are they, those things, then?” she asked, suddenly. “Why are you hiding that they’re out here? That they hurt people?”
I crouched down beside her, going through my pocket for a bit of tobacco to chew. It’s a habit I picked up from my father, long ago; fifteen years dead, and still I think of him when I do it, clenching down on the memory, to ground me.
“Animals do kill guests at parks like this, from time to time,” I said. “It’s nature’s way. We rangers try to keep civilians in areas we know are safe, or reasonably so, where we can keep an eye on them, but sometimes people end up going astray. Here at the park, we have things other than animals around. Hard to say what they are, or where they came from, seeing as they’re all so different. But they were here way before any people ever were.
I call them Old Kings. Everybody calls them something else. Walpurgis folk only know about some of them, so they make up fairy stories, get it into their heads that they understand. But they don’t. Let me tell you a story, back from when I’d been working here just three years or so.”
I knew I had to keep talking till an ambulance turned up, which I’d already called in on my way over. I had to keep Ms Cameron’s mind off the kid in the ground, and whose hands had put her there.
I’d seen what could happen, if I didn’t.
If I kept talking, I’d keep this woman alive.
“There’s a place we call Howler’s Ridge,” I said. “Kind of a thin, high, hill pass overlooking a valley. We didn’t recommend it to inexperienced hikers, back then, and we warn people right off it, now. There are signs up, and we have cameras monitoring the area so as people don’t stumble up there not knowing any better. Folks said they’d hear strange noises, like a howling— not like the wind through the valley, or wolves, or coyotes, or any sort of animal at all.
It was like a vocal whooping— human voices, I guess, hollering, screaming, rebounding off one side of the ridge to the other so it made folks feel like they were being hunted, somehow, only they couldn’t see a damn thing, not a person for miles. And though it wasn’t the wind making that sound, there was always one hell of a gale blowing up there.
Guests would come down saying it was like they were being pushed and shoved around, that’s how strong it was.”
I paused, taking a quick look at Ms Cameron.
Her dead doe’s eyes met mine far too evenly.
“Go on,” she said. “I want to hear it. And don’t hide any of it, Dianne. I need to know. Please. I want to understand.”
Nodding, I went back into my story, which in all my life I’d told only once before.
“One day a girl went hiking up on Howler’s Ridge,” I said. “Just turned nineteen years old. She took a couple of friends with her. They walked along there a time, had their camcorders out filming a bit of the way. I’ve seen some of the footage; you can hear the girls laughing, talking, a little wind, nothing out of the ordinary.
Then, on those tapes you hear the noise start up: the hollering, some of it deep, like a man, others like folks being tortured, sounds like, and you see the girls being dragged back and forth, just ragged around like something had its hands on them.
They start screaming, the cameras fall down the valley; one gets stuck on a bit of rock and ended up being salvaged, afterwards.
The girls— well. Three of them we just found in pieces, ripped apart so as there would be a leg in one place, a head somewhere else. Too purposeful to be animals that had done it, and there were no other people around at the time.
Besides, there was the tape.
The last girl— well. Me and another ranger found her coming down the Ridge in a state of shock, both her arms torn off; hell knows how she didn’t bleed to death. Still alive, as far as I know, though she doesn’t talk about what happened.
Can’t, since she didn’t see a damn thing anybody would believe. ‘The wind,’ she told us. ‘There was something alive in the wind up there. They did it.’ Soon as the words came out of her mouth the ranger I was with went sort of stiff, like he’d heard the story before. It was after that we put up all the signs.”
Ms Cameron sat quiet, rubbing a flake of blood off her cheek. Knowing she’d been right about at least one thing tonight was holding her together: she’d figured something strange lived in the park, she just hadn’t known how deep it ran.
“Strange thing is the Howlers tend to leave the rangers alone,” I said. “Same with most of the Old Kings, except the odd case, now and then. It’s like an instinct: they know what we’re doing out here, and don’t meddle with us if we do the same. We’re caretakers for them and their habitat; the Kings only live as far as a certain point, and most can’t cross it.
That’s what makes me think it’s the park itself that brought them here, to start with. Don’t know how, or when, and certainly not why, but here it is: the land’s alive. That’s what I believe; and always will.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ms Cameron, dully.
She wasn’t crying, and that had me worried. Too calm is a sign to watch, in these cases, and one of the worst.
I was glad to hear sirens in the distance, vehicles pounding the dirt roads through the park.
“I don’t understand it, either,” I said. “And I’ve come just about as close as this place will let a person get to the truth. I’ve seen forests breathing, even walking. Bodies of people missing only hours ago turn up looking like they’d died a century back. Things crawl out the lakes I have to pretend I don’t see until they go back in.
Folks aren’t meant to know about things like that. All I’ve got to do is take care of the park, and the visitors, only I don’t always get it right, and I’m sorry for that. I really am.”
Ms Cameron didn’t say a word, didn’t hit me, or laugh at the stupid cruelty of my position, and all the human lives that I was forced to watch slip by for the sake of those I’d chosen to guard. She just sat there until the cops and the ambulance came for her, looking at the shallow grave that she’d built in the darkness.
*
After talking to the cops and watching them dig the girl out of ground I should have finished my shift, taken a week off to set my head straight from it all: the little body all wrapped up in a sheet, the mother screaming, everyone at the scene white-eyed and sick from the tragedy of it, none of us going away right afterwards.
I could have gone to the bar I know at the skirts of Walpurgis and thrown back beers till I was half blind just to wash the scene from my memory, but I’m a tough old bird, and besides, I had a duty to finish.
The minute the cavalry cleared out I radioed up to the ranger’s station.
“Mel?” I said. “Hey, kid. Figure you owe me a favor tonight.”
I had her drive out to the nearest store and pick up a few bags of salt; I would have had her bring me silver, too, only that’s not so easy to find in the middle of the night.
Mel hauled up an hour later, meeting me at the station, so as we could head back out to the burrows together.
“Look, Dianne,” she said, uncomfortably, as I drove up to the meadows in grim silence. “I’m sorry I broke the code, or whatever it is, okay? I messed up. I thought I was doing the right thing, and— and I wasn’t. This is my fault.”
“Nah,” I said, looking ahead at the dirt road. “Gotta start telling you younguns the truth earlier, I guess. You were trying to do a good thing. Wouldn’t have happened if you knew any different.”
I’d been Mel’s age when Wade Brentwood had been my mentor; looking at the kid in the rear view mirror, I figured it was about time I had a trainee of my own.
We walked out to the burrows, hauling the salt along with us. The humming under the earth was stronger now, and I saw Mel stop in her tracks, looking like she was close to turning tail and getting right back in the van.
“What’s that?” she asked— her voice cracked like a teenager’s; I would have laughed, if I hadn’t been too shook up for humor.
“Your fairies,” I said. “Could be they ain’t too happy with all the noise up here tonight.”
I skirted around each of the burrows in the meadow— thirteen of them, from a quick count, leading down further than anyone up top will ever know. Mel followed, picking her feet up almost on tiptoe, like she thought the dirt itself would haul her down.
“Salt the burrows,” I said. “I want you out here doing this once a week, and any day after it rains. You were right about one thing: they hate this shit.”
Mel started cutting open the salt bags.
Glancing up, she said, “Won’t they make more holes?”
I grinned, ignoring the creeping at the back of the neck from knowing the things underfoot were surely listening.
“Sure. And you’re gonna be salting and filling them in, too. They’ll only be around this area; all the Kings keep to their own territories, thank Christ.”
“Kings?” Mel repeated, but I waved the question away.
“Later. Let’s get this done. Can’t have any more deaths out here. Don’t need the bad publicity.”
But as we crossed the meadow all I could think of was that lost little girl, what she must have seen out here, what memories the burrow folk must have stirred up to change her enough that her own mother hadn’t known who she was.
That kind of fear you never let go of or forget, even when you’ve worked the park for a long as me.
—
For those curious about Ms Cameron’s version of events, read Here
The Morgue 