Unbury Carol(51)

Someone’s in here with you. Someone’s in here with you. SOMEONE’S IN HERE WITH YOU, CAROL!

Carol had never felt another person in the darkness. Not a moment’s contact with Hattie ever translated into the coma itself. Even as Dwight and Farrah carried her body upstairs, Carol felt nothing.

But now…fingertips…a palm…a hand rolling her over.

Roll over.

Carol felt herself rolling. Rolling onto her back.





ROLL OVER


Was she doing this? Was she responsible for the roll?





NO


And the two letters, thought by her, exploded across the everywhere sky of Howltown.

Rolling now (rolling!), she heard shuffling. Feet upon stone.

Rats, she told herself. Because if it wasn’t rats, then how about that?

She was sideways now, yes, there was no question she had rolled (been rolled, Carol, BEEN rolled, someone did this, someone NOT YOU) to her side, a woman falling through black tar infinity on her side, her dress no doubt flapping in a different way, her hair now wholly off to one side, as though pulled.

Still rolling.

Rolling over.

Until Carol felt the momentum of her roll, felt herself moving quicker, unable to influence the speed of the spin at all.

You’re going to keep rolling, spinning, twirling into nothingness, CAN’T STOP forever CAN’T STOP forever CAN’T—

She stopped.

The roll was complete. And for the first time ever in her life, Carol Evers was on her back in Howltown.

She looked up.

And saw all the darkness she’d fallen through.

She heard the hoarse wheezing. She recalled the cold hand. And just as she attempted to shove these frightening aspects from her mind, Carol saw.

Carol saw.

Light.

And the anxiety she’d felt at discovering her husband’s betrayal was laughable compared with the sensation of sight in the coma.

She was no longer falling. And yet not awake. She lay on her back on a stone slab in a storm room she could see. A storm room she had assisted in building herself.

And the light…

It appeared to be a sconce, yes, one of the candles aflame upon the left stone wall. And at the very distant arc of the candle’s range, she saw (saw!) the open dark space of the storm room entrance.

Carol could hardly comprehend the sight of it. It was the storm room, yes. Not in a dream. Not in her mind’s eye. And whoever had helped her onto her back had also given her this light.

Right?

Near fifty times now she had climbed the wood ladder with her mother and called Hattie’s name as she fell through the earth’s crust, to the inner core where, only Carol knew, there was no heat, no fire, no light.

She was not awake. Yet…what had become of Howltown?

You’ve reached the end, she thought. And with this thought came an even deeper plunging of fear.

For what could be considered the finish of a place with no lines?

But Carol knew this was no end. Whoever had rolled her over was only beginning.

She heard the shuffling of bare skin on a pebbled floor.

This, Carol now recognized, was not the patter of rodent feet within a dusty cellar.

“John?”

Her voice. Her lips had moved. Movement and light. The shock of it was so great that she hardly had time to reprimand herself for calling her friend’s name.

Wherever she was, this was no place John Bowie would be. In life or death. For while it looked like the storm room and smelled like her cellar in Harrows, Carol was very aware that, light or no light, she was still deep in the darkness.

She stared at the entrance to the storm room because she couldn’t bring herself to look anywhere else. She held her breath, the sour air growing even more stale within her.

She steeled herself for the sight of whoever had rolled her over.

The candle flickered but no wind came and Carol heard the hoarse breathing more clearly than she ever had before.

A face peered in at the storm room door.

It was not Dwight. Not Hattie in death. Nor John.

The face looked painted. Or as if several faces had been painted upon the same flat canvas, stored so deep in the shadows that Carol couldn’t see its frame.

Carol expelled the sour air with a cry for help.

This fear was deeper than any grave.

She heard a baying from far away, echoes off a stone passage. Madly, she imagined she was buried but buried beneath the graves of the graveyard. Even ghouls did not dig this deep. The howl she’d heard did not resemble lament, but celebration, as if the creature who cried did not scratch its coffin lid but rather the wood beneath, until the splinters might give way to dirt, and the dirt give way to Carol.

“Carol.”

It was the watcher who spoke. The one peering in the doorway like a voyeur. The head whose many faces she could see.

“Carol, Carol, Carol…”

The lines of its face were fluid, one painted face becoming another. Its mouth did not move.

Despite knowing she couldn’t, Carol tried to move.

The watcher entered and Carol saw its mouth was a blur, its nose too small for its eyes, its skin a shade of horse urine.

Then his features changed, entirely, occupying only the top right corner of his face before flowing like blood back down to their proper positions.

“I’ve watched you,” it said, as though what it spoke of could somehow be considered sane. It pressed its back to the wall, sliding away from Carol now, deeper into the storm room. “I’ve watched you fall for a long time now…”