From Fraidy Cat Quarterly: Volume 2
The walk this time feels shorter because now I know the way. Even so, for the last mile or so I find myself wondering if it’s still there, or if it ever was. Would it be better or worse if I imagined it all? Branches at either side of the trail scrape my bare skin as I walk, and I’ve come so close to convincing myself that it was all a horrible dream that when I finally do see the fissure in the rock face I nearly lose my footing and fall. I catch myself, rough stone grating the three fingers of my left hand. I remain standing, for now.
It is not time, yet, for me to be on my knees.
It’s quiet here. More quiet than it seems possible to be. Even when we first found the crack, the silence surprised us. I remember Rose saying that it sounded like every living thing for miles had gotten the fuck out of dodge. I also remember that she was the one who suggested we invade this secret space and I—a hopeless, lovesick girl—followed her.
Funny, the things you remember when they no longer matter.
I use the edge of the opening in the stone to brace myself as I step up and into what could charitably be called a cave. The silence here is thicker even than the oil-slick of darkness past the last shadow cast by the noon sun outside. I know it’s not safe to walk long distances in high heat without any supplies, any water. But I have left everything I have at the trailhead except my shoes. Safety is the last thing on my mind.
I need it to take me back.
There’s a creak in my voice when I call out to the dark. I recognize this creak. It’s the same one that veined the marble of my pleas to Rose as she shut the door in my face. That was barely four hours ago. I’ve chosen a lifetime of torment based on the suffering of a few days, and I know that I should be taking more care.
But she’s right. Even as I descend to what might very well be hell in the earth I know Rose is right about me. I can’t picture her face in love anymore, only her expression when she woke up on my first morning back in her home, when she found me at the foot of her bed. The horror on her face when I said I could only rest while kneeling. What I have to offer her now is something she never asked for. Unfortunately, my reverent body is all I have left to give.
I barely feel the descent, barely notice the grinding, choking pressure of the passage as it constricts around my body like an embrace. I had thought that my embrace with Rose before
she left me here
would be my last, but as it turned out I’d get another chance at hope before I found out that had been true. I offered my life for her freedom. She’d come to get me from the hospital when I was discharged, but instead of pulling me close, she looked at me with disgust. I know I am missing a finger, but I don’t know how else my body has deformed. How else could I have changed to terrify her that badly?
It was a mistake, I think, to have taken those three last days in her house. In what was once our house. I think it would hurt less to wonder if the world turns on without me than to know that it turns better with me below its shining surface.
I am standing over the altar before I even notice the passage has leveled and rounded. I feel my release from the clutches of the tunnel as keenly as I feel my jagged breathing now, but I have forgotten a release can be physical. I have forgotten anything but the pain of being
abandoned
to the dark by someone I thought loved me unconditionally. Terms and conditions apply, I suppose. I want terms I can understand. Terms I know.
However bad the conditions may be, I want suffering I can name.
I take off my shoes and walk to the center of the space.
This time, when I call it from the depths, I do so with intent.
The thing from under the earth slips into the room in a form I can barely conceptualize. This time, I meet it as it taught me over six months of service. I meet it naked, kneeling, arms wide, head down.
It doesn’t even matter that I can’t see it as it approaches me. It doesn’t matter, because I can’t see it anyway. In all the time I’ve been in this cave, my eyes have slipped from its skin as if oiled. I have a sense I cannot name, though, that knows this thing with every nerve of my body. As I feel it come near, the anticipation of what is coming makes each one of them sing how
you came back
with a detached certainty. I can’t hear it, but I know it knows that this is the case. I wonder if it always knew I would. I wonder if that’s why it waited quite so long to let me go. I wonder if it realized that, like a child placing a baby bird back in its nest, its touch had made me too
foul
for human acceptance.
I don’t bother speaking to it. I don’t bother speaking a word. I never needed to make a sound in its presence. I don’t even know if it can hear. My screaming never seemed to make an impact. Even when I sobbed and begged after it told me and Rose that
one of you must stay here
the impassivity of the thing was not the farthest thing about it from the humanity that Rose and I shared. Even when it told us to
say your goodbyes
we could both tell that it knew which of us would be leaving.
She clung to me like I mattered to her. She held me for perhaps a solid minute. Then she was never solid to me again.
The first thing I lost here was my name. I’m sure I had one when I arrived. But when Rose said it to me, when I was briefly by her side again, I couldn’t recognize the word. I can’t call it to my mind even now. Somewhere along the line, my connection with those sounds was severed as surely as the thing had severed the joint of my left ring finger. It told me
you can have it back when you return
and as I climbed, shaking, barefoot and still naked, down the trails to the parking lot I imagined must have existed even then, I couldn’t imagine a finger could ever be worth more than what waited for me in Rose’s apartment. In our apartment.
On the drive to where we were supposed to live, I felt the hot sun on my face and wondered at the fact that her name stayed with me even when my own was lost.
I also couldn’t stop the looping refrain of the
when when when
certainty of its declaration. When I arrived at the hospital, my ears were gently bleeding. The stump of my finger was not. I asked about it, and the doctor said she thought I had been born without it.
These were the only physical marks I wore from my time here. The rest, my
new knowledge
training, the ways I learned to please the thing that held me…those marks were my undoing.
The entity is wondering
did you come for this
and before I can ask myself what I did come for, I have my finger back. The feeling of the digit being replaced is pain in reverse. There is no less
white-hot blistering agony
than when it was taken away, but this time it has taken a form I cannot recognize. It is an instantaneous knitting. It is a spark of nerves made new, and out of nothing: sensation. When I pull my fist to my chest, it is whole. It has
always
been whole.
Before it set me free, it wanted me to look up and into its face. I knew that if I did, this was
forever
in a way that not even my and Rose’s marriage had been meant to be forever. Our marriage would end in divorce or my death or her death or any number of things more frivolous than the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
Eternity isn’t something I can look in the eye. It never has been. But now, I
head back eyes up
meet the gaze of something worse.
To say it is massive is beside the point. It is
all there is
the world. My entire world, space and time, is standing in front of me, though to say it is standing is also a misconception. To say I can see it is untrue. I am encompassed. I am consumed
filled
by the absolute certainty that when the universe ends, whatever this is will still be eating me alive. My body will be picked apart and reassembled endlessly, beyond what any concept of suffering can contain. The being acknowledges that
the other one did not want you
and the stark certainty of this tears me open with more surety than anything it has done to me before. I can feel that even then, even as it was taking me into itself that first time, the former
eons
of six months past, it knew as sure as I know that my past must have existed: this was always going to be the ending. It knew, and it cultivated my hope like a wild herb to season the despair I am living at this moment and in every moment to follow.
Am I still living? Have I ever been alive? Did Rose
let you die
alone in this cave, or did she never truly exist?
When I
if you
returned to her she called it a creature. This cannot be a creature, because creatures attack their prey belly and neck, fangs and claws snagging places where the animal is weak. With this subterranean
god
being my entire mind and body are an exposed throat waiting to be torn open again and again and
again again again
again.
Rose said being here changed me. She said I was like a different person. Only I and
god god
know that this is fallacious. When I returned to Rose, there was no person left to be different. My
god
was the only entity that would have me. The only place I knew I could
stay here stay where you can be
back to where I’m accepted as I am, as it has made me, without the kind of pain that only another
dirty ugly human creature
can inflict. For me, the pain that my
god god god GOD
offers me is more comprehensible than any life I could have outside. I cannot be where Rose is in the same world as I am and is not living in my house.
We were supposed to belong to each other. I don’t need shackles to know who I belong to now.
who was it you left here for
It doesn’t hurt like I imagined it would when I realize I no longer know the name.
My fist is still pressed to my chest as I meet the eyes of oblivion. My system locks itself in a brutal stasis, and all I know beyond
nothing everything please no yes
is that my
yes yes yes YES
god has left one shackle on.
The ring slips from the finger, so recently returned by a god. There is gratitude in this space, and no real concern for the circle of gold that clinks to the stone floor and rolls down, disappearing into darkness. Whatever it was or meant means nothing now. The air thrums with unending power and the devouring certainty that no human is or has ever been inside this cavern’s maw.
©️Ria Hill
Ria Hill is a writer, librarian, and nonbinary horror who lives in Toronto. They spend the majority of their non-work hours maintaining their recreational spreadsheet collection and regaling their friends and loved ones with deeply worrying story pitches. Their work has appeared in The Book of Queer Saints Volume II, Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors, A Coup of Owls, God’s Cruel Joke, and others. Chances of them devouring you on sight are always low, but never zero. They can be found online at riahill.weebly.com and on Bluesky and Instagram @riawritten.