{"id":1331,"date":"2011-09-20T03:00:04","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T01:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethingwicked.co.za\/?p=1331"},"modified":"2012-03-02T14:36:59","modified_gmt":"2012-03-02T12:36:59","slug":"groundswell-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/2011\/09\/20\/groundswell-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Groundswell of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Scott Brendel
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From Issue 13 (Sept 2011)<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

<\/p>\n

I was in such a rush to bury her, I forgot about the ring.<\/p>\n

By the time I remembered, she\u2019d been in the ground over two weeks, out behind the barn beside the old oak tree, in a hole I\u2019d dug with a few swipes of the backhoe\u2019s bucket. Nothing fancy, nothing ornate–just a deep hole with her at the bottom. The practical kind of thing an old farm widow would appreciate.<\/p>\n

But I had forgotten the ring, an oversight that would come back to haunt me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t meant to kill her. And she certainly didn\u2019t deserve it. Just one of those train-wreck moments you can\u2019t take back; God setting you up for a cosmic pratfall because He\u2019s got nothing better to do. Which is not to say I had no hand in the calamity–just that it needn\u2019t have turned out the way it did.<\/p>\n

It was the lavender that did it, the sweet stink of the bath water she put on when she forgot to bathe. Which had been happening more and more often.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust a touch,\u201d she\u2019d say with that addled look, then slather it on like it was sun block and her at the beach–the old lady smell I\u2019d come to associate with nursing homes, like the one where I used to work. A smell that made me squirm every time Aunt Tilly pressed her hairy cheek against mine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d dozed off in the recliner in front of the TV, helped along by the Jack Daniels I\u2019d been sipping, a remedy for the sense of failure I carried wherever I went. And I dreamed a glorious dream, of a beautiful woman who held me with forgiveness.<\/p>\n

The smell of lavender was faint at first, but then it began to grow. I said nothing to the woman, because she looked at me with the adoration seen only in dreams. But the smell grew slowly oppressive as she ran her hands down my arms and pressed them to my sides, held them there while she slid first one, then two, then three arms around me . . .<\/p>\n

\u201cCan\u2019t move!\u201d I screamed, as I came awake.<\/p>\n

It was Aunt Tilly who hugged me, the wrinkled prune of her face pressed to the side of mine, overcome, no doubt, by a moment of tender concern. But I woke violently, lashed out to free myself, and threw her backward in a parody of pinwheeling arms. The ottoman–an overstuffed obstacle of questionable purpose–was behind her and she tripped over it.<\/p>\n

When her head hit the radiator, the air rang with a husky tone that faded along with the light in her eyes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was screwed six ways from Sunday, ol\u2019 God getting a laugh at my expense. And this just the latest in a long line of them.<\/p>\n

Aunt Tilly had taken me in after my mother had died, suffered my stupidity until I was old enough to leave, then taken me back again when the state penal authority had had its fill of me. Her heart was a sponge full of love, which I\u2019d wrung dry and then stopped altogether.<\/p>\n

I stared in righteous disbelief.<\/p>\n

She lay on her back, her head propped up by the radiator and lolling to one side. Her arms stretched wide, palms up, as if to say, now<\/span> what?<\/em> Which, of course, was the first thing I wondered.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when the doorbell rang.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cTilly here?\u201d\u00a0 The man who asked had the sullen look of a dog denied its bone. He also had a cheap tin star pinned to the front of his hat and a sharp crease in his navy slacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is,\u201d I said, for once unable to lie. The one skill I\u2019d honed to a fare-thee-well deserted me in my hour of need.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I speak with her?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo?\u201d\u00a0 The deputy frowned. He didn\u2019t like me. I knew, because he\u2019d once gone out of his way to say so. \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s out,\u201d I said, clutching at straws and drawing the short one.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou said she was in.\u201d His frown deepened. \u201cWhich is it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOut like a light,\u201d I stammered, trying to shut myself up. \u201cDown for the count.\u201d\u00a0 Dead on her feet, and flat on her back. Halfway to heaven, and don\u2019t hold her back!<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d he drawled, stretching the word out so long I thought it\u2019d snap. \u201cTell her I\u2019ll come \u2018round again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I buried her that night, once I was sure he was gone, in a performance worthy of the comic greats. Uncle Floyd had once taught me how to run the old backhoe, but like all things worth remembering, I\u2019d forgotten.<\/p>\n

I had the bucket swinging and twisting, the backhoe rocking back and forth like an old lady at a Sunday tent revival, and all this in the dead of night with the moon nowhere to be found. Something fell over with a crash, but I was too scared to stop.<\/p>\n

When I figured the hole was deep enough–it was so dark, I honestly couldn\u2019t tell–I clambered down into the pit with Aunt Tilly in my arms, prepared to lay her to rest.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when it hit me, an ungodly stench that curled the hairs of my nostrils, a smell that convinced me I had stepped into a quagmire of shit.<\/p>\n

Which, it turned out, I had, a point driven home when I saw the splintered remains of the outhouse I had knocked over. The half moon cut into its door looked just like a smile, and I could\u2019ve sworn I heard God laughing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The phone rang off and on for the next couple of weeks, but I ignored it, for fear of whom it might be and what they might want. The deputy, with little else to do in the aching emptiness of our rural county, had taken up a vigil at the end of the long drive.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, doubt had seeped through the cracks in the foundation of my belief, which cast me as the innocent in this colossal foul-up. Had it really been an accident?\u00a0 Or a moment of pique?<\/p>\n

If truth be told–which some would say was not my strong suit–Aunt Tilly had grown increasingly strange over the past year. Forgetful at first, she\u2019d taken to carrying on whole conversations with herself, working both sides of an argument with ease.<\/p>\n

Creepy, too, when she\u2019d stare at me with that moony-eyed look and call me Floyd, like she had somehow confused me with the dead dirt-farmer she\u2019d married sixty years before. But I knew she\u2019d finally gone round the bend the night she tossed her nightgown over the bedpost and crawled in beside me.<\/p>\n

Call it what you like–Alzheimer\u2019s or hardening of the arteries–but I call it unnatural. And it came in a cloud of lavender, a smell that made me sick.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When the doorbell rang again, I knew it was trouble. Sure enough, I wasn\u2019t disappointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs Mom around?\u201d Annabelle asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s out back. In the outhouse,\u201d I said, my new-found propensity for the truth alive and well.<\/p>\n

She nodded, probably relieved she wouldn\u2019t have to deal with the old lady. \u201cI come for the ring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat ring?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one she asked me to sell. With the rubies and pearl.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew the one she meant. It hadn\u2019t left Tilly\u2019s finger in over thirty years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got a bidder on eBay.\u201d\u00a0 An annoyed looked crossed her face as I shuffled my feet nervously. \u201cIs there a problem?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNope,\u201d I said, looking over her shoulder at the deputy at the end of the drive. \u201cJust gotta dig it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

God must have thought it a howler, upping the ante and watching me sweat. I had to get that ring back, just to keep up appearances.<\/p>\n

The deputy packed it in early that night, his enthusiasm for the stakeout apparently having begun to fade. It was a chilly night anyway, and I imagined him headed home to a TV dinner and a rerun of Andy Griffith.<\/p>\n

But I waited until dark just in case.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When I crept out the back, it was to an eerie landscape of darkness and light, the waxing moon lost behind a tumbling scrim of clouds. With the old oak as my landmark, I made my way along until the silhouette of the backhoe emerged from the shadows, its arm and bucket like the trunk of a tuskless elephant. The machine had made short work of an unpleasant task on the night I\u2019d buried Tilly, even allowing me the luxury of rolling a boulder atop her grave.<\/p>\n

Well clear of the house, I flicked on my flashlight and crawled into the cab. Then I pulled down the visor to retrieve the key that Floyd had kept secured beneath a pair of rubber bands. But the night was cold and the rubber brittle. Both bands snapped in sequence, releasing the key to the force of gravity.<\/p>\n

I grabbed for it, but a piece of flying rubber caromed off my cheek just below my eye, and made me flinch. The falling key bounced off the heel of my palm, slipped between my fingers, and disappeared through the rusted lace of a hole where it took up residence in the cavity of the cab\u2019s floor.<\/p>\n

What were the chances that both rubber bands would let go at the same time?<\/p>\n

\u201cGimme a break!\u201d I screamed, a modern-day Job who\u2019d had enough. \u201cCut me some slack!\u201d<\/p>\n

As I levered myself out of the cab, a loose bit of bailing wire that Floyd had used to hold the contraption together snaked through the weave of my sock and sent me sprawling. I took a header past the edge of the tread and ended up stretched out on my back, just like ol\u2019 Tilly, my one bit of luck to find a shovel lurking in the dark within reach of my hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cHah!\u201d I screamed, waving the shovel at the veiled moon. \u201cI\u2019ll do it the old-fashioned way!\u201d\u00a0 I smacked the backhoe for good measure, retrieved the flashlight, and then turned my attention to the task at hand.<\/p>\n

The boulder presented a problem, preventing me from taking a direct route down from the top. So I went in from the side and tunneled beneath it at a long and steep angle, like it was The Great Escape<\/em> and me Richard Attenborough. My freedom lay at the end of that dark and gloomy hole, wrapped around Tilly\u2019s finger.<\/p>\n

At first, the dirt flew, as my anger and fear conspired in a frenzy of effort. But the deeper I went, the harder the earth was packed, a side effect of the days of rain we\u2019d had after I\u2019d planted Aunt Tilly. Then there were the roots . . .<\/p>\n

Picking a spot beside the old oak tree might not have been a good idea, I thought, fifteen days too late. The backhoe had shredded the root system, an agonizing offense to such an old and benign tree. But strangely, my route in from the side was threaded with them, as if they\u2019d already grown back. I hacked and stabbed my way through with the shovel, while the leaves of the tree rustled with near-silent suffering.<\/p>\n

Then I hit something that was neither rock nor dirt, something with a strange give to it. When I looked at the shovel\u2019s edge in the pale glow of the flashlight, I saw a dark smear of jellied blood.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d found her!<\/p>\n

The thought that I may have severed some part of her with the shovel\u2019s blade made me queasy. No sense in violating the old bat any further; I\u2019d take it more carefully from here on out. Retrieving a hand trowel from the barn, I got down on my belly and wormed my way head first to the bottom of the sloping tunnel I\u2019d dug.<\/p>\n

It was close down there, like an earthen birth canal, and it smelled like shit. Not surprising, since ragged bits of composted toilet paper marbled the sides of the tunnel. I wanted to make this quick, so I could refill the cesspool and put the whole sordid affair behind me. Working by the feeble glow of the flashlight, I carefully excavated what turned out, by a stroke of luck, to be the gray, fleshy flap of Tilly\u2019s arm, and worked my way toward her hand.<\/p>\n

It was quiet, the only sounds my labored breathing and the scrape of the trowel. From somewhere far off, I heard a distant rumble, as if a herd of horses had passed nearby. But my desire to see the job through led me to ignore it. I was close; I had uncovered her wrist.<\/p>\n

The first sign of trouble was a tickle of cold that worked its way into the tight funnel of my pant leg and up my thigh, where it soaked into the cotton crotch of my BVDs. It was water, pulsing down the slope of the tunnel in a thin stream.<\/p>\n

Oh, God!<\/em> I thought, then realized how right I was to accuse Him. He\u2019d conjured up a rainstorm, His way of pissing on me!<\/p>\n

\u201cDamn you!\u201d I screamed, anger fighting the fear.<\/p>\n

I dug faster, too close to my prize to leave, until the trickle turned into a torrent. When the flashlight winked out and left me in the dark, I knew it was time to go.<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, Tilly,\u201d I said, the remorse thick in my throat.<\/p>\n

I pushed against my dead aunt and the wall of earth that encased her, only to realize that the slope of the tunnel was too slick to traverse. With no friction, I was stuck. I had dug my own grave and would die beneath a mountain of shit.<\/p>\n

In the frenzy of fear that gripped me, I managed to turn over onto my back, while the level of the water slowly rose along the back of my neck. I cursed and I screamed, I bargained for a break, then I begged for God\u2019s mercy, only to hear a blistering crackle of thunder that sounded like laughter.<\/p>\n

As I wept, the scent of lavender slowly suffused the air in that tunnel, forcing out the stink of shit. But the smell brought no comfort, just a rising sense of horror–that this time, I\u2019d<\/em> climbed into bed with her<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Then I heard movement in the darkness behind me, from the end of the tunnel where Tilly lay–the sucking sound of something breaking free from wet earth. It plopped into the water like a fish trying to shake a lure, and ripples lapped against my skin. I clawed at the wet walls of the tunnel in panic and desperation until I felt my nails break and my fingers bleed, but to no avail.<\/p>\n

When something crawled onto my trembling shoulder to embrace me, I screamed for the water to take me away.<\/p>\n

But Tilly was there to console me.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Scott Brendel
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\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

[hana-code-insert name=’ArticleBlockOpen’ \/]<\/p>\n

Scott Brendel<\/a><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Scott Brendel<\/em> is the author of \u201cThe Seventh Green at Lost Lakes,\u201d which appeared in Read By Dawn, Volume 1<\/em>. Ramsey Campbell called the story \u201c\u2026satisfyingly grisly\u2026 the kind of fun in the sun Sam Raimi might have had in his less respectable days.\u201d He also wrote \u201cThe House Beneath Delgany Street\u201d, which appeared in Subtle Edens, an anthology nominated for a 2009 British Fantasy Award. \u201cAtaraxia\u201d appeared in an anthology entitled Day Terrors<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Scott lives along the Front Range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where he is at work on a novel.<\/p>\n

[hana-code-insert name=’ArticleBlockClose’ \/]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Scott Brendel
\n\"\"<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n
\n

I was in such a rush to bury her, I forgot about the ring.<\/p>\n

By the time I remembered, she\u2019d been in the ground over two weeks, out behind the barn beside the old oak tree, in a hole I\u2019d dug with a few swipes of the backhoe\u2019s bucket. Nothing fancy, nothing ornate–just a deep hole with her at the bottom. The practical kind of thing an old farm widow would appreciate.<\/p>\n

But I had forgotten the ring, an oversight that would come back to haunt me.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nFrom Issue 13 (Sept 2011)<\/span><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[226,178,111,115],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-horror","tag-issue-13","tag-scott-brendel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2000,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions\/2000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}