Spring Thaw - L.S. Engler

Content Note: Death and Gore

We were in those first early days of spring, when the world slowly warmed by the lazy heat of a pale sun, and the trees were budding with the yellow-green promise of things to come. It had been a little over a full year since the tragedy, and things were starting to finally settle into some semblance of how things used to be. In a place like this, it was easy to forget that anything had happened at all, if only for a little bit, until you emerged from the woods, back into the devastating reminders that filled every moment. She sat on a heavy slab of cement, which was slowly being overtaken by the nature around it, confirming its prominence and strength. Her legs were tucked up, chin resting on her knees, and she tilted her head as she looked at me. I was writing, pen scratching across the paper, the wind ruffling my hair. She didn’t hesitate to interrupt my flow.

“Duncan?”

“Yes?”

“What used to be here, anyway?”

I glanced over at her for a moment, as she brushed a long strand of red hair from her face. Then I glanced around at all the chunks of rubble and cement scattered around us. Formidable, they poked out of the green hill like industrial thorns, some looking too random to have been anything but dumped there, but others so particularly formed that they hinted at a previous life that seemed miles away from the pastoral landscape moving in around it.

“A building, probably.”

Her frown made it clear that this answer was dissatisfying. “You think so?” she asked, casting dark, doubtful eyes my way.

“Sure. I mean, look at that corner piece.”

“What kind of building?”

“Probably just storage.”

Her frown pulled down even more, petulance turning into annoyance, and I started to frown as well.

“What?”

“Storage?” Her voice was laced with contempt. “All the way out here?”

I shrugged. “Why not? What else could it be?”

“I don’t know!” She sighed, huffing out air, her small hands flying upwards before falling limply to her side. She stretched out her legs, leaning forward. “Something more interesting than that. This place…this spot. It feels too special and interesting to have just been some storage shed.”

“It’s too small to be anything else,” I pointed out, and had to ask, again, “What else could it be?”

“I don’t know!” she said again, meeting my repetition with some of her own. “You’re the writer! Make something up!”

Those words were spat out with so much flippant contempt that I had no choice but to be bound by them. Holding back a sigh, I stopped my pen and tucked it behind my ear; my notebook rested on my knees, and my arms rested on my notebook. I regarded her a moment before making up my mind.

“Guard towers,” I decided.

Her face was incredulous, but she laughed. “What?”

“Guard towers,” I said again with an assuring nod. “For the hospital. That’s why they’re so far out here. They mark the parameters of the grounds, and men would be stationed here to make sure none of the loonies or psychopaths escaped.”

It was incredible, the look on her face, and how she sat there, demanding tall tales, and then proceeded to believe every word of them. “Really?” she asked, looking up to where these imagined towers might reach. “Did so many of them escape that they needed to post guards and everything?”

I nodded again, solemnly, marveling at how brightly her gullibility lit up her face. It made the sun filtering through the trees even more atmospheric, as if dropping us into our own picture book. “Tons,” I informed her. “In fact, just down that way, you can see a spot where they had to fill in the mouth of a tunnel where they were known to escape through. Legend has it that they actually filled it in with people still inside. From that point on, nobody wanted the guard duty because all the strange things that started to happen, attributed to the restless souls of those trapped patients.”

Her eyes were wide and blue and fathomless. “Really?”

“No.”

Her hand went flying for my shoulder. The smack didn’t hurt at all, but I rubbed at it gingerly to appease her. She sulked, and I told her, simply, “You shouldn’t have asked.”

“Maybe it’s still true,” she maintained petulantly. “I mean, it’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I agreed easily enough, “but unlikely. If something like that had really happened, we’d have heard about it somewhere, you’d think.”

“Maybe it’s just been covered up really well.”

I was known for my cynicism, so my natural reaction was to argue with her, but the intrigue of a point like that halted my disagreement. I started to ponder the possibility. How hard would it be to create a cover for something like that, the story I had just made up right there on the spot? My brain supplied an avenue to investigate it deeper.

“Let’s check it out.”

“Check what out? There’s a tunnel? I thought you made that up.”

“I may have,” I admitted, “but I did base it on a real spot out here.” I started to gather my things, slipping my notebook into my bag and swing it over my shoulders as I stood. I offered my hand. “Come on. I’m tired of just sitting here, anyway.” 

I pulled her easily to her feet, and we began to walk again, down the wide trails and the narrowed trails both, intentional and unintentional meandering through the trees. They had idyllic names attached to them still, color-coded with wooden, ivy-laced sign pots. Cedar Cathedral, where the branched bent overhead in a natural tunnel. Old Orchard, where the hill sloped gently upwards and any hints of fruit-bearing trees had all together disappeared to make way for larger ones. Dagger Ridge, steep and littered with rocks. As we got closer to the old hospital grounds, the names grew increasingly clinical. Cistern Loop, twining around the big cement reservoir on the hill. Supply Line, with its two tracks dug out by trucks that had once rumbled over it. Even Bathhouse Lane, where the short, overgrown road once lead to where patients would bath in the small lake.

We skirted the wide, outside paths around the grounds, drifting along the base of one of the larger hills until we finally reached the place I had remembered. It was much farther back than I had recalled, but it was still marked by a particularly stout, thick tree, its branches twisting outwards around a flat, stump-like center. “The Portal Tree,” I told her, grinning as I wrapped my hand around one of the branches and dangled lightly from it.

“The what?”

“Portal Tree,” I repeated, then nodded toward the center, that flat platform of a stump from which all the branches seemed to radiate. “Look at that. Too perfect to be natural.”

“You mean someone made it like that?”

“Or something.”

“What?”

“Not natural, but maybe supernatural. You know I like to sit on rocks and branches and logs and things when I’m writing, but you’ll never catch me sitting there.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a Portal Tree. As in a portal to another dimension. Another world. Sit there too long, and the fairies will claim you and drag you into their nightmarish kingdom.”

She shook her head. “You are so full of it.”

“Am I? Fine, then. Let’s take a break. Why don’t you have a seat right here?”

Her hesitant pause was long and distressed. “I thought you were going to show me the tunnel,” she finally said.

“I am.” Grinning, I pointed to the hillside beyond the tree. Some of it was now reinforced by a barricade of round longs, to prevent erosion and landslides. In the vague frame of construction, with the right amount of imagination, it was easy to see how a certain spot could be the suggestion of the opening of a tunnel, filled in and grown over with grass over the years. “There. See it?”

She looked, her head tilting, spilling hair past her shoulders like a waterfall. I couldn’t see her face, but I could sense the moment of recognition in her body, filling me with a grim satisfaction. Then she started to move forward, just a little bit, before stopping with uncertainty and glancing back at me. “There?” she asked, waiting for me affirming nod before wading through the low ferns and long wispy grass to get even closer. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I followed, appreciating the sun in her hair and the way her cautious crouch provided me with an exceptional view of her backside.

She placed a hand lightly against a post, half embedded into the hillside, which could have been the suggestion of an entrance if you opened your imagination to the suggestion. More likely, it was just an unfinished part of the erosion project, one of many projects fallen to the wayside in the light of the events of the past years. “Here?” she asked. Her voice was quiet, awed. It was clear that her opinion of the faint little outline was the former rather than the latter. “Oh, wow. You didn’t make it up after all?”

“Maybe,” I said, lifting my eyebrows speculatively. I saw her take in a deep breath of anticipation, and I couldn’t keep up the farce anymore. I had to laugh, and she looked at me with irritation now replacing the wonder.

“What?” she demanded.

“Don’t you think,” I offered, “a secret tunnel would be a lot better hidden than this?”

She stared at me a moment as if caught in a headlight, then let out a frustrated little sound. She’d have hit me, I’m sure, if I was close enough, but since I wasn’t, I was able to laugh, unmolested.

“You are making all of this up, aren’t you?” she accused.

“Yeah, I guess.” She fell into sulking again, her lips drawn down into a pout. I wanted to kiss them, lightly, in apology, wrap my arms around her and kiss her some more. When I reached out for her, though, her attention was already diverted elsewhere, and she moved, slipping right out of my grasp. She was heading to the left, toward a patch of thick brush, long grass mingling with tall, overgrown brambles.

“But,” she said, cautiously, carefully, “it’s still entirely possible, isn’t it? I mean, why not? You’d just have to look for it a little more than that.”

There was something strange in her voice that made me eye her curiously. “What do you mean?”

She was already moving, though, ducking low as she gently pushed aside the waxy, thorny twists of underbrush. I went after her, wondering as the thorns caught my skin, how she’d managed to avoid being pricked. She wasn’t the type to keep quiet about little painful nuisances like that. She was leading me along the base of the hill, where the trees thickened and it started to take a real effort to continue. “Hold on,” I pleased. “It’s too dense.”

She wasn’t listening, though. She seemed able to move with surprising ease despite the obstacles with which I was struggling. I was breathless, feeling as though every inch of exposed skin was scratched to shreds by the time I caught up with her. The brambles broke into a small hollow, like a cave, and her grin was as bright as the slanting shaft of sunlight breaking through the foliage.

“Look,” she said, and pointed.

I followed her finger to a small indentation there in the near vertical side of this part of the hill. About as tall as my thighs, it did look like a little archway, packed with dirty, framed by creeping ivy.

I could only stare. “How did you…?”

She met my surprise with a chuckle and a shrug. “Intuition, I guess. You said it would have to be better hidden than that other one, so I just got the urge…I mean, look at it! That’s got to be it. What else could it be?”

“Hobbit hole?”

“What’s that?”

Sometimes I wondered how we were even together. It’s interesting, how survival can lead the most unlikely people to each other. “I swear, I made that tunnel story up,” I told her.

“Or maybe you really heard it somewhere and forgot.”

I wasn’t exactly convinced, but she was moving again, crouching down in front of her discovery. “How deep do you think the blockage goes?” she asked, her fingers tracing lines in the black dirt.

“Probably pretty deep if the story’s true, and they buried people,” I offered, before I could stop myself. The whole thing was ridiculous, a mere coincidence, but I could never stop pushing her buttons.

“Maybe they weren’t buried,” she mused. “Just blocked in.”

My frown deepened as she started to dig into the dirt, her fingernails already darkening. An uneasy feeling started to creep over me, and her digging became more dedicated. I wanted her to stop; I was uncomfortable, and I could just tell that something was wrong. “Even if they weren’t buried,” I found a pleading tone in my voice, “the dirt’s not going to be shallow enough that you can just dig through it. If it was, they would have dug out themselves.”

That caused her to pause for a moment, and a silence settled, so much so that even the birds seemed to cease their chirping. I may have imagined it, though, taken by the tension that tightened my entire body.

“Erosion,” she finally said.

“What?”

“Erosion,” she repeated. “Maybe some of it’s been washed away. It’s been nearly a century since the hospital was operating, right? That’s a lot of rain. And you saw the barriers they started putting up. Obviously, there’s an erosion problem here, so maybe erosion has taken away some of the dirt.”

“I’m not sure that’s really how it works,” I informed her, tempted to hold my stomach for all the butterflies and flip-fops it was deciding to perform. She wasn’t listening, either, digging her hands in deeper. Soil coated them to her wrists, black like gloves, and she wiped them futilely on her jeans. And then back to digging again, deeper and deeper.

“Come on,” I goaded, “it’s a goddamn hill. You could dig forever and not get anywhere.”

“Just a little more,” she said. “If it still goes nowhere, I’ll stop.”

“If you’re going to do this, we should at least get a shovel.”

“Just a little bit more!”

I realized just then that her progress had been pretty astounding. She’d managed to hollow out most of the frame, her head dipping into the round hole she’d dug. When she pulled out of the little enclave she’d created, she swiped the back of her hand across her sweating forehead, leaving a dark smear. She grinned at me, and my disquiet pitched into overdrive, striking me hard like a punch to the gut. This was a girl who complained for a week if she got a mascara smudge on her collar, and here she was, smearing soil on her face, messing up her knock-off designer jeans, and grinning about it. She seemed to be enjoying digging into the hillside with her nails like a wild creature tearing out the bowels of its prey.

“Stop,” I said. “I think we should head back.”

“Just a moment! Just a little further.”

“You aren’t going to get anywhere!”

“At least let me try!”

“I made that story up!”

“But the archway…!”

“It’s probably just an old fox hole. Come on!”

“A little more!”

“It doesn’t go anywhere. You’ll be digging forever!”

“Not if you help!”

“I’m not helping.”

A frustrated whine wiggled out of her. “Come on! Fine. How about this? You help me for just a few minutes, and if it still doesn’t go anywhere, we’ll stop, okay?”

So I started to help, if it meant that this farce would shortly be over. I couldn’t help marveling at how the damp dirt just seemed to fall away at my fingertips, no matter how deep we got. We could almost fit our torsos entirely into the little cave she’d created, mounds of displaced dirt heaping at our knees. Inside, it was cool and quiet, the scent of earth and decay surrounding us like a pleasant embrace. It was like being in the womb of the world. I started to understand why she was so eager; I could feel it now, too, as I reached out and squeezed my fingers around the clumps of moist dirt, pulling them away with wispy roots and the occasional earth worm.

Then I reached out and my fingers found not the soft resistance of the soil, but the emptiness of the air behind it.

“Oh my God.”

She must have discovered the same thing, too, because she let out a triumphant laugh. “I told you! I told you! It’s the tunnel! Your story was right!”

Incessantly, we dug even harder than before, eager to tear back what little else remained as quickly as possible, until we found our way through. It struck me hard just how far we had dug; both of us had to crawl a little to get into the opening space ahead, an impossible distance for how long it felt like we’d been digging. But, no. The shadows outside had elongated, slanting differently, to suggest that it had been hours since we started digging. A deep exhaustion took over me, but she seemed energized by the discovery. She wriggled through the opening, straightening up in the taller inner tunnel beyond.

She looked around in astonishment, though it was too dark to see much. “Wow.”

Damp, dark, dirty. The rush of digging subsiding, all I wanted was a shower.

“It’s a surprise it hasn’t caved in at all,” I noted, placing a hand on the side of the tunnel. It was definitely dirt, but hard as rocks, a complete contrast to the soft soil we’d come through.

“It’s incredible! Do you think it really goes all the way to the hospital?”

“There’s no way it’s all still intact.”

“We could find out!”

“No.” Reaching out, I stopped her from moving further into the darkness. I pulled her in, though she struggled against my hold. “Are you crazy?”

“But I want to see!”

“It’s too dark to see!” I hissed in her ear. “And too dangerous. Any sort of animal could be living down here, and this tunnel probably hadn’t been used in years.”

As I said the words, something twisted hard in my stomach. I didn’t like it, and I wanted nothing more than to just get out of there. I tugged her arm again, starting to head toward the hole we had dug. “Come on. It’s not safe down here. We should go”

It was only once I finished talking, in the pause before she could wrangle up a response, that I heard it. She must have heard it, too, her body stiffening next to me and her shoulder brushing mine in the effort to get closer. It was the sound of something dragging wetly, like a mop, across the dirt floor, followed by a slow, low moaning.

It was a sound we’d both heard before, little more than a year ago. A sound we both thought we’d never hear again.

She whispered my name, whimpering, reaching for my hand. In what little light we had from the hole, I could see that her eyes were wide, gleaming like she was about to start crying.

“Shhh.” I swallowed hard as another soft moan seemed to rise up from the walls of the tunnel. “It’s okay. We’ll just move slowly, back to the entrance, crawl back out.”

“They’ll see us!”

“No, they won’t. Not if we’re slow and careful and silent.” I tried to nudge her behind me. “Go first.”

“They’ll hear us!” she hissed, the harshness of it making me wince. I struggled ot keep my own voice low and quiet and calm.

“No, they won’t. We just have to be careful…”

“We’ll never make it out in time!”

“Yes, we will.”

“I thought they all died!”

Her voice had reached a pitch that made me sure that this was the end. The shuffling sound stopped; they were orientating themselves, readjusting their focus. I heard another low groan and realized that it came from me that time.

She was in hysterics. “They all died! They all stopped! They couldn’t survive the winters! Why, God, why…”

“Spring thaw,” I realized, despondency freezing me in place. “The spring thaw, and they were still down here, after all these years.”

Her scream pulled me out of my head, loud and terrified in my ear, and I felt the cold, slimy brush of decaying flesh against my arm. “No!” I shouted, snapping back into the terrible reality around us. I pulled back my fist and shot it forward, the knuckles connecting with something soft and hard all at once. My other hand reached for her. I wrenched her arm away from a cold grip. She was still screaming bloody murder, drawing more of them toward us, and I all but shoved her into the tunnel’s opening. “Go!”

“We’ll never make it!” she cried.

“Not if you don’t go!”

“They’re all supposed to be dead!” Her wail was so desperate that despair almost rendered me motionless again. That terrified sob held all the memories of when they first showed up, before the winter froze them and we thought we’d gotten rid of them for good. But we hadn’t. And that’s what kept me going.

“God damn it, go!” I gave her a push so strong she could do little more than cry out as if injured, as if I was doing something worse to her than what they might do. She crawled awkwardly forward, and I kept pushing, freeing enough room for me to start crawling up behind her. I kept pushing, pushing, pushing. She sobbed in contempt, in terror, but she kept moving. Every time something moaned behind us, she’d almost buckle again. But we had to keep pushing.

Just as I could see the end of the tunnel, the light breaking around her form, I felt a tug, surprisingly strong, on my leg. It was strong enough that I fell, chest and face smashing into the dirt. It pulled again, sharper this time. I dug my fingernails into the ground, clinging with conviction. But they were so strong. I gnashed my teeth together, straining against their hungry, dogged pulls.

She was out of the hole now, shouting my name, but, realizing my struggle, she came back to try and pull me out with her. Her fingers had only just barely brushed mine before a firm pull rendered me out of her reach.

“No!” I told her quickly. “Leave me! Get yourself out! Go warn everyone that they’re still here!”

“No.” Her face was a mask of tears, her voice a terrified, shaking tremble. “I can’t leave you.”

She tried to reach for me again. The moans behind me grew, and I felt more hands at my ankles. Futilely, I kicked.

“Damn it!” I growled. “Go! You’re not stronger than them! They’ll just get us both!”

“I can’t!”

“God damn it!”

Kicking seemed to dislodge them, but only temporarily. She hovered at the entrance, blubbering and shuddering with indecision.

“This is all my fault!” she moaned.

“Get out of here!”

It was all her fault; I couldn’t deny that. If she hadn’t insisted on digging, I wouldn’t be here, under the earth, clinging to dirty for my life. But we were here, and there was only one thing we could do about it.

“God damn it,” I growled again, “they’ll kill us both if you don’t move your stupid ass and get out of her!”

Another yank from behind. I moved back another few inches before I was able to stop myself. A low moan left me as I felt their teeth starting to nibble at my calf. Weakness overwhelmed me; my vision was starting to sway, and all the words in my repertoire abandoned me, leaving only pained howls.

It’s difficult to remember much after that. There was a sharp scream, but I think it came from somewhere inside myself, not from her. I was pulled back again, roughly and completely. She was receding from my vision, finally, and though I told her to go, I found myself reaching out for her desperately. The darkness surrounded me as did the sounds of all their horrible moaning, their clammy hands pawed all over my body. So many hands, cold and damp and dirty, reaching and clawing and grabbing, ripping my shirt, rending my flesh. Warm, wet mouths with sharp teeth sank into my sides, my legs, my shoulder, sucking all my blood and sinew. I felt lighthearted. I could hear myself crying, even over the sounds of their grateful murmurs and ceaseless gnawing.

Then they stopped.

Everything stopped.

All I can remember now is how I got here, my insatiable hunger and, how, in the first early days of spring, when the world slowly warmed by the lazy heat of a pale sun and the trees were budding with the yellow-green promise of things to come, we’ll slowly warm and live again.

Originally published by Ghostlight, Winter 2016

L.S. Engler writes from outside of Chicago, though she grew up weaving words in the woods of Michigan. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Bards and Sages Quarterly, Cardinal Sins, the Molotov Cocktail, and the Saturday Evening Post. She tends to enjoy all things nerdy, usually a little too much.