We Hear Them, a Vintage Story Chronicle

[stensaxpapper]

Day 23

The walls have held.

For six nights now the things beyond the torchlight have come against us. Some crawl, some run, and some make sounds that no living throat ought to make. We have learned not to pursue them when they retreat. We have learned to keep the gates shut until sunrise.

It seemed, for a while, that we were winning.

This morning we found the first growth.

A red thing, half buried in the earth just beyond the inner wall. At first I took it for stone. By noon there were three more. By evening, seven.

They are not stone.

They have no roots that we can find, yet they seem to push themselves upward from the soil. Some are round and smooth. Others form in layers, like something folded tightly around itself. They are warm to the touch.

We tried digging beneath one.

We stopped.

Tonight more have appeared.

The strangest thing is that the creatures seem drawn to them - or perhaps driven from them. We found two dead beside the largest growth. There were no wounds that we could see. One still had its weapon in its hand.

No one remembers hearing a fight.

We have barred the gate again.

The monsters outside the fort no longer trouble me as much as they did.

[stensaxpapper]

Day 27

We have begun calling them blood pearls.

I dislike the name. It makes them sound precious.

This morning Petru Ionescu, our butcher, went to the slaughter shed to dress one of the pigs. He found the little red things where old blood had dried between the floorboards. Yesterday there had been nothing there.

Petru tried to scrape one loose with his knife. He says it was hard at first, but yielded when he pressed harder.

He did not try again.

There was also a sound beneath the floor. A faint buzzing, so low that he first thought it was flies. But when he put his ear to the boards, he said it came from somewhere below the earth.

There are stains on the walls now as well.

Petru says some resemble claw marks.

I think he is imagining things.

He butchered the pig anyway.

There was nothing visibly wrong with the animal, yet the meat was bad. Not rotten exactly. The colour was nearly right. The smell was nearly right.

Petru tasted none of it.

He only kept saying that the flesh felt wrong beneath the knife.

We burned the entire carcass after sundown.

The smoke was thick and unpleasant, and for a time the smell settled over the fort.

That was when the boars began growling.

Not squealing. Not calling for food.

Growling.

All of them stood together at the far end of their pen, facing the slaughter shed.

They continued until the fire went out.

[stensaxpapper]

Day 29

Petru is gone.

Yesterday morning he woke with a wound in the palm of his right hand. A small thing, he said. Perhaps a splinter from the slaughter shed.

But it would not stop bleeding.

By afternoon he had wrapped the hand twice. He complained of hard little lumps beneath the skin. When Ileana offered to cut the wound open and look, he became angry and would not let her touch him.

Last night the pain became worse.

Petru said he needed air. Then he said he was going out to the old mine pits, beyond the north gate. When we asked why, he looked confused.

He said he did not know.

He took a lantern and left.

He never returned.

We searched until dawn and again throughout the day. There were no tracks beyond the muddy ground near the gate. No torn clothing. No blood. Nothing.

Tonight the search party stumbled upon something ominous.

Four great shapes have risen from the earth north of the fort. They are made of the same blood-red stone as the growths, but these are taller than a man.

They look like fingers.

I wish someone had not said that.

Because once you see the fingers, you see the hand.

And in the centre of its palm is something that is not stone.

It looks like an open wound.

We did not touch it.

Petru is nowhere nearby.

But when everything is quiet, if you put your ear close to the red stone, you can hear the buzzing again.

It is louder here.

Almost like a hundred flies trapped behind a wall.

Except sometimes it stops.

And in the silence between the buzzing, something far beneath the ground can be heard moving.

Not footsteps. Too many of them. And much too fast.

[stensaxpapper]

Day 36

Nothing happened for six days. No new growths, no creatures at the walls, and no buzzing beneath the floors. Even the red hand beyond the north gate seemed to have gone quiet. Some had begun to say that whatever had come upon us was passing.

This morning, Anica killed the bees.

Anica has always tended them. She is a gentle girl, though sometimes a little slow to understand what is asked of her. The bees never troubled her. She would sit among the hives without gloves and speak to them while she worked, and somehow they seemed calmer around her than around any of us.

Today she began screaming at them.

At first we thought she had been stung, but then she took a spade to the first hive. When we tried to stop her she fought us with a strength none of us expected. She kept shouting that they had to be quiet, that they were too loud.

“They are inside my ears. They are making my ears bleed.”

She smashed the first hive, then the second, and then the bees came upon her all at once. By the time we reached her there was nothing we could do.

Something else happened which none of us can explain. Every broken comb was heavy with honey, yet almost none remained upon the ground. We watched it pour from the shattered hives in thick golden streams, seep between the stones and disappear into the earth as though the soil itself were drinking it.

We buried Anica before sunset. Tonight the fort is utterly silent. There are no bees anymore, only the occasional sound of someone crying behind a closed door.

But near the place where the hives stood, some of us can still hear something.

Very faintly, there is buzzing beneath the soil. It is not quite the sound the bees made. It is slower somehow, deeper, and sometimes it seems to come from several places at once.

And beneath it there is something else.

A dry little scratching, like hundreds of hard legs feeling their way along the underside of the earth.

[stensaxpapper]

Day 41

The temporal storm last night was the worst we have seen. For hours the fort seemed to move around us. The walls groaned, lamps burned strange colours, and once the north tower appeared much farther away than it could possibly be.

Dumitru, the old keeper of the gates, was on watch at the north gate. Shortly before midnight he told the other guards that he could hear something beneath the stones. They thought he meant the buzzing, but Dumitru said that was only what you heard first. Beneath it was a clicking, moving back and forth under the gate, like claws feeling along the underside of the floor.

Then he said, “There is a way down now.”

Before anyone could stop him, Dumitru took his lantern and iron bar and went outside. He never returned.

When the storm weakened near dawn, four guards went looking for him. They found no trace of Dumitru. Instead, just beyond the north gate, they found another gate; an iron lattice set into old brickwork where nothing had stood the day before. The ground around it was split open. Blood seeped from the little red pearls and disappeared into the cracks, while several of the larger growths had opened into wet, bleeding wounds.

There were no footprints leading through the gate, nor any leading away from it.

We barred the north gate before sunset. Tonight, if the wind is still, we can hear something beyond the new gate. At first it sounds like someone moaning very far below us. Then comes the buzzing, and beneath that the clicking of many hard little limbs.

Sometimes they stop separately.

Sometimes they all stop at once.

[stensaxpapper]

Day 42

There is something wrong with the people here.

They whisper when I pass. They stop speaking when I enter a room. Three more disappeared during the night, and still everyone pretends not to understand. They say the creatures took them. They say we must stay inside the walls.

There are no creatures.

I understand that now. The others have found another way out. They know where the missing people went and they are keeping it from me. Perhaps Dumitru knew too. Perhaps that is why he left.

The answer is behind the gate.

tk-tk-tk-tk

I packed food, a lantern, a pick and enough weapons for several days. I waited until the north watch changed and went through while no one was looking.

There is a great space beneath the gate. Far greater than should fit beneath the fort. Brick pillars hold a ceiling I cannot see the end of, though I do not think the pillars are holding anything. There are bones everywhere.

Things came for me in the dark. Long things. Dead things. Ghosts wearing bones. I killed them.

They are not real.

They are not real.

There is something else down here. I cannot see it, but the emptiness speaks around it. Sometimes it sounds very far away and sometimes it whispers from immediately behind me. It is one voice, then many, then one again.

bzzzzzz - tk tk tk tk - bzzzzzz

The buzzing is back.

I know now it was never beneath the fort.

It was showing me the way.

I can hear it farther down.

It wants me to come.

tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk

[stensaxpapper]

Day 44

There is a mouth in the earth.

Not a cave. Not a mine. A mouth.

I know the difference now.

The buzzing is everywhere here. In the stone. In my teeth. Behind my eyes. Sometimes there are words inside it, spoken by too many voices to understand, but I know what they mean.

down down down down

My hands have changed. The wound opened yesterday and the little red pearls have grown through the skin. I tried to cut one out. There was another beneath it. And another beneath that.

I think they are beautiful.

No. No, they are not.

There are stairs beside the maw.

I saw them clearly for a moment. Old stairs, cut by hands. Iron fittings in the walls. Rotten beams. Bones. So many bones. And marks scratched into the stone.

Names.

Dates.

People lived here before us.

tk tk tk tk tk tk

For one moment the buzzing stopped and I saw it below.

God.

It looked up at me.

Or I looked up at myself.

I cannot remember which.

There are legs where there should not be legs. Hands among them. Faces perhaps. Petru was there. Anica too. Dumitru opened his eyes when I called his name, though I do not think the thing that looked through them was Dumitru anymore.

They opened their mouths together.

I heard my own voice come out.

The stairs go deeper. The answer is below. It has always been below. Every wall we built, every gate we barred, every fire we lit --

we built them over it.

bzzzzzzzzzz

My feet hurt.

Too many joints.

It does not hurt anymore.

We remember this fort.

We remember other walls here. Other gates. Other names for the place. They always build above us eventually.

They always hear us eventually.

And when the stones grow red they always think something has come.

Nothing came.

We were already here.

I am going down now.

I am

we are

tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk

quiet

There are people above.

We can hear them walking.

[stensaxpapper]

I hope you liked my little Halloween fanfic.  / Sten