Belief
Dylan Charles
Alan stepped out of his car and stretched. The last five hours had been long and tedious, a drive up and over mountains through nowhere, where the only signs of civilization were rundown gas stations and bullet hole riddled “No Trespassing” signs nailed to trees. He’d gotten lost twice and had almost shot past and straight into Tennessee. But if Harry was right, it’d all be worth it. And from what Alan had seen so far, Belle Carne was everything that Harry had said it would be: an out-of-the-way town forgotten by the rest of the world.
He grabbed his bag from the passenger seat and grinned at the sleepy neighborhood around him.
Alan was here for one thing: the stories. Everyplace and everyone had stories to tell. Stories that went back and back and back through time, from ancestor to ancestor from continent to continent. Old World tales that became New World tales with a few tweaks and twists added on.
Alan collected these stories, listening patiently to old men and women in nursing homes as they spun the stories that their parents had told them. Alan preserved them for all eternity when otherwise these tales might vanish. Too much television, too many kids leaving small towns for big cities, too much global culture squashing local traditions.
It was a holy cause for Alan, saving stories from death by modernity. He captured them as they tumbled from the teller’s mouths, stripped them bare of accent and dialect and laid it all out as black words on sterile white pages. He approached it the way some people might approach saving the panda or the condor: by shooting them, stuffing them and sticking them on display in a museum.
He walked up the steps of the houses, the old wooden steps giving, just a little, underneath his weight. The house was big, but old, on its way out if no one bothered to fix it up. Paint coming off in chunks, screens on the windows hanging loose and frayed, like cobwebs. He ignored the ramshackleness of his new digs and knocked.
Within moments a woman opened the door, looking every bit as used up as the house she lived in. Faded hair, faded skin, faded dress, faded washed-out eyes, a pale, pale blue like breath on a cold morning. Eyes like a fog that clung low to the ground. Alan wondered about the woman behind those eyes and shoved the thought down deep. They stood and stared at each for long moments and Alan cleared his throat.
“Missus Lomax?”
She nodded, her expression remaining the same. He held out his hand and she took it, her own hand limp. “I’m Alan, we spoke on the phone.”
She nodded again, nothing more.
“Uhh, about the room?”
She sighed, “Come in,” and stepped back out of the way to let Alan in. Alan brushed by her, trying not to knock her over with his bag.
“Go up the stairs,” her voice barely a whisper.
The inside of the house matched the outside. Faded wallpaper, curling at the edges, as once-bright flowers marched their way up. Nothing was dirty, everything spotless, but everything so old and in a state of disrepair.
As Alan headed to the stairwell, he looked at a steady line of photographs that followed him toward the stairs and up. Old pictures from days when the camera was young, Missus Lomax’s family he assumed. He walked up through sepia, through black and white and half-way up, entered color.
He reached the top of the stairs and stopped, confused about which way to go.
“The first door on your left.”
Alan jumped a foot in the air and turned around. Missus Lomax had come up the stairs behind him without making a sound.
He walked down the hall to the left, his heart thudding like mad in his chest. He pushed open the door and stopped in shock. Rather than the dilapidated décor of the rest of the house, his room had a faint air of charm about it; matching furniture, made of dark, polished wood, the smell of clean laundry and a wealth of sunlight poured in through the window. He dropped his suitcase on the bed and turned to face Missus Lomax, managing to contain his surprise at her stealthy approach.
“How long do you think you’ll be in Belle Carne?”
“Not long, just a week at first, just to see what it’s like.”
There was a long pause where she just stared at him. Alan struggled to keep from looking away.
“What business do you have here?”
“I’m here to talk to folks about their stories of Belle Carne, try to get them down on paper. There’ve been a lot of changes in communities up and down the Appalachian mountains. People are moving away and just not telling those old stories anymore.”
Missus Lomax laughed, a dry sound, like the crackling of fire, “Mister, in Belle Carne, people stop telling because the old stories don’t deserve to be told. They’re better off gone and buried.”
Alan bristled. “You can’t possibly feel that way about your own heritage. We can’t lose these traditions.” He realized he was almost yelling and he struggled to keep calm.
Missus Lomax seemed unperturbed. “Mister, sometimes, it’s better to leave history forgotten. The past needs to stay where it is. There are bad things in Belle Carne’s past. Things folks would rather not think about. Or talk about. Bad things can be spread by words. Bad memories, bad feelings. And we’d rather you didn’t start em up again.”
She turned and left and Alan just stood there, flummoxed. Then a broad grin spread across his face: he had he found his first interview. He began to rummage through his suitcase for his equipment.
He came downstairs a little while later, the tape recorder in hand. Missus Lomax stood at a window, her back to him.
“Missus Lomax?”
She turned, saw the recorder and sighed.
“I’m going to tell you a story. A short one. And then I’ll let you go out and see the place where it all happened. I think that’ll end any interest you have in our town.”
Alan shrugged and set the tape recorder on the windowsill, between him and Missus Lomax.
“So this is a true story?” He said it with a small smile, the look of someone who has heard a thousand true stories and believes the veracity of none of them.
She saw the smile, recognized it for what it was and ignored it.
“Yes, it’s true and you’ll know it’s true when you hear it. This isn’t a Jack tale or some fairy tale brought over by my ancestors. This is history, pure and simple, part of the history of Belle Carne.”
Alan stood at attention, his mind ready to dissect and preserve.
“1879 was a bad year for Belle Carne, bad crops, bad rain, bad everything. People in this area, they didn’t know what to do, ‘cept pray. So they prayed and they prayed, and the weather got drier, the crops got dead and the town got flooded. A flood without rainfall is plenty enough to shake a man and it’s enough to break him if he’s already been shook.
“A group of folks, scared people who were scared out of their right minds, decided they were going to find a way to talk to God. So they went back up in the woods and built themselves a church with stone from the mountains. A heavy, blocky ugly thing. And they went back to the old ways of doing things.
“People whipping themselves into a bloody frenzy, starving themselves, depriving themselves of sleep. And other things…”
Alan watched her, his jaw a little slack, “Sacrifice?”
She laughed, the first burst of genuine laughter he had heard from her and he turned red, “Mister, this was America in the 19th century, not pagan godless Europe before Christ came. They wouldn’t have gotten very far sacrificing people left and right, no matter how bad times were.” She paused, “No, what they were doing was just as bad in a way. Sometimes, the worst things people do are the things they do to themselves.”
You go on out to the church. Take Mill Creek Road till it dead ends in a field. You’ll see a path at the end of that field. Follow the path and you’ll follow the church. You’ll find out what they did to themselves. You’ll find out what kind of God they made for themselves.”
Alan stared at her and turned off the recorder. He thought a moment about what he was going to say and then shrugged. “OK, I’ll check it out. But will you tell me more about the town if I do? If I’m still interested that is.”
She laughed again, that dry, crackling sound, “If you still want to listen, I’ve got more stories to tell.”
Alan felt a chill run down his back and he left the house with her laughter still burning away. Christ, what a nut.
He stood at the edge of the field, a wind beginning to pick up as night started to move in on Belle Carne. He was starting to rethink this. He could always just go back and say he’d gone to the church. There was no need to actually go through with all of this.
Unless she asked him what the church goers had done to themselves. He sighed and began the march into the woods. The things he did for the stories.
As the trees fell into line alongside him and the weeds grew thick around his feet, shins and finally knees, he realized he wanted to see the church. He wanted to see the site of the stories. Too many times, the few truly true stories he had heard had lost their place. The location was buried under a parking lot or strip mall or a river. The story was dead and gone, just a relic.
But now he had a tale with actual substance, a way to connect the story to reality. He could already see the cover to the book about Belle Carne. A picture of the church. If he could find it.
So he walked and the heat was pulled from him as the sun dropped behind the trees and the shadows grew in breadth and depth. The path, what little there was, narrowed to a knife’s edge and Alan pushed through the branches of the dense-packed trees. He was on the verge of giving up.
And then he was there.
Stones stacked on stones, nothing more than a block building, nothing to show it was a house of worship. Slate grey, it squatted among the trees, an obviously artificial thing in a natural world.
The windows resembled the arrow slits in medieval castles, small, narrow, and tall. A solid oak door, still in place after over a hundred years, looked more like it was meant to keep out intruders. Missus Lomax wasn’t kidding when she said they went back to the old ways.
Alan walked up to the building and pressed his hand against the rough-hewn stone. Cold, terribly cold. It didn’t look like a place to worship God, but a place to keep a god out.
He shoved on the door and it swung open easily. In the dwindling light, he could see the inside. Simple pews carved from stone, an altar, made of that same, dull stone. No decorations, no stained glass, no tapestries, no triptychs. Just the same slate grey. He stepped inside.
It was even colder inside. His feet made hollow sounds as he walked toward the altar.
He hoped to find a Bible, an ancient leather-bound volume, the pages cracked and yellowed, still turned to the last sermon, but there was nothing. Except…he bent down. Below where the priest would have stood, there was a trap door, oak like the door to the church itself.
He lifted it up, grabbing it by the rope handle and looked down into the dark. A ladder went straight down a single story.
He began the climb down, moving slowly and surely, uncertain of himself in the dark. His foot encountered stone and he hopped down turned and saw a third door by the dim light that drifted from above.
He opened it.
A long corridor lay in front of him and burning torches lit the way, set into the wall.
He began to walk down, wondering at who lit the fires, who kept them burning. It was warmer down here, fetid, a smell of dirt and stink and unwashed bodies. There was an opening to his left, eye level. A slit in the wall.
He peered through and stared into a cell. It was barren, save a tattered blanket and a corpse, kneeling in the corner. It looked like it was on its way to fully decaying.
Alan stared at the body. They had locked this person up. Left him in there to starve, to freeze, to die staring at dirt walls and stone floors.
He stepped back and saw a faint outline in the stone. He felt a numb shock. They hadn’t just locked this person up. They had walled him in. No chance to get out. No matter how much he begged. No matter how much he pleaded.
He kept going down the hallway. More slits. More corpses. All kneeling in the corner. It looked like their last acts had been to pray.
They were all at different stages of decay, some almost skeletal, some looking only a few years gone. Some women, some men. All looked gaunt and worn thin. All with long hair.
He had almost reached the end of the corridor. One more slit and then an open door.
He peered into the slit and saw two eyes staring back at him. He gasped and jerked backwards.
“I heard you! Heard you come down! Haha! First person I’ve seen in years! Decades!”
The man clapped inside his cell.
Alan went back to the slit, “How long have you been in here?”
“Long time, loooong time.” The eyes that stared back were mad eyes. The smell of rotten teeth and unbathed skin penetrated Alan’s nose, but he kept at the slit.
“What happened? Why are you here?”
“Haha! You don’t know? They put us here to pray. They read about that. In the old days. The anchorites. Men, women, came to be put in cells to pray. All day, all night, every day. Pray for the rains. Pray for the crops. All day long, we prayed. Locked in. They locked us in!”
“Against your will?!”
The eyes looked puzzled. “Nonono, we volunteered! It was an honor to pray. We prayed and prayed and prayed. Never stopped. NEVER. I’ve prayed here the longest. I’ve talked to God!”
Alan swallowed hard. A wind made the torches flicker and dance.
“How long have you been here?”
“1880! I was one of the first to go! When is now?”
“You can’t have…that’s…”
Something moved at the far end of the hall and Alan turned to see. Two bony hands reached through the slit and grabbed Alan by the collar.
“GOT HIM! GOT HIM! GOT HIM!” the man gibbered and screeched.
Alan tried to pull away but something rushed down the hall, snuffing the torches as it went. Alan tried to see, but the man jerked hard and Alan slammed his head against the cell wall and was out.
Alan woke up.
Groggy, disoriented he looked around. It was a small six by six room, with a tattered blanket in the corner. There was no door, just a slit in one wall.
Alan’s inside froze. He ran up to the slit and peered out. The torches had been relit and the shadows flickered and danced on the walls.
Across the hall from his, two mad eyes stared at him.
Alan fell to his knees and began to pray.
© 2011 deathheadgrin.com