Well

Living on his uncle's farm at the turn of the century, a young boy begins to suspect that something nameless dwells under the surface.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of physical spousal and child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.***

Thank you for listening! If you have any feedback or inquiries regarding the show, please feel free to drop me a line at darkerpasturespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Family is a funny thing. Often, we speak of it as the wellspring of society, the source of all good things. And in the best of cases, that is true: family can offer love, support, guidance, and security, help provide for the most basic of human needs while building the foundation of our highest accomplishments. But families can also harbor darkness, shelter and feed monstrosities, propagate them down through the ages. And when such terrible things are allowed to grow and proliferate too long, never brought into the cleansing light of day, but protected and nourished until they have spread like a toxic aquifer, they can permeate the very bedrock of society.

You can find such poisoned wells everywhere, not only in these darker pastures…

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Seven: Well.

(Sounds of prairie storm)

NARRATOR

Calum stumbles upon the rough wagon trail that cuts through the open Kansas prairie. The rain falls heavily, soaking through his aged and worn clothes, and the thunder mutters angrily in the sky. The heavy clouds obscure the sun totally, blanketing the world in unrelenting twilight, and he isn’t sure whether he’s been walking for only a few hours or the entire afternoon.

He knows he’s tired, though. Not once did he drift off during the long night, expecting at any moment to hear his father rise from the bed where he had lain throughout the day. His blue eyes were full of deadly wrath and simmering resentment, even under the glassiness of death. Calum understands death, has understood it since his perpetually bruised and ailing mother passed almost two years prior. But the one thing that has always seemed more certain and more terrifying than death is his father, and it took a full day to assure Calum that the man was truly gone, never to return.

So when morning came and his father lay, unmoving but changed by the early stages of decay, Calum knew that something must be done. He dug a shallow grave behind the barn, far from where his mother rests, hoping the distance will preserve the peaceful repose she never found in life. Digging in the dry, root-tangled soil was long and difficult, and it took all his strength to drag the body, lean and malnourished as it was, from the little sod house to the hole. It made horrible noises as Calum shifted it, and twice he had to stop and retch over the grass.

When he finally replaced the dry soil over his father and placed a crude marker, it was past noon. He tended to the milk cow, the horses, and the chickens as quickly as he could, then set off toward the wagon road on a course he hardly knows, has rarely traveled in all of his eleven years.

And now, with the sky darkening further in what Calum is increasingly sure is the oncoming of night, he wanders still in the direction where he thinks his uncle Rory’s homestead lies.

The wind, though not especially cold, chills him in his soaked clothes. His face and shoulders are growing numb, and at times he stumbles as he walks, falling once in the mud and grass, scraping his palms.

Then, he tops a low hill, and sees the farmstead, spread upon the silent grassy flats like the osseous remnants of a scavenger’s meal.

He lets out a breath, half laugh and half sob, in his mingled relief and desperation. The mud of the wheel-carven path sucks greedily at his ankles, spilling in through the holes in his ill-fitting shoes and staining the hand-knitted socks beneath, the last pair his mother had ever made for him.

He passes the north field, lined by stubborn chokecherries, passes under the twin bur oaks that shade the house which is so unlike the one in which Calum was reared. It is built from real lumber, though it is an older house, constructed around 1872 when Calum’s grandfather brought his family from Illinois out into the lonely, still mostly unpeopled prairie of western Kansas.

Rory stands in the open doorway, smoking a black pipe after dinner, just as Calum’s father once did with his hand-rolled cigarettes. Rory’s body is stockier than his older brother’s, his face broader, but the difference between the two men runs deeper. The uncle’s eyes are the same shade of blue, but their cast is kindly rather than hard, the folds and crinkles in his sun-browned face from smiling as much as from exposure to the elements.

Seeing him, Rory withdraws his pipe from his mouth and calls out his name, as much a question as a statement. His brows rise in confusion and concern, and he asks how Calum came to be there.

Calum stumbles in the hoof-churned yard, falling and burying both hands and knees in the clay mud. Rory stows his pipe once more between his clenched teeth, strides out to pick the boy up and carry him into the house. He smells of tarry tobacco smoke, of old but well-laundered linen, of sunbaked earth and grass-sweetened wind.

Calum tries not to cry in his arms, but the exhaustion and loss in him are overpowering, inevitable. He stifles his weeping as best he may.

His aunt Lena turns from the wood-burning stove as they enter, both man and boy dripping mud-laced rainwater. Her eyes widen when she sees her husband’s burden, and with a very mild-mannered oath she motions for Rory to sit the boy at a stool near the stove. She asks Rory to fetch some water for a bath, and he nods and leaves the house. She helps Calum out of his wet clothes, retrieves dry replacements from another room. They fit Calum poorly, but are overlarge rather than outgrown like the wet discarded ones, a welcome change. He wonders where they came from until he remembers his mother once mentioning that Rory had a son who died in some terrible accident.

Suddenly he feels uncomfortable in the new clothes, which have the drily musty smell of long disuse. Still, he makes no protest, warming himself by the fire while Lena prepares a modest meal of home-baked bread, cheese, and preserved fruit, and heats the water for his bath.

After he has bathed, eaten, and warmed himself, Rory sits beside him at the rough-hewn kitchen table. He blows a cloud of bluish smoke toward the ceiling, through which the drumming of the slow, hard rain can be heard. The sound makes Calum think of a thousand falling songbird carcasses.

Finally, Rory breaks the silence, and asks Calum where his father is. The boy wants to answer, but finds he cannot summon forth the words. As he looks into his uncle’s eyes, he falls back through time, into that last horridly still gaze into his father’s eyes.

At last, he croaks that his father is dead, his voice so low and broken that he fears his uncle will not hear him. But the way that Rory’s face loses its usual vital hue, seems somehow to contract in upon itself, leaves no doubt that he has.

After a long moment, Rory nods. He sits a little longer, until his pipe burns out, then he rises and walks out of the house.

Lena, her voice soft and soothing, leads him upstairs to a small bedroom, one which smells dusty and which he guesses also belonged to the dead cousin he never knew. He settles into the freshly made bed, and Lena sits beside him, tells him that he is safe and welcome here, that they will take care of him.

Then she leaves, taking the candlelight with her. His skin warm and pleasantly pink from the bath, Calum buries his face into the pillow and weeps again, this time from joy rather than exhaustion and uncertainty. He does not know when his swirling thoughts give way to dreams.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

In the morning, over a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, porridge and bread, Rory asks him about the body. Calum explains that he buried his father before he left, and Rory nods solemnly, but says that they should return, to say a prayer over the grave and to collect the livestock.

Calum nods, though inwardly he dreads the thought of revisiting that dismal little soddy. 

After they have eaten, Calum helps his uncle finish the morning chores and prepare the battered buckboard wagon, harnessing the draft horses and loading a few large chicken crates into the bed. The three of them climb into the bench seat, with Calum in the middle, and the wagon bounces as they roll over the same wagon trail he walked the day before.

As they ride, Calum tries to remember the dream that held him in the last moments of sleep. The night tendrils of the fading recollection lash at the edges of his mind, subtle but insistent, and he feels certain there is some dark mystery there that requires solution. All that come to him, though, are vague and fading visual impressions, and a sense of impending, inevitable horror.

So his thoughts are bleak as the boards of the wagon clatter, as the horses’ hooves cut across the unyielding earth and through the secretive grass. There is no sign of the rain that fell in the night; the land has drunk it all and looks parched once more. The sky is a cloudless, harsh blue that tends toward grey, the sunlight stark and unkind.

It is noon when they reach the dour little soddy, and Calum thinks that it looks like some crouching beast, waiting hungrily for its next wicked meal. A rooster crows its dominion from the shade of the decrepit coop as they pull into the yard, and, as if in answer, the horses and the milk cow give voice to their hunger.

The three of them tend to the animals’ more immediate needs, then they stand over the crude grave that Calum dug. Calum expects his uncle to say that the grave is insufficient, that they will have to rebury the dead man, but he says nothing of the sort. Instead, he produces a hefty leatherbound Bible and reads a few words from it, then says his own somber prayer while Lena and Calum bow their heads. Calum doesn’t really understand the words, but the impression they leave on his mind is joyless and unpleasant.

He is glad when they tether the milk cow and horses, when they put the chickens into the crates, and leave his erstwhile home as a fading darkness on the horizon behind them.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

The work on Rory’s farm is much the same as it was on his father’s, but the evenings seem warmer, the house lighter. Rory does not drink or even raise his voice often, and Lena never sports new bruises or pains for which she has to concoct fragile explanations.

For the first time in his life, the constant shadow of his father’s anger, of his hard and heavy hands, fades from Calum’s mind, and the hard work he shares with his uncle, though far too much for only two pairs of hands, nevertheless seems pleasant under the bright sun.

Then comes the day when his uncle shows him the old well.

It is a weathered thing, hand-dug, mouthed and lined crudely with pale granite pulled directly from the fields. The mouth is sealed with a heavy cap, a slab cut thickly from the stump of an ancient bur oak, and cleverly carved so that it grips the lip of the well snugly.

Rory tells him that the well is dry, that the windmill pump provides all the water they need, and that there is no reason to ever lift the seal. He repeats the last part with ponderous emphasis, and adds that he lost his Malcolm to the well. He doesn’t elaborate, but Calum nods and says he’ll leave the well alone.

Rory looks at him long and hard, and he looks so like Calum’s father that the boy almost shies away from him. Then Rory nods, and the darkness withdraws from his brow. They set about the day’s work, Rory’s usual good humor returning, and Calum almost forgets about the strangeness of that earlier moment. But when evening comes and they quit the day’s work, Calum’s eye drifts once more to the old well. He wonders what exactly happened to Malcolm, if he fell in and drowned, if his body is still down there somewhere. A thrill of mingled dread and fascination flows through him.

Then he grows conscious of Rory’s gaze, and he looks away. Fumbling for a question to distract Rory, he asks what his grandfather was like. Rory stops in his tracks, and when Calum looks back at him, he is standing very still, staring blankly into the growing gloom.

All he says is that his father was a very hard man, that he and Calum’s father did not get along well, and that it was a mercy for both boys when their father died before the age of fifty. 

Calum falls silent. He wonders if the memory of his grandfather is what kept his father far away from Rory’s farm throughout Calum’s life, if it was what drove him into the bottle and made his hands so ready to fly into a rage. Even as he thinks these things, the image of that well, dark under the twilit trees, lingers in his mind.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

Autumn comes, and then winter. The fields are left to sleep, the milk cow and pigs brought into the barn where the cold, wet winds will not sicken them. Snow falls and lies heavy upon the land. The days shorten, the nights grow long and dark and biting.

They play cards in the evenings, after supper, and sometimes Rory brings out an old, battered chess set and tries to teach Calum the game. Calum finds it very difficult, but Rory is gentle and patient.

Sometimes, as Calum lies trying to fall asleep, he can hear the cold wind wailing through the bare chokecherries that grow at the field’s edge, and thinks that it is a voice calling to him. On such nights, sleep comes slowly.

When the snows thaw and winter begins its retreat, he finds that the windy voice still haunts the dark.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

Calum dreams he is running down a long, dark corridor, from something that at first is his father but then becomes something else, something large and vague and which he does not try to remember more fully when he wakes.

He lies alertly in the little room that still feels like it belongs to someone else, listening to that familiar wind that seems to howl his name. Looking out the window, he realizes that there is no sign of wind, no stirring in the grass or the trees or in the distant chokecherry thicket.

A white-hot scream knifes through his brain, his vision flashing bright as a lightning strike, and he sits upright in his bed. His hands shake and his heart hurts in his chest. He looks around the darkened room for a few moments, dazed, but the night is still. There is no sound of movement, no murmur of wakened voices, from the room next door where Lena and Rory sleep.

Calum sits, waiting for something more to happen. Nothing comes. He settles back onto his bed, certain he will not be able to sleep again, and falling asleep almost at once.

Now he dreams he is standing beside the well. And when he looks at the heavy wooden seal, it begins to rattle and quake upon the old pale stones.

Something that is not water whispers liquidly beneath.

Ready for the harvest. Come, come, to the harvest with me. Come.

At the last word, the searing whiteness shoots through his eyes again, and he wakes in agony, feeling like red, glowing needles are snaking through his veins. He screams, and when his aunt and uncle come and ask him what is wrong, he cannot speak.

Lena murmurs that it was only a nightmare and that there is nothing to fear, sitting at his bedside and stroking his hair. Rory scratches at his beard, mutters something about coddling boys, and goes back to bed.

Calum is grateful for Lena’s presence, but he knows she is wrong. Nightmares are not new to him; this was something more. The question of what it may be spirals blackly behind his eyes.

When she finally recedes from his room, the door closing with soft finality behind her, he lies knowing that sleep will not return, and this time he is right. A storm blows up from the south, thunderous and heavy, and in the long hours before dawn he turns onto his side and listens to the water beating insistently upon the eaves and the windowpanes. And underneath it, he is certain he still hears that same wet susurrus he heard in his dream.

Come, come, come to the harvest.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

The rain lasts all the next day, keeping Rory and Calum from the spring planting, so instead they spend the day tending the animals, mending leaks in the barn and the house, and seeing to the myriad other little tasks that perpetually accumulate on a small farm—particularly one so short-handed.

A hundred times throughout the day, Calum almost asks about the well, but he never quite musters the courage. He is not sure what question to pose, exactly, and knows Rory will not be pleased at his broaching the subject.

So, instead, he works in silence, and after supper and a single, dismal defeat on the chessboard, he goes to bed and lies in the dark, thinking.

He dreads the thought that the dream might return, but some perverse corner of his mind also hopes it might, calls to it with a morbid yearning.

And there is an answer, when sleep takes him.

Once more, he stands before the well, and the cap begins to shudder. Now it shifts, revealing a hand’s breadth of impenetrable shadow. The watery voice rises from the stale, stone-lined depths.

The fruit hangs heavy on the bough.

There is the sound of movement from below, a squelching, sucking noise, then a soft and moist slithering over the rocks. Calum wants to turn and run, but his body will not obey him; it feels like he is sunk into deep mud, into plaster. He stands and watches helplessly as the slab of oak shifts upward with agonizing slowness.

Come to me.

He feels some other will enter his body, feels control of his limbs wrenched from him, feels his legs carry him forward against every impulse of his own mind.

He wakes silently, his body paralyzed as he stares upward at the black ceiling. Even breathing comes difficult to him, for he dreads what lurks in the wide, unknowable darkness, what waits and calls for him.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

Calum does not hear his uncle ask him what’s wrong until Rory repeats the question a third time. Then the boy looks up, blinking blearily, and mumbles that he didn’t sleep well. Rory grins mischievously and says that Calum must not be getting enough work in, that he’ll have to think of more tasks for the boy.

Calum does not smile at this teasing, but his uncle does not seem to notice. The boy shakes his head, trying to clear away the fog in his skull, and finishes harnessing the two draft horses, Warbler and Nettle, to the disc harrow.

Rory seats himself upon the harrow, urges the horses forward, and moves out onto the field to turn the soil. Calum watches for a moment, then moves to take care of the animals, a task that has been left to him while his uncle works the fields.

Again and again through the day’s chores, his mind drifts, and he sees once more the well as it had appeared in his dream, sees once more the lid creeping upward.

By the time that the sun is setting, Calum feels almost too tired and too muddled to eat his supper, longing only for his bed. He wolfs down his food, seeking only to be done with the necessity of filling his belly, and then asks to be excused for the night. His aunt and uncle are surprised, but they acquiesce.

As he lies in the dark room, he buries his head under the covers despite the spring warmth, hoping that it will drown out the whispers that worm up the walls and through the minute cracks of the window.

Sleep takes him soon, but the dreams come again, and he wakes sweating.

For a moment, he pants in the night, wiping away the clammy moisture upon his brow. Then he rises, and carefully opens his bedroom door. The house is dark, his aunt and uncle snore softly in their room. His father taught him how to move stealthily, when they hunted rabbits, deer, and turkey around the creek, and he puts all this experience to use as he sneaks through the house, dons his worn and dirt-caked shoes. At the door he hesitates, then takes the lantern from its hook beside the door. Fetching the matches from the cabinet, he raises the globe and carefully lights the lantern, taking great care to put the matches back in place.

Then he slips quietly through the door and into the still night, holding the lantern aloft and trying to angle his body so that the light will be obscured, should his guardians wake in the night and look out their bedroom window.

He walks toward the well. Every step feels equally wrong and inevitable, a conscious mistake he cannot avoid. And no matter how much he tells himself it is only his imagination, each reluctant stride starkens the moldy murmurs in his ear.

Beside the well, he stops, gazes at the oaken lid. Setting down the lantern on a relatively bare patch of earth, he lays his hands upon the roughly hewn wood. He is certain it is too heavy for him to lift, but the months of work and of adequate nourishment have strengthened his body more than he knows, and he shifts it up and then off of the well. Its hits the earth with a dull, heavy thud, and rests leaning against the stone wall and the drily rotting timbers of the defunct pulley.

Calum hesitates, listening. His heart races unsteadily in his chest, and he feels ill, on the verge of vomiting. The night air is cool, but his skin is clammy and he shivers.

Picking up the lantern, he leans over the wall. Keeping a firm grip upon the handle, he lowers the lantern down into the well as far as his arm will reach. Down at the very edge of the light, there is the hint of movement. Calum stares, and slowly his adjusting eyes perceive more. There is something slick down there, opening radially, like an unfolding flower, like a cow’s anus. And within, needlelike protrusions as long as a man’s forearm jut from the edges.

It is a moment before his mind can make sense of the image, before he realizes he is looking at a mouth. He blinks and stares, certain that he must be imagining it, seeing shapes where only darkness swirls. But the longer he looks, the clearer the details become: the horrific teeth are pale, slightly translucent, and the flesh reminds him of an earthworm’s skin.

The maw suddenly opens fully, with a faint gust of warm air that reeks of bloated carcasses, and the inside glistens darkly. Calum utters a strangled cry and drops the lantern, watching in horror as it falls toward and then into the mouth, and keeps falling. When its light disappears, he cannot tell if it has fallen out of sight, or if the mouth has simply closed once more.

He pulls himself carefully back up and out of the well, his neck chilled and prickling with the sudden obsessive thought that he too might fall down into that nauseating aperture, to be riven by those daggerlike teeth and swallowed. As he emerges once more into the cleaner darkness of the surface night, a low growl rolls up from the depths, along with another blast of that deathly stench.

Calum falls backward, crawls away from the well, and remains sprawled upon the earth, his hands shaking. He realizes he is weeping, and a gasping sob tears itself out of his core.

It is a long time before he can move again, and longer still before he summons the courage to put the cover back over the well. As he does so, a palpable certainty that the mouth will rise up out of the hole and take him itches in his forearms and shoulder. Every rustle in the chokecherries, every call of a nightbird, causes him to drop the cover and leap with a bleat of terror away from the well.

When he finally secures the cover in its proper place, he creeps back into the house and into his bed. He does not try to rest, having no hope that sleep will come, but instead lies wondering what that horror in the well might be, how long it has lived there, what the rest of it looks like. He wonders if there is anything at all to keep it from crawling up the stones some night and slithering into the house.

And he wonders how he will explain the disappearance of the lantern.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

It is two days before Rory notices the lantern is missing. They seldom use it unless some emergency arises after sunset, and when Rory does notice, he does not even think to blame Calum, instead assuming he absent-mindedly left it somewhere in the barn when last he used it.

Calum can hardly manage to be grateful for this turn of fortune, however. The impossible vision he had that night keeps turning over in his mind, raising questions that are too deep and dark for his nascent mind to articulate, let alone answer.

He asks his aunt if he may start reading the Bible they keep upon the mantle. Her brows rise in surprise at the question, but she nods and says that of course he may. Neither Rory nor his father ever showed any particular religious inclination, but Lena is a quietly devoted Christian of no particular denomination, and she offers Calum occasional guidance when he struggles with an unfamiliar word.

He reads dutifully, secretly hoping to find something that will provide a hint of explanation, or the briefest span of comfort, but he finds neither. His thoughts meander after the first few minutes of reading, and he often finds himself reading a single verse over and over again without absorbing its meaning, instead seeing that chthonic maw widening once more. In his memory, it seems to be grinning, though that is impossible given its alien anatomical arrangement.

One day, as they are stabling Warbler and Nettle and stowing the six-run seed drill they used to plant the spring wheat, Calum cannot resist asking his uncle the question that has been rattling in his skull for days.

He asks what is the largest animal that lives underground.

Rory seems mildly taken aback by the question, scratches his beard, ponders a moment.

He finally says that he figures its bears, when they burrow a den. Seeming to think that answer satisfactory, he shifts the seed drill back into its usual corner of the barn and places an earth-stained canvas tarpaulin over it.

Calum presses further, asking his uncle if he’s sure there’s nothing larger.

His uncle says that, maybe, long ago, there was something. He says that sometimes bones are found in the earth that learned men say belonged to strange beasts, totally unlike the ones of today. Then he shrugs, and says he can’t say much more, because he doesn’t know much about it.

Calum resumes patting down Warbler, then feeds the horses and refreshes their water, filling buckets from the storage tank beside the windmill. As he works the steel spout, he wonders when the well the windmill draws from was dug, how long after the older well was sealed. And he wonders if the water source is the same, realizes it must be. Suddenly he feels ill, thinking that he has drunk water that has touched whatever monstrosity lives below them, and bends over, waiting to retch. Nothing comes up, but he feels nauseous and light-headed as he finishes the day’s chores, until he almost wishes he would be sick so that it might pass.

He does not eat the dinner of bread, butter, canned green beans and tomatoes and roasted chicken that Lena sets before them that evening. Instead, he sits, absently picking at his plate, until Lena asks him if he is feeling well.

He shakes his head. Lena places a hand on his forehead, frowning with worry, but seems relieved when she feels no heat there.

Rory tells him, kindly but firmly, that he’d best get to bed.

Calum does not argue, but neither does he try to sleep when he reaches his room. He does not even undress, but waits, crouched by the window, watching the darkness for any sign of movement. There is nothing but the shifting of windblown grass and weeds, no sound but the calls of birds and chirping insects and once, a distant coyote’s high howl.

He waits until he hears Rory and Lena retire for the night, hears the sounds of sleep issuing from their bedroom, then once more he sneaks out of the house. The sky is moonless, and with no lantern to light his way, he stumbles twice on his way toward the well, the second time falling hard onto his palms and scraping them raw. A small, warm trickle of blood dribbles from his right hand as he rises and approaches the well.

He stands there, waiting, expecting some horrible sight or sound to greet him, but there is only the night breeze. Finally, he shifts the seal, not removing it entirely but opening a gap about a foot wide at the extremity. He gazes down into the thick blackness.

He hisses a question down into the dark, ask what is down there.

There is no answer.

A droplet of blood runs down his palm, falls into the depths. And at last, there is a stirring beneath. The voice that only Calum seems to hear utters the words that have never quite been words, only now Calum understands them correctly for the first time.

Bring me the harvest.

Calum’s mouth goes dry, his throat feels thick and tight.

Falteringly, he asks what the harvest is.

A vision swims behind his eyes, clear as though it were before him: a body, as seen from below, limned by the relative brightness of the surface, falling into the well. Then, the sensation of mastication, of a warm, ripe, metallic taste flooding his mouth and sliding down his throat.

Calum does vomit now, vomits into the well. There is another sound below, a sound that is totally unfamiliar, and yet which Calum equates with laughter.

Calum whimpers, repeating the word no over and over again, his knees sinking to the earth and his face coming to rest against the cool, rough stone, even as his fingers yet clutch the lip of the well.

The alien laughter below deepens, widens, swallows the night.

(Tense, dreadful music)

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

The next morning, over a breakfast of oaten pancakes and fried eggs, Rory mentions sealing the old well more permanently. Calum looks up in surprise from the plate where he has pushed around, rather than eaten, his eggs. He repeats the words seal it up, half a question.

Rory nods and says he should have done it long ago.

Calum pushes around a mashed egg once more, the deep orange-gold of the runny yolk looking almost like blood upon the tines of his fork. He asks, very slowly, what is down there. Rory’s face grows guarded, hard, and he says nothing is down there, nothing at all.

Calum repeats nothing, once more half a question.

Rory somberly replies that there is lots of dirt, likely spiders and worms and rodents. Then he asks Calum harshly if he’s been playing there. Calum shakes his head, and his uncle says that’s good, but does not look satisfied. Then he affirms, more sternly, that they will mix some cement and seal it the next day, after the morning chores.

Calum wonders why he feels apprehension rather than joy at this sudden decision. They still have fields to till and sow with the rest of the year’s planting: oats and sorghum, maize and beans. And they have yet to finish the spring work in garden that Lena has begun, yet to mend the fence in the small pasture, to set the hens upon eggs.

Calum imagines opening the well, working to cap it with cement, and shudders. He cannot believe that the thing below will simply allow them to seal it away.

But when he tries to think of words to convince his uncle to abandon his plan, he finds none that sound moving, even to his own mind.

Lena suddenly asks if he’s feeling any better, her brow creasing as she looks at his plateful. She shifts her gaze to his face, and adds that he looks pale.

Calum replies that he is just sleepy.

Rory gives him a lingering sidelong look, and Calum feels that his uncle has guessed at far too much. Calum forces himself to finish his breakfast. Then he and Rory head out into the middle field, to start planting the oat crop.

All that day, he dreads what the next will bring. He keeps imagining something nameless rising from those depths, to seize them both and drag them down, to gulp them like a frog swallows an insect. Worse yet, he imagines that looking upon that subterrene entity will be so unimaginably awful, that the mere sight will break his mind and leave him lost inside his own skull.

So once more, when evening comes, he picks at his supper and can summon no good humor. After he has gone to bed, he hears the adults speaking in tones that, hushed, nevertheless betray their worry.

They think he is falling ill. He wishes it were something so simple, so comparatively benign.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

Calum wakes, surprised to find that he has finally gotten a full night’s sleep. The physical relief of this is quickly soured when he recalls the day’s task that awaits him. Once more, he thinks of trying to convince his uncle to abandon the new project, or even to postpone it, but he cannot think of how to communicate its urgency without divulging his disobedience.

He rises, eats his breakfast dutifully, not wanting to worry Lena any further than he has already.

As he and Rory gather supplies from the barn, he looks at his uncle, feeling certain that the older man must have some idea what is down there.

Calum asks his uncle if he has ever looked in the well.

Rory goes stiff, turns slowly toward Calum. He says, in a voice that is cold, metallic, and totally unfamiliar, that there is nothing to see down there.

Calum asks steadily, if he hasn’t looked, how he can know that.

Rory says firmly that that’s enough talk, lays a hand on the boy’s shoulder and kneels down, so that their faces are mere inches apart. That unrelenting grip reminds Calum of his father’s hard hands, and for the first time, he feels a sudden revulsion toward his uncle.

And as they stand there, it occurs to Calum, again for the first time, that maybe that ugliness that existed in his father, lies more deeply buried within his uncle, came from the same source. He wonders if two boys, many years ago, once witnessed a thing moving in the deep darkness of the well. He wonders what happened to the grandfather of whom neither father nor uncle ever breathed one voluntary word, wonders if it was after that grandfather disappeared that the well was sealed.

After a few seconds, Rory straightens, throws several tools and a sack of cement into a wheelbarrow, and pushes it off toward the well without a further word. Calum has little choice but to follow.

Rory pulls a sledgehammer from the wheelbarrow and begins to smash apart the stone walls, shattering the mortar and letting the large stones topple inward. There is no sound from below, no splashing, not even the dull thud of rock hitting earth, or flesh.

Calum tells his uncle, in barely more than a breath, to stop, says that he’ll make it angry.

Rory does not hear him. There is a set determination in the older man’s features now, a kind of rigid obliviousness to anything but the task at hand.

Calum walks forward to put a hand on his uncle’s shoulder, to draw him out of the strange reverie into which he has fallen. But as he moves, another thought enters his mind, one that feels like an intrusion. His arm shoots forward with far more power than he originally intended, and Rory falls forward, the sledgehammer clattering amongst the scattered stones. Rory catches himself briefly upon the foundations of the well, but the stressed mortar crumbles under his weight and he falls with a short, sharp cry that is followed by a sudden silence. Where he had clutched the jagged masonry, a faint smear of blood remains.

Calum stands, his mind wiped blank by utter disbelief. Slowly, he raises his hands before him and stares at them, turning them over slowly. His head hurts and his heart feels like it is damaging his insides, every pulse of its rhythm making his vision throb darkly.

He calls, softly, to his uncle. There is no answer.

Falling to his hands and knees, the boy crawls forward, to the very edge of what is now hardly more than a yawning hole in the earth. Calum fears that, were he to approach it on his legs, they would fail him, and he would fall in too.

Slowly, he peers over the brink. Far below, many long, sharp teeth glisten wetly.

More, the thing says.

Calum screams for the thing to give Rory back, pounds a hand on the stone. His vision reels as something in his pinky finger breaks.

Harvest, freely given.

Calum whimpers a weak denial.

But once more, he sees his hand dart forward, pushing Rory off balance, and hot tears cloud his vision. He utters a scream of self-hatred, of denial, until he feels like the blood vessels in his neck and face will burst.

Lena comes running out of the house. She asks Calum, with hardly controlled alarm, where Rory is.

Calum cannot speak. Sobs rip themselves out of his chest, his vision is blurred, spittle bubbles on his lips. He raises a finger to point at the well.

Lena’s face pales. She steps forward, visibly shaking, to peer down into the hole. Calum, seeing this, imagines her moving too close, losing her footing or perhaps being seized by that something below.

Mumbling through his tears, he tells her to get back, then shouts a repetition.

He rises and moves to position himself between Lena and what remains of the well, but as he steps forward, he feels fragments of rock turning treacherously under his feet, feels them slide and send him plummeting down. His head cracks painfully upon a sharp corner, a warmth spreads over his scalp, and then suddenly the pain is gone. As he feels his body slide and then tumble into the nothingness, toward what resides within it, a wild, despairing laughter rises in his throat.

Come, come, the maw yawns hungrily.

(Dreadful music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]