Short Fiction: ‘The Resting Place’

I wrote “The Resting Place” a few years ago, when I wanted to write a short story without knowing ahead of time where it was going to go. I knew I wanted a group of kids to uncover a hole in the ground in the middle of the woods and that I wanted to discover what was down there alongside them. That story ballooned into a novelette, and this is the result. Please enjoy this tale of a group of friends who find a hole and, at the bottom, discover what they believe to be the corpse of God, or the Devil, or some entirely Other alien thing, only to be terrorized by the burst of creation leaking forth from its rotting brain. Have fun!

I. THE ADVENTURE

They had been warned to stay out of the woods, but they had not been told why. This had only sparked their curiosity. Mark was nothing if not curious and his friends, Billy and Teddy, both shared the trait. It was what had brought them together. They were children who simply needed to know. And asking would never do. Asking was cheating. Parents lied. They told you to stay out of places, they told you what not to do, but they were never capable of explaining why you couldn’t do it. Not with any honesty, at least. So Mark had decided they would go into the woods behind his house, where he had never been allowed before, and they would discover things for themselves.

It was not a hot day and the breeze, while currently calming, threatened to turn to a chill at the drop of a hat. Mark had promised them that they would turn back if it got cold. Teddy, who had moved to Maine from California, hated the cold with all of his being. So Mark had assured him they would turn back, but, he had thought silently, that would depend entirely on what they found.

They entered the forest at just after five. Mark’s parents had left a half-hour earlier, and he had waited to make sure they wouldn’t return for anything before he risked setting out on the adventure. His father forgot his phone nearly every time he left the house. But not today. So they had gone out the back door at precisely five o’clock and they had run as quietly and carefully as they could across the wide lawn and down to the tree line.

Even though Mark had never stepped foot in these woods himself, Billy and Teddy had followed behind him and looked to him for leadership. Less because it was his house, he was sure, and more because it was what they always did. They followed him. Wherever they went, they went at Mark’s back.

“Your parents don’t know you’re out here?” Teddy said, stating what he already knew to break the silence.

“That’s right.”

“Well, what are they going to do to you if they find out?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said. “Haven’t thought about it.”

Billy’s eyes widened. “Well… what will they do to us?”

“Skin you alive,” Mark said. “Teddy too. Skin you alive and eat your eyeballs.”

“Very funny,” Billy murmured.

“It’s true. Didn’t you know my parents were cannibals?”

Billy laughed, but it was empty. There was actual fear in it. He was uncomfortable in the woods. So were the others, but Billy had always been less skilled than other boys of his age when it came to covering his emotions.

Mark, on the other hand, was able to wrap his emotions up in warm blankets. They were always well-covered. To other boys, it meant he was fearless. That was not true and they knew it, deep down, but it impressed them nonetheless. Mark could hide his fear. He could hide important things with a maturity rare for his age, at least among the boys he knew. That was why they stood behind him, why they followed him so loyally. If they stood behind him, maybe he could cover them too.

They stepped into the woods. Mark had never been out here before, but he remembered an old path his father had told him about. It was funny the way parents explained things. They would tell you in detail. Explain things like the old path in the woods back behind Higgins’ Store. How people said they’d seen things up there. How most people never went up there anyway, not for anything. Then they would tell you to stay away. As if any of that meant he could possibly stay away.

It astounded him that parents didn’t know what they were doing, when they said things like that. Their sense of adventure was so long dead and buried, they couldn’t even hear the call in their own voices.

But now that he was on the path, Mark understood what his father had been talking about. This place felt different. He wasn’t sure if it was fear, he hadn’t actually felt primal, visceral fear too many times in his life, but he thought he would recognize it if he felt it strongly enough. But this was just different. It was almost like entering another world, the way everything new felt to a child. The trees here didn’t look the same as other trees in town. They were deader, long and spindly like curled witch fingers. Some of them looked completely black.

“Do we even know what’s out here?” Billy asked.

Mark gently shook his head, still walking.

“Nobody knows,” said Teddy. “My parents never tell me shit about it, they just completely avoid the subject. Every single time I bring it up.”

“Mine too,” Mark said distantly.

Billy shivered. “Maybe we shouldn’t be out here.”

“Don’t say that,” Teddy said. “One, you sound like my mom. Two, that’s what the people in those scary movies always say and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to turn out like one of them.”

Mark stopped.

The others stopped just behind him.

“What?” It was Billy. His voice was cracking.

Mark stayed silent a moment longer, trying to see if it was just his imagination. It wasn’t. “Do you guys smell that?”

Teddy took a sniff. “What is that?”

Mark glanced back and forth between the two of them. His eyes said enough: he had no clue. That made both of the other boys a little uneasy.

“Maybe it’s a landfill.” It was clear in Billy’s tone that he didn’t believe it and didn’t expect them to believe it either.

Mark thought about replying, but decided against it and continued forward. Teddy followed behind him but this time Billy did not.

“You guys seriously aren’t going up there.”

“I want to find out what it is,” Mark said. It was true, but there was something else to it. Another truth, something he couldn’t explain, something of which he was only barely aware. He didn’t just want to know what was being hidden out in these woods. He didn’t continue on to sate his young curiosity, although he wished that was it. He was being driven to it. Something compelled him forward, and Mark didn’t argue. He simply went along for the ride.

They kept walking, smell getting stronger with each step, until they came to an incline. It was steep and lined with jagged rocks. Usually, there would be the danger of broken glass, leftovers from local drunks. But there was nothing. This place looked like it had never been touched by anyone before this moment. The woods continued downward. The spindly limbs of the trees taunted them forward and dared them to continue on.

None of the boys had ever said no to a dare.

Mark traversed carefully down the side. The rocks looked like they would hurt, but they at least provided traction. He didn’t expect the others to follow behind him. He would understand if they didn’t. Whatever they were stepping into now was different than where they’d been only a minute ago. There was nothing guiding them. If they turned back now, there would be no consequence. They would be let go. Mark knew that even if he wanted to turn back, whatever guided him was not going to let him walk away. Only forward.

So forward he went, and to his surprise both Teddy and Billy followed him. The wind began to pick up, singing to them and calling them onward. It was minutes, maybe hours, before they had gone down and continued on the path, and finally came to where they were going.

It was not what they had expected.

II. THE HOLE

None of the boys had even known they’d expected anything, until they were there.

Until they found the hole.

It was huge; nearly twelve feet across. Amazing how nobody had ever seen it before. No, Mark thought, thinking back. People had seen it. They must have. This was why nobody ever came out here. This was what all the adults were hiding from the children. Whatever it was, they didn’t want anybody to see it. They didn’t want anyone to know.

But he had to know.

He dimly heard his friends’ footsteps behind him. Their gasps sounded a thousand miles away. All Mark could see was the hole in front of him. He stepped up to it carefully.

“Be careful,” Billy said absently. His mind raced to make sense of what he was looking at. He could barely even remember where he was. “What is this?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Teddy said.

Mark said nothing.

“Is it… is it natural?” It was Billy again, frantically trying to categorize what he was seeing. “I mean, like… was it made by… I don’t know. Erosion or something?”

Teddy shrugged. “Maybe it was aliens.”

Mark looked into the hole, trying to see as far down as he could.

Billy gawked at Teddy. “Jesus, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Teddy said. “I’m grasping at straws. Look at it. Do you know what that is? No. Billy, I don’t think anybody anywhere has seen something like this before.”

“It looks like something fell,” Mark said, finally.

The other two boys fell silent and turned to look at him. “What?”

“It looks like something fell. Into the Earth. And straight down, maybe. I don’t know. I can’t tell how far it goes.”

“Do we want to find out?”

It was a good question, and one that Mark didn’t have an answer for. He’d been compelled to come, driven toward the hole, but now that he was here he couldn’t imagine going any further. He didn’t want to go down there. For all he knew, it went on forever.

And yet…

Something was down there. Something had to be, right? And they had come this far. Maybe this was just curiosity taking over, but why would they come this far not to find something? Sure, they hadn’t even know what they were looking for, but now they were clearly standing on the verge of something important. That was probably why he was so scared. But Mark tried not to think too much about that.

For Billy, on the other hand, fear was the only thing on his mind. “I really don’t think we should be out here.”

Teddy shook his head. “So, what, we came all this way just to look at a hole in the ground?”

“Give me something,” Mark said.

“What?” from both of them.

“A rock, a stick, anything. I just want to see if I can hear how far down it goes.”

Billy picked a rock off the ground, scraped some of the dirt away and handed it to Mark. “Here,” he said. “Will this help?”

Mark nodded and took it. He stared back down into the blackness of the hole, held the rock high above his head, and dropped it. All three boys leaned in, careful not to fall but waiting for a sound.

They heard nothing.

A few more seconds, then Teddy started getting nervous for the first time. He turned away, but looked like he was still expecting to hear a thud. “That’s impossible, right?” His voice was shaky.

All Mark could do was shrug. “I don’t know.”

“It probably hit the bottom and we didn’t hear it,” Billy said. “Sound can travel funny sometimes, you know.”

None of them believed it, but they said nothing.

Then, finally, a noise. It was not, however, the thud they were expecting. Instead, they heard a splash.

Exchanged glances between the boys, then Mark looked back down to make sure he couldn’t see anything. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, and they all agreed. He thought on it for a moment. “Maybe it’s a cave.”

“Why would there be a cave in the middle of the woods out here? There’s no stream. The lake’s a mile away.” Teddy sounded certain, but it was mostly just justification to himself.

“I don’t know why,” Mark said. “But that’s what it sounds like. I just wish I could see, even a little bit. It’s so dark down there.”

Teddy produced a lighter from his back pocket. “Would this help?”

The other boys stared at him.

“What?”

“You smoke now?” Mark said, sounding much more like his mother than he intended.

“Oh, please.” Teddy rolled his eyes and placed the lighter in Mark’s hands, curling his friend’s fingers around it. “Like the two of you are saints.”

Mark took it and kneeled down beside the hole, trying his best to shine a light. He didn’t care what he saw, as long as it was something. Anything was better than blackness.

He outstretched his arm. Something had caught his eye. The walls of this hole — and walls they were — were almost completely smooth. It was harder to tell when he had been standing, as it simply went from dirt into hole, but looking at the structure of it, he could now see that it was almost as smooth as marble.

And there was something else. He shined the small flame closer to the side where he sat, illuminating the wall beneath him. There were markings inside of the hole, covering almost every inch. He couldn’t read them. They didn’t even look like letters, no matter the language. But as he took a closer look, he started to recognize some of them.

“Billy,” he said, standing again.

“Yeah?”

“You did that whole Ancient Egypt project last year, right?”

Billy looked confused. “I guess so, yeah.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

Billy took a curious step closer. “Yeah, I actually enjoyed it a lot. What does it have to do with anything, Mark?”

“I need to see if you can read this.” He signaled for Billy to kneel beside him.

The other boy recognized the markings immediately. “Whoa.”

“Can you read it?”

Billy shook his head. “No. No way, I only remember how to write my name in hieroglyphs.” He looked at the writing for a long moment before another confused look washed over his face. “But…”

Teddy, fed up by being out of the loop, sat down beside them. “But what?”

“These markings here,” Billy said, pointing them out. “These are hieroglyphs. Everything else isn’t.”

Mark felt cold all of a sudden. “You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

The boys each exchanged a glance.

“I told you we shouldn’t be out here,” Teddy said. But none of them moved. None of them could. Billy, at once, seemed especially fascinated.

“How is it so smooth?” he asked.

Mark shook his head, or at least he thought he did. “I don’t know,” he said absently.

They looked at him, still awaiting a response.

Suddenly, he cursed the position of leader they had forced onto him. But he couldn’t deny his own curiosity, either. Maybe that was what ultimately won out. “There’s really only one way to know for sure,” he said finally.

“What’s that?” asked Teddy.

“We have to go down there.”

And so they did. It took them a few hours to get everything ready. They each told their parents that they were gathering ropes, climbing and camping equipment to spend a night in the woods and build a tree house. Apparently it was a good enough excuse and all their moms seemed to buy it. None of the boys stuck around long enough for their motives to be questioned.

Part of it was because they didn’t want their parents finding out, sure. But even more than that was the place. The hole. As soon as they walked away from it, despite their confusion and nervousness, they felt a strong and powerful need to go back. It was nothing they could explain. They didn’t even think about why the place cast such a spell over them. All they knew was that they felt a powerful need to return and so they did.

The hole pulled them back, and the pull was stronger this time. Mark had felt it the moment he left, like he was tethered to the place by a bungee cord, and every step he took away from it, the pull grew stronger. And so they went into the woods a second time, only now there were no expressions of doubts. Nobody said a word.

This time they knew exactly where to find it and exactly what they were going to find. And this time they had come prepared. Even as the light was fading, they did not stop. They’d packed every flashlight they owned, between the three of them. There would be no loss of light so they knew they wouldn’t have to worry about that. What they did have to worry about was the rope snapping. They had to worry about falling down into the hole and being stuck where no one would ever find them again.

It was a very, very real possibility. In fact, it was exactly what each of their parents would say. Mark could even hear his mother’s voice at the back of his mind.

He tied the rope off anyway. Whatever it was, it was a chance he was willing to take. Mark looked into the hole, then looked back at his friends. “Make sure this rope holds,” he said.

They nodded.

Mark began to climb down, studying the symbols in the glow, a small canvas painted by the flashlight. The deeper he went, the more unrecognizable the symbols became. He’d never seen anything like them. Not in school, not on TV, not online although he hardly knew what to look for there.

He went deeper.

III. THE RESTING PLACE

Two things struck him, although one did it first and hit Mark like a truck: the smell. It was damp, heavy and overpowering. It was everywhere. Clinging to his skin the moment he came into contact with it. The smell was oppressive, unlike anything he had ever smelled before. The worst thing he’d ever smelled in his life, prior to this, was a dead cat that had been left in the sun in the ditch behind his house. He’d discovered it the previous summer, when the stench had hit such a peak that his curiosity demanded he investigate it and discover the source.

His stomach did no such thing now. It turned in knots and begged him to leave, but he could not. There was something to see down here. The promise of sight overpowered his other senses, quieted them, at least as best it could. For a brief, barely registered moment Mark thought that it would be better to die than go any further and see whatever he had come here to see. It was the first truly dark thought of his entire life. Perhaps his first adult thought, hitting him at the age of twelve.

Mark reached the bottom and pushed forward. His flashlight barely illuminated the cave, but the vast darkness alone spoke to its size. The flashlight’s glow was a small and steady stream. It gave glimpses of texture, dark and smooth. He waded in about six inches of water, but it made no noise, even in a huge and echoing place like this.

That couldn’t be right, he thought, so he splashed his hand through the water, just to be sure. Again, it didn’t make a sound. The water itself was unlike anything he had ever seen, though he supposed he hadn’t seen that much. It was blue, but a kind of grayish murky blue, as though it had once been bright but had grown faded and discolored over time.

Mark knew there was no point in pressing forward. He had seen what he had come down here to see and he couldn’t move any further while attached to the rope, but none of that seemed to matter now. He had always been a rationally minded kid and even though they wouldn’t admit it, that was the thing his friends admired most about him. But he could feel all of that slipping away. He couldn’t go back. What would be the point? No.

No.

He couldn’t leave until he saw everything there was to see down here. Even in the darkness, he knew it would be worth it. They would be worth it, whatever secrets this place was hiding. And that felt like the right word, too. Hiding. And he was a kid, after all. It was only in his nature to seek.

So Mark untethered the rope and moved forward, out of the water and onto what he expected to be rock. He turned on his flashlight and shined it down. The ground below him was almost mossy. He knelt down to get a better look at it. It wasn’t moss. It was grass. But how could that be? How could grass grow down here without light? He supposed there could be types of grass that grew like that without him knowing about it, but he definitely didn’t know of anything like that in Maine. Plus, this grass was dead. It was black.

He kept the light pointed forward as he walked. It wasn’t long before he felt that sinking feeling in his stomach telling him that he never should have come down here in the first place. As a kid who’d been branded brave, that feeling was no stranger to him and was one that — at twelve — he had already learned how to suppress. Up ahead, he started to see forms and his mind caught up to his stomach’s instinct.

The ground was littered in animal bones.

They were, almost all of them, intact. Not crushed, the skeletons had not been piled and broken up. These looked pristine, almost as if they’d just come out of a museum. Mark thought that maybe there was something here he was not quite ready to see. As it was, he couldn’t understand was he was already seeing. Trees, animals, all things that couldn’t have possibly existed in a cave like this, and all of them dead. For how long, he truly had no idea.

He could barely think about it at all, the smell was so overpowering.

And within a moment, he saw why. He understood. He focused the flashlight forward, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. At first, he thought it was (somehow) a small mountain. That would have been impossible, of course, but the cave had been full of surprises. And this would be its greatest one yet. Because what Mark was looking was not the peak of some small mountain; it was the curve of a bent, bony and rotting knee.

Mark followed that knee to get a feel for what he was looking at. From a single glance, he arrived at two impossible conclusions: it was a man or at least something close to a man, and it was very dead. The skin was dark and gray, looking almost more like tree bark than anything his young mind could imagine as flesh. This was a giant. He had found the dead body of an actual giant. Part of him, in that instant, wanted to cry out to Billy and Teddy and tell them to get down here, because they needed to see this. But he couldn’t do that. Mark had never considered himself a greedy person, had always enjoyed sharing his knowledge of weird subjects with his friends. But this was his. This sight belonged to him.

Mark moved closer to the body, inch by inch. As he came upon it, he started to wonder how he could possibly have thought that smell was so bad, when he now noticed it carried such a strong undercurrent of cinnamon? He also noticed that the thing’s chest had caved in and collapsed. Another observation followed that, almost more impossible than the sight of the dead giant he was now finding himself face-to-face with.

That realization was this: the sunken hole in the giant’s chest was the source of the grass. It all stemmed from there, and now it was just as dead as whatever had once called this body home. Mark may have understood the circle of life as it had been explained to him by cartoons, but he had never heard of grass actually growing out of a corpse before. Mark knew about death. He knew bodies decomposed, that they fed the soil and became overtaken by nature as they rotted away to nothing but bones. That was natural. This was different. Everything here seemed to spring from the body’s collapsed chest, from its heart, to spark from that specific point and grow outward, overtaking not only the body but the entire cave around it. Having seen it, he had to assume that the deer and other, vaguer skeletons he saw had also somehow stemmed from within the creature, and that he was looking at some micromanaged ecosystem, some specifically maintained and curated circle of life happening in a cave right beneath his own home town.

At that moment, his whole body went cold with realization. The smooth surface of the hole, the messages written in every language. He was right. Life had stemmed from this thing. All life had. Barely able to comprehend any of the concepts circling around in his head, he nonetheless understood in an instant exactly what he was looking at. This was God.

This was the corpse of God.

Mark couldn’t begin to understand how it had happened. He only knew that it had. This thing had existed in some great form, a source of energy that must have spread life wherever it went. If its dead body was enough to produce everything he was seeing in this cave, it seemed logical enough that at its peak it was able to create a universe. In truth, Mark couldn’t conceive the particulars. His family rarely attended church. Usually once a year on Christmas Eve, and even then, they’d missed the last one. It all bored Mark to tears and he was grateful that his parents must have thought the same. But now that he was seeing what he was seeing, he had a feeling that the Bible must have fudged a few things.

Mark had seen many pictures of God before and all of them were of an old white man with a great big beard. The God he was looking at, decaying as it was, had dark, leathery gray skin. There was no beard. It had no hair at all that he could see, nor was there any sign that it ever had. But that was hard to tell when so much of it had been overtaken by its own creation. Grass had grown outward from its sunken chest, vines dribbled down from the corner of its drooping mouth. He could understand how humans were supposed to have been made in God’s image, but it was a loose inspiration at best.

This God had two arms, two legs, like a person, but there were little details that made things look just a little off when comparing this body to his own. The fingers were long and curled, longer than any fingers on a human hand. The head was tall and narrow. And of course he immediately noticed that there was nothing between the legs and no sign that there had ever been anything there. He’d heard angels were supposed to be like that, too. Mark understood that, though. God created the universe and himself and everything in it. He’d probably had no need to reproduce. Not, he supposed, that he’d have a chance now, anyway.

What did it mean, he wondered?

If the world was still here, still spinning, still moving, but God was lying entombed in a cave beneath it, what did that mean? Mark had seen kids a few years older than him, a couple of eighth graders, wearing T-shirts that read “God is dead.” He had never really cared enough to question it. Those kids were annoying and they never let him hang around them, so he didn’t really want to prove them right. Maybe they weren’t. He had a feeling that what he was looking at, as different as it might be from what he had been told in church, was just as different from anything those eighth graders imagined when they put on those T-shirts.

Mark didn’t know what to do. Now that the reality hit him, it was almost too much to bear. He could hear his friends calling to him, but they sounded a million miles away. They didn’t matter, not right now. This mattered. Was this supposed to be his little secret? Was he supposed to leave this cave, pretend he’d never found it, never tell his friends about it and be the only person on the planet to know — truly know — that God was dead? That God was not at all what any religion he’d ever heard of had made him out to be? What about the people who had always told him to stay out of the woods? Did they know what was down here?

Or were they afraid to find out, and that’s why they never asked?

Mark needed to do something to quiet his mind and began to feel his child’s curiosity overtake him. The questions were not nearly as enticing to him as the experience. They never had been. So without anyone to tell him no and no good reason to think of not to do it, he reached out and placed hands on the leathery, rotten leg of God.

He felt a surge of electricity rush through his body before he even had time to regret his decision. The moment he made contact, he began to see things. Not one glimpse, not a series of images, not one past and not one future, not one time but all times, not one reality but all realities. He saw everything. The entire scope of time from beginning to end and it was too much to recognize, too much to process. It was simply, in general, too much.

Mark rubbed at his eyes, backing away, as if that would make the images stop. In a way, it did. Taking his hand off the corpse seemed to disconnect him from whatever he had seen. But he couldn’t shake the images. They were still there, behind his eyes. Instead, he looked out at the darkness of the cave, only to find that it was lightening. The grass became green again, and beautiful. The vegetation was lush, it bore bushes and trees full of fruit. The skeletons on the ground restructured themselves into healthy, beautiful deer. Were these just visions? Was he seeing what had become of this cave in reverse?

It couldn’t be that. When Mark bent down, he could feel the grass between his fingers. He could smell it. He could smell everything, from the trees to the fresh deer shit on the ground. The deer looked up at him. They blinked their eyes. One of them smiled.

What?

Before he could question the deer’s ability to smile, it spoke. “It’s a nice place to live, Mark,” the deer said to him.

On instinct, he opened his mouth to reply, only for nothing to come out as he tried to process what was happening.

“You should stay,” the deer said.

“Oh, yes,” another deer chimed in.

“It’s awful lonely being dead,” said a third deer.

“We have no one to create for anymore,” the first deer spoke again. It seemed to wear a wry, knowing smirk. There was even a twinkle in its eye as it said, “How would you like us to put on a show for you?”

Mark was frozen. He didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Would you like to see your favorite animal?” A fifth deer said, but as it spoke its skin peeled away like a snake shedding its skin to reveal a jaguar. “Or why stop there? Old animals are boring. Let’s create something entirely new. Haven’t done that in ages.”

“Oh yes,” another voice from another animal. “Let’s do that!”

Cheers from the crowd of the shapeshifting animal kingdom, all of them in agreement, like a sitcom audience. The canned laughter that he always knew sounded too fake to possibly be real.

Mark found himself backing away. Inch by inch. But he found the distance more and more comfortable.

“Well, if you don’t want to make your dreams come true, we can always settle for a nightmare,” the jaguar said. “Maybe that will get a reaction.”

Mark wanted to turn and run. This was too much. And for the first time since he’d come down here, he found himself thinking of another figure he’d heard about in church who was said to have fallen from the Heavens. Maybe this wasn’t God at all. Maybe he’d been an idiot to let himself get tricked. Yes, to get tricked by the trickster himself. Maybe-

“Oh, you think too much,” said a voice behind him, familiar but unrecognizable in the moment.

He turned. It was his mother. His father appeared beside her, either stepping out of the shadows or emerging from thin air, Mark couldn’t quite be sure which. He was excited just to see their familiar faces, even if he didn’t know what they could possibly be doing down here. He tried to approach them, but stopped, seeing that they looked different somehow. Their eyes seemed to glint in the darkness, almost red. Their mouths were dirty, messy. It looked like they had something dark spread across their lips, like chocolate. It took him only a second to realize that it was blood.

His mother smiled at him. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said sweetly. “We’re cannibals, remember?”

“Cannibals,” repeated his father with a gleeful chuckle.

“We just want to eat you, Mark. We want to eat you up. Would you like us to do that?”

That was it. Mark ran. As he did, the grass seemed to grow around him. The animals turned their sights on him and the cannibals chased after him, still giddily singing about the things they were going to do once they caught him. He pushed forward. He ran toward the light, where it seemed that all of the dead thing’s creations were afraid to touch.

The colors of the facsimile of life blooming around him only made the darkness darker. It was becoming harder and harder to navigate the cave. That, he thought, was probably The Creator’s doing as well. Whatever the thing actually was, it had full control of the environment down here. Or, alternatively, it didn’t. There was a thought. What if the thing truly was dead and its power was simply stirring and restless, going mad over the course of millennia with nothing to do?

He slipped as he continued running, and felt a rush of pain as he fell. Oh, shit. He’d felt this before, last year, in soccer practice. Just like that, just one slip and he had sprained his ankle. The cannibals chittered in the darkness, gaining on him. The deer, just as likely to eat him, no doubt, cackled like a coven of old witches.

He felt something bite into his ankle and looked down to see the hungry eyes of his mother looking up at him. Mark screamed, but only for a moment. He couldn’t afford anything else. He turned away, kicked her with his good foot, and kept running. In the darkness ahead of him, there were luminous forms, wet and hairless, their skin milky, grayish white. They were smaller versions of The Creator, perhaps, half-formed dreams of birth. The smallest black slits for eyes, no hair, no nostrils, no fingerprints, he couldn’t even say for sure that they were solid, let alone that they were even really there. But they grinned at Mark with rows and rows of sharpened teeth. Those were real enough for him, as was the bite on his ankle. One of them outstretched a hand toward him, silky slime like spiderwebs between its uncurling fingers.

So this was it. The eighth graders were right.

God was dead and so was he.

“What the fuck?” A voice came quietly in the darkness. It was Billy.

“No,” Mark groaned. Why had Billy, the most afraid of them all, suddenly found his courage the one time he was actually right to be afraid? But it was a stupid question. Mark had felt the pull of this place. Of course it was so strong that even Billy couldn’t ignore it. They had to get out of here, now, before Teddy made the descent as well and there was no one left to monitor the rope.

“Billy!” A hiss from the cannibal parents, the voice of an excited snake. “You’re just in time for dinner! We’ll be eating our pride and joy first, but then, oh, don’t worry, we’ll get to you.”

“Yes,” the cannibal father echoed. “We sure will. We’ll hold you down and make you watch while we eat your stomach.” The cannibals were shadows as they came toward the boys, nothing but dark forms with small pinpricks of light where eyes would be. “That’s life, isn’t it? To feel sensations, to eat, to die. And you get to do it all at once.”

Billy screamed louder than any scream Mark had ever heard. Something broke inside of Billy as he let out that scream and Mark could swear he heard it break.

The shadows drew closer. Mark pulled Billy back toward the rope, gritting his teeth, doing his best to ignore the pain of his sprained ankle. But tears came nonetheless and made it even harder to see. He wiped his eyes. The shadowed cannibals were crawling now, on all fours, all illusions of humanity stripped away. Yes, that was the word, wasn’t it? Illusion. As he reached the rope, he suspected that the shadowed appearance of his cannibal parents had little to do with the darkness of the cave. The illusion was wearing off. The closer he came to the light, the less it held together.

“Pull us up!” Mark finally found himself able to scream as he re-attached the rope. “Pull us up, goddamn it!”

Teddy was surprised by the urgency, but complied. Mark was afraid that those bony fingers were going to reach out and grab him, that the giant dead thing would start moving and pull him back into that great dark pit of in its chest. But it didn’t. Everything seemed to retreat from the light. He didn’t know why and he truly did not want to. Maybe it was because God or whatever it was had been down there so long that it could no longer stand the light. Or maybe it was something else, a thing that had only ever known darkness. Maybe that was the most compelling case for it being a thing from Below rather than a thing from Above.

Mark tried not to think about it. It seemed to take forever, rising back into the light and onto fresh ground. He and Billy both told Teddy that they had seen nothing down there. In Billy’s case it was true. He had only seen glimpses of shadows, only heard voices, and that was enough to leave him changed. Teddy didn’t buy it, but they were both clearly so terrified that he didn’t press the issue.

Mark knew about death. He had heard that when someone died, the brain flooded with a dream state, dumping all its last reserves of a chemical called DMT, a real-life version of someone’s life flashing before their eyes as they dream their last dream and their memories play back and forth in a moment that could supposedly last forever. As he thought back on it, Mark suspected that was what had happened to him down there. He had kickstarted something, and that consciousness flooded out the same way the deer and grass had. A mind that created so much life must still be powerful, even in death. With nothing new to create it had leeched off his own creativity, his young imagination. He had waded through the murky waters of the chemical spill of God’s own dead brain. Or a god, a stranger. A cosmic being, at the very least. A thing from Somewhere Else that had come to his home to find a nice hole to die in. Whether it be The God as he knew it, its power was undeniable. That thing, in its life, had created worlds, no two ways about it. Whether one of those was his, he couldn’t say. He didn’t know any more than that, and he never, never wanted to find out.

He had, from that day, figured that his friends had so clearly seen how scared he was that they would never want to know. But that did not turn out to be the case. If anything, Mark’s inability to vocalize what had happened to him in the cave had become something of a private obsession, especially for the friend who had come right up beside him, but not close enough to bear witness. Ten years later, almost to the day, Billy announced to his girlfriend that he was going for a hike in those woods and never returned. Billy, who had always been terrified. Billy, who had heard, but not seen. Mark always knew exactly what Billy really went out there looking for. And he was absolutely positive he had found it.

For Mark himself, though, it was the not knowing that got him through. He had seen so much down there that he took great comfort in everything that had gone unanswered. What was it, really? Had he seen God or the Devil down there, or something else entirely? He liked the not knowing. He figured the point of life was the uncertainty and took comfort in that as an adult in a way that he would not have even been able to understand as a child.

But he also knew that the uncertainty would only carry him so far. As much as he didn’t want to know exactly what he’d seen, exactly what had happened down there, Mark knew that life wasn’t the kind of thing anybody could ever successfully outrun. And as much as he didn’t want to know if that thing had been the creator of all life or the first of the fallen, or some Other that had simply fallen out of time and space, he knew the answer would come for him sooner or later. Heaven and Hell always had a way of catching up.

As much as he prayed to forget his brief encounter, he had long ago found prayers hopeless at the tender age of twelve and the sentiment had never left him. But curiosity doesn’t always fade over time, it simply changes shape. It disguises itself, as a hobby or interest, or sometimes in the glassy look in a man’s eye when he stares out the window in the middle of the night and refuses to tell his wife what he is thinking. He thought about it on those nights, and believed he always would. Mark suspected that one way or another, he would lie awake at night all his life hoping that he would never get his answers to the questions he carried since that day.

But knowing, of course, that one day he would.