byChrisWhite – 2025

Just playing around with something more surreal than my normal flash fiction. More fantasy fiction but with gothic tropes. Hope you enjoy. I decided on creating a little epigram for the beginning, just for texture.

“What is buried does not die, but waits, and the waiting is hungrier than death itself“—J.C. White

The road into Hickory Ford dipped through pine flats where the water lay black and sluggish, ringed with cypress knees jutting up like bones that had no business surfacing. A low fog clung across the bayou, thick enough to choke the lantern lights on the porches of a sleepy row of shotgun shacks. The glow looked smothered, as if the air itself was tired of carrying it. Folks said nothing good ever grew down here. Corn came up with yellow leaves, beans died before the first picking, hogs turned thin and brittle in ways you couldn’t explain at the butcher block.

Noah Lee Carver knew the talk. He never gave it much weight. Still, when he stepped off the gravel track into the muck, something in the air tightened around him, a pressure and vibration he could feel in root of his teeth. His boots sank with a wet pop. The smell was swampy but with another edge to it—iron maybe, old and sharp, like rainwater standing too long in old tires.

The ruin showed itself slow. A church, folded in on itself, boards gone soft, steeple split and leaning as though it couldn’t hold its own weight anymore. The floor had dropped out, opening into a pit. Not dug by men. Forced up from below, like something buried had pressed till the wood gave way. Air rose from it colder than a winter breeze, midsummer. Fog streamed toward it in a thin pull, vanishing into the dark like smoke up a chimney flue.

Something down there caught the little light. Not rock. Not timber. Folds and ridges slick and pale, dimly glowing. It twitched once, just enough to make Noah’s throat tighten, and from it came a sound that didn’t belong in any living throat. Thin, high, sharp enough to cut the ear. Higher than a bird’s cry. Higher than the midnight whistle of the Mississippi Central.

He stumbled back. Pines stood above him in the ranks of a battalion, but in that instant their branches looked awkward and bent, stretching out to the ruin, toward the pit, toward whatever was climbing free of it. And Noah knew then what had ruined Hickory Ford. Not mold. Not poverty. Not bad crops. Something far older than people, settled in the earth, waiting and hungry.

The fog came close and his legs shook. The town behind him slept, clocks ticking, women whispering over children. They didn’t know how close they lived to this hole. Or maybe they did, which was worse.

He pressed a hand to his chest and tried a Psalm half-remembered. The words broke apart in his mouth. What answered was not God. It was the low stir of meat against stone, a slow reminder the earth was never as empty as men liked to think.

He bent closer without meaning to, as if a hand had clamped the back of his neck. The folds below began to heave upward, wet sheets peeling open. Not one body. A crowd of shapes shoved together, all glistening. For a second it convulsed, and in that spasm he saw sphincter type openings; eyes, maybe, or mouths, that collapsed as quick as they appeared.

The stink thickened. Not the rot of leaves. Something worse. Too much life in one place, heavy and rank. He gagged, staggered back, feet sliding in muck, but his eyes stuck to it. The boards at the rim sagged further, wood darkening, the fog itself bending low, sucked down.

The thing cried again, deeper now, and the sound rattled in his ribs and climbed up his spine. Pines shivered though the night were suddenly still. The ground gave a slow pulse, like the belly of some beast taking a breath.

Something slick touched the edge of the pit. A tendril maybe, veined faint, lit from inside. It curled slow, deliberate, pressing down. The wood cracked sharp as a rifle shot. Then nothing.

He ran. Couldn’t tell you the path he took, or the swamp, or the row of shacks. Only the fog followed, thick in his lungs, tasting of iron and salt and something unfamiliar. It was inside him already, working its change.

Too late.