A legion of flies

Inspired by the sounds in an outhouse, King and Lovecraft, an urban legend of a deep hole in Russia, and the premise of...if the devil spoke to you through a hole in the ground would you listen.

                                                                                                 A legion of Flies 

                                                                                                              By

                                                                                           Carlos Lorenzo Estrada 

           "His mouth is full of curses and deceit and oppression; Under his tongue is mischief and wickedness." Psalm 10:7

                          "An evildoer listens to wicked lips; A lier gives ear to mischievous tongue." Proverbs 17:4

                                                                             1890 Salinas Valley, Northern California 

     There is a sound we often hear in the seclusion and calmness of nature.  Incessant, nattering, and reverberating.  It crawls into the skin when heard.  Like an eldritch sibilate murmur far older then the world itself.  Whence it came?  Its origins forever elusive.  But it buzzes like a legion of flies, then stops.  And is gone.  To where no one knows?  Nor, as civilized creatures are we meant to.  But its primordial origins whisper none the less, speaks to our darker convictions and the very moral decay of our mortal souls.  If you should ever hear this sound while out in the calm, as caution, you should run.

     "We dug too deep...we let it out...." The voice of Cillian "Old man" Barret spoke with a hard thick Irish inflection.  He was dead.  Flies covered him like a second skin.  The acrid nauseous scent of rot stung at the eyes that wandered to close in proximity.  It was a palpable sour reek.  His flesh flayed and laid in strips around his exposed body.  Maggots crawled seeking refuge into the earth along his desiccated corpse.  His voice haggard and struggled to breath from decayed lungs.  But he spoke none the less. And told me a story I shall never forget.

     Much is said of old folklore between the plush farmland of Los Coches Adobe and leading north upwards snaked along the Salinas River toward the sea by Monterey.  Some have remarked one can see Eden just west over the mountain range.  But none dare mention of the sounds of hell that emanate from a hole that had been dug too deep. 

     The old man and his two young adult sons, Conor and Ciaran, traveled from the Appalachians making their way westward.   They did not travel west for fool's gold, nor the promise of El Dorado.  It was black gold and its unrefined greed that lured them to its call.  With faith in hand and determined will they believed the coastal land would yield to them its hidden secret.  So they crossed the country by wagon and with all their worldly possessions in tow they searched for what they felt was their's by right.  Let it be known that this lot of men were vile, iniquitous, and treacherous by nature.  They held no qualms in the cutting of a man's throat for sheer entertainment.  And easily cast judgment from bigoted views they held.  Upon reaching their destination they staked their claim to a patch of land already occupied.  They terrorized and forcibly pillaged a small wooded cabin of a mestizo family who worked as laborers for a farmer south of Salinas.  They took what did not belong to them.  And the devil smiled.

     Five years they toiled upon the stolen land.  Digging deep into the moist earth.  Driving metal pipes into its heart.  But it yielded no secrets.  Instead it fought them, taking from them what they had taken from others, pieces of their life.  So with enraged heart they dug deeper.  There lives became monotonous, like the sailors upon the sea in search of the great white elusive whale.  They worked, ate, and drank. Drowning their anger and cursing the land, which tempted their avarice.  It was on a late spring night in an old catina in Monterey that a steep price was paid in blood.  During a drunken argument with a local Ciaran met his end at the point of a knife.  He bled to death several feet from the cabin laying on the moist earth staring upwards at a yellow moon.  He laughed as he could feel the ground drink his warm blood, a debt paid for his foul curses.  The old man and his last son buried the boy; without even a kindness of a mournful prayer.

     A week later the remaining two struck what they believed to be the end of their search.  But upon further inspection the hollowed end of the metal pipe revealed something far more sinister and unnerving to heart.  It was a sound.  A pitch of high frequency that at first caused an excruciating discomfort, before changing to a hiss.  There was a scent odious, pungent, and sulphuric in its presence.  A thick mist seemed to cascade outward into the air, eventually dissipating with beguiling dread.  And the noise began to reflect its malleable nature.  Screams and wails emanated forth from the hole in the ground.  Tortured in caustic rapturous agony; a cacophony of the dead.  As well as familiar voices.

     Cillian fell to his knees in both horror and anguish.  He could hear the voice of his dead son call out to him from within the hole.  It was unmistakable and it wavered between damnation and ecstacy.  As if the pain he suffered was sweet and distressingly forlorn.   Inhuman sounds screeched in mordant chorus aching to satiate its unquenchable lust.  Echoing in an apathetic chittering liken to the feeding of a horde of insects.  They assailed the senses sending him into a frenzied delusional madness.  Conor sought to escape his predicament rushing toward the cabin to hide himself behind the grey wooded splintered door.  He was left trembling and clinging to the remnants of his fractured sanity and weeping in utter despair.  He too had heard and recognized the voice of his deceased sibling calling out to him.  Placing the palms of his hands firmly against his ears he sought to silence the voices that bore into the deepest recesses of his detestable mind.  It was hell that he heard, reminisced from the bleakest nightmares dreamed, and the ever present wailing agonies that spoke to him now, which caused his ears to bleed.  He begged to an unkind indifferent God to cease the torturous sound, but no solace came.  Black oiled stained bones would be the remnants found upon the worn wooded floorboards that marked the young man's passage.  Along with the lecherous sanguine flies that ate in delight.  These vile black specks that fed upon the horrid wretched decay of living wound; like the parasitic creatures they were born to.  Nesting, feasting, devouring the inequities of our profane vices.  A morbid horde stifling the throat as to silence the horror of a scream.

     Two months later the old man would eventually be found laying by the hole and gibbering in complete and utter madness.  Stripped of all semblance of humanity and left in decomposition.  Dead, yet alive.  He claimed the devil spoke to him through a hole in the ground.  And he believed it to be true, for the evil prophesied he would be found on a day filled with rain.  So it came to pass that one of the largest storms in history flooded the valley.  And I took it upon myself to warn the surrounding neighbors, when I eventually came upon this site of pure living nightmare.   

     I am old now.  Frail and clinging to elusive memories that call to me like shadowed apparitions in darkest night.  I have no allusions of what death brings, or its untold mysteries.  I carry no profound wisdom, nor belief in faith.  But I am empathetic to the suffering we shall all experience in our demise.  Yet, years later I returned to the spot of old man Barrett's cabin.  The land around it was barren and dead.  The skeletal remnants of the home served as warning to any who dare come.  And the piece of metal, which pierced the earth was still visible.  The pipe worn red in rust pointed upwards like an accusatory finger beckoning to our vile nature.  Come listen...let us speak so that I may reveal to you the world as I see it.  And in the distance I swear I could hear...a legion of flies.

                                                                                                               Fin.