Worms In Appalachia

This short story is, in theory, a modern Cthulhu mythos tale based loosely on the works of Brian Lumley and Manley Wade Wellman (in the latter case extremely loosely as I've never been able to get any of Wellman's books, I've just read about them). The narrator and protagonist, Mary-Jane, is supposed to be a descendent of Silver John the Balladeer.

I have never been to Appalachia and this will probably be obvious.

***

I know these hills; I know these hollows. I know the stories and the songs shaped by the tangled forests, the rich dark soil, the rivers and bridges and tiny isolated communities. These are my people. I know when something is wrong… and there are certain threats most know nothing about. Protecting from these threats is my family legacy, passed down with my great-grandfather’s books and stories and silver guitar strings. So when I heard people whispering about Shudde M’ell – when people started vanishing – I had to act.

Earthquakes are not unknown in West Virginia. Some are natural. Most are man-made – the results of bad mining practices. These, too, were man-made in a sense. But when an earthquake strokes one house with enough force to level it, to sink a house and its garden forty feet into the good loom, but leaves the trees surrounding it untouched, that is neither natural nor an accident.

It was a day in late July when I stood by the old Weaver place, looking down into the pit. A cordon of police-tape ringed it off, a pathetic barrier in the face of that vast hole and the destructive force that had made it. Around, the woods were lovely, flowers grown in the understory beneath sycamore and maple and oak. Birdsong and the buzzing of insects filled the air. But there was a sense of stillness over the pit. Nothing sung in there. I looked down, at dunes of newly-fallen earth, exposed roots, huge boulders partially unearth, at the pitifully small pile of timbers and shingles that was all that remained of the house. No-one had seen old man Weaver since the earthquake – if earthquake it was. The people in the next house, some three hundred yards down the hill, hadn’t heard or felt a thing. So, Weaver was dead. I closed my eyes for a second, coming to terms with that. I’d liked Weaver. He was prone to sticking his nose in and making everything his business and asking questions people didn’t want asked. The world needed more people like him.

The pile of rubble was too small. Something didn’t make sense.

It took me half an hour to descend into the pit, more to aside planks and shingles and confirm my suspicions – not enough, even for a place as small as Weaver’s. At last, at the lowest point of the pit, where Weaver’s living room would have been, I found what I was looking for. A deeper pit, collapsed on itself, maybe two meters wide. A faint smell like burnt tar and something else, something like leaf-mould but fouler. I climbed out of the pit, lost in thought.

The family in the next house, who hadn’t seen or heard anything but had called the police when they went to visit Weaver and found his house gone, were well-meaning enough but they were new-comers, born in Appalachia but parents from outside. They didn’t know the old stories or the old families. I thanked them for answering my questions, passed myself off as Weaver’s niece, and took my leave. There were other places I needed to go, other questions I needed to ask.

It took a week, but eventually someone talked. I heard the rumours. And the name. Shudde M’ell. The man who told me was tall and broad, a strong man who looked down on those who weren’t strong or men, and said it was nothing a pretty little thing like me should worry my head about. He smiled as he said it and I smiled back. Later that night I visited him – kept him deep in sleep with a lullaby, gently called his ears and mouth to wakefulness with a morning-chant, and asked him questions until his rambling, half-dream answers told me what I needed to know. It would have been quicker to get the truth out of him with a knife, but I was trying to keep a low profile.

In the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, a river called the Danube drains into the Shenandoah, and then into the Potomac, and then into the Atlantic ocean. No-one knows who named it – the first white settlers here were Scots-Irish, not European, and there are no similar names for rivers in the languages of the Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee or Seneca people. It is a small river and will not be found on any map not hand-drawn in Appalachia. Its source is somewhere in the limestone cliffs and nearby is a place where the cliffs seem squeezed together, great pilers of rock bunched around a natural amphitheatre. I had never been there before but I recognised the description, and the directions, from the dreaming mutters of my source. I hitched a ride with a logging truck for most of the way and then I walked for a night, through increasingly tangled forest and over steep ground, until I found the place. When I got there, it was unmistakeable – white rocks like great finger-bones bunched together and reaching yearningly for the sky. And I noticed the silence, the same as at Weaver’s place, but deeper, as if no bird had sung here for a hundred years. I did not want to climb that last hill and scrabble over boulders to the gap between those great pillars – wide enough for me but my informant must have scrapped the sides unless he turned sideways. But I did, and found myself in the place. It was as described, a huge space, floor of boulders and pebbles, walls of rock, those same walls closing in above so only a tiny window opened to the sky. Overall, the space was shaped like a teardrop. On the rounded walls there was plenty of space for men to sit. It was a huge space.

No, I realised. It was a large space, fully a hundred yards across at its widest point and stretching up twice that height… but the man had said Shudde M’ell came here. I looked at the rocks at my feet. There was a faint reek of bringing and leaf-mould but much fainter that at Weaver’s place. I assumed the lose rocks at the bottom obscured the actual entrance to any further tunnel. Here at the base of the teardrop, the space was much narrower, less than a hundred yards across.

I had to be sure, so I went back to the man. This time I needed more than songs and I took roots and potions, old magic. He startled awake when I placed the first poultice on him but I held him until it took effect and then he didn’t move. Slowly, I made my way into his dreams.

We were in the amphitheatre again. It was night, the night of the new moon, and above the cliffs vanished in blackness, no hint of star-light coming through thick clouds. Burning torches lit the space and there were dozens of men there – all men, I noted – in robes of deep red-brown, faces hidden in cowls. I sensed their anticipation, their sense of... smug superiority, a feeling that they deserved more than the ignorant mass of humanity. It was not a pleasant feeling.

They were chanting. That name. Shudde M’ell, Shudde M’ell, Shudde M’ell. Faster and faster, louder and louder. At last, the ground trembled and the earth roared and the great worm came, bursting up through the ground like a whale, higher than any living thing had a right to be. Skin slick and pearly grey, worm-body reaching to the top of the space and then curving down again, trunk sixty yards thick, the two dozen or so head tentacles themselves as thick as oaks and as long as giant redwoods. The reek of the think’s musk was overwhelming and its hide was somehow both slick with mucous and blazing heat like an oven. The men brought forward their sacrifices – my stomach twisted, although I was in no way surprised – and the great worm, the worm that was still not Shudde M’ell, bent lower and engulfed them. The screams were mercifully quick.

After I left that man, dead of what seemed a heart-attack – I could not in conscience let him live – I followed the clues from his dreams, vague hints of names and place associated with his fellow cultists. I found stories of luck. A man whose failing business had suddenly received a major contract. Another whose rival’s tractor dealership had burnt down. Work, money – small recompense for human sacrifice but people have done worse for less. And they all spoke the name Shudde M’ell. But I could only track down four and I knew there were dozens. If I wanted to stop them it would have to be at the next ceremony. New moon. By now it had been nearly three months, a season, since the last ceremony. I only had a few days left.

I found a suitable place – an old coal-mine near the amphitheatre, deep underground as I could go – and prepared a suitable draft, of cinnabar and arsenic and other things. I went down, with only an old oil-lamp. Shudde M’ell does not like light, it is said, although this is a preference and not a fear - once it faced and survived a nuclear explosion. And I imagine there is enough light in the molten depth its calls home. Perhaps it is only our light, the blue light of sun and sky, that is not to its taste.

When I came to the lowest part of the mine, I made marks on the walls. Not for protection or warding, not this time. I traced my own blood in them. It was a delicate balance, enough blood to appease the god-worm, not enough to actually summon it physically. Finally, I turned off the lamp and lay down in the middle of that space and took the poisonous draft I had prepared.

I felt my spirit loosen from its moorings and, rather than drifting, I forced myself to go down. The earth is dense and textured and I felt and saw much as I descended, calling out the name. Shudde M’ell.

- Who calls me?

It was a voice as old as basalt, as deep as caves. It was not angry, or hungry. Yet. Bu to show fear would be death.

- My name is Mary-Jane Wellman. I am a hoodoo woman, a descendent of Silver John the Balladeer, and a daughter of Appalachia.

- And why do you call me? Do you seek to beg favour?

A hint of anger there. I bit my lip, quieted my mind before answering.

- No.

- Do you offer me sacrifice?

- I have written your praises in stone and spilt my blood in your name. But I will not offer you a living sacrifice.

- Then do you seek to summon, to control me?

A hint of amusement there.

- No, Shudde M’ell. I merely wish to give you a message.

- Then speak.

- One of your children is mocking you, Shudde M’ell. One of your children is taking your name and using it to men, humans, who do all those things you though I wanted to do. They give this pretender sacrifices, yes, but it appears for them, in the flesh, like a king demeaned into a prancing jester. And it gives them magics for their sacrifice, the magics of your kind, for them to achieve their basest desires.

Silence. I wondered then if I’d made a mistake, if Shudde M’ell knew or did not care or would find my presumption in calling it more insulting than the pretender.

- You lie. My children would not be so foolish.

- It is not a lie, Shudde M’ell. Look in my mind and see my memories, if my words are not enough.

Silence, then. At first I thought it was over. Then Shudde M’ell struck. I felt its mind sliding into mine, felt vast tentacles plunging into the space between my neurons, felt white-hot pain. I fought – not to resist the intrusion but to keep from screaming stop, to keep from panicking, to focus only on my memories. Weaver’s place. The amphitheatre. The man’s dreams. The other things I’d seen. As Shudde M’ell went through my mind I felt something of its, felt the pressure and heat that were like air and nourishing water to it, remembered diving through solid rock, remembered battles when the earth was young. I felt the things it had done and what it wanted to do. It was the worst feeling of my life.

- WHO WOULD DARE?

- Now there was anger. I did not answer, not wanting to attract Shudde M’ell’s attention, but I focussed my memories again. That huge worm in the teardrop space. And the fact that the next ceremony would be on the night of the new moon.

Suddenly, Shudde M’ell was gone. I lay there, trembling, as all the fear I’d supressed crashed through my body It was a long time before I could stand.

The next earthquake as felt across a hundred miles. A few days later, when I went back to the place, that teardrop-shaped amphitheatre was gone – limestone columns shattered to flinders, as though from a titanic blow from beneath. The pillars were fallen inwards, or flung outwards – a section as large as a house lay two hundred yards away. When I climbed the slippery raw earth of the destroyed path and peered into what had been the amphitheatre there was nothing left of its original shape, or the original floor – a wider, deeper hole, filled only with fragments of the surrounding pillars, greeted my gaze. I closed my eyes and reached out with my mind and I saw what had happened here.

I saw the cultists, gathered, chanting, torches lit. I saw the thing they bargained with and falsely called Shudde M’ell – huge beyond any naturel life, but only mid-size in Shudde M’ell’s brood. I saw the sacrifices, in sacks bound with rope, lying on the floor – I grieve their deaths, but there was no way I could have rescued them from such overwhelming numbers and I have the consolation of knowing they are the last.

And then I saw Shudde M’ell erupting from below, the great worm a quarter-mile long and a hundred yards across, dwarfing the arrogant pretender. I saw it rise into the sky, impossibly vast and unimaginable quick, the other worm caught in its may like a seal in the mouth of a great white shark. In les than a second it was taken from the amphitheatre to high above the hilltops. The cultists were obliterated Shudde M’ell’s passage, as surely as if the entire space had been swept clean by dynamite. I swayed, face paling, as knowledge of the elemental forces I had unleashed swept over me. And when I left that place, my legs shook with more than the exertion of the climb.

There is one more thing. Shudde M’ell has seen fit to repay me. It came to me in a dream that night. I sensed rather than saw the great worm, resting in the comfortably warm embrace of Earth’s upper mantle, drowsing as it slept off the meal it had mad if its disobedient child. A flicker of its attention passed my way and a new power burnt into me, like the pressure of a titan moving through magma. I cried out and awoke. And now I know the Red Sign of Shudde M’ell.

I have leant many spells, many songs and cantrips and potions. Sometimes the learning has been hard and the truth has shaken my view of the world. But this is different, a magic never meant for humans, and my mind skitters away from the knowledge as from the wheel of a fresh burn/. But a cannot unlearn it, - Shudde M’ell’s boon is a part of me now, like a scar, or a bone. If I make the signs and speak the words I can call the crushing pressure of the earth-quake, the heat of the larva, on my foes. I know – I do not know how – that I can do this once and Shudde M’ell will consider us even. If ever I have to do it again, I will have to repay the great old one. I hope I never have to use this power even once, for it is a terrible thing to do and a terrible thing to channel through mortal flesh and mind and spirit. But I truly hope I never have to use it twice.