The Fallow

A deal with the Fallow is a gamble. Be sure it is what you want.

The Fallow

“There’s no turning back now.”

Anna knew this in her bones, and that decisive thought scraped at her mind as she continued. There was no back, because she had already started, and if she stopped, there would be a cost.

Costs.

The ground was loamy, now: the day had been long and spiteful with heat, but evening damp had begun to tenderize the world.

The candles that Anna had reverently placed only flickered fleetingly, enduring the shroud of chill. They illuminated this small, drab place; so wet, and so meaningless, but also the center of Anna’s universe. The blood spatters were a gruesome black in the candles’ light; the fawn had fought, and splashed, but it didn’t matter now. The blood-palimpsest Anna had whispered onto the substrate of the earth didn’t matter. The imprecation she sang, quietly, didn’t matter.

The soil was all that mattered.

The man had been clear about that aspect of it. His eyes white-burnt as though sundered by fire, had held to hers with certainty as he had explained. “The Fallow isn’t about the flesh. Or the bone. Not the soul, or the blood, or even the fucking fingernails.” She remembered being scared then, as his lips became slick with spittle. “It’s the soil. The earth. It remembers death and decay, and holds it. Forever. The shape it starts in, yes – and then the stages of rot, and oblivion. The Fallow holds the taste of everything consumed, and every terrible part of that consumption. We’re all equal in death.” The man had continued to hold her gaze with those empty eyes – to scrutinize her exhausted, grieving face – and steadied himself. “Be mindful that it’s what you want. The Fallow never forgets a touch, from the dead or from the living.”

And Anna wouldn’t, either. She would not – could not – forget Isabella. Everything would be forgotten, if not forgiven, and the world illuminated again, if Isabella would simply burst from that soil, sodden with the bowels of the earth but hungry for life.

There was a hum. So small as to be the spine of everything, but it became present.

The fawn had just been a gesture, Anna knew. The power was not in sacrifice, but intent. Its blood pooled and curdled with the hard, scattered grass and the world below.

The thing below. The thing below everything. The hum was a breath. Sonorous and primordial, and pulsing with something like electricity. Power.

It was almost imperceptible, but to Anna it was everything. She wondered if the Fallow had a true form, or if it was beyond such a thing. A great link to everything living and dead could not possibly have a form, could it? Did it have eyes and teeth in the dark? Fucking fingernails? Had people worshipped it once, or was it beyond the concept of deities: was it merely a force that needed no reverence? A shadow within the beating heart of the world itself?

The hum deepened and seemed to spread wider. Higher. It became something transcendental, like a choir embedded in the very concept of the earth. Anna’s mind hummed in concordance with it, and her thoughts – which had once been filled with nothing but Isabella’s pale skin and the image of her slick with the dirt of renewal – were replaced with black.

No, not just black. Something else, moving through the black. A shadow within shadow, moving upward.

Whatever it was, it raked and grunted. It was an insubstantial wisp at first, but as it dragged itself up through the innards of the world it seemed to fill out, coalescing the clods and emptiness around it into something with form. Soil adhered to bone, and unguent trickles of mud transmuted into sinew. If the man had been right, then the Fallow contained everything within its immutable memory. Not just Isabella as she was now – nothing – but the stages of her deterioration. Isabella hard and cold in the soil; Isabella writhing with the worms; but also Isabella pale and real at the moment of her being first pasted with the wet earth. Anna wanted that Isabella back. The Isabella that was closest – so achingly close – to the Isabella that had been real flesh and real warm soul.

The creature labored on and upward, and the hum shrouding Anna’s mind turned to something like pain. But the pain was ecstasy, because the creature she saw was Isabella. There was no doubt. Isabella rising to the surface.

Mangled, desiccated Isabella. The beast that Anna could see only in her mind’s eye tried to scream as it climbed up, up toward Anna. Up toward her love, and to the light of life. But the compacted earth filled its half-formed skull, its gnashing teeth flailing helplessly against the onslaught. Anna found herself silently praying as she watched, even as she buckled under the weight of the sheer power, forcing her down like the palm of a great and terrible hand. Watch, the great thing seemed to say. Watch what it is you have done. The Fallow was – or perhaps could be - a force of resurrection, but a force beyond reckoning.

Anna didn’t know if it was tears or blood pooling in her eyes. She remembered the words of the blind man, whose frenzy had abated. “The thing about the Fallow is that it is like gambling. You’re staking your soul. It will hurt. It has to hurt, otherwise it’d not mean anything. But who knows what you’ll get? And if you decide not to play after all, well…you can’t just cash out. It’ll take a piece of you back with it.”

They were tears, Anna knew. The vision in her mind – was it really Isabella? In life her skin had been beautiful. Her smile warmth and grace and passion. This thing lurching through the guts of the dark below bore no resemblance to her. Perhaps it couldn’t be her. It was something else. It was impossible.

“Stop,” she whispered. “I don’t want it.”

Her shaken voice was a quiet wisp. But it was only the intent that mattered, after all. The hum ceased, and the vision dissipated. Anna’s heart lurched with renewed grief, and the stab of a newfound absence. Of a fragment of her soul, now lost. Swallowed into the dark below everything.

Costs, yes. One price had already been paid: Isabella was gone. And in beginning and failing to continue, Anna had lost part of herself. She wondered vaguely and in a stupor whether the Fallow, in some indescribable shape beyond the liminality of time itself, would be glutting on that stolen fragment of her soul.

--

Isabella curled into herself, in the dark, which stretched around her endlessly. It had consumed her, filled her mind and her skull and her soul. Had she been close to the light? It all seemed foggy, like a forgotten song.

The thing she clutched was new. Formless. But it was so familiar. Its scent, and its shape, were things she would remember forever.

Yes. The time before seemed so long ago now, but she knew it was a piece of Anna.

Isabella had no body, but something of her smiled: she would have this gift, a fragment of Anna, with her forever, in the endless dark.