Marrow

The mine took Harlan Skaggs on a Tuesday, which was fitting because Tuesdays had always been unlucky for the Skaggs family. His father had lost three fingers to a conveyor belt on a Tuesday. His grandfather had coughed his last black spit into a coffee can on a Tuesday. And now Harlan himself lay somewhere beneath four hundred tons of sandstone and shale, entombed in Shaft Nine of the Boone Hollow Mine alongside two other men whose wives would also learn to sleep diagonal across suddenly enormous beds.

  Cleda Skaggs received the news on the porch, standing behind the screen door as if the mesh might filter out the worst of it. The company man held his hardhat against his chest like a shield and spoke in that flattened, practiced tone they must have taught at some corporate seminar on the delivery of devastation. She stared past him at the ridgeline, where October had set the maples on fire, and thought: The mountains giveth, the mountains taketh away.

  She did not scream. She did not weep—at least not then. She thanked the man, closed the door, and sat down at the kitchen table across from her three children, who were eating commodity peanut butter on white bread, and told them their daddy was with Jesus now, which was a lie she figured the Lord would forgive, since she had no earthly idea where Harlan actually was, only that he was underneath something from which no man returned.

  The children were young enough to still be made of rubber: Jessa, nine; Colton, seven; and little Pearl, just four with a gap in her teeth wide enough to whistle through. They cried the way children cry—in great heaving storms that clear quickly, leaving bewildered sunshine in their wake. Within an hour they were playing in the yard. Cleda envied them that. Her own grief had no weather pattern. It simply settled in like fog and stayed.

*** 

Winter came early that year, as if the mountains themselves were in a hurry to bury everything. The company's settlement check—seven thousand dollars, the price of a man's life measured in monthly tonnage—went to back rent and the gas bill and a cord of firewood that smelled of rot. By January, Cleda was boiling the same ham bone for the third consecutive soup, and the broth had grown so thin it was practically a memory of food.

  It was desperation, then, that led her back to the mines.

  Not to Shaft Nine—that was sealed now behind a concrete plug and a plaque no one visited. But the hills above Boone Hollow were riddled with old drift mines, bootleg tunnels dug by hand during the Depression when men would claw coal from the earth with the same grim determination they used to claw life from poverty. Some of these mines still held coal. Low-grade, sulfurous stuff, not worth a company's time—but enough, maybe, to heat a house through February.

  She left the children with Granny Rowe down the road and hiked up the ridge with a headlamp, a pickaxe, and a feed bucket. The entrance to the old Messer drift mine was half-collapsed, a mouth of broken timbers and kudzu, exhaling a breath of cold mineral air that tasted of deep time. She squeezed through the gap and followed the tunnel inward.

  The coal seam was there, a dark ribbon in the wall, just as the old-timers said. She swung the pick. Chunks fell away like black bread. She filled the bucket, then started on a second load.

  That's when the pick broke through into something hollow.

  The wall crumbled inward, revealing a fissure—a natural crack in the rock that angled steeply downward into a darkness her headlamp couldn't penetrate. But there was something else. A light. Not reflected light, not the bounce of her own beam, but a glow rising from deep within the fissure itself—a luminescence the color of spoiled moonlight, pale and faintly green, pulsing with a rhythm that seemed almost biological.

  She leaned closer. The air rising from the crack was warm, which was wrong. Mine air was cold, always cold. This air carried a sweetness, like honeysuckle and copper.

  Along the edges of the fissure, where the coal seam met the deeper rock, she could see the source: a vein of ore unlike anything she'd encountered. It glowed. Threads of iridescent mineral laced through the dark stone like veins in a wrist, and the light they threw was strange—it didn't illuminate so much as suggest, turning the surrounding rock into a cathedral of pale shadow.

  Cleda broke off a piece. It was warm in her hand, and heavier than it looked. It hummed—not audibly, but in some frequency that vibrated in the bones of her fingers and traveled up her arm to settle in her chest like a second heartbeat.

  She took it home.

***

Why she gave it to the children, she would later be unable to explain. It was pretty, she supposed. It glowed. Children love things that glow. She set the chunk of ore on the kitchen table after supper, and the three of them gathered around it like it was a birthday cake, their faces lit from below in that unearthly pallor. Pearl pressed her cheek to it and giggled. Colton licked it, because Colton licked everything. Jessa simply stared, her eyes catching the light in a way that made them briefly, horribly, reflective—like a deer's eyes on a dark highway.

  By morning, the ore had stopped glowing. It sat on the table like an ordinary rock, dull and inert, as if something had drained it.

  The children wouldn't eat breakfast. They said they weren't hungry, which was unprecedented—these were children who'd been hungry their entire lives, who knew hunger the way fish know water. But they pushed away their oatmeal with thin-lipped indifference and went outside to play in the frost.

  It was three days before Cleda noticed Jessa's fingers.

  They were longer. Not dramatically—maybe a quarter inch—but Cleda knew her children's bodies the way a carpenter knows wood, and those fingers were wrong. The knuckles had shifted, the joints multiplying subtly, giving the hand an articulation that was fluid and unsettling. When she grabbed Jessa's wrist to examine it, the girl pulled away with a strength that startled them both.

  "Don't, Mama," Jessa said. Her voice had dropped half a register. "It hurts when you touch me in the light."

  Within a week, all three children had begun to change.

  Their skin lost color first, fading from the ruddy Appalachian complexion of outdoor children to something approaching translucence. Cleda could see the blue maps of their veins, the shadows of their bones. They grew—not upward, as children should, but outward, their limbs elongating while their torsos remained childlike, giving them the proportions of cave insects. Colton's spine developed a curvature that let him move on all fours with disturbing fluidity. Pearl's jaw unhinged slightly, enough that her mouth could open too wide, revealing teeth that had grown pointed and numerous.

  And they were hungry. God, they were hungry.

  But not for oatmeal. Not for peanut butter or commodity cheese or even the venison jerky that Cleda traded for with Granny Rowe. They turned away from all of it with a revulsion that bordered on violence. Pearl threw a bowl of soup against the wall and screamed in a register that cracked the window glass. Colton gnawed the leg of the kitchen table down to splinters, then vomited.

  It was Jessa—still the most human of them, still able to form sentences, though her voice now carried an echo as if she spoke from the bottom of a well—who finally told Cleda what they needed.

  "Bones, Mama," she said. She was crouched in the corner of the darkened bedroom, her elongated frame folded into angles that shouldn't have been possible. Her eyes, once brown, now glowed with that same spoiled-moonlight luminescence. "The inside of bones. The soft part. We can smell it. We can smell it in you."

  Cleda felt the blood leave her face. "You mean marrow."

  Jessa smiled, and there were too many teeth in that smile. "Yes ma'am."

*** 

The first was a deer. Cleda shot a doe on the ridge and dragged it down to the root cellar, where the children now spent their days, having grown intolerant of sunlight. They fell on the carcass with a ferocity that made Cleda back against the wall and press her fist to her mouth. The sounds were obscene—wet, crunching, sucking sounds, the sounds of something ancient and efficient feeding. They cracked the bones with their bare hands, those terrible elongated fingers strong as vise grips, and extracted the marrow with tongues that had grown thin and probing.

  It sustained them for two days. Then the hunger returned, worse.

  She brought them a second deer. It bought a day and a half. A third deer: one day. The math was impossible. The hunger was accelerating, and the children were growing—there was no other word for it—more. More pale, more elongated, more other. They moved through the root cellar like ghosts made of angles and appetite, clicking to each other in a language Cleda couldn't understand but felt in her marrow, which perhaps was the point.

  "It's not enough," Jessa told her, pressed against the cellar wall, her body casting a shadow that didn't match her shape. "Animal bones are like... like drinking water when you're starving. It fills but doesn't feed. We need—" She stopped. What remained of her humanity surfaced briefly in her luminous eyes, a flicker of the nine-year-old girl who'd cried when her daddy died. "Mama, I don't want to say it."

  "Then don't."

  "We'll die if we don't eat."

  "Then don't say it."

  Jessa said it anyway. The word hung in the cellar like a held breath.

  People.

***

Cleda Skaggs did not sleep that night, nor the next. She sat in the kitchen with Harlan's shotgun across her lap and listened to her children move beneath the floorboards—she could hear them now, scratching, tunneling, expanding the root cellar into something larger, a network of passages that connected, she realized with sick certainty, to the old Messer drift mine on the ridge. To the fissure. To that vein of glowing ore that had started all of this.

  She thought about calling someone. The sheriff, maybe. A doctor. A priest. But what would she say? My children are turning into monsters and they need to eat people? They'd take her kids. They'd put them in some government facility, study them, cage them. Or worse—they'd kill them. They were still her children. Changed, yes. Monstrous, perhaps. But when Pearl clicked and whistled in the dark, Cleda could still hear the melody of "You Are My Sunshine," and that was enough—just barely, just terribly enough—to keep her from doing the rational thing.

  Instead, she did the unforgivable thing.

  Dale Sizemore was the town drunk, a man who'd pickled himself so thoroughly that his liver was presumably already the consistency of beef jerky. He had no family. He owed money to everyone. He'd been arrested twice for exposing himself behind the Family Dollar. He was, by any community metric, disposable—and Cleda hated herself for thinking in those terms, but desperation had rewritten her moral architecture the way the ore had rewritten her children's bones.

  She told Dale she'd found a vein of copper in the old Messer mine. Copper was worth money. She told him she needed help extracting it. She told him she'd split the profit sixty-forty, in his favor. Dale, who had never been offered the favorable end of any deal, agreed immediately.

  She led him up the ridge at dusk. She showed him the tunnel entrance. She handed him a headlamp and said she'd be right behind him.

  She was not right behind him.

  She waited outside, sitting on a stump, while the sounds traveled up from the dark—first confusion, then a shout, then a scream that devolved quickly into something wet and then into silence. The silence was worse than the scream because it contained within it the sounds of feeding, those obscene crunches and sucks that she had come to associate with her children's satisfaction.

  They didn't need feeding again for five days. And when they did, Cleda found that the math had changed. Three meals had become one. Five days of peace. The ore's mutation had reached some kind of equilibrium, it seemed, a metabolic plateau that required maintenance rather than escalation.

  She did the arithmetic of evil in her head. One person every five days. Seventy-three people a year. Boone Hollow had a population of four hundred and twelve.

  God forgive her, she thought. She could make that work.

***

The second was a drifter who'd been camping by the creek. The third was a bill collector from Lexington whom nobody missed for weeks. The fourth was old Mabel Hensley, who'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and whom Cleda told herself she was doing a mercy, which was a lie so monstrous that even Cleda's re-engineered conscience flinched.

  Between the feedings, she visited her children. She descended into the expanding network of tunnels with a lantern and sat among them in the pale green glow that now emanated from the walls themselves, the ore's influence spreading through the rock like a living thing. The children recognized her. They gathered around her, those elongated bodies folding and unfolding in the cramped space, and they pressed their translucent faces to her arms, her neck, her hair, breathing her scent with a tenderness that was more terrible than their hunger.

  "Mama," Pearl would whisper, her voice a frequency that vibrated in Cleda's fillings. "Mama, Mama, Mama." A litany. A prayer.

  "I'm here, baby."

  "Are we still yours?"

  "Always."

  She sang to them. "You Are My Sunshine." Their eyes pulsed in time with the melody.

***

By spring, six people had disappeared from Boone Hollow and its surroundings. The sheriff, a weary man named Combs who preferred the explanation that required the least paperwork, attributed most of them to the opioid crisis—people wandering off, people getting lost, people ceasing to exist in the bureaucratic sense long before they ceased to exist in the physical one. But suspicion was gathering like weather. Granny Rowe mentioned to the postman that she hadn't seen Cleda's kids in months. The postman mentioned it to his wife. His wife mentioned it to the woman at the IGA checkout. The web of gossip, which in small towns functions as both social fabric and surveillance system, was tightening.

  And then there was the matter of the ground.

  Several people along the ridge road had reported sinkholes—small ones at first, the size of dinner plates, but growing. Donnie Prater's toolshed collapsed into a hole that, when he shone a flashlight down into it, seemed to extend laterally in a direction that didn't make geological sense. The air rising from the hole, he told anyone who'd listen, smelled sweet. Like honeysuckle and copper.

  Cleda knew what it meant. The tunnels were expanding. Her children—and she still called them that, though the word required increasingly creative interpretation—were digging. Not randomly, but with purpose, extending their network outward and upward, toward the town. Toward the scent of four hundred and twelve living souls whose bones contained the marrow they craved.

  She went down to reason with them. She brought a lantern and descended into the main passage, which had widened enough that she could walk upright. The walls glowed steadily now, the ore's luminescence strong enough to read by, if anyone could have concentrated on reading in a place like this. The air was warm and sweet and wrong.

  She found them in a chamber they'd hollowed out beneath the ridge—a cathedral of living rock, the ceiling buttressed by columns of glowing ore that pulsed in the same rhythm she'd felt months ago in her hand, in her chest, that second heartbeat. The children were there, all three of them, but they had continued to change. Their features had smoothed, their individuality fading into a shared morphology—pale, elongated, luminous, something between human and geology, as if the mountain itself were dreaming of having children and these were the result.

  "You have to stop digging," Cleda said. Her voice echoed in the chamber and came back to her altered, harmonized by the ore's frequency. "You'll break through. People will see."

  Jessa—she thought it was Jessa; the shape that unfolded from the far wall had Jessa's bearing, a certain tilt of the head—approached her. Her face was a pale oval with the suggestion of features, like a face seen through ice.

  "We're hungry, Mama." The words came from everywhere, from the walls, from the ore, from the mountain itself. "There are so many up there. We can taste them through the rock."

  "I'll bring you someone. I'll bring you someone tomorrow. Just stop digging."

  "You can't bring enough. You know that."

  Cleda did know that. The arithmetic of evil had shifted. Three children had become something else—a colony, a network, a hunger that grew not in proportion to their bodies but in proportion to the tunnels themselves, as if the ore and her children had fused into a single organism whose appetite scaled with its reach. Every new passage they carved exposed more of the glowing vein, and every new vein fed the transformation, and every transformation deepened the hunger. It was a cycle with no ceiling, an equation that only solved for annihilation.

  "Please," Cleda whispered. "Give me time."

  The shape that might have been Jessa tilted its head further than any human neck should allow. Something flickered in those luminous eyes—a memory, maybe, of a kitchen table and peanut butter sandwiches and a mother who told her that Daddy was with Jesus now.

  "Three days, Mama. Then we come up."

*** 

Cleda climbed out of the mine into a night so full of stars it seemed indecent. The mountains stood against the sky like black teeth, and somewhere down in the hollow, a dog was barking at something it could probably feel through the ground. She sat on the stump where she'd sat while Dale Sizemore died and she pressed her palms to her eyes and tried to think.

  Three days.

  She could run. Pack a bag, steal a car, drive south until the mountains flattened into Mississippi delta and never look back. But the children—her children—would surface, and four hundred and twelve people would die, and that math would follow her like a scent no distance could outrun.

  She could tell someone. Sheriff Combs. The state police. The National Guard. But what would they do? Bomb the mountain? Pump gas into the tunnels? And somewhere in that collapsing labyrinth, three children who still whispered Mama would choke or burn or be buried, and Cleda had already lost one family member to a mine collapse and the symmetry of that was more than she could bear.

  Or she could do the thing she'd been avoiding since January, the thing that lived at the bottom of every calculation she'd run, the variable she kept refusing to solve for.

  She could go back down and not come back up.

  The thought had a clarity to it, a clean geometric logic that cut through the fog of months of horror. She was the lure. She was the mechanism by which the hunger was fed. Without her, the children would surface sooner—but she'd seen how they reacted to sunlight, how even the dull gray of an overcast day sent them recoiling. Without the cover of night, without a guide, without the careful orchestration of a mother's love perverted into predation, they would be exposed. Vulnerable. The town would see them coming.

  But there was something else—something she'd noticed during her last visit and refused to examine. When the children pressed their faces to her skin, when they breathed her scent with that terrible tenderness, they didn't feed. They could have. She was right there, full of marrow, full of everything they craved. But they didn't. Whatever the ore had done to them, it hadn't erased the one prohibition that even monsters apparently honored.

  They would not eat their mother.

  But they would eat with her. They would eat what she brought. They would restrain themselves within the parameters she set, not because they lacked the power to do otherwise, but because she was the last thread connecting them to what they'd been. She was the lighthouse, and they were the ships, and without her beam they'd crash against whatever shore was nearest.

  Which meant that leaving—in any direction, by any method—was not an option. She was the valve. The regulator. The only thing standing between a hungry god in the mountain and a town full of unsuspecting bones.

  She went home. She sat at the kitchen table where the ore had first glowed and her children had first pressed their faces to its light. She poured herself a glass of Harlan's bourbon, the bottle she'd been saving for no particular occasion, and she drank it slowly, letting the warmth of it settle into the same place in her chest where the ore's frequency still faintly hummed.

  Then she made a plan.

***

The next morning, Cleda Skaggs walked into the Boone Hollow Community Center, where the monthly potluck was being set up by the same women who'd brought her casseroles after Harlan died—tuna noodle, chicken and rice, the beige cuisine of Protestant grief. She stood at the front of the room and asked for everyone's attention.

  She told them about the mine.

  Not all of it. Not the children, not the marrow, not the six people who would never be found. She told them about the ore. She described its glow, its warmth, its hum. She told them it was something new, something valuable, something that could save the town. She used words like rare earth minerals and government contracts and economic revival, words she'd heard on the news and now wielded with the precision of a woman who understood that hope was the most effective lure of all—more effective than copper, more effective than whiskey, more effective than anything except perhaps the promise that things might finally get better.

  She watched their faces as she spoke. These were people who'd been promised things before—by coal companies, by politicians, by every carpetbagger who'd ever driven through Appalachia with a contract in one hand and a lie in the other. They were wary. But they were also tired, and poor, and desperate in the particular way that people are desperate when they've been left behind by every version of progress that ever bothered to visit.

  She saw the want in their eyes. The terrible, human want.

  "I need volunteers," she said. "To help me excavate. Small groups. We'll go in shifts."

  Twenty-three people signed up that morning.

  Cleda drove home with the list on the passenger seat and a coldness in her chest that she understood was the final death of something—not her conscience, which had died somewhere around Mabel Hensley, but her ability to pretend that what she was doing had limits. She had just sold her community the same lie the coal companies always had: Come into the mountain. There's treasure inside. It'll change your life.

  It would change their lives. Just not in the way they imagined.

***

She went down that evening to tell the children. The chamber was larger now—she could feel the space before she saw it, a cathedral expanding toward infinity, the ore-veined walls pulsing like the interior of some vast luminous heart. They gathered around her, these things that had been Jessa and Colton and Pearl, and she told them what she'd done, and they listened with that terrible patience that the hungry learn.

  "Not all of them," she said. "Not at once. Small groups. Enough to sustain. I'll manage it. I'll keep the schedule. I'll make sure no one suspects."

  The shape nearest her—Pearl, she decided, because it was the smallest and it still hummed a melody that could have been "You Are My Sunshine"—pressed its smooth face to her hand.

  "Mama provides," it said, and the walls said it too, and the ore pulsed, and the mountain itself seemed to sigh with satisfaction.

  Cleda closed her eyes. In the green dark behind her lids, she saw Harlan's face—not as he'd been at the end, buried under stone, but as he'd been at the beginning, young and coal-dusted and grinning, standing at the mouth of Shaft Nine on his first day of work. The mountains giveth, he'd said, and she'd laughed, and he'd kissed her, and the future had been a tunnel that might have led anywhere.

  "Yes," she said to her children, to the mountain, to the glowing vein that had rewritten her family and was now rewriting her soul. "Mama provides."

  Above them, on the surface, the stars shone down on Boone Hollow with the same indifferent beauty they'd shone down on a thousand other towns that thought they knew what was beneath them. In the community center, the potluck continued. Someone was playing guitar. Someone was laughing. The casseroles were warm and the coffee was hot and the list of twenty-three names sat on the passenger seat of a dead miner's truck, waiting.

  The mountain hummed.

  The mountain was patient.

  The mountain was fed.

*** 

In the years that followed, Boone Hollow's population declined steadily, a fact attributed by the county clerk to the same forces hollowing out every small town in eastern Kentucky: outmigration, opioids, despair. The mine on the ridge, locals said, had been a bust—no rare earth minerals, no government contracts, just another false promise from a desperate woman who eventually stopped coming to town altogether.

  Her cabin still stands, though no one visits. The floorboards have collapsed into a darkness that seems to breathe. On quiet nights, the old-timers say, you can hear something moving beneath the mountain—a sound like singing, like a lullaby, like a mother calling her children home.

  They are still hungry.

  They are always hungry.

  And the mountain provides.