The Unwishing Well

by Don F. Muchow:

The heavy gray clouds hung low and seemed to close in around the weary man as he picked his way up the barren hill toward the lone landmark, a small stone structure.  March winds pelted him now and again with fat, cold raindrops.  Shoes slipping in the mud as he navigated the rocks and weeds, he approached with a sense of relief and anticipation.  Decades ago, he had fallen horribly in love with a dark haired woman half his age, and for a moment the sun seemed to shine.  But that one brief excursion into light had ended badly; he wanted it behind him now.  And thus it was with the others over countless centuries, each carrying the weight of a wasted life to a hole in the ground where legend held that the first Emperors drowned their sorrows.  Into this well were thrown all the memories that people wanted to forget.  He marveled that any place could hold such a burden.  He looked over the weed encrusted edge, past the circle of jagged stones and into the vacant space below, and lost all sense of time and place.  A susurration arose, low and indefinite, softer than a whisper, and he looked up and glanced around.  But it was nothing but the wind, and into it he released the memory of her.

Years later, two men and a woman watched sheep graze one evening on a hillside.  The three of them, Cavutto, Mariela and a neighbor, Charles, basked in the evening sun as the animals stood placidly in the distance, heads buried in the yellow-green grass.  Cavutto and Mariela had been together for fifty years, and neither of them remembered how long the herds had wandered the verdant fields and valleys below the town.  Charles said it had been at least since the Saracens.  None of the animals, however, ever went anywhere near the top of the hill, where it was said there stood the entrance to an old mine, or mausoleum, or cave.  Little was known about the place, and people avoided it for the most part.  Mariela thought she remembered once seeing a young couple crossing the field to attend to desire in the woods beyond, but it was long ago.  The conversation devolved into a discussion among the two men of an assortment of legends and speculation.  It was in the midst of such off-hand banter that Mariela, who was most inclined to fancy, heard Cavutto’s dog barking and thought she saw a man cresting the hill.  Glancing over her shoulder in the fading light, she turned to follow the men back inside.

The traveler could no longer remember his own name, for he had no one with whom to share it.  He had learned to live on little and enjoyed the open air.  The forest and fields were his home, the sun and moon his guardians.  As daylight retreated with the herds, he stared at his shadow and lit a handmade cigarette.  He sat smoking until it was almost done, then put it out with some earnestness and opened his backpack.  In it were the remains of a sandwich and enough provisions for the night.  Tomorrow he would forage for wild berries along the south edge of the property, feeding off them until he found a creek deep enough for fishing.  He dared not kill any of the sheep.  Others had been hanged for less.

Behind him in the fading light beckoned a cave mouth, encircled by a ring of fallen stones that hinted at its history.  Mausoleum? Root cellar? Treasure hoard? It was no longer possible to tell.  There was now just the ring of stones, which further inside held a little of their original structure.  Pocketing the sandwich, rolling papers and a bag of tobacco, he shouldered the pack and decided to explore a bit before the sun set.

The stone tunnel quickly dove, leading so sharply down that he had to climb the rock face by clinging to it with his fingertips.  At the bottom lay soft, cool earth, where the tunnel continued.  He lit a second cigarette.  The walls leapt into a nacreous yellow glow.  The passage was adorned with a handful of sconces for the next thirty feet or so, and in one of them sat the remains of a torch.  Feeling the match burn his fingers, he reached out and lit the torch.  It was ragged and dry, and lit ashes fell to the floor for a while before it finally caught fire.  He shook his hand vigorously and sucked on the end of his finger.  It was only then he saw the rest of the cave.

Cobblestones lined the floor ahead.  The tunnel crested, then continued to descend to the left.  Spotting a second and third unlit torch to his right, he stowed them in the backpack and proceed further down the passageway.  The weather outside was worsening, for at the edge of his hearing he could discern the keening wind.  Spring was fickle.  While daylight voice spoke of life and hinted at the land’s bounty, night took a toll on the unready.  He hunkered down and prepared himself for an extended stay.

He was unprepared for what came next.  Stretching below him lay an impossibly large cavern, lit from within by a dim glow like pale green moonlight.  Rivulets of orange flickered and ran as the walls caught the light of his torch.  A black expanse of gnarled, leafless trees stretched out and engulfed the path a few feet ahead.  In the flickering light, little paths seemed to lead off crookedly to the left and right.

Something with wings screeched and swooped down from behind him and collided with his head.  As it fluttered away, he dropped the torch, which rolled away under a thicket of branches and threatened to snuff itself out.  He beat at his head until he was certain the thing was gone, and as the torch died, he was left only with the impossible moonlight.  It seemed cold and unnatural.  He reached into his pocket for another match.  There were eight left.  Lighting it, he grabbed the torch again and raised it high overhead as he made a circle with his arm.  Bats! He tried to remember what he had read about them, but all he could recall was that they hunted insects at dusk and lived in high, protected places.  He gathered up a few dry sticks to make a fire.  Meanwhile, he let his eyes wander in search of more defensible shelter.  Perhaps it was the light, but as his eyes took in the cave, it seemed larger, more alien, and somehow more menacing.  For the first time since he had descended into the cave, he felt a vague unease, and a sense of longing.  Then after a few minutes, it disappeared.  Not far away, he spotted another cave mouth, perhaps fifty yards across a fairly navigable path.  Looking back to remember the way he had come, he set out for the opening.

What should have been ten minutes stretched out to more like an hour, as the path was strewn with mud and twigs and bits of leaf debris that slid beneath his already wet and soggy shoes.  At last he reached the mouth of the cave, and after a brief examination that revealed yet another warren of passages, returned.  He sat down, placed the bundle of dry twigs just outside the entrance, and lit it with the torch.  He thought he smelled creosote as the orange flame mixed with bits and spurts of blue.  It was nice to have a fire, and feeling more comfortable for the first time in a while, he laid the torch a few feet behind himself and sat down to eat.  By his best guess, it was about nine o’clock in the evening.  But it wasn’t worth the trip back to the entrance to check the moon, as there were things abroad at night which saw man as no threat.

He took off his jacket, folded it under his head, and tried to get some sleep.

An hour or two later he was awakened by rustling and the sound of footsteps.  The torch behind him had snuffed itself out, but the fire at the entrance was still burning in a sort of haphazard way.  He glanced around cagily.  Seeing nothing, he wiped his eyes and raised himself up, yawning but hyper-aware.  Without explanation, there suddenly stood a woman not three feet from him.  She appeared to be between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, with straight black hair that emerged from beneath a blue hood and ran to an abrupt, dramatic stop just above her jaw line.  She was dressed in a robe or cloak that covered most of her garments.  In the weak light, it took his eyes a few moments to adjust.  When he was able to see clearly, he could tell that she was little more than a shadow, a vaporous haze in the flickering light.  As he watched, she mouthed a single word: remember.  Then she was gone.

It was some time before he fell asleep again.  He tossed and turned as his mind was assaulted by a vivid stream of frightful images.  A man wandered alone among the ruins of his home town, looking for family.  In the near distance, explosions rocked the earth.  People dove for cover or were blown free and didn’t get up.  Crackling, roaring firestorms silenced the screams.  The survivors fled to rivers and oceans with no hope of rescue.  The shell shocked and injured crept among bodies of the newly dead, through the shattered remains of lives forever altered, from the rubble of nameless towns and villages to yet others more viciously stricken.  And always among the shouting and weeping, the whistling that preceded each explosion, and the next, and the next.  He slept fitfully for perhaps the next two hours before awakening to an urgent need to attend to nature.  His heart pounding in his chest, he made his way around the smoldering embers and into the open area beyond the cave’s entrance.  Stumbling a few steps to one side, he leaned against a rock wall and relieved himself.  When he was done, he glanced at the forested hollow he had trekked across.  This time it seemed as though the cavern, the path he had traveled, the forest–everything–were less expansive in some vague, unplaceable way.  Indeed, as he ducked inside to retrieve his backpack and the two good torches, the cave within seemed smaller, too, barely enough for a man.

Shivering, he shouldered the pack and tried to shake the cobwebs from his head, but the dream would not depart.  The image of the woman kept coming back.  Who was she? A ghost? A prophet? A vision?  Where did she come from? And why?

By his own reckoning, much of the night had passed, so he decided to head back to the surface.  Dumping fresh earth on the dying fire, he made his way gingerly across the muddy field that nevertheless was the most direct path back, and the only one that didn’t require negotiation of dense forest by dim light.  This time, the going was faster, and he was across the divide in a matter of twenty minutes or so.  By the time he reached the foot of the path leading up to the main entrance, though, something was different.  The way up was blocked by an opaque, undulating darkness.  His first thought was that one of the larger trees had fallen, the canopy blown by some invisible gust, but as he moved closer, he could see that what blocked his way was a black, sooty fog, at points so thick that he could not see the way ahead.

As he edged closer, shapes formed and faded in the mist.  A young soldier, still holding his weapon, helmet caked with blood and gore, reached from the thick wall of cloud and was drawn back into it.  A little girl, her face as pale as linen, stumbled aimlessly clutching a doll from one roiling bank and into another.  A man in a long, blood soaked overcoat helped a woman up from beside the path, only to be drawn back with her into the dark mist.  Doing his best to disbelieve, he pressed forward, eyes closed, walking steadily ahead.  As he did, he could feel the clinging, beseeching grasp of the cloud, a fetid, repellent moistness that was almost physical.

A memory of the bats returned.  He opened his eyes, hands flailing around his head, and raced toward the bottom of the path.  But it was not bats.  The black cloud now enveloped and enshrouded him and no longer permitted a view of his destination.  The shapes seemed more solid now, the faces clearer.  Keeping his head down, he dodged and elbowed his way back toward where he thought he’d been, but the crowd kept penning him in.  A rage welled up inside him as he remembered the two torches he still had.  Shouting, he motioned the crowd back, reaching into his backpack and taking one out, then fumbled for the matches in his pocket.  Surely he still had them!  Then he remembered that he had slept on his coat, and that they might have fallen out the previous night.  He waved the unlit torch in a wide circle as he rummaged vigorously through every one of his pockets.

From his left, a hand grabbed his arm.  It was cold and solid.  He was forced to look up.  A woman, maybe thirty, with long black hair and blue eyes, he could see them now.  Behind her gaze, intimations of profound loss, regret, and unhappiness.  She made as if to talk but was swept away into the crowd.

It was no longer a black mist now, but a shadowy horde of physical beings intent upon some hidden purpose.  He glanced behind, hoping to find a break and make it back up the hill, but his attention was split.  If there had been an opening, it was gone now.  He looked back downwards, hoping to find the woman again and get some answers.  He thought he saw her hood as she moved among the others, making her way to the side.  He ran after her, stumbling on the roadside and tumbling down the embankment, his back lodging against one of the black trees.  He got up and chased after her.  It seemed now that the embankment rose to an indefinite height, and no attempt to scale it met with any progress.  Beside him, the horror stricken faces of the war ravaged met his gaze, their hands tearing feverishly at the mist as if to afford escape.  After what seemed like an eternity, he crested the roadside.  The way up was clear now, and the way past the bats looked unoccupied.  Behind him, the clawing horde retreated down the embankment.  He looked up.  There was only the one hill now, a short turn around the corner and up a brick lined wall to the Outside.  But as he watched, this time he saw the path stretch visibly, widening and lengthening, and at the periphery of his vision he felt the cavern growing.  He wanted nothing now but to get out.

More images now: fields strewn with bodies, faces frozen in entreaty.  Vehicles left unattended.  He shook his head and blinked.  The road now went on for miles.  If he made a forced march of it, he might be at the top, near the well entrance, within an hour.  An hour.  He wondered if he would last that long.  Fearing the worst, he broke into a run across the rutted, uneven terrain.  Stumbling, he got up again and kept going, trying to forget what he had seen.  But the road stretched onward, and he was making no progress, and after three more hours, he began to give up.  Exhausted, he slackened his pace, at first to a walk, then to an affectless shuffle.  He wished none of this had ever happened, that he could put forever out of his mind the death and carnage and oblivion that had found so welcome a receptacle in his head.  But he could not.  Even now, he felt it clinging to him, searching for a new home, weighing him down.  He was half inclined to look back, but was afraid of what he would find.  Dragging himself forward, he clambered through the rocks and mud until he got purchase on something solid; and heaved his tattered body forward and upward.  At last he felt fresher air, and heartened, he rested, and there fell into that sleep from which few have ever awakened.

The insistent barking of Cavutto’s dog drew his master’s attention away from the wandering herd and toward the cave entrance.  Cavutto followed some paces behind.  Fear of the place weighed heavily on the gullible Cavutto, but not so heavily on Charles, who was first to find the body lying in the shallow limestone hollow, covered by a thin layer of moist black leaves, its face fixed in terror.  “Vagrant,” said Charles.  “Trespasser.” He was a man of few words.

Cavutto stepped forward and looked down.  He shrugged, uncertain or dissatisfied, he didn’t know which.  The man looked like a homeless wanderer.  There were so many these days.  Unprotected and addled by his own demons, he had probably died the previous night from overexposure.

Charles thought for a minute, turned and spat tobacco and assessed the situation once more.  “Traveler, then.  Perhaps a veteran?”

“Perhaps all of those,” said Cavutto.  “It’s sad.  Mariela says she saw a man crossing last night.  She sees these things, you know.  All those bad memories, it is not a surprise.  So many returning from the wars these days.”

“And so many who do not,” Charles replied.  “Indeed, let us not forget.”

Don F. Muchow lives and works in Dallas, TX. His short story “The Fool” appeared in the print anthology Thirteen Stories; and his short stories “Couatl,” “The Buddhas of the Past,” “Harmless,” and “The Thousand Year Door” appeared in SFNovelist.com’s 2011 anthology of annual short story contest winners.

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