Content warning:

Murder, bodily harm, blood

Be honest, now. What did you think you would find?

You have ventured all the way to this cellar, meaning you must have first braved the porch balustrade of milk teeth, skirting the welcome mat that parts down the center like a grin. Perhaps you chanced up to the second floor where the beds are heavy beneath the weight of fungal networks spun as fine as silk thread, or into the dining room set for two: plates flexing concave and convex like the thudding of ventricles, crystal glasses filled with a red gelled as thick as stone. Eventually you must have decided to continue your search below ground.

Oh, dear. Don’t bother going back up the stairs. Yes, they exist still, but the door at the top will no longer take you anywhere you would wish to go. Look—the vines, if that is what we want to call them, have made some room. Sit.

You must have come with selfish intent, with purpose the house found fitting. The pure of heart are barred at the gate—we have no use for them here. What are the tales told about this place? In my time, I came to know a bit of the rumors, but rumors, like flesh, are malleable. You must tell me what they speak of in these days, when the weathervane is glimpsed from the road, in flashes between the pine boughs. What treasure is now said to be buried here, nestled beneath rotting floorboards or cradled in some long-dead miser’s skeletal arms?

Speak, I do not bite. These jaws are for show.

I’ll tell you what people used to believe. They used to say a witch once lived here. They used to say she had planted her body and its sorrows in the tarry dark of this cellar, long ago. She stirred her magics; she hated whom she hated; she died alone in the dark. Her skin and muscle withered away, but in the imprint where she had once crouched, there remained the force of her will. The shape and weight of her intent, like the molted exoskeleton of a cicada freshly out of the earth. Down here, in the limestone drip, in the ash-leach shadow, in the gloom.

Powerful stuff, those old rumors. A bleeding woman once came chasing them, from a town not so far away. The gate did not bar her: she had been accused of many things, but purity was never one. She followed a campfire tale through the shrouds of kudzu and holly, pretending not to notice that bones hung like chimes for the wind to play, that the tree trunks were columns of ants so thick they could swallow a hand to the wrist. She went over the rotting porch gums, over the gaping smile of the welcome mat. In the kitchen she touched nothing, and so the cupboards did not snap her up piecemeal, as they have done with many foolhardy teenagers looking to burn off a little courage on a moonlit night.

You see, it used to be said the revenant shell of the witch could grant any wish, as long as it was a wish for an end to your grief. This woman’s sorrow trickled from open wounds, and she held such a wish for oblivion in her chest, heavy enough to drive her heels into the floor.

The imprint in the cellar called to her through the floorboards. She stood in the kitchen and let the linoleum part under her soles like an oil slick. She was not afraid of being submerged beneath the earth. It hadn’t been very many days since she had woken below the cement quilt of a newly laid foundation. Blood in her ears and eyes and on her thighs and running down her throat; dirt and well-water fossilized to salt under her fingernails.

When she found the door to the basement stairs and reached for the knob, it became a tongue that licked her palm, tasting the sweat there. The whole house shivered in delight. The vines and thorns beyond, too. You cannot grow a garden on sweat the way you can with bone meal and blood and shit, but the salt excites a root just as it does a throat. Speaking of sweat, you should try to calm down. You are starting to wake up the floorboards.

It was clever of you to strike out through the forest, by the way, for the road from the outer gate would have digested you. Your hair would have been woven into the nests of the one-eyed mockingbirds. Your marrow would be sculpted into the combs of the paper wasps, who have not had to use anything so indigestible as wood pulp in years.

Let me tell you another thing about the witch who used to live here, the witch whose imprint has long since unhooked itself from these walls and gone on ahead. She wanted to fight the devil. Can we blame her? Both God and the devil have chosen to ignore the evils that stalk the living, and the devil is marginally easier to find.

The trouble with getting your revenge on the devil is that usually by the time you get to his parlor, you are in no state to be fighting anyone. The witch mulled over the question of how to reach a mortal hand into hell and strike a blow. Of course, she came up with an answer. She’d been a witch for only a little while, but she’d always been brilliant. It was one of the things I always—well, I digress.

It doesn’t seem as though you have heard of this witch. Another story gone into its grave. But your pockets are empty, and so is that bag you brought. So tell me, little thief. What did you hope to steal?

The bleeding woman who chased the story of the witch—she had empty pockets, like you. Unlike you, she was not looking to fill them. Seeking out an end to her hurting, she arrived in this cellar. Which is, if we adjust our perspective just slightly, more of a ceiling. She curled up in the hollow shaped like another woman who had crumbled to dust long before, and she agreed to remain.

Growing a bridge into hell takes a very long time, and someone has to stay by the root to water it.

The witch, they say, built this place from sorrow. A lost lover, I remember the stories used to say, though always disagreeing on the details. Details, ha—if the devil were really in them, we’d have done away with him long ago. The witch tore her hair and the roof shingles grew spines. Or she wept a salt rain and the spores in the soil woke up. Or she said a name and the pipes pumped an elegy instead of water. I’m sure you can extrapolate. There are many ways to tell it; this kind of myth is well-trodden, and for good reason. You cannot find one place on this earth where the roots are not familiar with the taste of suffering.

In any case, the witch tilled her spells into the soil. The deer in this place began to walk on human hands, splayed flat against the soil. The rabbits grew ravenous, and then tall enough to pluck new leaves from the tips of branches and fresh-hatched nestlings from under the parents’ breast feathers. The strangling vines grew thick; the red ants locked their jaws to build pillars and flying buttresses.

The witch hunched in the dark and thought of her lover left in the dregs of the old well, half-buried in pelted stone and hurled prayer. You won’t know the place—it was bulldozed long ago, as was the black tupelo beside it that would dapple a cheek in shade, so that one kissed a chiaroscuro of flushed skin. It’s the kind of thing that a flung javelin of a prayer calls aberrant. Did you pray, this morning, hoping for success today? You don’t seem like the praying type. If you do not believe in God, you probably do not believe in the reflection of God, that is to say, the sum of all prayers offered out of hate, that is to say, the evil that sweats from mortal pores and lives on for as long as it can be invoked. That is to say, what men have called the devil.

Perhaps you believe in loss? For example: you will notice now that your legs will not straighten, that the tendons and the ligaments will not respond to your fear. Now imagine the extrapolation of this. Imagine feeling a grief that opens your spine to the air, that turns your limbs to stone. Imagine you arrive at the old well with joy in your mouth, and when you call your lover’s name, it rebounds off the nautiloid spiral of her unbreathing body far below. Even I can barely fathom it. It’s much easier to die than to be the one left behind.

Listen to this story, now: a bleeding woman wakes up, many years after dying, under the poured foundations of a suburb as clean and sterile as a hospital ward. The old well and its crimes are paved over, redone in bright ribbon. She coughs and expels a town’s fossilized hatred from stone-choked lungs. Licks her lips and they are salty from someone else’s crystalized tears.

Listen to this: such a woman might be unkillable but find out too late to save anyone, including herself. A woman claws her way into the sunlight and sees that the stones of accusation have littered her face and arms with stigmata that do not heal. Since it seems she cannot be killed, and since the ones who last tried are long since gone, she looks for a way to follow their tracks.

She had nothing, you see? No chin tucked against the hollow of her clavicle in the clover-thick field in the heat of summer, when the last inch of water in the deep old well is cold and sweet. No mouth pressed to the sun-dappled skin of her cheek. No arms twined around hers in the gumshade, the well-damp. Not a name. Try preaching forgiveness when you do not even have a name. Even you with your empty hands, come here to grasp what you can—you have more than what she had. What does a woman do when she is given a miracle too late for it to matter? When she wakes up too late for earthly vengeance?

Not even a name, but when she curled into the hollow in the stone, she remembered the shape of the body that made this house, and it remembered her. A few decades too late, she’d come—the witch’s grieving body long since gone to silt. The cellar walls whispered the plan to her, like a note left buried in the late-autumn roses.

Listen to this: a woman looks for a way to leave but finds instead a reason to stay. As I have said, someone must water the root.

Perhaps feed would be a better word. As I have said, my jaws are for show, but this entire house is a mouth, little thief. You have done the swallowing for us, crawling your way into an open esophagus. Now, hush. The burning sensation will pass as your lungs adjust to the moss—a body will accommodate even its own impending end. I would know. Decades later and I have not lost the stigmata of my first death.

No, I am not the one who strung together the canticle of this house. She has gone on ahead, as I mentioned. I should revise: she has gone on below. When I arrived a half-century too late, with my empty pockets and my temples streaked with blood that would not fade, I had no idea the witch of local whisper was her. But it would have taken a lot more than something as cheap as time, for me to not recognize the echoes of her.

I took up the post; I let spellwork root me into the soil and remake me down to the bone. She didn’t know enough of magic to save us, back when we were both alive. And maybe if she cuts down the devil and chokes the world’s evil off at the source, she’ll forgive herself for that. I told her I would tend the garden. I told her I would grow us a hunting path. I told her I loved her always. I told her: when we breach the crown of hell, throw the first punch for me.

Look, if you can, how your eyes are each sprouting a beak, fledging a pair of wings. Taste, if you can, all the trace metals you have sweated into these walls. Are you here because you have squandered your life? None of it will be wasted now. Are you here because life has squandered you? She and I will be grateful for every mineral-rich mouthful. Ah, little thief, do you imagine, with the final sparks of a liquifying cerebral cortex, that you are being drafted into some glorious war? Nothing like that. Wars are heaven’s business. She and I, we were merely human.