Before the Sewers

The sky split before there was a town, before the maps and deeds, before men ever named the bend of the Kenduskeag River. It was 1579 when the Abenaki tellers said the world shook. A fire burned across the heavens, white and green, like the spirits of dead warriors writhing in the night. The people of the river had seen many winters, many storms, but never that. They whispered of P’rowok, the hollow in the earth that eats what it touches. What fell did not land with thunder, but with silence. That silence was worse than any storm — a deep, sucking absence that rattled bone and made teeth ache. The forest animals scattered. Wolves howled for three nights, then no more. At the heart of a clearing, where the soil was rich and black, a pit opened. Not dug, not natural, but opened, as though the land were a mouth yawning wide after a long hunger. The Abenaki would not go near. One boy, though, only twelve winters old, wandered too close. His mother said he was bold; his father said he was foolish. That night, he went missing. What they found was not his body, not blood, not tracks in the leaves. They found only his toy — a small doll of birch bark and painted ash — lying at the edge of the hollow. Its head was torn off. And still, in the nights that followed, his voice could be heard from the pit. Come play with me. The dark is fun. The dark is ours. The elders burned the clearing. Fire roared for two days and two nights, black smoke curling into shapes that seemed to laugh. But the pit did not close, and the voice did not stop. They abandoned that place, marked it in their stories, warned their children: do not build where the Hollow breathes. But men forget. Years later, men in buckled hats crossed the ocean, looking for land to tame. They found the river, the fertile soil, the trees that stretched tall enough to touch the sun. They saw no curse, no hollow, only promise. One night, as they laid the timbers for their new homes, the ground shivered. They said it was frost, or a quake, or perhaps God testing them. The truth crouched deeper. Something had awakened. Something old. Something hungry. In the black beneath the earth, it stirred. It had been here before men. It had watched beasts crawl out of the sea, watched them die, watched new things take their place. It had been patient, dreaming in the dark, until the sky cracked and let it fall. Now, it tasted something better than beasts. Beasts were meat. Men were more. Men had fear. Fear was sweet. The thing in the hollow did not have a shape yet. It reached into their minds, brushed against their terrors, sampled them. To one it appeared as a wolf with eyes like lanterns. To another, as a woman hanged in Salem. To a child, as a smiling man with red lips and a painted face. It did not need to be one thing. It could be all things. And as the first houses rose by the river, so did the first shadows. A girl went missing by the well. A man was found flayed in the forest, no tracks leading in or out. A mother drowned her infant in the river, babbling of voices. When asked what she heard, she only said: It laughs in the dark. It laughs, and it knows my name. The settlers dug their wells, carved their homes, raised their church, and laid their dead in the soil. The soil swallowed. The river swallowed. The Hollow swallowed. And far beneath them all, it smiled. Because Derry was only the beginning.