I don’t know what led to my obsession, exactly. It’s nothing short of that- an obsession, a compulsion, an addiction that has rooted itself within my soul and will never let go. It is admittedly difficult to say that I care- as I find it harder and harder to do so, but in this fleeting moment of lucidity, I want to at least commit my work to writing. I want to try and warn anyone who will listen that there’s something under the ground in West Grove, North Carolina; and to leave it buried or it will bury you.
I live on a small abandoned farm in a very rural town known as West Grove. If you haven’t heard of it, you are far from alone in that fact. I think it’s technically more of an incorporation than an actual town, and there’s very little in the way of information about it. Hell, even locals in the nearby county have oftentimes not heard of West Grove, and the ones who have stay far away. There are a lot of stories I could go into about the town itself, but, I don’t have that sort of time. To give you some frame of reference, though, it’s at the feet of Appalachia.
My nearest neighbor lives a mile or so away. “Town”- if you can call it that- is seven miles away, and it’s not much and is mostly abandoned. Any real infrastructure is going to be twenty or so miles in either direction. All of this is to say- I am, and have been, fairly isolated. There isn’t anyone or anything within shouting distance, and given the shoddy wifi and lack of cell reception in and around my home, I tend to keep to myself.
I tried to maintain friendships, but, when the pandemic hit I was laid off and had to move back to this abandoned family home and had a hard time ever landing on my feet again. A couple of weeks became a couple of months, and a couple of years- and, yeah. No one really wanted to drive out to the middle of nowhere to visit- and I can’t blame them, and maintaining contact became bittersweet. Friends seemed to move on with their life as more and more time and opportunity passed me by, and I became a faded dead-end like more or less everyone and everything else in West Grove.
I was able to pay my bills with the unemployment check, but I didn’t have many. Eventually, I turned to drinking. It wasn’t a lot- but it quickly became never enough, and then it was a lot. A whole lot. Cheap room temperature whiskey that I would down out of the bottle- usually at night. I at least did that much. Some mornings I would wake up and find my way to the bottle in a hungover stupor, heart pounding in my throat and sweat beading on my palms- but with a few pulls of lukewarm gut-rot I would be functional, splash the haze off of my face in a filthy sink, and would continue my routine of… drifting, from room to room, day to day.
The alcohol itself isn’t the obsession I am referring to. If anything, it may have… delayed, whatever this is. I don’t know. Hindsight, and all of that.
No, the obsession began at first as an intrusive thought. A passing one, at that- nothing remarkable or even dark. I became obsessed with wanting to rest in an enclosed space- a small cavern or tomb or something of the like, enwrapped by the Earth itself, quiet, and content. I found it odd- as it was such a vivid thought, and not one I had conjured, but dismissed it. Maybe I’d drunkenly dozed off- I had thought- while listening to something that had mentioned caving, maybe.
But the thought gnawed at me. It would circle back more and more frequently. Taunting me. The image would become clearer and clearer until the daydream became disruptive to what little functionality I still had. I could sit for a near half-hour sometimes, visualizing- a wordless stream of consciousness- and I would abruptly be brought back to my senses and realized how much time I had lost.
Whether by fate or by fault, I realized one day that I had such a place on the property. A perfect haunt for me to entomb myself. I had only glanced at it while walking in from buying more liquor- and it had been enough. It was an old pumphouse built to shelter a now-defunct and buried well. The well was long gone, and to be clear this pumphouse was… small. The roof on it maybe only rose to about my stomach in height, and the inside was basically a crawl space. It was bleached white by the sun, save for the simple grey roof which was barren of any shingles. I had never actually been in the structure- I’d never had a reason to.
There wasn’t any hesitation on my part- there should have been. It was likely structurally unsound and addled with snakes, spiders, or a million other dangers, but none of these bothered me even if I quietly thought of them. I walked outside that afternoon with a strong sense of direction and purpose, unburdened by any anxiety about what could go wrong.
The door to the little place opened with a strange ease. I had expected it to either be nearly broken or jammed- but it gently opened as though the place had been built yesterday. The inside was unremarkable. A dirt floor, and a ceiling that let no light in. It was dark, tepid, and claustrophobic- and precisely what I wanted. I crawled inside, curled up to fit between the walls, and closed the door behind me.
There were no signs of bugs or that anything living at all had ever been in the place. The air smelled damp and earthy, and despite the humidity of the room, it maintained a constant temperature that I could not explain or account for. The summer heat didn’t seem to break through the walls. It was ever so slightly uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and so there I laid. The noise of the outside world seemed exceptionally muffled, and in the dark, I drifted in and out of a midday nap.
When I emerged, it was dark out, and I immediately had an overwhelming sense of feeling overstimulated and exposed. The crickets seemed to chirp unnaturally loud, the air was furiously hot, and the moon seemed eerily bright. I retreated to the interior of my house but was deafened by my own heartbeat and the sounds of the house creaking in its age and the buzz of cheap lighting. I sat in my recliner, casting glances out of the window to the pump house as I downed more of the whiskey. I yearned to return to it- I wanted to sleep there- but I passed out in the recliner, and eventually ambled my way to bed.
The next morning, though, the desire to return was overwhelming. In my sleep I had dreamt of the small cramped dirt room, hearing it beckon to me. For a moment- I paused. There was something wrong about this- and I knew it- but I couldn’t place what, and shrugged off the anxiety and returned to my abode in the mud.
For the next week or two this remained a daily ritual. I would pass my days somehow shielded from the heat, wind, rain, and every other element of North Carolina in my strange and dark vault in the earth, my clothes thoroughly covered in mud by now, my hair filthy- but my body felt renewed. I was content and only felt the itch to drink when I returned to my house in the night. I would spiral down into a drunken coma at night, and return to the well-house by day. For a while, this was fine. Then the dreams began.
While I’d lay sleeping in the abode I began to have faint dreams- glimpses, I think- of the abode, and the dirt around it. They were foggy at first, but they became clearer and clearer. There was always a set of eyes just in my peripheral vision- someone or something watching me as I slept, as I dreamt. I could hear its breathing. I could not hear the outside world, but I could hear its slow and staggered breaths. Sometimes I would hear them for a moment or two after waking up.
This startled me, but whenever I would try to stay away for too long, the itch would draw me back. It became a worse craving than alcohol. I would not sleep and my hunger would know no end until I returned to rest in the cradle of mud. I started bringing the whiskey with me- hoping maybe it would stave off the dreams. It didn’t.
The eyes seemed to be getting closer, and I decided to try and avoid the pumphouse- but it felt like the only place that was truly safe. My house began to… change. I would find scratches on the windows. I would hear footsteps in the night wandering around my home- and would awaken in a panic, rushing to find who or whatever had made the sound and find the house empty. Televisions would turn on to dead static. Random rooms would have a chill that could not have existed in the spring, let alone the summer.
The sleeplessness and paranoia of staying in the house- along with the random power outages- took a toll. I caved and returned to the pump house.
The dreams were more vivid, now. I saw below the dirt and the mud. I saw where the tree roots ended and where an old limestone cavern- drenched with wet dirt and dripping water- had been forgotten deep beneath the Earth. I saw stains on the cavern wall that were deep red and seemed warm to the touch- even from a distance- and that painted patterns and murals of obscene violence and ritual worship and bizarre shapes that I could not make sense of.
And I saw them. I don’t know if they were where the eyes came from, but they were there. Large reptilian forms, buried in the mud and stone. Many of them had decayed to a near skeletal state, but shades of black and red scales glistened in a strange amber glow of the cave. They were… gargantuan; far larger than any animal I had ever seen. And they were hateful.
I awoke gasping for air and… tired. I felt weak. I managed to stumble out of the pumphouse and into a storm that I had been somehow unable to hear while the door was closed. When I got inside and checked my computer, I realized that two days had passed, and I was ravenously hungry and thirsty.
That was two days ago. The power is on for now, but I imagine it won’t be for long. It hasn’t been. I haven’t slept- any time I close my eyes, the eyes are there and the breathing is too loud. Too close. A window shattered the last time I was asleep for too long. I’m probably heading back into that little room soon. I almost did yesterday- and I noticed there was a small, small hole in one of the corners of the mud. The sight of it sent a terror down my spine that I have never felt before- but it’s gone, now, and the madness of being in the house is winning over. I’m finishing my drink as I write this. If you read this- keep whatever is under the mud buried, and don’t go looking for it. It will drag you down with it.