The Cinder Man in the Root Cellar

I never believed in ghosts until I inherited my great-aunt Thirza’s farmhouse. She died of a stroke, they said, but when I found her in the root cellar, face down in a pile of smoked hams, her body was folded like a prayer book. The coroner noted contusions on her wrists, but ruled it an accident. I was sixteen, and I had just become the sole owner of a hundred acres of diseased elm and a house that smelled of mothballs and vinegar.

At night, I used to hear scratching from behind the pantry wall, like a dog trying to get at a buried bone. But it wasn’t a dog. I saw it first on the third night, when I woke to a pressure on my chest, as if a child was sitting on me. Above me, a silhouette blotted the moonlight from the window, a dark, shifting shape that had no head, but a mass of quivering cilia that waved like the tendrils of a sea anemone. It whispered in a voice that sounded like crumbling dry leaves: ‘You are the last of the line. You must pay the debt.’

I told my friend Lena, who was visiting from the city. She joked that I was ‘hallucinating from farm dust’ and suggested I install a nightlight. But that night, she woke me with a scream. She was standing by the bed, pointing at the corner. ‘There’s something in the corner, Milo! It has eyes like burnt holes in a blanket!’ I saw nothing, but her shivering was real. She left the next morning, and I was alone again.

The dreams started after that. I would be in the church that used to stand next to the farm, but it was a husk, its steeple punctured like a rotted tooth. My great-aunt was there, but she was not the kindly woman I remembered. Her skin was the color of old cheese, and her fingernails were yellow and curved like talons. She said, ‘You must bring me the bone whistle. It is buried under the elm with the split trunk, where the roots meet the cellar wall.’ I woke with mud on my hands, and I was holding a spoon that was bent into a hook.

I dug under the elm, just to prove to myself that it was nonsense. My shovel struck a tin box, and inside, wrapped in waxed linen, was a bone whistle carved from something that had long, hollow bones. It was old, and the finger holes were stained dark. As I held it, the scratching behind the pantry wall grew frantic.

That night, I had a vision. I was standing in the root cellar, and the great-aunt was there, but her mouth was sewn shut with black thread. She pointed to the old stove in the corner, and I understood: I must burn the whistle, but not before I spoke to the ‘Cinder Man’ who lived in the ashes. She gave me a box of matches, and as I struck one, the cilia-creature appeared, its tendrils reaching for the flame. It spoke in a voice like a sobbing wind: ‘You are of my blood. You hear me. Don’t burn me. I will bestow upon you a gift: the sight beyond sight.’

I was terrified, but I also felt a pull, a thrill. I lit the whistle with the match, and as it burned, I saw everything: the creature was once my ancestor, a medicine man who had sold his soul to the earth to protect the family from a plague. But he had failed, and the plague took him, and now he was a thing of cinders, bound to the house, and every descendant must inherit his agony. The debt was to feed him with their life force, to keep him from spreading the plague again into the world.

I stood there, the whistle crumbling in my hand, the ashes drifting like black snow. The creature pressed a cinder hand to my forehead, and I felt a sear of heat, then a freezing cold. When I opened my eyes, I could see the ghostly shapes of the dead farmhands wandering the fields, and I could hear the whispers of the trees. But I also saw the Cinder Man, and he was smiling with a mouth that was a horizontal gash in the air.

‘Now you are the keeper,’ he said. ‘You must never leave the farm for more than a week, or the plague will seep out,’ and he showed me a vision of the world drowning in a black miasma, people choking on cinders.

I have been here for three years now. I rarely leave, and when I do, I count the hours. Last week, I went to the county fair, and I stayed too long. I came back to find the root cellar door open, and a black dust coating the hams. The scratching in the walls has started again, and I fear it’s not the Cinder Man but something else. Something that wants to be born. And now, I see it at the edge of my vision, a shape that looks like a child, with cilia for hair, and its mouth is opening to ask me a question I am too afraid to hear. I am the last of the line, and I have no one to pass this burden to. So I will write this down and hope someone understands, because I don’t think I have much time left. The root cellar is calling, and the cinder man is waiting for me to light the next match.