Erasure
Written for the Milk and Honey June Writing Challenge
The afternoon sun hung low over the valley, gilding the leaves of the last remaining oak beside the barn. Children's laughter rang through the crisp air as they hurled themselves into piles of scarlet and gold, sending up flurries with each leap. The scent of apple cider and woodsmoke from the Allison's annual harvest bonfire drifted across Isaac Cooper's fields, mixing with the earthy aroma of the soil.
Isaac crouched in the wheatfield, his work-roughened fingers testing the plants. They should have been sturdy this late in the season, their ears fat with promise. But the stalks crumbled like ancient parchment at his touch, disintegrating into dust before they even hit the ground. His mouth tightened.
His boot sank unexpectedly into the earth with a wet squelch. Yanking his foot back, he found the soil beneath it pitch black, as if someone had poured ink between the rows. The darkness spread like a stain, leeching the life from the surrounding earth. No chemical smell, no telltale burn of fertiliser overdose. Just...nothing.
"Damned Co-op," he muttered, scuffing dirt over the spot with his heel. Probably another leak from their storage tanks. He'd have to call Thomson in the morning, give him an earful about proper maintenance.
A child's delighted scream cut through his thoughts. Across the field, little Emily Carter held up a cabbage twice the size of her head, what should have been its vibrant green skin gone sickly grey. As Isaac watched, the vegetable collapsed in her hands with a wet splatter, stringy innards sloughing to the ground in a putrid heap.
His gut clenched. That wasn't normal. That wasn't right at all.
"Hey!" he called, forcing a chuckle into his voice. "Best leave that one, Em."
Emily giggled and tossed the rotten mess aside. The lush grass browned and withered where it landed, the blight spreading outward in a perfect circle.
Isaac swallowed hard. Early frost, he told himself. Just an early frost and some bad luck. Things rot. That's nature.
Turning his back on the field, he jammed his hands in his pockets and whistled an old bothy ballad as he headed toward the village. The melody sounded thin and brittle in the golden autumn air.
***
The fluorescent lights buzzed as Dr. Elena Veski made the first incision. Her scalpel should have met the tough resistance of a breastbone, but, instead, it sank through with disturbing ease, the keratinous structure crumbling like poorly fired pottery. She froze, forceps hovering over the gap she'd created. That's not right.
Peeling back the glossy black feathers revealed a horror of absence. Where there should have been moist, glistening muscle and the rich copper scent of blood, only desiccated strands remained, as grey as old cobwebs, as brittle as ancient parchment. The cavity looked like it had been empty for years, not just hours.
"Working late again, Veski? Or just avoiding the departmental meeting?"
Liam's voice startled her. She hadn't heard the lab door open. He leaned against the counter, steaming coffee in hand, eyebrows raised at her makeshift necropsy station.
"Come and look at this," she said, her voice tight.
He set down his mug and peered into the bird's chest cavity. "Whoa. Nature's skipping ahead of itself, eh?" He chuckled. "Mummification usually takes weeks."
Elena stabbed the forceps into what should have been the heart. The organ disintegrated into a fine, ash-like powder. "This isn't decay."
The remaining feathers suddenly lost their sheen, curling inward as if they’d been exposed to an intense heat. The overhead lights flickered just for a second, and, when they steadied, the entire skeleton had collapsed into itself with a dry crunch, like a drinks can under the heel of a boot.
Liam's coffee cup shattered on the floor. "Then what the hell is it?" he whispered.
Elena stared at the black dust staining her gloves. "Erasure," she answered.
***
The August sun hung heavy over Pete Callan’s turnip field, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and impending rain. Isaac Cooper leaned against the fence separating their farms, watching the old man shuffle between the rows with that familiar stiff-hipped gait of his. Something about the way the plants shimmered around Pete, a wrongness in the light, like oil on water, made Isaac pause.
Pete stopped suddenly, clutching his chest. His red handkerchief slipped from his fingers as dark stains bloomed along the seams of his denim shirt and oozed like molasses through the fabric.
Isaac's hands tightened on the splintering fence post. "Pete?"
The old farmer turned. His forearm split open with a sound like the tearing of wet cardboard, revealing a pulsing darkness beneath the skin. Isaac's stomach lurched. He'd seen livestock bloat and burst from the build up of internal gases, but this was different. This was wrong.
When Pete's face tilted toward him, Isaac saw his eyes were gone. A black liquid dripped down his weathered cheeks from the empty sockets. His jaw sagged open with a wet crack, too wide, too loose, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
***
Iain Henderson's pickup screeched into the lane, spraying gravel. The wiry doctor took one look at Pete's body and immediately started stringing quarantine tape between the fence posts. "Defra needs to see this!" he shouted.
Isaac fumbled for his cigarettes, hands shaking. Behind Henderson, Pete's overalls were collapsing inward, the fabric sinking like deflating balloons. A black stain spread outward from his body, creeping through the soil in branching tendrils.
"Some toxic mould," the doc muttered as he tied off the tape.
Isaac lit his cigarette with three matches. The flame reflected in the puddle of darkness that expanded slowly towards his boots. For the first time in forty years, Isaac Cooper was afraid to step onto his own land.
The wind shifted, carrying with it the scent of rotting fruit. Isaac exhaled smoke through his nose and watched it curl toward the darkening sky.
***
The café’s bell jingled when Elena pushed through the door. The usual lunch crowd huddled in at the tables, their voices low and urgent. Steam rose from untouched mugs of coffee as Old Jenkins demonstrated with trembling hands how wide Pete's jaw had stretched before the end.
Elena's fingers tightened around her field notes. Seven of the customers wore surgical masks. Mass hysteria, she told herself, then glanced at her own gloved hands and swallowed hard.
At the counter, Sergeant Wilson spun his hat in slow circles. "Defra says it's that new AgraCorp pesticide," he announced to the room. Behind him, Mike Fucella made the sign of the cross. "Exodus 9:9," he whispered. "The sixth plague. ‘They will spread out like fine dust over all the land of Egypt, and everywhere they will produce boils that become open sores on the people and the animals’."
Elena opened her mouth to protest both theories when the sergeant turned his head. The rash on his fleshy bullneck pulsed visibly beneath his collar. She snapped her mouth shut and bit her tongue.
A newspaper slapped onto the counter beside her. Ron Harris, the community radio station’s news reporter and editor, tapped a yellowed photo from 1883 showing blackened fields. The caption read: ‘The Rotting Season - Third Occurrence’.
Elena's pulse jumped. Her gloved finger traced the date. Three years after the previous solar minimum. The correlation clicked in her mind like a dislocated joint snapping back into place. The latest solar minimum had likewise occurred three years ago.
Harris leaned in close enough that Elena caught the scent of his nervous sweat. "Found journal entries describing black rain," he murmured, "and livestock that died and kept moving for weeks afterwards."
Elena's coffee turned to acid in her stomach.
Through the café’s fly-specked window, they watched Isaac's Land Rover kick up dust as he sped toward his failing fields. A crow dropped mid-flight onto the pavement outside the café. Elena slammed her notebook shut. "We need to track this. Now."
Harris unfolded an OS map of the area dotted with red circles, marking every incident from the past month. The pattern exactly matched that of 1883.
Elena clenched her fists. For the first time in her career, the scientist in her was afraid.
***
The first drops hit the farmhouse roof just past midnight. Thick, heavy splatters that sounded more like wet cement than rain. Isaac jerked awake. The stench of rancid meat and battery acid seeped through the walls.
He reached for the curtain. Rebecca's hand clamped around his wrist like a vice. "Don't," she whispered.
In the dim glow of the nightlight, Isaac saw her other hand pressed over their daughter's eyes. The bedroom mirror reflected the window behind them, already streaked with yellowish runoff from the overflowing gutter that furrowed the glass.
A deafening crack split the night. The two-hundred-year-old oak by the barn rent down the middle like rotten firewood. Through the downpour, Isaac watched its core spill out like a gutted carcass, black and spongy.
"Basement," Isaac choked out. "Now."
By dawn, the storm had passed. Isaac stepped onto the porch. The boards were slick with oily residue. His cornfield wasn't just flattened; it had dissolved into a popping and hissing black slurry. The scarecrow's jute face sagged, revealing what looked like the gleam of a human jawbone.
His breakfast came up bitter. As he spat, his vision swam at the edges. Were his fingertips tingling, or was that just his imagination?
Rebecca sat rigid at the kitchen table, her eyes squeezed shut. "I didn't look," she whispered, holding up her pristine hands like proof.
Isaac's breath came too fast. The realisation hit him like a physical blow. Seeing made it real, made it stick.
Suddenly, their daughter screamed from the porch. Isaac turned instinctively. Six-year-old Ellie was pointing at the blackened, misshapen puddle that had once been their border collie, the remains twitching still.
Rebecca's wail of grief drowned out Isaac's choked sob. He watched in horror as Ellie scratched at her suddenly weeping left eye, the same eye Pete's black tears had started from.
***
The mourners stood in perfect rows, their black coats and dresses fluttering like a flock of crows caught mid-flight. The wind carried the scent of overripe silage and wet, rotting earth, too sweet, too thick. Elena clenched her gloved hands, the notebook in her pocket suddenly useless.
"Earth to earth," Mike Fucella, the minister, intoned, his voice cracking on the words.
The shovels struck with a wet, sucking sound. Elena's stomach turned. She knew that sound from the lab, the moment before her specimens collapsed into black slurry.
One of the gravediggers stumbled back as the shovel on which he was leaning sank to the collar. "Jesus wept!" he gasped. Black ooze bubbled up around the shaft, as thick as tar. The coffin lurched sideways as the end of one of the putlogs sank into the liquefying earth.
A child whimpered. Someone vomited. Isaac's calloused hand found Elena's elbow, his grip painfully tight. If the very ground was rotting, where could they bury their dead?
A realisation struck Elena like lightning. Every case—Pete's collapse, the ruined crops, the dead crow—had happened in daylight. The morning light broke through the clouds and stung her eyes. She watched transfixed as the ooze seemed to recoil from the touch of her shadow.
"Darkness," she breathed. "It abhors darkness."
Isaac followed her gaze. The hope in his eyes was as dangerous as a lit match in a dry field. But when he held up his hands, the morning light revealed the truth. His cuticles were already blackening.
By sunset, the village had become a place of boarded windows and locked doors, Bibles, quilts, and children's drawings nailed over every pane.
***
The ancient radiator rattled in the corner, coughing dust into the overheated air. Miss Cunningham hummed as she pinned the children’s drawings to the bulletin board, paper leaves in fiery hues, lumpy pumpkins with lopsided grins. Then her fingers froze. Tommy’s drawing was different from the others, disturbingly so.
The paper showed their village bordered by woods, rendered in frantic black crayon strokes. Towering above the trees loomed a stick figure with too many joints, its body shaded entirely in black. Its smile, filled with jagged red teeth like shards of glass, stretched from ear to ear,
Just a child’s imagination, she told herself, but her pulse kicked hard against her ribs. She remembered Tommy whispering about his ‘black friend’ at playtime, how he’d refused to go near the woods since school restarted after the summer holidays.
***
Harris looked up from the drawing. "That’s him," he whispered. "Exactly like the 1883 descriptions."
Elena’s gloved hand flew to her mouth. The classroom walls seemed to breathe inward. Folklore didn’t match across generations like this. Not so exactly.
A small hand tugged Elena’s sleeve. Tommy beamed up at her, oblivious to the adults’ terror. "He told me his name," the boy whispered conspiratorially. "It’s ‘Lobh’."
Elena’s blood turned to ice. She’d known what he’d say before the words had left his lips, the secret they’d missed in all their research. Lobh, the old deitific representation of death and decay.
Outside, the school playground suddenly erupted in screams. Through the rain-streaked windows, they saw crows falling from the sky like black hail. Their bodies burst on impact, releasing tendrils of smoke that twisted toward the woods with eerie purpose.
Elena gripped Harris’s arm, her voice barely audible over the children’s whimpers. "We were wrong." The woods beyond the windows darkened, the trees swaying despite there being no wind. The fluorescent lights flickered. "It’s not spreading. It’s waking up."
***
The ‘ON AIR’ light blinked on as Harris barricaded himself into the radio booth. His fingers, stiff and threaded with black veins, fumbled with the mixing board. Outside, the station stood empty. No engineer. No interns. Just the lingering scent of coffee gone cold layered over something sweet and putrid.
He leaned into the microphone. "It's not a disease," he told the outside world. His voice sounded alien to his own ears, the words slurring around something thick in his throat. The studio lights flickered. "It's the world remembering what it really..."
A wet click cut him off. The transmission dissolved into static. Then the broadcast resumed, but the voice wasn't his anymore.
"...is."
The word dripped from the speakers, guttural and wrong, like a man drowning in his own lungs. Harris's hands flew to his mouth. His fingers came away black.
Across the village, in cars and kitchens, the same nightmare unfolded. In the café’, forks froze halfway to mouths. At the petrol station, a pump nozzle overflowed unnoticed. In Isaac's Land Rover, the radio dial turned itself off with a soft click.
Back in the booth, Harris's reflection in the glass smiled back at him. It kept smiling as his jaw unhinged with a sound like tearing Velcro. The last thing he heard before the lights blew out was his own voice, his real voice, whispering: "No."
Then silence.
***
The paraffin lamp guttered, painting Rebecca’s hands in shuddering gold. Her fingers curled into the quilt, the tips blackened and glossy like overripe plums.
Isaac’s breath caught. He’d seen this before, in others. But watching his Rebecca’s flesh swell and split still punched the air from his lungs.
She smiled, her chapped lips cracking. "Remember that old well behind my father’s barn?" Her voice rasped like dry leaves. "How the water always tasted like iron?"
Isaac’s throat tightened. That well had collapsed twenty years ago. Why remember it now?
She pressed her blackening palm to his cheek. The touch burned cold. "It underlies everything, Isaac, death’s corruption." A droplet of inky fluid slid down her wrist. "Even the good memories."
Outside, the wind carried the shrieks of what used to be the Allisons’ dogs as their thrashing bodies slammed against the boarded-up door, trying to get in.
Rebecca’s wedding ring clinked to the floor as her finger dissolved into strands of black liquid. The droplets crawled across the woodgrain, moving toward Ellie’s bedroom.
Isaac’s hands shook. Burn her quick before she changed? Bury her deep where nothing could spread? Or grab Ellie and run until the petrol tank ran dry?
Rebecca’s eyes still held the blue of their wedding day, even as the whites darkened. With a shuddering breath, Isaac slid his arms beneath her brittle body. She weighed nothing now.
"Show me," he whispered into her hair that smelled of turned earth and lightning. "Show me that well."
He carried her down to the cellar.
***
The forest fell silent as they pushed through the last tangle of undergrowth. No birds. No insects. Even the wind held its breath.
Then the ground opened before them, in a perfect yawning circle, where the earth had collapsed inward in concentric rings as if some great weight had pressed down on it. Exposed roots dangled into the void like torn veins, glistening with moisture. With each slow pulse, black fluid oozed from their severed ends.
Elena's flashlight beam vanished into the darkness without ever finding bottom. The light bent strangely halfway down, warping as if passing through a prism.
Isaac's boot sank slightly at the rim. The earth gave like rotten mulch. A warm, sickly-sweet draft of air rose from the depths. It carried something, something that smelled like...
"Breath," Elena whispered.
A fat droplet fell from a root above, stretching impossibly long before splashing on Isaac's boot. The leather hissed, eaten through before he could react. The stain spread up his laces, black tendrils creeping like living ink.
The roots tensed suddenly, pulling taut. From the darkness below came a wet, rhythmic sound.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
A heartbeat.
Elena's flashlight died. In the sudden dark, her fingers found Isaac's arm. The heartbeat quickened. The roots began retracting, dragging chunks of soil and broken saplings down into the gullet of the earth.
Isaac didn't run. He stepped forward, boots sinking into the soft, living earth. If this was how the world ended, he'd meet it with his eyes wide open.
The walls of the sinkhole pulsed around them as they descended. Black tendrils threaded through the soil like exposed nerves, recoiling at their touch. Elena's breath came in short, panicked bursts. Nothing in her years of research had prepared her for this. Her gloves smoked where they brushed against the veined walls.
Then the flashlight beam caught it. At the centre of the cavern stood a massive, hollow structure, shaped like a petrified tree. Its gnarled roots twisted deep into the earth, pulsing faintly as if with blood. The trunk, wide enough to swallow a car, stretched upward, its branches puncturing through the sinkhole's ceiling and into the darkened sky above.
Lobh.
Isaac's ruined hand throbbed in time with the roots' slow undulations. The pain was familiar now. Expected.
Elena's vision doubled. The tree flickered in and out of focus, its edges blurred by something vast and unseen lurking just beyond it, a shadow cast by an even greater darkness.
Another gust of breath rushed up from below, vibrating through the hollow trunk, then was sucked back in again. Isaac's legs gave way. His knife slipped from his belt and clattered against the roots, the sound echoing endlessly upward.
Elena reached out. Her gloves disintegrated on contact. Bare skin met the trunk and stuck. When she yanked back, her fingers tore free with a sickening rip.
The trunk split open with a groan that shook the earth. Beyond the fissure lay an absence, a yawning nothingness where something, everything had once been.
Isaac stood. His rotting flesh pulsed in time with the roots, no longer in pain but in welcome. He took a step forward. Then another. For the first time since the blackening began, he felt no fear. Only peace.
The tree split again with a sound like a thousand dead forests falling at once. Its trunk peeled back in jagged sections, revealing an absence so complete it made Elena's eyes ache. The air grew thin; her ears popped violently as the pressure dropped.
Then Lobh breathed in for a third time. The inhalation pulled at their clothes, their hair, at the very light around them. Isaac stumbled forward, his blackened veins pulsing in time with the rhythm. His face twisted into something between terror and ecstasy as the rot spread across his cheeks.
Roots tore free from the cavern walls, whipping through the air like desperate fingers. Elena's remaining glove dissolved as she fumbled for her journal. The pen bled across the page, her handwriting growing more jagged as her fingers stiffened, the bones pressing through their thinning skin.
"The seasons never changed," she wrote. Her flashlight died. The pages fluttered in the suffocating dark. "We just forgot how to see death."
She closed the journal. Somewhere in the blackness, Isaac made a sound. A sigh, a prayer perhaps.
Then came the wet noise. Too vast to be organic, too rhythmic to be random. Like something chewing. Like something swallowing.
The darkness pressed in. Then... nothing.