The Phantom Pulse #1 | May 2026
Rowan Hill
No matter how deep we dug, she always seemed to be sinking. Sprouting like a thorny weed in an impotent soil, the young woman, no older than eighteen, wore an oily rag for a blouse. Found on a late August afternoon up to her pits in a ditch on the east side of town, she was lodged a spit away from the cemetery on the hillock. Spectators gathered. No one could say how she arrived in such a place.
The Farmer Hudson claimed the depression was once a bog, all dried and shriveled since the drought of ‘57, and the bog was nature’s killing field before that, drowning wild critters and livestock alike in its muddy depths.
Hair a dirty brown and slicked wet with mud on a dry day, the woman said no words we knew but cried long, unintelligible strings of a language older than the earth. Chords that rattled in one’s head and stayed there long after they’d left the air. Her mouth, smudged and stained with peat at the corners, screamed them as if something ate at her beneath the hard packed soil. She wailed and howled, and the women-folk had to leave for their sensitivities, dragging children behind them.
Only then did we men begin hacking the soil, her cries spurring a ferociousness we’d never known, and for every inch we loosened and shoveled out, another inch she sank. We dug and dug, and she sank and sank, until we were all in a depression deeper than a grave with her lodged at the bottom. Never did she try grabbing us, to pull herself up, to push herself out.
Firechief Andrews said it first. It ain’t a woman, ain’t human. Nothing human would sink like that, drawing down inside the soil like she weighed a ton. Or something pulled her down, burying her as we loosened the soil. No human could withstand that unearthly pressure. Only then did we notice the shape of the nose, angular and too sharp. The delicate taper of her fingers, like tentacles if you looked too close.
The horizon abruptly clouded the lowering sun, darkness filling the hole we stood in. The thing at the bottom stared upward, light glinting off eyes, terrible and black, glistening wet.
Mayor Tomlin first put the thought into words. Trap. A trap to bury and feed men to the ground, sacrifice us to whatever swam below it, waiting. All the men nodded, and some imagined the earth groaning beneath our feet. Soon we’d be so deep, climbing out wouldn’t be an option, or an earthquake would shiver the walls and our dirt would bury us alive. She–it–was bait, but of what kind and who cast it, no one would say. Or maybe this was the monster itself, the ending of a long phalange, reaching from the depths of the earth’s heated core, famished and desperate.
Or maybe it was just a girl trapped in a sink hole.
One by one, we crawled out, abandoning the task, fingers digging into the steep wall of thick soil, not turning our backs on the thing as its scrabbling of the ground ceased, and it turned quiet for the first time. Watching us leave.
It was Doctor Brady who suggested burying it. A mercy, he implied with a grim mouth on his round face. For it and us. Can’t leave something like that in a hole, stuck. Can’t leave such a thing where anyone could stumble upon it. Nodding men murmured eager consent. It screamed louder when the first shovelful of dirt hit its exotic face. The terrified shriek resonated in the back of one’s head like a struck tuning fork.
One of the Harvester’s sons startled forward. A good, handsome teen, a young man, really, known for singing like an angel in the church choir. He leaped into the ditch as if summoned by a siren’s song and joined it, clawing at the dirt with bare hands, ignoring his daddy. Deaf to any protest.
It grabbed his arm, not unkindly, more like a friend. Together they scooped dirt. The young man, methodical and strong. Hypnotized. The swell of a small breast emerged from the soil, the ground crumbling and loosening. That, or it had been released. Unhooked.
The Harvester called down to his son over and over, teary-eyed, a hard look on his wrinkled face as the young man’s digging became frenzied and possessed. Standing at the edge of the hole, the father raised a small gun designed for field critters. The metal trembled with the weight of other men’s eyes on him and after a long moment stilling the very air, he shot twice. One for each. The son fell forward, twitching. The creature, unhurt, grabbed his body and pulled him into itself, lover-like, until their limbs tangled. The men hovering overhead began shoveling again.
It seemed to understand its doom and cried those strange tongues louder, edging closer to English, desperation cloying its throat raw as it pawed the teen’s body. We shoveled blindly, hoping the son was dead rather than dying. And when its screams grew muffled, smothered and clipped, we knew its head was under, and the men collectively exhaled, relaxed, the immediate peril gone. Some turned to witness the last of it; knuckles breaching through black soil, sharp fingers reaching skyward, struggling just below the soil-line like worms laboring to breathe. One of the men quickly threw dirt on them.
For ten minutes, five of us men furiously shoveled in the dark, leveling the ditch, stomping it with boot heels and the backs of shovels. We said nothing, the Harvester’s choked sobs and sniffled tears filling the space between the shuffling of dirt. Only once he fell to his knees, laying his head on the ground, was he quickly drawn up and led away. When it was done, we watched the bare mound for the next hour, wondering if it’d sprout again. Wondering if the son might instead.
We didn’t speak of it the next day, or any days after, and no townsfolks asked. Mammoth stones were laid on the site, flat and impenetrable. Once a bog, now a grave. No markers or warnings. Time soon eroded fear and worry.
On quiet evenings, some often think they hear a woman’s cry, mouth full of clod, echoing between patches of loose stones and undiscovered caves beneath the town. Sometimes a young man’s sweet angel voice joins it in an infernal choir. The earth groans with their strange tongues, cursing us in their wordless song for burying them, or maybe, not falling for the trap.
About the Author
Rowan Hill is a sci-fi horror author currently living in America. Her comfort movie is Aliens and her ASMR playlist is all about someone scratching your face. Her most recent release was the collection ‘No Fair Maidens From Earth to Mars’ released by Trepidatio Press. She can be found on all forms of social media as writerrowanhill or her website of the same name.