The Down Below

The Down Below

  Copyright 2013 Matthew Lewis

  Part 1

  Exploration

  There was something about the old farmhouse, with its derelict buildings and broken down physique, that Milly found intriguing. Every time she walked through those high weeds, journeying to paths beyond, she could feel something pulling at her from outside the norm, seemingly magical in its intent, unobserved and yet there, moving with the grace of intangible butterflies. The further she moved from civilization the more she felt it, like there were worlds within the worlds she knew, like she could see them mingling along those winding tracks.

  Skipping down limestone highways and walking derelict footpaths, Milly took note of the shadows existing inside the landscape itself, the color of their memories primordial and multifarious, the exotic greens and mottled grays entwining with a million dissimilar embers. They were like nothing she had ever observed. There were blurs on the canvas creating blemishes where spots should not exist, her dreams showing her things she could not see in reality, denoting something calling from a place outside existence.

  She had read stories where fairies danced ancient grottos, where derelict cities littered the world known to mankind. Here, in this place, she did more than feel it. She lived it, arms spread out, moving beneath the noonday sun, listening to the music of ages.

  Milly felt a kinship with the wild as she explored the forgotten acreage of the overgrown farm, inspecting the places others seemed to fear. She examined the areas her grandparents had not explored in ages, pushing back the high weeds and the lingering vines, probing the crumbling sarcophagi of pharaohs unnamed and the desiccated temples of Gods unheard of. It was but a brisk day's walk for her, pushing her way through the brambling forest of overgrown peaks and valleys.

  There was something beautiful about the siren melody the untamed seemed to whisper, piping in undecipherable melodies that made her heady as she pressed further and further into the unknown.

  Perhaps there was a minute hand on the clock, and perhaps there was a time when the sun rose and a time went it fell, but she did not take note. There was only the now and the path, the gargantuan fields of green that folded on forever amidst these endless summers, inviting her to check them for treasures.

  Milly had always been an adventurous spirit.

  On this warm morning in May, her senses would drive her intellect once more, reconstructing a moment where she saw something seemingly lost, that she did not know existed. A call would waft on the breeze, and anyone claiming detection would be thought mad, but for Milly it would indeed be audible. Like the pitch that only the canine hears, littering the air like pollen, asking her to come and savor something superb and exotic. Out there, amidst grass as high as her waist, she would stumble across a symmetrical stone barrier, erected in the shape of a gargantuan fairy circle. Initially formed around a stack of red bricks, it would become, in later years, nothing more than a few stones standing in unison with a strange disc.

  Were there someone there to tell her, she might hear the words "depths" and "danger" and "some things should remain hidden" spoken all in the same breath, alongside words like "hunger" and "sealed off forever" and "mystery lost in time." Had a guide taken her by the hand and understood the creases within the land itself, she might not have walked down a path that desire the wantonness of wishes. Too bad there was no one left that could quite recall the scent of the place's miracles.