Bones of the Earth Who: James & Fern What: A Cemetery Plot When: Night Where: El Dorado Valley, Between Las Vegas and Searchlight Rating: Medium - Gore
The El Dorado Canyon was a flat stretch of dirt between Las Vegas and Searchlight, in the shadow of the Eldorado Mountains to the east and the McCullough Range to the west. It was named in 1857 by a steamboat entrepreneur who struck gold there, a few miles from the Colorado River. That dry, desolate patch of earth called to him, but he wasn’t destined to keep it for himself. By the start of the Civil War four years later, word had spread that gold, silver, and copper lodes had been discovered in the canyon, in what was then the New Mexico Territory. Miners flocked to the area to strip it of its riches, including camps sympathetic to both the Union and Confederate causes. Conflict was natural, bloodshed inevitable. By 1867, the U.S. Army established a camp there, ostensibly to protect the miners from a string of Paiute attacks; that was the prevailing narrative of the time. The canyon was mined until World War II and then abandoned, or so it seemed.
The earliest marked grave appeared in 1931, when something inspired the residents of Clark County to begin burying their dead in the canyon, in a spot just off Highway 95, on a piece of federally owned land. The most obvious residents were animals: dogs, cats, horses, and livestock. But as the years wore on and flash floods turned up the shallow graves, other bones were found, still in their graves, or wherever the coyotes had dragged them off to eat the decaying corpses.
It would be charitable to describe local lore about the cemetery as rumors. The stories were secrets passed behind closed doors, stories of mobsters buried without their heads, of mafia hits, and of a grisly dog that prowled the property at night. And there were stories of what might be found by digging deeper into the hard earth, underneath the beloved pets and city criminals.
To see it now was to be immersed in a world of stark contrasts: Vestiges of carefully made burials where pets were laid to rest, their quiet graves decorated with photos and declarations of their loyalty and devotion, written in childish hands, all interspersed between broken fencing, barbed wire, and angry governmental signs declaring that the site should remain off limits to anyone who might dare visit.
Some markers had faded to the point of illegibility, while others carried splashes of once bright paint and tattered photographs, attached to small monuments. A more discerning eye would see more intermixed with the stone and weathered wood; there were shards of bone, assumed to be animal but without any real way to tell out in the desert dust. The charm of the place, the tenderhearted memories it might stir in those who had loved and lost a pet, began to lessen as night fell and darkness took hold over the canyon. Without the light of day to soften the view, things began to change. Perhaps there was something there, only in the dark, that called out without a voice, drawing in those who might bind together all that remained and let horrors be unleashed.
A pair of headlights illuminated the turn-off from the highway into the lot. The beams bounced across the low relief of the landscape, picking up particles of dirt that whirled away from truck tires. Light bleached the picket fences into jagged, white teeth jutting out of the soil. As the engine died, the driver’s side door opened on a squeak. James climbed out of his seat and slung the strap of a messenger bag over his head. He walked around the front of the cab and offered a hand to the young woman in the passenger seat of the truck.
Fern took his offered hand with the briefest flash of a nervous smile. She moved stiffly, the jostling of riding the desert roads something she didn’t believe she would ever get used to. Dirt and gravel crunched beneath her boots as they walked, a large tome clutched to her chest. The air seemed to go still around them in deference to what was to come.
A thin gauze of clouds layered the sky. James took a small camping lantern from his bag and began to lead them on a crude path through the plots, from the newest interments close to the highway to the older ones farther back, which were obscured by desert vegetation of mesquite and yucca. In the dark, a desert tortoise crawled away from the noise of their footsteps. When they reached a clearing, he lowered the bag and turned to Fern. A light breeze ruffled the hair on his forehead and made the coarse grains of sand whisper between the monuments and scrub. “What do you think? Is this the spot?” It needed to suit both of them, so that James could tap into the spirit realm and Fern could bring growth where none had been.
Fern took a deep breath. There was so little life here, only aged and hardy things that needed little to survive and lived almost modestly among the shallow graves, coarse ground cover that curled tightly in on itself and stayed dry and brown. It looked dead to her eyes, even if the roots ran deep. Nothing green. Nothing lively.
“It’s perfect,” she said softly. What better place to test her abilities than a dry desert wasteland? What better way to prove her worth to the Lady? She nodded, more to herself than to James, and then repeated herself: “It’s perfect.”
James watched her come to the decision and nodded his agreement. “Okay.” He leaned over to gently set down the lantern and his bag. Then he knelt in what would become sacred dirt, taking time to look at the place that they’d chosen together and picture what was hidden under their feet. He felt for the potential of the place, imagining a wavelength that would carry the magic of their ritual to a door and ensure that when they knocked, there would be an answer. A rough pair of mechanic’s hands cleared the larger pebbles out of the way and smoothed the imperfections of the surface. When he felt good about it, James dusted his palms on his jeans and removed a bundle of cloth from the bag. Unwrapping it exposed an athame and two small, sharp knives to the night air. James set it on the ground.
It was time to pry open cages, both forced and self-inflicted. There were cages made of earth and there were cages made of four walls and a roof. James and Fern wanted to see what came out of both. He met her eyes over the book. “I’m ready if you are.”
Fern nodded, eyes gone almost comically wide. The moment seemed too important to speak, too sacred even to sully it with words, so she knelt beside him in silence and reached for the athame. She winced without realizing it, unaccustomed to the way the hard ground bit into her knees. Her gardening had always been of a more dignified sort: elegant pottery, goatskin gloves, all neat and clean and sanitized. There was no prostrating herself on the ground or running her bare hands through the bones of the earth. Tonight, that would all change.
The book had been old when it first came to Fern. She didn’t know how he had found her, but the man who had first put it into her hands as a young child brought to the Worship House had found a way for it to reach her when her new life with the O’Gradys had first begun. It had arrived by special delivery and somehow her new parents had paid it little mind. The grimoire had made little sense to her then, but as the years passed she realized the power it held. She laid it gently to the ground, opening the yellowed pages to just the passage needed, and took the athame in her hand.
“Once I carve the sigil, it will need us both to offer sacrifice to seal it,” she reminded James.
James noticed the set of her eyes as she prepared herself for the ritual. It was neither innocence nor fear that he saw, but awe. “I got it,” he replied. He kept his voice soft and his face calm, wanting to instill in her the confidence that she could trust him. Fern needed to believe he’d do his part if the spell was going to work. Doubt, if she felt it, would be a dangerous ingredient. As he got ready to speak, an undercurrent of anticipation made his heart beat faster under his shirt. James broke eye contact while he questioned himself on it. He realized this was the first time he’d done blood magic with someone kneeling alongside him.
Head down, he waited for her to press the tip of the ceremonial knife into the dirt. When Fern began to draw, he spoke:
“Blood of our blood, Bones of the earth, We summon forth the demon Ipos, The corruptive union of creatures great and small, We offer this sacrifice in your honor, That you will grant us your unholy power.”
The athame scraped through the layer of dust atop the earth. Each meticulous movement of Fern’s hand delineated part of an intricate sigil: outer and inner circles, letters, a collection of rings and spokes that reminded James of the ribcage and limbs of an animal. They called upon Ipos, a prince of Hell and a commander of thirty-six legions of demons, who wielded the power to reveal things lost to time or yet to come. Ipos, who possessed the head of a lion, the body of an angel, the tail of a hare, and the feet of a vulture, a physical abomination of nature that could call forth the same from the ground on which they knelt.
Fern scratched the sigil into the ground with the greatest care she could muster. It was far more complicated than the witch runes and symbols she usually worked with, simple circles and lines that could be drawn at a glance. This required concentration; one broken circle, one line carved too short or too long could bring only ruination to them both. She glanced back and forth between her work and the book open at her side with each gouge of the blade into the hard ground, feeling light-headed and almost giddy with the effort.
When the last line had been drawn, James reached for the knives in the cloth and gave one to Fern. He made a long, thin incision across the back of his forearm, flexed his fingers to get the blood flowing, and angled it so that it would flow along the ulna towards his wrist. In the dark, with nothing but the lantern to guide them, the blood was a darker red, nearly the color of ink on the shadowed side of his arm.
This part, at least, was far more simple to Fern. She had learned to bleed for power quite young, and didn’t even wince as she slashed a line across the back of her forearm with practiced ease, clenching and unclenching a fist while watching with frank interest as the blood began to flow. It dripped into a small puddle in the dirt, just outside the sigil, before she let it slide down her index finger and began tracing the lines of the sign she had carved into the earth.
James stretched to hold his left hand above the sigil. The droplets patted the ground with a gentle sound like rain, wetting the dry pathways and merging with Fern’s blood in others, until there was no way to tell where one magic user’s blood began and the other’s ended. When each etched line had been filled, he picked up the athame. The night around them had gone silent. James held still, dark eyes losing focus as he let himself fall into that place in his mind where he no longer cared where he was, only what he wanted. He took a breath, turned the handle in his palm, and drove it down into the center of the sigil. The hard-packed ground gave way around the blade.
The sigil glowed the blazing red of a dying ember for a moment before the split around the athame began to quake, little mounds of dirt pushing up alongside the wound in the ground before being washed back by a sudden torrent of thick red blood. It gurgled and flowed forth like molten lava from the earth, falling into little channels and rivers along the lines of the sigil before spilling over the lines. The earth drank it up like water, parched dirt quickly going muddy and red, the spillover reaching their knees on the ground and soaking through their clothing.
Fern pressed both hands into the garish red mud, the dusty scent of earth intermingled with the hot slick copper scent of fresh blood that was still so familiar. Her fingers sank into the ground with little effort, dipping an inch or two below the surface until she held one aloft, bloody and dripping with muck, and offered it to James.
James kept one hand on the athame and lined up the other palm with Fern’s. He breathed deep as the strange feeling of a second consciousness began to awaken inside him, like the first wave of a strong narcotic, making him woozy and warm. He broke into a sweat and his pupils dilated until they overtook the irises. There was a splitting sound within his skull, as if the fabric between this realm and the next had ripped open, only inside his head. He heard the low blast of a horn calling beasts to battle, the trampling of a demon horde over the earth in a time that could be the distant past or the near future. An infernal greeting from Ipos. The world started to tunnel and spin. James squeezed Fern’s hand as he lost control of all but the most basic of his faculties. He couldn’t speak, move, or stop it if he wanted to. Behind him spread the faint outline of a pair of ethereal wings.
Pressing her free hand deeper into the muck and clinging tightly to James’ with the other, Fern squeezed her eyes shut. She felt no wind but heard the sounds of it all around her, the aural impression of a rushing freight train as though they were caught in the eye of a strong storm. It began to feel as though something were pushing back from the ground, trying to break her away from where she knelt rooted there, and it seemed to take all of her strength to hold still. Her lips remained pressed tightly shut but her mind was racing. Without saying a word, she let her silent pleas reach out into the void.
Please, Fern thought. Please, give me the strength to hold on. This is for You. This is all for You.
As Fern prayed to her Lady, James surrendered control of his body to Ipos. He released his grip on the athame and his hand loosened in Fern’s fingers.
An eternity seemed to pass. Then the figure that crouched beside Fern stood up, his knees and shoes caked in dirt and blood, the first of the insects finding its way to alight on his arm and walk across the open wound. He cast his eyes on the ceremonial mounds of rock and wood, and the unmarked graves that stretched into the distance in all directions. The raw materials that would become his earthly army were not the primordial creatures of Hell, but they could be rebuilt in that image, sewn together of disparate parts and charged with the same vigor. Ipos raised his palms, the shadows of which appeared to have talons, and opened his mouth. The noise that came forth originated as much from the air around them as it did the human throat. It was the growl of an ancient animal.
The silence around them was broken by sounds never heard before in the desert. Mewls and moans of no natural parentage began to echo around them, paired with the clatter of claws and gangly hands tearing and scraping at the earth above them to get free. Fern gasped, forgetting the mess of bloody mud on her hands as she reached to cover her mouth in something between shock and horror.
They weren’t human, but they weren’t animal either, rather some ghastly amalgam of the two: tattered fur and creaking bones joined together in a melding of sour grey flesh and dripping black fluids. Some crawled and some shambled on two legs or four, leaving stick trails of sickness in their wake. They groaned and snarled, some forming speech that was nearly human while others just drooled and panted with mouths full of jagged yellow teeth.
They seemed not to see the interlopers who had called them forth from their final resting place. Eyes of vivid glowing yellows, dripping blacks, and milky whites flashed past them but paid them little mind, the creatures intent on moving beyond the cemetery borders and spilling out into the world that quietly waited, none the wiser to the flood of fetid beasts heading their way.
“We did it!” Fern gasped from behind her hands. “We actually did it!”
James’ knees bent. He sat down hard on the ground in one of the few places that wasn’t a gaping, desecrated grave. The demon had left his body in pins and needles, exhausted, thirsty, and wet with sweat. He nodded while he caught his breath and stared at the retreating shapes, his nose burning with the pungent odor of reanimated flesh, the life they’d made out of nothing. James looked at Fern with the same disbelief that she was feeling and the beginnings of a smile. “We did it.”
He held out a hand to her. James needed her help getting to his feet.