The Witch Jar

The Witch Jar
(Word count: 498)

The TF4-Automated Excavator dropped a chunk of masonry onto a pile of rubble with a crash.

"Kabor, the TF4 needs to be fixed," Dreama griped.  She squatted in her cumbersome HAZMAT-suit, and peered into the hole.

"It's on the list."  Kabor's voice crackled over the com-link.  "Anything?"

"Negative."  Dreama angled her visor toward Kabor.  Through the ochre-colored sulfurous mist, she saw him in the remains of the kitchen.  Finally, a field assignment, but it's in some freakin' backwater mining town.  Dreama's sigh fogged her visor.  At least I wasn't on the cadaver crew. 

When the nearby coal mine had blown up, most of the surrounding acreage had been leveled.  Townsfolk who had survived the blast, had been asphyxiated by lethal gas which had spewed from underground tunnels. 

"There's nothing under the hearth.  You sure we're in the right house?"  Dreama asked.

"Yes.  The diary said: 'priceless heirloom buried underneath hearth.'  Do I have to do everything?"

"No, I'll find it."  Dreama recalibrated the TF4 and watched its spider-like legs burrow into the hole.  As it wrenched bricks and earth from the bottom of the hole, Dreama spied a spark; the glitter of glass.  She leaned precariously closer, and saw a glass jar, the kind her grandma had used to preserve fruit.  The machine dredged it up.  She pressed the 'stop' button on the remote, but the spindly arms failed to respond and the load crashed onto the pile of masonry.  The glass jar smashed.  Dark liquid oozed out, carrying tiny objects with it.  Dreama bit off the expletives which bubbled up her throat, and crab-crawled to examine the jar's contents.

Deep beneath the mountain, something stirred, and escaped its fetters.  It rushed through time-worn tunnels.  It roared with exuberance at its release.  Months, years, decades of imprisonment sluiced from its alien veins, leaving behind its one, sole purpose – kill those in the house of its conjurer's enemy.

Dreama lifted a copper penny, a rusty razor, and what looked like a small bone, from the puddle of putrefied juice.  Disgusting.  She grimaced, nauseous.  The syrup stained her glove crimson. 

The ground rumbled and shifted beneath the desiccated house.  Crevasses fissured bedrock.  Demented determination and hatred erupted from a mind driven insane by confinement; wild cravings cascaded and coalesced into a ravening hunger for revenge.

The frenzied elemental burst from the earth in a plume of maniacal rage. 

Dreama saw Kabor snatched from the ground and shredded into scarlet streamers by a tornado of rocks and dirt.  Her frantic petitions to God were strangled as she was evicerated, her entrails ripped out, then crushed into a pulpy mass.

The creature whirled inside a storm of gore.  Blood-rain fell through the mist and seaped into the earth.  Its crazed thirst slaked by carnage, its momentum faltered.  The task completed, its purpose fulfilled, it slowly evaporated into the ochre gas.

The TF4 pulled dirt from the hole and dropped it onto blood-soaked masonry.  Dispassionate, it fulfilled its purpose again and again, endlessly excavating.