Blue Wolfe and Friends presents: Camp Here and There.

Episode Sixty Four: Sounds of a Haunted Human

ROWAN

In the cystic dark, I drip through the tunnel. Charting a passage by raw-knuckle scrape. The backs of my hands flay in the brush of the stony roots. I breathe chalk and the stink of my own terror. Segments, forward, each one a prayer for a stopping point, a lessening, a rocky curve merciful enough to press my forehead into and stop shaking. That’s the theory, anyway.

The rain… The rain began at dusk that night and it did not end. It fell like trickling gravel, like hate. Like a slice of gritty fury. The Northern slope violently careened on itself, collapsing like a breathless, baying creature. The trees above would, by now, be slumped and sopping, every limb bent under the density of the hunger in the air. Juniper said storms are soup for crows, that they come down from the fence lines in wet droves, beaks pecking the runnels. I do not know if this is real, but I have chosen to believe all Juniper’s weather facts. It’s better to take company in error.

I close my eyes even here, though the dark is total. Even in blindness, I cannot shake the afterimage: a sky so sharp you can taste it in your dry, clammy spit. A sky like a lid waxed over the world. Up there, somewhere. Up there, the camp body will soon realize that I am missing. I hope they do it after dessert, or at least after dinner, because it’s a waste to panic if you don’t get to finish your meal.

The walls around me make tiny noises: a pop, a drip, the slow veining waterfall of sand collapsing, somewhere distant but so alive. I add my own music, keep time with it. One beat for left, one for right. I cannot sleep. I remember every storm I have ever known.

There was the great salt blizzard of 2013, a storm so alkaline the roads frothed as it passed. And every unshuttered lung in three townships burned for a week. There was the wind-shear that took the roof off the Holy Redeemer and scattered the shards along Route 60 for miles. There was the red air of my birth city, brick dust ground so fine it stained the very eye of all who witnessed.

And Sorrel…

And then there is the storm I have always known is coming, the one that eats us all, the one you can’t recall because it hasn’t happened yet, but you feel it, gnawing at the undersides of your every cell.

I flick my wrist. Watch the pinpricks of light in my vision dance. Watch… That word is stupid, but it can be true even when I’m blind. If the world ends, I want to sense it with all possible faculties, especially if they are failing.

I’m sure I was a freakshow before I came down here. Smug little Juniper, always correcting my handle on the visions, always trying to temper the world from behind his shroud of “concern.” And Soren must think me a worm in the soil, or worse, a risk to the populace. I hear his footfall above, soft, too soft for wet grass, but perfect for the grief of a funeral home.

I hope they do not come for me.

I’d rather think in closed rooms. The tunnels are smooth as intestines, and I move through them same as a meal. Sometimes I pretend if I keep going, the old oubliette will digest me and spit me out in a better world: one where I don’t have to explain myself, or my night terrors, or why I eat with the lights off. I could be mulch: good, honest, unambitious dirt.

Early hours are best for wandering, but less so, now that the slope has peeled back like an abscess. My little kingdom, sealed with flood and mud. I pace the long cut behind the eastern edge. When I outgrow the fear, I fill it with math. When I outgrow the math, I fill it with simple counting. Count the drips overhead, the pebbles I step across, the times I pass the same rusted soda can wedged in a root cluster. Seventeen, so far.

Above ground there is always a sky. Under here, it’s just me.

Sometimes, in the sticky air, I swear the tunnels breathe with me. I am alive, I am alive, I am alive. Sometimes I say it out loud to hear what the world does with the words.

I’m cataloging the current weather, so I can talk about it if I ever see Juniper again. The last five days I’ve checked off…

Barometric pressure falls out of bed first thing in the morning.

Relative humidity spikes, then develops a limp for the rest of the day.

Temperature rises, then stutters, then collapses like a bird hitting glass.

Wind chills the whole set, even underground, it feels like a reach-around.

Rain does its best, but the ever-faithful soil swallows it voraciously. Like the mouths of sea-floor worms.

It matters. One day it could matter. If I keep my records in order, then so will the world.

Sometimes I picture Juniper’s face: the way he crinkles his nose at algae slick. The sound of his whistle through his front tooth gap. Sometimes I picture him standing right behind me. He always snuck up, even with those damn boots. I tell him about the rain, and how it’s probably his fault, and how if he wants me to fix the drain again, he better not mix the laundry this time, thanks.

I am not afraid. That’s a lie; I am afraid constantly, but underground, my fear is compressed into a manageable chew. What scares me is the way my eyes adjust to the dark so fast, faster every time. Makes me worry about what I’ll see when they flash on, or startle me with some new geometry.

I have lost track of time. I write the phrase with my finger.

“Forecast: Stable for now. Not for long.”

I add this to the wall near the bend that dips toward the old crawlspace, just in case anyone else ever reads it.

Juniper used to play these documentaries late at night, and would jovially laugh about them the next day. I hated it at first, but now I miss the dumb drone of them, the way an authority would say, “In the case of an emergency, remain calm and locate your nearest exit,” as if we haven’t always lived in a state of emergency. As if the nearest exit is ever obvious.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

In case of emergency, remain indoors and await further instructions.

ROWAN

The tunnels bend. Sometimes I hear a faraway drip, clear as a metronome. Sometimes the air pressure changes suddenly, and I feel it in my ears, and I think about how the world is always shifting, even in stillness. I am still, but the world is flexing. This is the lie of rest: all things are motion, even… when locked in mud.

Once, when I was little, I tried to burrow through a mulch pile, and my mother screamed because I was gone for hours. When they pulled me out, I had a mouthful of leaves and half of a rotted apple. My grandfather told her, with a slap on my back, that I would make a good mole someday.

I press my palm against the weeping wall, grateful for the cold. The rain has done its job. The world is thicker and harder to navigate. My lungs clench with the stench.

The tunnel grows thinner, and the air stews. I pulse with panic. I try the old tricks: hum a song, think of something trivial. But all trivia in me is bent by memory, curved by the same centrifugal force as my own orbit. I remember Juniper’s hands this morning, holding my hand as if bracing a baby bird. His voice was clean and low, “Don’t go too far, okay?”

“Sure…” and then I ran as far as bone would take me.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

Be advised: lightning may strike twice in the same location.

ROWAN

I have, in my life, fled three different burning buildings. I am, statistically, more likely to be trapped in fire than the average Iowan. Funny, down here, all I want is to feel heat, an implication of any upward force. I slide my head forward and listen. I listen, and the ground at my cheek sounds like the hush at the center of a tornado.

I do not want to die under the earth.

This is the part of terror where you start to beg and bargain. I will not make them out loud, because words are too brittle, but I permit myself a few secret if-then statements. If I get out of here, then I will say yes when Juniper asks if I want to walk in the rain with him. If I get out, then I will never once again let terror rule. If I get out, then I will breathe the sky even if it kills me.

I move forward, slowly. I drag myself, hands and knees, until the only thing left of the tunnel is the sound.

Days pass. Maybe hours. I don’t know. I’m here, rootlocked, end-to-end with the vertical. For six hours I have been chewing furrows into my gloves, and beating rhythm against the raw bent rib of the service tunnel.

It is very important that I do not forget my place. It is very important that I do not see the sky.

I am not made for it. My eyes are not built for the color. My vision swims toward the earth, and when I look up, the picture rises with me. The future makes its own shape in my optic nerve, but only if I look up, let the air touch my corneas, let the sun smelt the image into my skull. I do not do it. I will not do it.

It is safer in the tunnels. It is very safe here.

In this tunnel, in this hour, in this sealed capsule of time, there are only three things: Me, the dark, and the memory of what is not the dark.

Sometimes my head gets confused and plays back sunlight like a cassette tape. My eyes, shut as coffin-lids, can still see the afterimage, the bone-white of a day without clouds. My heart speeds up; I remember the rhythm of wind.

I make up new weather, name it as I go.

Sintered rain. Updrafts of shale. Dust devils that get caught on century roots and twist into infinity…

It is safest here.

[HE CHANTS, SOFT] I will not look up. I will not look up.

[LOUDER] I will not look up!

This is how I pass the time. In my safe, sound tunnel.

I have catalogued every spider and beetle, every rivulet of water, every choked-off root that snakes the wall. I know the cracks by feel; I know the drips by taste.

I know the voice of the tunnel, and sometimes it talks to me. I talk back.

Hello, Tunnel. You eating well today?

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

Everything is well. Everything is under foot.

ROWAN

Good. Good.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

Should the waters reach your knees, do not attempt to swim. Seek immediate shelter, and obey evacuation orders.

ROWAN

I am tired of the clouds.

I keep talking, because if I stop, the tunnel will seal me up wall-to-wall and make me part of its own voice.

In my mind, I return to the surface, but only through memory. It’s cheating, but it’s safe. A flitting play of my vision, to pretend. Surface is nothing but a metaphor, anyway. The tunnels are honest. In the rain, you know exactly where you stand: beneath, below, within. The mud encases you. The roots embrace you.

The only weather that matters is the slow shift of weight above, the promise that eventually, the rains will become river, and river will become flood, and the whole network will sink and fill and drown, and it will be over.

I could live with that. I could be much, much worse than dead.

They think I am hiding, and I am, but not from them. Every time I get closer to the exit, to the little holes of sun leaking through the droplets, the vision comes back, and I see the shape of the world as it will be, and it is always breaking.

I can’t do it.

The memory of it wigs through me: standing alone at the mouth of a drainage pipe, summer maw, sky like a predator, every nerve in my arms screaming. I couldn’t bear to look up. Her terrible scream. I never even learned how it ended. Maybe it never did. Maybe it’s still going, somewhere in the vaults of the world.

I tell the tunnel these things. I speak out loud, so the dark knows my side of it. If there is a way through, I’ll be the only one who knows, and that is a slim beauty; if there isn’t, I will grind myself down to a pebble of thought, and at least that has a nice sound to it.

To escape the swelling, creeping panic, I sketch, with my finger, shapes in the grit. Sometimes I imagine the root-knots as neighbors. They are my kin. I envy their calm; the way they never fret about endings.

Marigold beetles, cave crickets, the small white bodies of paralyzed grubs, I watch over them, make lists of their trajectories. It passes the time, and it keeps me from listening too closely to the higher frequencies. I let them crawl on my hands, try to remember how it felt to be a scared animal with simple needs.

My own needs are this: air, food, exit. I permit myself a swallow every dozen yards. I must keep the water rationed. The more rules I set, the less room there is for improvisation.

I keep crawling. I keep going, because stopping is a kind of death, and that’s too cliché even for me.

Above me, a slit of dying light leaks through, a dirty yellow. It is so bright, my eyelids pulse. I cannot look. I try once, and my vision stabs me like a migraine with a thousand knives.

The bravest thing I ever did was once stare directly at an eclipse. Next morning, I couldn’t see a thing for hours, but I still see the glow-ghost when I close my eyes. A permanent stain under my vision.

Maybe I’m due for a second one.

I have the thought. It’s a weak thought. But it is a thought…

Maybe I will go up. Maybe I will go up and see, and be. Isn’t that what tunnels are for? A delivery system for birth, again and again, until you reach the world you actually want to be born into? Maybe if I see what’s coming, I can make it feel smaller. Juniper would say that, too.

I scrabble up, every muscle saying no and a little part in the center of me saying please. Sixteen more feet. Sloped up, like a last gasp. Roots cut across my face, scoring it with stinging strands.

The light gets bigger. My body is pulled by it. It’s so close: I want it, I want out, I want the sky like I want oxygen, and for just a second, I do. I want to break the surface.

But the white of the slit is wrong.

It moves.

A second of confusion and my lungs seize: the light isn’t light at all. Fire! Bright with velocity. It explodes inwards with a crooked noise, like someone dragging piano wire through bone. The whole crawl shakes, and then the dry roots catch. In one inhale, all breath is smoke. Roots blacken and spit. The slit howls open, a mouth of starving flame swallowing the tunnel around me.

I fall back, try to shut my head into the wall, smoke filling my lips, eyes, the tunnels now edged in orange and screaming. This is what looking up gets me.

Bad sky. Bad light. Bad rowan.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

If wildfire is moving your way, leave immediately.

ROWAN

Down is the only instruction! I crawl backwards, hands flayed raw again, choking on an atmosphere thick with cinders. All my careful rules rip apart. All my math means nothing. The only numbers left are seconds, and how many are left before the crawlspace collapses or I am cooked in it.

I blot out every single childhood memory of sitting by a campfire. I blot out the way Juniper tilts his head and tells the story of the storm that cracked his first rib. I blot out hunger, and need, and yearning, and let myself become a crawling, coughing animal. No more than that.

The fire eats through the perimeter. The plastic soda can at the crook of the wall melts and hisses, boiling sweet. There is a scream in the dirt. Maybe it’s the worms. The only thing left of the walls are char and noise, and I keep moving. Keep moving. Keep. Moving.

Tunnel’s end, root’s bend, don’t let the day begin again. Smoke and teeth and finger’s length, crawl ‘til you convulse in strength. Better move, better slide, you can’t let them see inside.

I go down. I push with my knees, with my teeth.

Lower. Lower.

Hunger. Fear. Want.

It’s safe here.

I close my eyes even tighter, see the ghosts of all those I love: mom, grandpa, cousin Isaiah, Juniper, Sydney, the tiny beetles.

Right… Sorrel… who was swallowed by a fiery, howling zephyr. [CHOKED UP] A destruction so total, I can barely think of her face.

[DISTRESSED CRY]

I go down. At the bend, I collapse. Could be minutes. Could be tomorrow. The crawlspace hisses. My throat is a rind. I promise the tunnel that if it keeps me safe for just an hour longer, I will never betray it again. I will be a better shadow. I will be a soil king, and I will watch every single storm from the comfort of my own grave.

[SILENCE]

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

In prolonged darkness, conserve hope.

ROWAN

I do not know if I sleep. But in the blankness, I see a better weather. Somewhere, under the crush, I see the dark-red sunset over the drowned city of my mother. There is a good wind, the kind that smells of iron and rain. In the silence of being almost nothing, I realize, for only a moment, that I am not so afraid.

When I come awake, there is quiet. The fire is gone. The tunnel is blacker than ever.

I am still here.

And the only thing left is to keep moving.

So I do.

I go down. Crawl. Crawl. Rest. Panic. Repeat. Sometimes I think I’m a snake, sometimes a worm, sometimes just a thing with too many legs. There’s a philosophy to tunnel living. Whatever is behind will become the floor, so just keep crawling.

The cartilage in my wrist shrieks every time I push through the slush. My breathing is a threadbare metronome, ticking off whatever crawling time decays in this bruise of a corridor. Maybe I truly am meant to be buried here, king of pain and mud.

I do not think I could be deeper in the earth. It holds me with a sweet, sucking embrace. Darkness. Cold and complete. I think of Juniper, and my throat buckles with a fist of memory. He was the only one who could get me to talk about things that mattered; he’d pin me in the greenhouse, mosquito-biting the back of my neck, and get me to explain in plain English what I saw in the clouds, what I heard in the air, what I feared in the undertow.

What happened to Sorrel…

The force of my love violences my heart apart. If I go on in this kingdom of mud, cowering behind the blinds, then I’ve failed him, and my mother, and everyone I’ve ever claimed to love.

A new smell invades, ozone-sharp; the whiff of surface. I taste it before I see. The slant of the tunnel goes steep and mean, and the mud loses its chill, warm here, a little holey, like an artery.

I stop, sucking my fingers clean for one last sandwich of memory. I want to remember. I want to remember my friends. I want to…

I crawl up.

The shaft is mean, squeezing my ribs, compressing my belly flat. I shoulder through, teeth cutting my tongue, and I let as much blood as necessary paint the way up. Up. There’s a gravity to it I cannot fight.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

In the event of a calamitous pressure change, remain calm. Breathe slow and even. If loss of consciousness occurs, you may awake in a new state of being. Please report any symptoms to your supervisor immediately.

ROWAN

[GRITTING AGAINST THE EFFORT] Symptom: heart exploding in chest. Symptom: eyes full of jelly and light.

I crawl. I crawl until my vision blanks, and then, when the blank is complete, the world flips.

Far above me, ringed in afterimage and migraine, is the mouth of the tunnel. It’s a pinprick of the sky. I can see it.

The sun hangs there, a yellow muscle, trembling through the rain rot. It’s framed on all sides by tunnel mass…

My hands have gone numb, and my heels dig into the clay.

I keep looking up.

It’s hell. God. It aches. It’s everything I remember about the sky. It will kill me, but if I look away…

I bear it. I make myself bear it. My heart detonates over and over and over and over… then changes pace. There’s a song here, and it’s for me. I stare until the afterimages go negative and burn new holes in the lining of my world.

[WITH INTENSE DETERMINATION] Fine. I’ll be your fucking prophet.

I’ve cowered too long. I’ve refused to see, closed the blinds of my world to cradle the kernel of my fear. I will stare, fully, wholly, into the beautiful corona, as I crawl within an inch of my life. Upwards. Upwards. Slowly, grinding and pulling at the earth with a fervent, languid heave. One clench after another.

I keep crawling, even as the drawing light starts to bleach through my eyelids, like acid through tissue. I can’t blink it away. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. The heat sizzles my mouth dry, and the sweat runs off me in chemical sheets.

Through the animal suture of my vision, I see the storms to come. I see it all, the beginning and the end: I see the camp buoyed on a sea made of melted phone screens and charred honeycomb. I see Juniper, knuckles bone-white and bleeding on the glass, laughing as he hammers sense back into the world with the sheer percussion of survival. I see Soren, on hands and knees, pulling the dead out of the mud, weeping deliriously as he names them.

I see Fennel in the grip of something huge and burning. They are smiling. The storm swallows them both, but I can still hear Soren’s voice in the updraft, clear and unafraid. You would like that, wouldn’t you, Soren?

I keep looking. Worse things arrive. The sun pulses, spitting kaleidoscopes of tragedy. Birds ignite in flight. Clouds curdle into knuckles before lashing out in violence. The winds shear trees clean, then peel the lawns like old glue bandages. I see it all, every possibility, every ending. They crowd together, fight for precedence, jerk through me like lightning hitching a ride on my lymph system.

But there is beauty, too, in the crush. A hundred faces, some I know and some I never will; they scavenge, they mourn, but they keep making tunnels. They keep making paths. The storm flattens, and still the hands raise up houses against the sky. Even in the hollow of disaster, the world is thick with wanting to live.

My heart is a centrifuge. My ribs want to shatter. The light thickens and blazes, white with fury and knife-bone. I do not stop. I crawl upwards, I crawl in service of every “if I get out” promise I gave the tunnel, the sky, Juniper, myself.

I pay for every inch with my vision. The light chars my retinas. I know I am going blind. I watch the sun until it is a white-hot needle, until the darkness rushes in from the sides. I will not look away. It’s burned in, every image, every forecast, every warning.

If it costs my eyes, let it. I will be the prophet they need, even if I have to spell the warnings in blood on the walls of the camp! My eyes are melting… but my mind is clear.

And then the world goes dark-swirl, hot, then cold, then nothing. I am without light, but I know the way.

DOCUMENTARY VOICE

Congratulations. Exterior reached. Please orient yourself accordingly.

ROWAN

In my last moments of vision, there’s a hand on my ankle. I almost kick it, but it’s a soft tug.

Juniper. I feel the tremble in his touch.

He pulls, steady, till I’m scraped free of the tunnel.

I collapse belly-flat into the dirt, eardrums ringing, vision dashed and stippled, but for a second I can see hi— [PAUSE] Juniper…

JUNIPER

[VOICE TIGHT WITH TEARS] I thought you were dead.

ROWAN

I—I can’t… see you. My vision, it’s—

JUNIPER

[CRYING] Oh, Rowan. Oh, my dear… Oh, my poor dear. I’m so glad you’re alright. [SNIFFLE] Please, just let me hug you.

[SHUFFLING. JUNIPER EMBRACES HIM]

ROWAN

I— yeah. Okay.

[BIRDS CHIRPING, A CLEAR DAY]

[SILENCE]

[CLICK]

Today’s episode of Camp Here & There was written and directed by Blue Wolfe.

The role of Rowan Chow was performed by Corey Wilder.

The role of Juniper Sloan was performed by Tom Laflin.

The Documentary Voice was performed by Buddy Lucas.

With original music composed by Will Wood and produced by Jonathon Maisto. 

Additional music composed by Kyle Gabler, and Another You.

 Dialogue editing by Emily Safko

Audio engineering by The Leo!

Sound design by Blue Wolfe and Another You.

And a special thanks to Patrons for making this possible! 

Special thanks to Charlie Chellecharm.

To join them, and to get behind-the-scenes content like bloopers, development notes, early access to episodes, interactive events, and more, visit the Patreon at patreon.com/bluewolfe.

You can also join the official Discord server to connect with fellow listeners and discuss the latest episode—find the link in the description of today’s episode. 

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 Thank you for listening to Camp Here & There! And remember: The North star brings hope.