If you wander out of town, to the farthest corner of Habitsville, past dilapidated houses and a single shack of a hardware store, down the desert road and across the algae-green creek, you might find yourself in Shrike.
Though Shrike is technically a part of Habitsville, they certainly don’t seem to need us. They are incredibly private and self-sufficient. They have their own council, their own community events and festivals—they even grow their own food.
For the most part, Habitsville and Shrike coexist peacefully and separately.
Except, of course, when someone from Habitsville hears the Shriek.
Calling it the Shrike Shriek is a bit of a joke around town, though there’s nothing funny about it in the least. I’ve heard the Shriek described in a few different ways. Some say it’s a religious experience, like having a divine calling, deep in your soul. They see the journey to Shrike as a sort of pilgrimage, and actually want to be the chosen one to feel it.
Then, there are some who describe it quite differently. Like an intense howling deep in their head, as if a creature is trapped within the confines of your skull, scraping and screaming to be let out. They grab at their ears, trying to cover them, but you can’t exactly block out a sound that’s coming from within your own head.
And it isn’t just the sound that’s the worst part. It’s the sensation that comes with it. All those who hear the Shriek describe it—a deep, terrible, hollow feeling of want. It’s almost like thirst, but no water, no tangible thing can quench it. The feeling builds over a few days, and usually by the third day, the person makes a decision.
The only thing that can satiate the brutal feeling of directionless desperation they feel is a trip to Shrike.
The little village leads them like a beacon, down the only road that links them to the main town. They feet become coated with the same yellow dirt as the path, and they say that when they reach Shrike, all of their problems are solved.
I have no idea what the Shriek really is, or why it chooses the people it does. I don’t even know what awaits those that make the journey to Shrike, with their sacred talismans, or their hands clamped tights against their ears.
No one in Habitsville knows. Because no one who hears the Shrike Shriek ever makes the journey back.
But no one is too worried, mostly because everyone believes it to be no more than an urban legend, a prank. Small towns have to make their own fun, and that often comes with strange little myths cropping up now and again. Despite my path crossing with the unusual and strange more often than most, I, too, thought the Shriek to be nothing more than an old wive's tale.
Until, of course, Esther heard it.
Esther works at the Habitsville Gazette office with me, in the photography department. She’s older, about fifty-five. She has two kids who are grown now, and an ex-husband. Her main photo subjects are high school sports games, new stores in the mall, and local government events. Pretty vanilla stuff, for a pretty vanilla woman. But there was something different about her that day—the first day she heard it.
She came into the office late, which wasn’t like her, and as she crossed past my desk, her eyes seemed unfocused, and her face slack. “You alright?” I asked, but she didn’t respond. “Esther?” I called again, and that time she shook herself, then turned to me.
“Oh, sorry Sam,” she said, her voice coming out in a dry croak. “Yeah, I’m good.” Though she had shifted to face me, I could see it—her glassy gaze staring right through me, towards something far, far away.
I waited a moment, trying to read her expression, but finding that impossible, I decided to act like everything was normal. “Good,” I said, then, opening the file on my desk, I continued, “I wanted to talk about the Barlow piece you wrote for my column, maybe fact-check a few things—”
“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, her eyes narrowed, her face twisted into a wince. Then, she asked her question, the one I imagine she already knew the answer to.
“Do you hear that?”
I swallowed, forcing that lump that had risen in my throat to lessen. “Hear what?” I asked slowly.
Her eyes re-focused and she began to peer around, even stepping over my feet to check under my desk. “It started yesterday,” she said, her voice muffled by the wood—then, her flushed face popped up again, and she stared at me with wild, ungrounded eyes. “I thought it was a cat. Or, I think it’s a cat. But it’s followed me from the store, to my house, to here, and I don’t—”
She stopped, her head tilted slightly, and she looked down, listening.
“What do you hear, Esther?” I asked.
Her eyes grew wider still, and her bottom lip quivered.
“Crying.”
She said it softly, and as she uttered the word, a single tear tracked its way down her cheek.
I couldn’t get Esther to elaborate, couldn’t get her to a doctor—I couldn’t even make her sit still long enough to ensure that she was okay, because—well—she wasn’t. She turned from my desk and left the office, walking as though led by a rope, and I feared I knew exactly where she was headed.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but when Esther didn’t show up to work at all the next day, I knew what had happened. So, there I was, out of the office on a Tuesday afternoon, driving down the long, dusty-yellow road towards Shrike. The cloud of dirt that billowed from my car’s tires made it impossible to see more than a few yards in front of me, and I spent all of my energy hoping against hope that I wouldn’t see a humanoid shape emerge from the dust’s clouds.
And then, I saw her, and my heart sank.
She looked far worse than when I had seen her last, but from what I had heard, that was to be expected on the Third Day. She was in the same work clothes as yesterday, but now they were smudged with the very same sickly yellow that permeated the ground and the air. She breathed in shallow puffs through chalk-coated and cracked lips, her eyes bloodshot and fixed on a point in the distance that she couldn’t have been able to see through the mustard haze.
I rolled down my window, squinting as pieces of grit whipped across my face. “Esther!” I called, coughing and spluttering as dry sand bit against the wet interior of my lungs. She didn’t turn, and continued in a trance to trudge down the well-traveled road.
I could have returned, left Esther out there on that path—but if the stories were true, and Esther was headed for Shrike, she wouldn’t be coming back.
The only thing to do was follow her.
Because of the yellow miasma that floated over the road, it was impossible to tell you were about to cross the point of no return until you were already there, inside Shrike town limits.
But when her feet planted firmly in the brackish green creek and continued to the other side, I knew we were there.
I drove in right behind Esther, my wheels rolling slowly over a makeshift bridge, as my eyes took in every detail of the foreign place. If there was one word I could use to describe the community of Shrike, it would be ‘contradictory.’ The houses were tiny and dilapidated, There wasn’t a roof that had all of its shingles, nor a door that hung quite right on its hinges. The entire place was crooked, desolate, and unkempt.
Except for the gardens.
It didn’t make much sense—with the state of the properties and the dry, lifeless soil, nothing should have been able to survive out there, save a few cacti. But the gardens that flanked the houses of Shrike were beautiful. Lush and green, every vegetable I had ever seen in the supermarket was here, but twice the size and richer in color. As though in Shrike, everything is always in season.
Esther continued to stumble through the streets—there weren’t any people out to see her, though I did see a few peeks through drawn curtains. It felt like a ghost town, with an eeriness in the air that made me shiver, despite the heat. “Esther,” I called out the window again, but she had raised her hands once more to cover her ears from the attack of the Shriek.
Then suddenly, she stopped.
I hit the brake as Esther’s feet ceased trudging across the dirt and settled at the end of the farthest street in Shrike, in front of another broken-down house. This one was a sickly yellow, almost chartreuse color, with peeled siding and a faded look to it—as though the very pigment of reality was being eroded with each gust of sand.
Though I was feeling that familiar sense of dread course through my veins, I got out of my car. Esther has standing with her back to me, swaying slightly. “Esther?” I said again, this time daring to phrase it as a question. She still didn’t answer, so I walked up behind her, and got a good view of her face.
Esther wasn’t looking at me, but she wasn’t looking nowhere either. Instead of fixing her tired brown eyes on the horizon, like she had on the journey into Shrike, she now was focusing quite clearly on a very particular thing.
She was staring at the ground, about three feet in front of her.
“What are you looking at?” I asked her, and in response, she took a long, raspy breath through her parted, cracked lips—it rattled around in her lungs for a moment, then, she actually answered.
“There,” she said, and raised a dirt-caked fingernail to point at the small square of soil.
I stared at it to, but whatever she was seeing was invisible to my eyes. “What about it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady and reassuring.
She didn’t answer, only tilted her head towards the ground, and I realized something. It wasn’t what Esther was seeing that was haunting her—it was what she was hearing.
Then I began to hear something too, and for a moment, I was afraid I had also been bewitched with the Shriek as penance for following Esther within the town limits. But eventually I saw the source of the strange metal-rattling din, though I didn’t quite understand what I was seeing.
It was a golf cart, old and decrepit, outfitted with a variety of rusting tools that banged together as the wheels turned over the rough ground. It came closer and closer, and I could make out more of the objects, though the driver was hidden. Trowels and huge shovels, pickaxes, even a serving spoon—each hung from its own position on the cart, and just as the cart pulled up directly next to Esther and I, I realized the common denominator.
They were all things with which to dig.
An old man got out, heavy-set and short with skin spotted from decades in the sun. He wore tattered denim and a plaid button-up, with a wide-brimmed hat. His face was lined and serious, with a permanent squint, and I knew what he was: a farmer, no doubt one of the tenders of the luscious gardens of Shrike.
“How ya’ll doin’?” he asked with a grunt as he heaved off of his odd vehicle. Despite Esther’s gaunt and absent appearance, he didn’t seem to pay her a second thought.
“A-alright,” I answered, though I didn’t mean it in the least.
“Good, good,” he said with a southern twang, as he began to rummage around his cart, passing over his various tools but not removing any. Then, he peered back at Esther, squinted even further, then pulled off the trowel. “How’s this for you, darlin’?” he asked, handing it to Esther.
“Uh—“I started, thoroughly confused, but then, Esther’s catatonic state broke. She grabbed the small shovel like a starving man would seize a burger and dropped to the ground so hard I swore I heard the sharp crack of a kneecap.
Then, she began to dig.
It was ferocious, frenzied digging, the tip of the trowel diving viciously again and again into the hard soil. Esther’s breathing grew heavy and ragged, her eyes fixed on the deepening hole before her. I watched, frozen, as a tear tracked its way down her cheek, then dripped off the bridge of her nose and onto the ground below. “Esther—” I said, meaning to stop her, but I was interrupted.
“Let her be, son,” the old farmer said, placing an uncomfortably warm hand on my shoulder. “She won’t be satisfied until she’s finished the job.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t like what was happening, and I could think of nothing besides my overwhelming need to leave that place. But I swallowed this fear, and calmly as I could, I asked a question. “What job?”
The man didn’t answer, just walked over to a nearby patch of crops—plump, red tomatoes—and pulled off a fruit. He wordlessly tossed it to me, and I caught it. It felt warm as well, the same heat that seeped from the skin of the farmer’s hand. “We here in Shrike pride ourselves on the fruits of our labor.” He pulled himself off one and took a huge, wet bite. “But our tomatoes are the best of them all. Go on, try it.”
I looked down at the fruit in my hands, then turned back towards Esther. She was still digging, her face smeared with dirt and drenched from sweat. “Let her be,” the farmer said, and it didn’t sound like a request. He nodded back towards the tomato. “Try it.”
I raised the skin of it to my lips, and though my stomach was churning and sick, I let my teeth slice through. The sweet juice of the tomato filled my mouth, the flesh soft and supple. I choked it down, my anxiety impossible high, then smiled at the farmer. “It’s good.”
He nodded, smiling.
“I’ve almost got him.”
I could hear Esther’s voice, but I couldn’t see where it came from, because the next time I looked over at her, she was underground. The hole she had dug was impossible large, with a monstrous heap of dirt sitting on the surface and growing ever bigger. I raced to the edge of the hole and saw her down there, in the dark, continuing downward. “Esther, you need to come up,” I said, trying not to sound as panicked as I felt.
“I’ve almost got him,” she repeated.
“Got who?” I said.
“The one who’s crying,” she answered, her voice on the edge of a sob.
I didn’t know what to say. Then, I noticed that the farmer had gone back to his cart. Whistling a tune I didn’t recognize, he picked up the large shovel. “What are you doing?” I asked, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he walked over to the side of the hole, scooped up some dirt from Esther’s pile, and then—
He dropped it down the hole.
It rained down on Esther’s hair, but she didn’t even look up, she only continued to dig downward. “What are you doing?” I asked again, this time in a yell, but the farmer only continued to whistle, then drop another scoop of dirt onto Esther. “Esther, you need to get out,” I called down, the fear in my voice palpable.
“I can’t. He’s still crying.”
Esther wasn’t going to come out, and if the farmer kept going, she would suffocate. There was only one thing for me to do.
I ran over to the farmer, grabbing hold of the wooden handle of the shovel in his hands. His whistling stopped as we wrestled, adrenaline pumping through my veins, and for a moment, I thought I had won. But the old man was strong—illogically strong—and he threw me off in a moment, sending me tumbling into the dirt.
“We eat good here in Shrike, my boy,” he said jovially, a smile rising again to his face. “It wouldn’t look it, but we’ve got the best soil in the country here. Our own little paradise.”
Then, as I looked up at him, he walked towards me. With an effortless push, he used the end of shovel to send me into the hole.
I tried to catch myself, my nails breaking against bits of root exposed on the side, and I managed to take hold of something that had emerged from the soil about halfway down. Esther was still hard at work below me, oblivious to her impending doom. A rain of dirt hit my face, through my nostrils and into my lungs as the farmer took up his whistling, and his filling in of the hole. I gasped for breath, and in the moment between me blinking and the next torrent of soil, I saw what I was holding onto, suspended in air.
It was a human femur.
That was the last bit of adrenaline that I needed. With a grunt of effort, and immense pain in my wrists and shoulders, I hoisted myself up. My fingers dug into the wall of the hole, grainy bits of dirt going so far under my nails they began to bleed. Pile after pile of dirt landed on my head, and as I looked down, I could see that Esther was up to her neck. She didn’t noticed, only kept digging, her trowel useless now. “Esther—” I called again, but even that single word filled my lungs with dirt. One more grunt and—
I pulled myself out of the hole.
I ran fast and hard as the Farmer whistled, and the thumps of dirt faded.
I was back in my car and down the road before I thought about looking back. But by then, it was too late. I was driving through that swirling yellow dust again, unable to see the road to Habitville in front of me—the only thing there was to think about was the sound of Esther, crying beneath deep, damp soil, and the sweet, sharp taste of tomatoes, fresh from the vine.
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