My story isn’t a ghost story exactly. But it’s creepy. I heard back when I lived in New Mexico. I’d been in an accident and this old guy had found me and talked to me while we waited for help. He told me all sorts of stuff, but this one stuck with me.
Long before whitey came to this continent, before our history remembers, a great catastrophe fell upon the land. No one knows what this catastrophe was, but it was big and bad and people were desperate to avoid it.
To get away from whatever was happening, the whole of the world came together to hide in these caves in the desert. The caves went deep down, all the way to the heart of the world, and everyone who’d once lived separately above ground now lived together beneath it.
After many years had passed – maybe ten, maybe a hundred – the catastrophe passed. It was safe for people to go live under the sky again. So for three years, the people toiled to make a ladder that would reach all the way from the heart of the earth to the skin. Once the ladder was finished, people started climbing it. Everyone was excited as the people who’d climbed first and reached the surface sent word back down of how bright the sky was. Soon more and more people reached the top.
But once one third of all the people in the world had reached the surface, they moved a mountain over the opening, so that the people below could never reach the surface and get revenge. Now, whenever the earth quakes or the mountains spout fire, it’s the spirits of the people below. Some of them are pushing against the mountain, trying to move it and escape to heaven. Others are setting fires beneath the earth that will reach the surface, hoping to burn the children of the people who killed them.
But some say that not everyone trapped died. Instead they…adapted. They became monsters, killing and feeding on the others. And they grew used to the perpetual dark and the cold and the taste of human flesh. Sometimes, at those times when the earth trembles from their efforts, these descendants escape. Sometimes people like us see them. I’ve heard that some of them look like lizards, with scales and slit eyes on humanish bodies. Others are like bats; shadowy people with bat wings and eyes that glow. Then there are the ones who’ve grown huge and hairy. They have to be big to fight off the others, and the hair keeps them warm in the cave.
But there are the truly frightening ones as well. The shadow people. There are two theories about them. The first is that they’re descendants who stayed smart. While the others became like animals, these descendants retained human intellect but forgot everything else, like how to be human, how to feel. The second theory, the one no one likes to think about, is that the spirits of the dead found new bodies and have come to the surface for revenge.
It’s always made me wonder, if maybe we aren’t the monsters. I mean, if something like that were true, how horrible would we be? We’d be the descendants of people who’d killed the rest of the world for no reason. They created monsters, Moth Men and Big Foots, never mind earthquakes and volcanoes.
We accuse people who make two-headed dogs and put kittens in ovens of being monsters. We avoid their families for fear that that sort of evil is contagious, or it’s a trait passed from generation to generation. Our ancestors were, like, Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde and, and, and every serial killer you can think of rolled into one and spread out over everyone who would be the parents and grandparents and great grandparents of everyone who ever existed. And we’d be left over from that genetic line. What would that make us?
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