The Ditch, A Tonight's Terror Original

On a stretch of the half-built Erie Canal, a man buries his brother and tries to go back to work. The mud has other plans.

No AI Writing. No AI Narration. 

Intro/Outro: D. Moore

Tonight's Terror. Original horror stories told in the dark. 

Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, like, and turn on notifications for future stories! Check out our website for every episode, merch, and more. 

http://www.tonightsterror.com

Contact us at tonightsterror@gmail.com

This audio is an original short horror story written and performed by Tonight’s Terror (C.S. Austin). It is not adapted from, based on, or affiliated with any existing novel, audiobook, film, or copyrighted intellectual property. All writing, narration, and production elements are original and owned by the creator unless otherwise credited.

Transcript

Cold Open

SPEAKER_02 0:01

In 1817, the state of New York broke ground on the most ambitious construction project the young nation had ever attempted: a canal. 360 miles of it, carved by hand through wilderness, swamp, and stone from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It would take eight years to finish. It would transform New York into the commercial capital of the continent. It would make fortunes. It would make history. It would also make graves. They called it many things. The engineers called it the Grand Canal. The politicians who backed it named it for the governor who had staked his career on the thing, DeWitt Clinton. The politicians who despised him called it Clinton's Folly. The men who dug it had simpler names, the ditch, the cut. An estimated 1,000 men died building it. They drowned in the trenches. They were crushed under falling timber. Most of all, they died of fever. The men called it the egg. It was malaria. Bred in the marshes, the canal cut through, though no one knew that yet. They shook, they sweated, their skin went yellow. They were buried in scarcely marked graves along the banks, within the sight of the ditch that killed them. This story takes us to that time and place. Tonight, we dig.

Channel Intro

SPEAKER_00 1:35

You're listening to Tonight's Terror, original horror stories to hear in the dark. Subscribe and share if you're a fan. And now, tonight's story.

Story

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Patrick woke in the gray before dawn. He lay still a while. The shanty was his alone now. He looked at the other one across the dirt floor. Someone had stripped it to the rope. The ticking, the blanket, the footlocker at its foot, squared against the wall, shut. He looked at it for another moment. Then he set his feet on the cold floor and did not look at it again. Outside the camp was already awake. A dozen shanties stood along the high ground above the cut, a cookfire going thin at the end of the row. Men were filing down to the work in the half-light. Patrick took his shovel from inside the door and went down with them. The ditch ran east and west past scene. The engineers called it the Grand Canal. The men called it the ditch. A few called it Clinton's Folly and meant it. They said it would join Albany to the lakes one day, 300 miles and more. But no man who dug it had laid his eyes on the hole. Patrick's gang had this half mile and no other. East of their stake, another contractor's men worked ground Patrick had never walked. West of them, another still. Each crew knew its own stretch and two markers where a stranger's began. The engineers swore it would all meet up true. That it would be as packed with barges and boats as the Mississippi. The men dug either way. The work was mud. They cut the prism forty feet wide. The water came up as fast as they bailed it out. They wheeled the spoil up the bank, dumped it, came down for more. The wet ground bred fever. Men went down with the egg, the shakes, the sweats, the skin gone yellow. Some got up from it, some did not. Those that did not were put in the ground near the cut. Their crew had been lucky. They'd only lost one man to the egg yet. The digging went on over the sound of the shovels that buried him. Patrick was not a large man, narrow through the chest, long armed, the kind of built that wore out slowly. His shirt was Lindsay Woolsey, gone thin at the elbows and dark at the collar, with dirt that no longer washed out. He wore wool trousers held up with braces he'd mended twice with cord, and an older pair of boots he'd brought from Rochester. Cracked at the sole, the leather black and stiff with canal mud. A new pair waited under his cot back in the shanty, set aside for when these gave out. His hair had grown past his ears. He pushed it off his forehead, the back of his wrist, and left a stripe of dirt there. He did not notice it. No one in the cut would have. By dark, Patrick's hands had stopped feeling the handle. This was the work. This was the everyday of it. Tomorrow, the same. The day after, the same. Until his cot emptied too, paid off, moved on, carried off. He ate with the others at the cook fire and said little. The men around him were tired past talking. A few passed a jug. Patrick took it when it came and drank and passed it on. The whiskey was cut with water, and it tasted like the canal smelled, but it was warm going down, and that was enough. He went back to the shanty after dark. The other men had their own shelters, two and three to a structure, some of them only a canvas slung between poles. Patrick's was plank built, solid enough to keep the rain off, wide enough for two cots set at opposite walls, with a narrow strip of dirt floor between. He ducked through the doorway and stood there. The second cot was empty and the footlocker closed. He looked at it for a long time before he sat down on his own bed and pulled his boots off. He set them side by side on the floor. His feet ached. He thought of the new pair under the cot, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth. He did not look at them. The footlocker had been Owens. His brother had been dead eleven days. Patrick had counted each of them the way a man counts the distance left to walk. Not because the numbers helped, but because his mind would not stop making it. They had come down from Rochester together in the early spring when the flour mill on the Genesee let them go. There had been no ceremony to it. The foreman told them on a Tuesday that the mill was cutting men and that they were among the cut. Owen had taken it worse than Patrick. He had a way of wearing a wound on his face that made other men uncomfortable. And Patrick had told him to stop it, that they would find something. And within a week, they had. A man in a tavern had told them about the ditch. The state was hiring any able body who could swing a pick and heave a shovel, that the pay was fair and the contractors fed you. They signed on with a crew working a stretch west of Utica, near a town called Seneca Falls, that neither of them had ever heard of, and that turned out to be not much of a town at all. They walked there in three days. Owen's boots were already wearing through at the heel by the time they arrived, and he said nothing about it. The work was what it was. Patrick did not mind it the way some men did. He could dig all day, feel only the weight of his body at the end of it, which was a pure feeling, something close to sleep. Owen was not built for it the same way. He was broader than Patrick, stronger in the arms and chest, but he tired faster, drank more water, and by the end of the day his face had that look on it again. The one that said, this was not what he wanted. But he dug. They both dug. Word came down the line from other crews that the fever was killing men by the score in the marshland near Montezuma. The men talked about it the way they talked about weather. A thing that happened over there. Past the next crew's stakes. In ground they would never have to work. Their own stretch was wet, but not swamp. The mud was bad and the mosquitoes were worse, but no one on their gang had gone down with the egg. They said this to each other like a charm. They said it the way men say a thing to keep it true. Then Owen got sick. It started with a shaking he could not stop. He sat on his cot, with his arms wrapped around himself and his teeth chattering. Patrick brought him water and a blanket and told him it would pass. By the second day the shaking had turned to sweat, and the sweat had a smell to it that Patrick did not like. Owen's skin went the color of candle wax. His eyes were wet and bright, and did not fix on anything for long. The other men kept their distance. They had seen it before, in other camps, on other crews, and they knew what it looked like when the egg set in. They told Patrick to keep him cool, keep him drinking, and wait. Patrick waited. He sat on the edge of Owen's cot through the second night and held a wet rag to his brother's forehead and listened to him breathe. Fast, shallow, the air catching somewhere in his chest. Toward morning, Owen started talking. Not to Patrick, not to anyone in the shanty. He spoke to people who were not there, called out for his mother, answered questions no one had asked. His voice was thin and high and nothing like himself. Patrick held the rag to his brother's scalding forehead and said nothing. On the third morning, Patrick went out to dig. He told himself his brother was sleeping and would wake up and that standing over him did no good. He dug through the day. When he came back, Owen was still on the cot, still burning, his lips cracked and his eyes half open. Patrick gave him water. Owen did not swallow it. It ran down his chin and into the blanket. The men found him the next day. Patrick had gone down to the cut at first light. A man named Lyle came down the bank an hour later and told him. Said they had found Owen face down in the mud some distance from the shanties. Said it looked like he'd tried to get up and walk and had not made it far. Said he was sorry. Patrick set down his shovel. He stood for a moment, then picked it up again. They buried Owen that afternoon in a patch of open ground thirty feet from the edge of the cut, next to two stones marking men from another crew who had died earlier in the season. The men wrapped him in his own blanket. He was so covered in mud they could scarcely see his face. Patrick told them to go ahead without him. He said he did not want to see him like that. The men understood, or said they understood. They put Owen in the ground and set a flat stone over it, and that was all there was. Patrick did not go to the grave that day or the next. He went back to work. He dug. At night he lay on his cot and looked at the empty one across from him and the closed locker at its foot. He did not know exactly what was inside because he had not opened it. He had not touched anything of Owen's. He had not gone through his things or sorted them or set anything aside. Patrick lay there and stared at it and did not close his eyes for a long time. The heat came on by mid morning each day. It pressed down on the ditch like a hand. The air did not move. The mud steamed where the sun hit it, and the mosquitoes rose out of the standing water in clouds so thick a man breathed them in if he opened his mouth. Patrick dug with his shirt soaked through, dark from collar to waist. Sweat ran into his eyes. He wiped it with the heel of his hand, smearing the mud already there, and kept digging. Lyle worked the bank above him, hauling spoil in a barrow. He was an older man, thick through the middle, red faced from drink or weather, or both. He had been on the ditch since the Rome dig two summers back. He set the barrow down and stood it at the lip of the cut. Patrick. Patrick looked up.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Take a rest. Get some water.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

I'm fine. You're not fine. You're as white as paper under all that mud. Sit down a minute. Patrick drove his shovel into the bank. He climbed up and out of the cut and sat on the spoil pile. The heat was worse up top. The shade from the tree line did not reach this far. He drank from the bucket they kept by the stakes and poured some over the back of his neck. Lyle sat down beside him. He was quiet a while. And then he said, Owen was a good boy. Patrick looked at the water in the bucket. He was strong. Stronger than he looked. He was strong, Patrick said. The egg doesn't care about strong. It takes whoever it wants. I saw it go through a crew of 30 men near Montezuma last season. Took eight of them in two weeks. Big men. Healthy. Didn't matter. Patrick nodded. You shouldn't be out here today. Not in this heat. Heat doesn't bother me. Lyle looked at him. Nobody'd say a word if you sat out a day or two after what happened. The boys would understand. I know they would.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Then sit out.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

I'd rather dig. It occupies my mind. A long chain of sweat droplets fell from his face into the earth. And earn a wage, he finished. Lyle let it go. He nodded and stood. Taking the barrow handles, he wheeled it back toward the dump. Patrick sat there another minute, then he ambled back down into the ditch. The day stretched, the sun climbed and did not stop. By noon the air above the ditch shimmered, and the mud had crusted at the edges where the water pulled back. The men worked in silence. Two of them had stripped to the waist. One had tied a rag across his nose and mouth against the mosquitoes. Patrick kept his shirt on. He dug. A younger man named Polk brought him a dipper of water in the early afternoon. He was new to the crew, hired on a month before Owen died. He stood at the edge of the cut, holding the dipper down to Patrick like an offering. Here. Patrick took it and drank. I didn't know your brother long, Polk said. But he helped me true my barrel when the wheel was getting crooked. Didn't have to, just came over and did it. Patrick handed the dipper back. That was like him. I'm sorry you lost him. Thank you. Polk stood there a moment longer as if there were something else. But there wasn't. He went back up the bank. The name came to Patrick all day. Owen. The men said it gently, the way you handle a thing that might break. They said it at the cook fire, and at the water bucket, and on the spoil pile during rest. They told him small stories. Owen lending a hand, Owen making a joke Patrick did not remember, Owen carrying a man's tools when the man's shoulder gave out. Each one was delivered like a gift. Each one expected something back from Patrick. A nod, a word, a softening of the face. He tried to give them what they needed. He nodded, he said the right things. He thanked the men who offered their stories and did not turn away from the men who gripped his shoulder as they passed.

SPEAKER_03 16:54

He wore the grief where they could see it, because there was nowhere else to put it down.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

The heat would break late. A wind came off the flats to the west, carrying the smell of standing water and cut timber. The sky went copper at the edges. The men climbed out of the cut one by one, tools over their shoulders, moving slow. Patrick was the last out. He stood at the top of the bank and looked down the length of the ditch. The long wound in the earth running east until the heat haze swallowed it. At the cook fire, a man named Garretty was telling a story about a mule that had wandered into the canal bed in the night. The men laughed. Garrety was good at this, at keeping camp loose. He saw Patrick come up and let the story finish, then caught his eye. Sit down, Patrick. There's extra tonight. Patrick sat. Garrety handed him a plate of salt pork and boiled potato. The plate had been Owen's. Patrick knew it by the chip on the rim. He held it on his knee and ate. Nobody said anything about the plate. Maybe nobody remembered. Patrick remembered. He ate everything on it, he cleaned it with his thumb and set it on the ground beside him. The fire burned low, the men talked in murmurs. Someone mentioned tomorrow's dig, the section past the birch stumps where the ground was rockier. Someone else said rain was coming. Patrick sat with Owen's empty plate at his feet. The dark settled over the cut. He did not speak again until a man said goodnight to him, and he said it back. Patrick woke in the dark. He did not know what had woken him. The shanty was still. No wind, no sound from the other shelters. He lay on his side facing Owen's cot. For a moment, less than a moment, the sliver of time between sleep and knowing. He expected to see his brother there, the shape of him under the blanket, the slow rise of his breathing. The cot was empty. The rope lattice sagged in the dark. The footlocker sat at its foot, closed. He knew he would have to open it sooner or later. His mother might want some of his things. An oppressive weight fell over him when he thought of his mother. He owed her so much. And he hadn't even told her that Owen had died yet. With a sigh, Patrick rolled over. Owen stood in the doorway. He was facing out toward the cut. He did not turn. He did not move. His clothes were the ones they'd buried him in. The mud was still on them. It was still on his face, or what Patrick could see of his face in the dark, the side of his jaw, the line of his neck. His skin was the color it had been at the end, not the color of life. Then the thing that looked like his brother moved. He reached for the shovel. It was where Patrick had left it, leaning against the frame just inside the door. Owen's hand came up slowly, his fingers closing around the handle. He held it the way he had held the shovel in the cut, loose, low, the short handle resting against his forearm. He held it like he meant to go down to the bank and dig, like the work was waiting, like no one had told him he was dead. The ghost put one hand gently to its forehead as if pained or trying hard to recall something. Patrick closed his eyes. He held them shut. He pressed them shut until the dark behind his lids turned red and flashed with pops of light. He did not breathe. He lay there with his face to the door, eyes sealed. He waited for a sound, a footstep, a voice, the scrape of a shovel blade on the dirt floor. Nothing came. He opened his eyes. The doorway was empty. The shovel leaned where he'd left it. The night air came through the opening, warm, carrying the smell of the canal. Patrick did not get up. He did not check the door. He lay on his cot with his eyes open until the gray came back into the sky. Then he put his boots on. He took the shovel from where it leaned. He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find, but he inspected it. The handle was cool and dry. He looked around the empty shanty, then turned and started down to the cut. The next morning was cooled. Some rain in the night had softened the ground, which meant the digging went faster, but the spoil was heavier. Patrick worked the floor of the cut, driving his shovel under the top layer where the roots held. The roots were the worst of it. They laced through the mud like stitching, thick as a man's wrist in places, and every few feet the blade caught on one. He would work it loose with the edge of the shovel and cut through it, then dig again. The engineers wanted the prism cut four feet deep along this stretch. They were at three. A team of men worked ahead of him, clearing stumps. They used axes and ox chains. When a stump came loose, the ground shuddered, and the standing water in the cut sloshed up against the banks. There was talk of a stump pulling machine, invented by a man called Roberts, that could do this work much faster. There was no talk of Patrick's gang getting one. One of the men, a wiry redhead named Cahill, wrestled a stump free with his bare hands after the chain slipped. He stood in the hole it left, knee deep in brown water, grinning like he'd won something. It was nearly free before he'd grabbed hold, but the other men clapped. Cahill took a bow. Patrick watched from down the line. Lyle came down the bank around midday carrying a surveyor's rod. The engineers had sent it down for the crew to check their grade. Lyle did not know how to use it. Neither did Patrick. They stood in the cut, holding the rod between them like two men trying to read a map in a foreign language. Just set her on the ground and see if the bubble's in the center, Lyle said. There's no bubble on this thing. Well then what's the point of it? Patrick leaned the rod against the bank. We'll tell him it looked fine. Lyle grinned. He sat on the edge of the cut, his boots hanging over. He was quiet for a moment, then he looked at Patrick. Does your mother know about Owen? Patrick kept his eyes on the mud. No. You haven't written her? I haven't had the chance. There's a post office in town. Man could walk there in an hour. I know where it is. I'm only saying she ought to hear it from you, not from some clerk or contractor. Patrick drove his shovel into the bank. I'll go. Soon. Lyle nodded and stood up. He took the surveyor's rod and carried it with him back up the bank. Patrick watched him go. The afternoon wore on. A crew from the next section east came by on their way to a supply wagon that had bogged down on the towpath. There were eight of them, strangers, carrying shovels and lengths of plank. Their foreman stopped to talk with Garrity. Patrick heard pieces of it. The section east had hit limestone a foot below grade. The foreman wanted to know if Patrick's crew had blasting powder to spare. Garrety said they did not. The foreman swore. The two men talked a while about the engineers, about the pace, about the rumor that the commissioners in Albany wanted the middle section open to boats by next year. Neither man believed it. They shook hands. The eastern crew moved on. Patrick climbed out of the cut when the light started going. He cleaned his shovel with a rag the way he did every evening. He wiped down the blade and checked the edge, ran the rag along the handle. Then he stood there. The other men were headed for the cook fire. He could smell the smoke and the salt pork. He did not follow them. He walked along the towpath instead, away from the camp, west, past the stakes that marked the end of their section. The graves were set back from the cut on a low rise thirty feet from the edge.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

There were three stones, two from men who died before Patrick's crew began this stretch.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

He did not know their names. The stones did not say. The third was Owen's. It was a flat piece of shale, no bigger than a man's hand, set into the dirt at the head of a shallow mound. There was nothing on it. No name, no date, nothing to tell a stranger who lay under it, or when he'd been put there. It looked like every other unmarked stone along the ditch. Patrick had seen dozens of them on the walk from Utica. He had not thought much about them then. He'd done his best to convince himself he hadn't seen Owen's ghost. That it had been a nightmare, something he ate maybe. Nonetheless, he scanned the trees and the slope behind him before turning back to the grave. He crouched down. The ground around the stone was soft from the rain. The weed had started at the base, and he pulled it out. From his pocket he took a piece of charcoal he had picked up at the cook fire that morning. He held it the way a man holds a piece of chalk, between his thumb and two fingers, close to the tip. He set it against the face of the stone. Then he scratched out Owen. The letters were uneven. The charcoal skipped on the rough grain of the shale. The W looked like two Vs pushed together, and the N leaned like it was melting off the stone. He sat back on his heels and looked at it. It would wash off. The next rain would take it. He knew that. He turned the charcoal over in his fingers and then put it back in his pocket. He would pay a man to cut at the name into the stone, a mason if there was one in Seneca Falls. He would do it when he had the money. He would do it soon. He stayed there a while longer, the light almost gone. The cookfire glowed at the far end of the towpath. He could hear the men's voices. He looked at the name he had written on the stone, and then he stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers and walked back to camp. The next morning, Lyle did not tell him to rest. No one brought him a dipper of water. The men worked around him the way they always had, calling to each other across the cut, passing tools, cursing the mud. Patrick dug beside them. Nothing had changed except the space they'd gave him closed like a window. The comfort was over. He ate at the cook fire that evening. Garrety told a story about a horse that had kicked an engineer in Albany. The men laughed. Patrick laughed with them. A bit late. A bit forced. Garratty glanced at him. It was a short glance, but Patrick caught it. He looked down at his plate. That night he lay on his cot facing the doorway. The shovel leaned against the frame where he'd always left it. The warm air came through the opening. He watched the doorway for a long time. Nothing stood in it. He rolled over. He rolled back. He watched until the dark blurred his eyes and ached from holding them open. Nothing came. He slept badly. He dreamed of things he could not hold on to. Voices, a road, someone walking behind him. He woke before dawn with his shirt soaked through, and lay listening to the camp. A dog barked somewhere beyond the shanties, a man coughed. Patrick got up, put on his boots, took the shovel, and walked to the cut. The days blurred. The work never changed much. The mud, the roots, standing water. The men were worse. Or not worse, but different again. Polk passed him on the towpath without speaking. Cahell nodded but didn't stop. At the water bucket, Patrick stood beside a man whose name he did not know. A quiet man from the next shanty over. The man filled his cup and walked away without even looking at him. Patrick told himself it was nothing. Men on the ditch did not owe each other conversation. They were tired. They were hot. The work ground a man down to silence, and that was all there was. But he watched them. He could not stop watching them. At the cookfire he studied their faces, looking for something, a turned shoulder, a lowered voice, a conversation that stopped when he came near. He found what he was looking for, or thought he did. Garrety spoke to Lyle by the water bucket. They were too far off to hear. Garrety looked in Patrick's direction. Lyle did not. Patrick's chest tightened. They were talking about him. He was certain. He forced himself to speak at the fire that night. He told a story about Owen. One he'd told before, about the time Owen fell asleep standing up in the flour mill and tipped into a grain bin. The men smiled, a few laughed. The story landed lighter than it had the first time. Patrick felt the difference. He pushed through it. He mentioned Owen twice more before the group broke up for the night. He said his brother's name the way the men had said it to him. Gently, like a thing that might break. Walking back to his shanty, he felt sick, not from the food, but from the effort, from the weight of holding a face in place all day that did not belong to him. The nights were no better. He lay on his cot facing the door. He watched. The doorway stayed empty. He stared until his vision swam. Nothing. He closed his eyes and opened them. The shanty was quiet. The footlocker remained at the foot of Owen's cot, shut. He slept, he woke, he slept again, and each time he woke he checked the doorway first. Each time it was empty. He worked through the day, he spoke to Lyle. He made himself useful. He carried Cahill's tools when Cahill cut his hand on a route. He volunteered for the spoil run, the worst job, the one no man wanted. The men noticed. They nodded. The space around him loosened half an inch. That night he lay on his cot, and he did not face the door. He was tired of watching for something that would not come, and he closed his eyes. He heard it before he saw it. A rustling, the sound of cloth being moved, of something being lifted and set down. Patrick opened his eyes. He did not turn over. Owen's bunk was empty. The doorway was bare. He moved his gaze to the foot of his own bed. Owen was crouched beside Patrick's cot. His hands were inside the canvas bag where Patrick kept his belongings. He was pulling things out, one at a time. A shirt, a razor, a letter Patrick had started to his mother and never finished. The ghost handled each one carefully. His face was the face they had buried. Muddied, slack, the color gone from it, but his eyes were open. They were fixed on what his hands were doing. Patrick could not move. He lay on his side, just a few feet from the thing, and watched it go through his life. Then it found Patrick's bill fold. It was a small leather fold cracked at the spine, holding all the money Patrick had. Owen lifted it out of the bag. He straightened up slowly and raised his eyes to Patrick. He was grinning. The grin was grotesque. It split the mud on his face into halves. His teeth showed a stripe of white between. He held the billfold above Patrick's chest, dangling it tauntingly. Patrick shut his eyes, pressed them shut, held his breath, and waited. When he opened them, the ghost was gone. His belongings were in the bag. The billfold was where he kept it, folded inside the canvas, untouched. The shirt, the razor, the unfinished letter, all where they'd been. Patrick returned to his cot. His hands were shaking. He did not sleep again. He asked Garratty for the morning off. Garrety looked at him for a moment and nodded. He did not ask why. Patrick was grateful for that. He walked the towpath towards Seneca Falls. The morning was bright, the sky wide open, above the cleared land on either side of the cut. He should have felt relief to be away from the ditch, away from the men, away from the mud. He did not. He walked with his shoulders tight. Twice he stopped and turned to look behind him. The path was empty. A stand of birch, a pile of brush the clearing crew had left. Nothing else. He had never seen the ghost in daylight. He reminded himself of that. It did not help. Something in the quality of the air had changed since the Billfold incident. The feeling of being watched had followed him out of the shanty onto the road. It would not lift. Seneca Falls was not much. A handful of buildings along the river, a mill, a church with no steeple. The post office shared a room with a general store on the main road. Patrick ducked in through the door, and a bell rang above him. The storekeeper was behind the counter, sorting something into wooden bins. Patrick had finished writing the letter to his mother the night before. He had kept it short. He told her Owen had taken ill with the egg. He told her Owen had died. He told her the men had buried him near the canal. He did not tell her much else. He had stared at the page a long time before folding it. There was so much the letter did not say, that the few things it did say looked small on the paper. He paid the postage and handed it over. The storekeeper took it without comment. Patrick remained at the counter. Anything waiting for me? he said. I'm Ahern. Patrick Ahern. The storekeeper turned to the bins behind him. He thumbed through a stack of letters, pulled one free, and held it out. Patrick's breath caught in his chest. There were only two people who knew how to reach him at Seneca Falls. One was his mother, and he could already see the writing on the envelope wasn't hers. The envelope felt heavy. The handwriting on the front was not a hand he knew, but the name above the return address was one he recognized. He read it twice. The letters seemed to sharpen on the paper. The sounds of the store, the bell, the storekeeper moving behind the counter, a woman speaking outside, went distant, as though heard from underwater. He did not open it. He folded the envelope and put it inside his shirt against his chest. He could feel it there, stiff and warm against his skin. Thank you, he said. His voice sounded strange to him. The storekeeper nodded, and Patrick turned for the door. He passed a man coming in and did not look at him. Outside on the road for a moment, blinking in the sun, he stood. He looked left and right. A cart moved along the road to the south. Two young boys sat on a fence rail across the way watching a cat saunter past. No one was watching Patrick. He walked back to camp faster than he had come. He did not open the letter until he was back in the shanty with the door flapped down. He sat on his cot and pulled the envelope from inside his shirt. The paper was damp from his sweat. He turned it over and broke the seal with his thumb. The letter was short. The language was not. Words like obligation and forfeiture and consequent action. But beneath the dress of it, the meaning was plain. Patrick owed a debt. The debt was overdue. The man who held it was losing patience. Patrick knew the man did not work at a bank. He knew it when he took the loan. A real bank would never have given him credit. The letter did not say what would happen next. It did not need to. The name at the bottom was Phelps. Patrick laid the letter beside him on the cot. He sat there for a long time. It had started in Rochester, before the mill, before any of this. A man Patrick knew from a tavern had offered him a share in a cargo venture. Goods moving up the Genesee. A sure return. Patrick had put everything he had saved from two years of mill work. The venture failed. The goods were lost, or stolen, or had never existed. The man from the tavern disappeared. Patrick was left with nothing. He should have stopped there, but he didn't. He went to the card tables instead, blackjack, looking to win back what he'd lost. He lost more. He borrowed to cover losses. He lost the borrowed money too. The debt compounded. Interest grew on interest. The men he owed sold his debt upward until it sat in the hands of a man named Phelps, who owned a lending house on State Street, and who did not lose money. Phelps gave Patrick a choice. Pay what he owed, a sum that had grown beyond anything Patrick could earn in a year, in five years, or put up collateral to buy time. Patrick had nothing to put up. Nothing except the deed to his mother's house on Lark Street. She had signed it over to him two years prior, so he could manage her affairs while her eyesight failed. He took it from her desk while she napped one day. He signed the papers in Phelps' office on a Tuesday afternoon. The clerk didn't look him in the eye. That should have been the end of it. Time bought. Payments to be made. The house safe as long as the money came. But Patrick could not make the payments on a mill wage. And when the mill let him go, he could not make them at all. The night before he left Rochester for the canal, Phelps men found him. There were three of them. They came to the boarding house where Patrick and Owen were packing their things. They did not knock. They stood in the room, big men, calm, the kind of calm that comes from knowing no one could rush them. They told Patrick that Mr. Phelps expected regular payments, regardless of where Patrick chose to work. They asked where he was going, and Patrick told them. They asked how he could be reached. Patrick said Seneca Falls. They left without another word. Owen had been sitting on his bed through all of it. He did not speak until the men were gone. Then he looked at Patrick with a face Patrick had never seen on him before. Patrick told him everything. The investment, the cards, the debt, the deed, their mother's house. When Patrick finished, Owen was quiet for a long time. Then he said he would not tell their mother. He said it the way someone makes a promise they don't want to make, quietly and looking at the floor. A shout from the cook fire brought Patrick back. He folded the letter from Phelps. He put it back inside his shirt. He sat on his cot and looked across the dirt floor at Owen's footlocker. He had not touched it since Owen died. He had told himself he was not ready. He had told himself he was respecting his brother's things. Neither were true. He had not opened it because he knew what was inside, and he knew what he would do when he saw it. He crossed the shanty and knelt in front of the trunk. He lifted the lid. Owen's things were neatly kept a clean shirt, a razor with a bone handle, a small Bible their mother had given him, the leather soft and dark from use. Beneath the Bible, wrapped in a piece of cloth, was Owen's money. Patrick counted it. There were his brother's savings, a little heap he had set aside week by week from his pay on the ditch. There was also pay that had come through after Owen's death, owed for the last days he'd worked. Patrick held those coins in his hand. He took all of it. He put the coins in his bill fold. He closed the footlocker. He set it back against the wall, shut, as though he'd never opened it. He went back to his own cot and sat down. The money was not enough. He knew that without counting it against what he owed. It was not close to enough. Phelps would send more letters. Then he would send men. They would come down the towpath, or they would come through the trees, or they would come into Seneca Falls and ask for him by name, and someone would point them toward the canal. They would find him the way they'd found him in Rochester. They would take his mother's house, or they would take something from Patrick himself. Maybe both. He sat on his cot with his dead brother's money in his bill fold, the letter against his chest. The ditch would not save him. The work would not save him. The distance he had put between himself and Rochester was not distance at all. The new man's name was Weyland. He had joined the gang two days prior, hired off a crew that had finished its section to the east. He was talkative, in the way of a man who had not yet learned the rhythms of a new group. He talked while he dug, he talked while he ate, he talked while other men said nothing. He found Patrick at the water bucket during the afternoon rest. Lyle tells me your brother died of the egg, he said. He'd said it plainly, without venom, the way a man might comment on the weather. Patrick drank from the dipper. He did. Anyone look him over? A doctor? A caroner? No, there's no doctor out here. Whalen leaned against the spoil pile. Funny thing about the egg, when it gets into a crew, it runs through. You don't lose one man on it. You lose five, six, ten. I saw it happen near Montezuma. Half a crew down in a week. He looked at Patrick. But nobody else here got sick. Patrick set the dipper down on the rim of the bucket. Lucky, Weyland said. He nodded slowly, then he picked up his shovel and went back down into the cut. Patrick stood at the bucket. His hands were still, his face was still. He watched Weyland walk down the bank. He turned and started up toward the towpath toward camp. He didn't make it to the shanty. Halfway there he stopped. The towpath ran along the high ground above the cut, packed dirt, dried mud. And there was a place just off the path, ten yards from Patrick's shanty, where the ground dipped slightly. The mud there had dried in the sun and cracked into plates. Grass had not yet started to grow through the patches. It looked like any other stretch of ground along the canal. It was not. Patrick stood over it. He looked down at the cracked mud. His breath was shallow. His hands hung at his sides. This was where Owen had fallen. It had been early. The light was just coming into the sky. Patrick was sitting on his cot, pulling on his boots, the old ones, with the cracked soles, when Owen spoke from across the shanty. Let me wear the new pair today. Patrick did not look up. No. My feet are bad, Patrick. The blisters have gone wrong. I can feel it in the skin. Well then wrap them up. I've been wrapping them up. The wrapping doesn't hold in the mud. I need boots that don't let water in. Patrick pulled the laces tight. Those are my boots. I'm saving them. Saving them for what? Your feet are fine. For when mine wear through. Same as anyone would. Owen was quiet. Patrick could feel him looking, but he didn't look back. He stood and took his shovel from the door and went down to the cut. Behind him, Owen said something he did not catch. He didn't ask him to repeat it. Within a week, Owen's right foot had swollen. The skin around the blisters had gone dark and cracked open, weeping. He wrapped it in rags each morning. By midday the rags were soaked through with mud and fluid. He limped in the cut. He kept digging. He did not ask about the spare boots again. Then the fever came. It came the way the men described the egg. The shaking first, then the sweats, then the skin going, but Patrick knew it had started in Owen's foot. The infection climbed. The rot had gotten into his blood. It was too late to share the boots now. The egg was what men called it because the egg was what they knew. Patrick said nothing to correct them. He sat with Owen through miserable nights. He held the rag to his forehead. He gave him water. Owen burned. His eyes went glassy. He spoke to people who were not there. He called for their mother. Patrick told himself Owen would come through it. He told him the fever would break. On the last morning it broke the wrong way. Patrick woke to Owen standing over him. Not in his cot, standing. His eyes were wide open, bright, feverish. His whole body trembled, but he was smiling. The smile wasn't his brother's. You're up, Patrick said. He sat up on his cot. You should lie down. I should lie down, Owen repeated. His voice was high and mocking. I should lie down. I should wrap my feet. I should drink water. He laughed. The sound was thin. You know what else I should do, Patrick? I should tell someone. Patrick went cold. Tell someone what? Owen swayed on his feet. He steadied himself against the door frame. His smile widened. About the money, about Phelps, about Mother's house. He said the words slowly, tasting them, rolling them around in his mouth. About what you did. Owen sat down. What you did with the deed, what you signed, how much you owe. Owen pushed off the doorframe. He took a step toward Patrick, then away, then sideways, a strange, lurching dance. She doesn't know, does she? Mother doesn't know. Nobody knows. His voice was rising. Nobody knows what you are. Owen, keep your voice down. Why? Who's going to hear? The boys? Let them hear. He turned toward the door. Let them all hear what Patrick Ahorn did to his poor old mother. His voice was a twisted, crooning song. Patrick was on his feet. He grabbed Owen's arm, and Owen wrenched free. He stumbled through the doorway and out into the half-light, barefoot, his arms wide, his head tipped back. He was laughing, and the sound carried across camp. You put up her house, Patrick. You gambled it away and put up her house. Patrick followed him out. Stop. She'll lose it all because of you, because you couldn't stop. Patrick. Patrick. Owen was moving away from the shanties, down the slope toward the towpath, still shouting. His words were breaking apart, half-formed, tumbling over each other. He spun to face Patrick, walking backward, his arms out like a man on a tightrope. I promised I wouldn't tell. I promised, he grinned. The grin split his face. But I'm telling, I'm telling right now. Patrick looked down at the shovel in his hands. He did not remember picking it up. It was leaning against the outside of the shanty where he left it the night before. Owen was rolling his head from side to side, like he was trying to loosen a kink in his neck. He was starting a new string of taunts. Blackjack. Right? Patrick? Blackjack Pat. Blackjack Pat Patrick swung the shovel. The flat of the blade caught Owen across the forehead. The sound was dull and heavy. Owen stopped. His mouth stayed open. His eyes stayed open. He stood there for a moment, perfectly still, as if the blow had not yet reached him. Then his knees folded. He went down into the mud. Patrick stood over him. Owen was on his knees, his hands in the mud, his head hanging, and he was still talking. The words came out broken, half voiced, aimed at the ground. Blackjack, you won. Enough. Patrick turned and began walking away. Get yourself back in bed. He walked down the towpath toward the cut. The morning was coming in. The light was gray. He could hear Owen behind him still gibbering in the mud. The sound grew quieter as Patrick walked. Then it stopped, or the distance took it, and Patrick did not turn around. He went into the cut, and he dug. An hour later, Lyle came down the bank. He told Patrick they'd found Owen face down in the mud. He said it looked like he'd tried to walk and had not made it far. He said the egg had taken him. He said he was sorry. A crow called from the tree line and Patrick blinked. He was standing on the towpath looking down at the cracked mud where his brother had fallen. The grass was coming through. In a season, it would cover the spot entirely. No one knew what had happened here. At least no one knew yet. He heard Weyland's voice in his head. Nobody else here got sick. Patrick turned away from the spot. He walked to his shanty. He sat on the cot. He did not go back to the cut that day. Patrick sat on his cot. He sat through the afternoon, through the evening, through the sounds of the men coming up from the ditch. He did not eat. He did not light the lamp. He sat in the dark with his hands on his knees and waited for whatever was coming. There were only two ways it could end. Phelps' men would come for the money he did not have. Or the police would come, asking questions about Owen, about the egg that only took one man, about the mark on his forehead no one had seen because no one had looked under the mud. He did not know which would come first. He did not know which was worse. Sometime in the night, he lay back on the cot. He did not decide to sleep. His body decided for him. He lay there with his boots still on, and the dark took him. Patrick didn't dream of the canal. He didn't dream of the debt. He dreamed of Owen's ghost standing in the doorway, reaching for the shovel. And this time Patrick did not close his eyes. He watched his brother take it. He watched him step through the door and into the dark. Patrick wanted to follow. He wanted Owen to turn and look at him. To come back. To finish him. To drag him away into the mud. But the ghost did not come back. Patrick slept. He woke to a voice outside the shanty, bright light through the doorway. Morning.

SPEAKER_03 57:34

Hey, Patrick. It was the head engineer. These men just come. They say they're here for you.

Channel Outro

SPEAKER_00 57:52

Thanks for listening to Tonight's Terror. If you enjoyed the story, follow, rate, and review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps new listeners find the show. Visit tonight's terror.com for all our stories, merch, and more. Until next time, sleep well.