A Shovel of Dirt

Karen Mellon suffered a hearing problem.

No, it wasn’t that she was deaf. The sounds coming into her ears were quite normal for a 24 year old.

It wasn’t the sound. It was what she was hearing.

Imagine for a moment, a simple sound of a shovel being pushed into a gravely mix of dirt, its metal blade grinding against the small rocks and stones, its pointed end slicing into the Earth, as hands and feet pushed with a great might to dig that shovel as far down as it could go.

Imagine that you hear it at night when you are lying in bed waiting for the sleep fairies to take you away.

Or you hear it at work, when there is a quiet moment, and your breathing is the only other sound in your office.

You are at the grocery, and in the produce section there is no one there but you…and suddenly there is this sound, the metallic sound of a shovel penetrating dirt, slicing into the Earth, like a sharp sword cutting through the flesh of a large animal.

That was Karen Mellon’s reoccurring hearing problem.

She brought it to her mother.

"I keep hearing it, Mom," she said, lowering herself into an armchair.

"It probably means nothing, Karen."

"I would think so, except it is always there, like a companion you don’t want, sitting on my shoulder like the devil himself, and when muse strikes him he takes out a shovel and plunges it into the dirt."

Her mother seemed concerned.

"Karen, this thing is taking you over. You are putting way too much into it. It is probably nothing."

Karen Mellon fidgeted. She held her glass of water for a long moment before taking a drink.

"Karen, have you seen an unsettling movie lately?" Her mother paused, thinking further.
"I hate to even bring it up, but what about Kent, your divorce and all that. It was all so stressful."

"That has been more than a year," Mom. "I don’t even see him anymore."

"Is he still in town?"

"Yes, he still works at McMaster’s Industries."

"You should never have married a man who makes his living with his hands. He was not right for you."

"Mom, that is an old conversation. I want to move on. This thing I am hearing…it has nothing to do with my ex husband, or a horror movie."

With that, Karen Mellon left. Her mother watched out the window as she drove off. There did not seem to be an easy answer. Her mother was bothered by that.

Several days later Karen visited a friend from her college days, who majored in psychology and worked at the local high school as a guidance counselor.

"I keep hearing a shovel sound," Karen told the counselor, Matt Jankins.

"Have you been working in the yard with a shovel. Or did you visit a construction site where shovels were being used?" Matt asked. "The sound could have come from nearby you and you picked it up and now can’t get rid of it."

"Matt, I have never been on a construction site, and I live in an apartment. Been there since my divorce."

"A movie, maybe. A frightening movie?"

"Haven’t seen anything scary in a couple of years."

"Listen, Karen, I have a student coming in in a few minutes. Do this for me: Just let your mind wander back in time, savor the memories, and maybe an incident will pop up that will give you the answer."

"You’re saying it is all in my head? Matt."
"I am guessing."

With that Karen Mellon was off. On her ride home she turned the radio down but did not hear a shoveling sound. Maybe talking about it made it go away.

When she entered her apartment, she sensed there was someone else there. The door was locked. But it was an unmistakable feeling, the sense that there is another living, breathing organism in your midst, an unidentified one, a threatening one.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The apartment was well lit. There! There was that shoveling sound again, the grinding back and forth motion of a shovel in gravel and dirt. It startled her and kept her from hearing the footsteps of a man coming up behind her.

He swung the heavy end of a baseball bat. Karen Mellon collapsed to the floor, unconscious but breathing.

The man had a distinguishing characteristic – large hands. Workingman’s hands. Hands that lifted and pulled and yanked and stretched and clenched. If a pencil were in his hands it would be a flat contractor’s pencil. If those hands were wearing gloves they would be leather lined and padded work gloves. Those were the hands of a man who spent his day working with them.

Karen Mellon was unconscious. Yet there was no blood. Just a swollen knot on the back of her head.

The man grabbed Karen by the feet and carefully pulled her into a very large industrial cloth sack, pulling the drawstring tight after the body was fully inside.

Now the man pulled the sack along the floor and worked his way to the back door of the apartment where he loaded the sack into Karen’s own car, putting it into the back seat, and throwing a large blanket over it.

The man went back inside the apartment, turned on a few lights, and took a second set of car keys off a small chalk pegboard. He locked the front door.

The man took Karen’s car and started driving out of town. An hour later there was still no movement from inside the large sack. The man pulled Karen Mellon’s car off the road onto a small farm lane that led to a stand of trees at the edge of an abandoned gravel pit.

There he had dug an elongated hole six feet long, six feet deep, and three feet across. His shovel lay on the ground.

He pulled the sack with the woman inside out of the back seat and lined the body up with the length of the hole and then rolled the body into the hole where it fell with a soft thud.

There was movement now, from inside the sack. Karen Mellon was coming out of her unconscious state. Seeing that, the man moved quickly, and started shoveling dirt into the grave. He had to hurry, and shoveled with a fury.

The shoveling gave off a metallic grinding sound due to all the gravel in the dirt.

Karen Mellon was slow to awake. It was dark in the sack, and she could not figure out what happened. Her head was in pain, and the knot had swollen and was throbbing with blood to the beat of her heart.

There was something heavy being thrown on her, and she struggled to figure it all out – the darkness, the dampness, the heaviness of dirt being thrown on her body, and finally there was that sound.

The sound of a shovel scraping against rocks and stones as it did its work moving dirt from where it didn’t need to be to where it needed to be.

Karen Mellon was starting to come alive. She was getting her bearings.

She didn’t know where she was or what was happening, but at least there was that familiar but eerie sound.

The sound of a shovel being pushed into gravely rock.

In some strange way it was comforting.

She had been living with that sound.

And now she was going to die with that sound.

She struggled against the sack, trying to tear it and kick her way out, until she lay exhausted from her efforts, and breathing hard, realizing now that she was being buried alive. She fought against it as long as she could. She cried out, but the sound was muffled by all the dirt.

Gravely dirt was shoveled on top of her until the grave was filled.

The man above was finished. He was exhausted from shoveling so much dirt so quickly. He was determined to get the job done. He scraped the grave to flatten out the top and make it appear neat and orderly. There was no headstone.

So he took the shovel and pushed it into the earth right where a headstone would go.

When he did so, there was that one final sound of a shovel being pushed into gravely dirt, scraping against the small stones and rocks.

Except this time, Karen Mellon did not hear it.