“Run!” screamed the watcher on the belltower of the tallest steeple on the hill.
So they ran.
What else could they do?
What else could lord or serf do, could manager or employee do, could king or lover or thief or wizard or software engineer do but obey the simplest command?
The earth under Murble’s Crossing trembled. The sun shone watery in the pale blue sky. The snow dusted itself from the tree branches. A wren folded its wings and fell weary and resigned from the heavens. Someone’s cow gave a grunt and heaved out the hindlegs of what, it had become obvious some time earlier, was a three-headed calf. Mercury had started last night in retrograde, changed its mind halfway through, then punched Venus in the face. The moon had new spots on it. The mayor’s favorite cat had gone bald last night and had regrown all its hair five minutes ago (she had also gone from tabby to tortie).
Yes, even a blind eagle or a deaf bat could understand what was afoot. All could, save for Burtholomew Puddle, who was staying at the Murble’s Crossing Holiday Inn and was still angrily ringing the bell.
“About time!” he said to the manager, as she erupted from the backroom like boiling lava. “Your clerk just interrupted my simple request for cleaner sheets with – hey! Hey! Hey! Get back here!”
“Run!” called the manager over her shoulder, head only half turned, word gasped as much as shouted – only the sparsest of effort diverted from her own headlong flight. “Run!”
Then she was gone and Burtholomew stood alone at the desk with the tragic and bereft face of a man with a full head of indignation and no target whatsoever, a cat that had failed to catch their own tail.
He consoled himself with a pocketful of complimentary hard candies.
***
Burtholomew walked into the parking lot in search of someone else to complain to and found no one and nothing, including his car.
“Outrageous!” he seethed. “There wasn’t a SINGLE handicapped person around when I took that spot, and it’s a weekend! They have no right! On a Saturday! I ask of you, what kind of day is THAT to remove an innocent man’s personal transportation?”
“It’s the day.”
The words were gasped, the face was strained, the body was fumbling at the lock on a bike rack. A shallow curse, the withdrawal of an expensive phone from the pocket – oh! A hammer! Bam-bam-bam! The lock broke apart, the adolescent dirt bike was taken, the person – a perfectly respectable middle-aged man in a suit (no tie) fled down the road like the police were on his heels.
He’d dropped not only the phone – screen now an interesting diagram of geologic stress fractures illustrated by a professional orb-weaver – but his wallet. Harvroy Blonk.
Burtholomew pocketed it for safekeeping.
“He could have,” he told the lonely street, “at least kept cash on hand. For a finder’s fee.”
It did not answer.
***
After ten minutes it became apparent to Burtholomew that the bus was not coming, nor was anything else. The road was bare and dry and empty.
He waited five more minutes to be sure, then gave up when a turtle he’d been idly watching had reached the central lane marker completely unthreatened. Downtown wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t walk it, it was merely so far away that he deeply resented it and was going to add to the litany of complaints to lay on the desk of the mayor, the chief of police, the local bylaw officer, and anyone else who looked at him.
Maybe Harvroy Blonk, he considered. He’d looked like he had money, and now he’d owe Burtholomew. If not for the wallet, then for not telling people about stealing a teenager’s bicycle. That wasn’t the sort of thing people got arrested for, but it WAS the kind of thing that made people talk.
Downtown was empty. Doors were unlocked. A trail of hair in the street messily dithered back to a barbershop, clearly dragged by an errant boot. Half a bumper marked a sudden and clearly nonfatal disagreement between two vehicles, which apparently had induced neither those involved to stop nor witnesses to set up traffic cones.
The police station was unlocked. The secretary’s computer was still on and their chair was still warm. Their browser, private browser, and calendar were all open, the calendar foremost.
On the calendar February the second stared back at Burtholomew.
“Ground hog day,” he read. Horse and bull puckies. Why not rat day? Why not pigeon day? “Fwaugh,” he enunciated. It pleased him. “Pfft. Blmeah.”
“Help!”
“Hello?”
“HELP!” The voice was desperate and scraped and – it came to pass – belonged to a man in Murble’s Crossing’s single jail cell, whose hands were bloody at the nails and the knuckles and the tips from the clawing and punching and grabbing at the (cheap, but only half-dented) lock.
“Let me out let me out let me out let me out let me OUT” he said, too frantic to get enough air in him to scream properly. “Almost too late let me out let me out let me OUT!”
“What are you in there for?” asked Burtholomew. “It’s not stealing is it? I hate thieves. Low work effort and no pride. Disgusting..”
“I punched a guy I took the lord’s name in vain I shot up the stagecoach who cares let me OUT please let me OUT please please please please key’s on the desk PLEASE-”
With the long sign of a reasonable man put upon beyond all belief by reality, Burtholomew located the keycard and brought it forwards.
“Really,” he said as he waved it around. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Is groundhog day so important here? What stupid little nickname did you give your local weatherrodent?”
“NO NAMES!” howled the man. “They’ll HEAR it! It’s today! Today the ground hog wakes and seeks Their shadow!”
Burtholomew realized the cell door required a slide rather than a tap and unconsciously decided to pretend he’d known that all along and had been waiting until now on purpose. “Fine, well, but I don’t see what’s –”
The door beeped, then clonked directly into his face. The man fled in a single long hyperventilation.
“Hey!” he shouted after him. “I’ll call the police back on you!”
He didn’t care. He didn’t hear. He didn’t stop.
Burtholomew, fuming and rubbing his sore nose, made the best of a bad situation with the contents of the breakroom fridge. Someone named Sarge DON’T TAKE THIS had left a half-serving of meatloaf and greens.
***
City hall was empty too.
Even on a full belly this was very nearly too much to bear for Burtholomew. His sheets had not been changed. His car had been towed – or, as he had come to suspect, been stolen in whatever frenzy had gripped this miserable little town – and he’d been forced to watch a bicycle theft and not received payment for helping a stranger with their wallet and he’d had a door opened in his face. He’d eaten a just-a-little-too-small meatloaf and then been let down by subpar greens that left his mouth bitter and resentful. And all of this without a single person to complain to.
“I WILL,” he vowed in front of the empty hall in the middle of the empty street in the midst of the empty town, to himself and the whole universe, “meet with whoever is to blame for this cavalcade of poor service and worse manners.
The ground rumbled.
Burtholomew swore and kicked at a pebble.
The ground shifted.
Burtholomew yelped and clutched at a lamppost.
The ground rose, and was not the ground.
Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth-Mover, the Mumbler, the Mountain, the Ground Hog, and the ground was They and They were the ground and it mantled Their shoulders and it was Their shoulders as a cape of ermine would delineate an emperor or a halo a saint or a haze of blood and sweat the naked flesh of a dying berserker lying prone on some plundered shore among the driftwood.
Burtholomew opened his mouth and made some noises.
Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Whistler, the Chucker, the Incisive-More. And so down was cast Murble’s Crossing, rent in ribbons around coarse fur thicker than iron bars and hoarfrost-tipped with the secret veins and lodes of the deep stone where the gold is rich and the heat is boiling and the liquid-rock hum of the mantle grows loud and unavoidable; dripping in pavement and asphalt around forty stout limbs tipped with claws that turned through adamant as if it were unfired clay; spilling big box stores and suburbs and apartments into a Deep hollow below a body that could only be described as perfectly massive, perfectly unstoppable, and perfectly round.
The Deep was below. It was not the concern of the day. The great craggy head was still rising even as the body halted; the blunt stubborn neckless head questing, the nose sniffing – a space that aircraft carriers could be lost in was sucking in air and sampling the atmosphere, determining heat and cold and pollen and things humanity had neither words nor weathermen for, and after determining all those things the head reached its zenith and Their eyes opened.
Slowly. Watery (if magma were water). Carefully. They had been so Deep for so long.
ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth’s Tail, the Not-A-Pig, the Fore-Caster, reared up into the blinding face of the still-rising sun, snout questing in squinting bafflement, and so did not see Their shadow, and was not afeared.
So They saw. And so They squeaked – once: short, sharp, satisfied, and so deeply-pitched that only an old, old earthquake warning system in Beijing could detect it. And so They turned and descended, limb by limb and turn by turn, until Their legs, Their skull, Their roundness was once more held beneath, and the Ground was ground again and the soft soil beloved of multicellular life once more hid Their back beneath.
All was as it was once more, save for Murble’s Crossing.
And Burtholomew, of course. But nobody much minded that.