The homecoming was not as Elias Thorne had imagined. He had spent two decades trying to scrub the Appalachian mud from his fingernails, only to be dragged back by a telegram that read: Abe is gone. The roots have taken him. Come home.
Elias stood in the funeral parlor, the heavy scent of lilies failing to mask the metallic tang of the air. He pushed the lid of the casket open. His father, Abraham Thorne, looked older than eighty. His skin was translucent, stretched over bone like parchment. But it was the chest that stopped Elias’s breath. It was rising. Slowly. Mechanically.
“He’s dead, Elias,” Miller whispered from the doorway.
“He’s breathing, Miller,” Elias hissed, reaching for his father’s wrist. There was no pulse. No warmth. Yet, the chest continued its rhythmic swell. Elias pulled back the shroud. Around Abraham’s neck, a network of black, fibrous veins pulsed with a faint, amber light. They weren’t veins. They were roots.
Elias spent the night in his father’s old Victorian clinic, the floorboards groaning under his weight. He found his father’s journals. The last entry, dated three days ago, was a single sentence written in a frantic, sprawling hand: The mine is waking up, and it’s hungry for the Thorne blood.
