Where do the bad men go?

He’d only ever noticed the barn when he was thinking the bad thoughts. He realised this as he stumbled towards it, the weight of the bundle in his arms both far too heavy and far too light. He had the bad thoughts a lot, admittedly, so the opportunities to notice its absence were infrequent. But that morning where his mind was on his unpaid bills, the morning when that bitch had moved out, the morning he lost his wallet, all had one thing in common; he had wondered when he’d missed walking past the barn.

She lived just past the barn, a few hundred meters down the path he always took when walking to the bus stop that led him to his job five days a week, her laughter and squeals tinkling in his ears, rain or shine, so he was usually thinking the bad thoughts by the time he got there. She was always laughing it seemed. It struck him as unfair, that she should always laugh so, when his heart was so heavy.

Something about the old barn had always drawn his attention, but he had never felt the urge to investigate it so strongly before now. He could never see the building or farm it was presumably attached to; he only ever saw the barn. There was very little around the path from his remote home to the village. The barn. Her house. A handful of others, scattered like wildly thrown dice along the way. Small rocky fields, clumps of scrubby bushes and ragged trees, small streams, tinkling and rushing in autumn and spring, arid, buggy and barely flowing in baking summer. The streams were fulsome and dark on this grey day in late November.

As he drew closer his eyes roved, trying to find the house or owner of the barn, and felt only relief when he saw nothing but barren land surrounding the broken down structure. Despite his erratic gait, he magically missed every fist sized rock that littered the dirt path leading him to the battered wooden doors, barely the rusted ghost of red they once were, making it all the way there without turning an ankle. A pair of filthy windows crowned the door frame, curved at the top, unusual for the structure, a voice whispered in his mind, but he paid it no heed. There was no turning from his path, not now.

He shifted the hideously light weight in his arms to free a hand enough to slide back the rusted locking bar, pointless he thought, with no padlock to hold it in place and it slid back with surprising ease, as though recently oiled, despite its pitted brown exterior.

The smell then, which he had been subconsciously noticing, became clearly, abundantly apparent. Not quite rotten meat; more like the ghost of rotten meat. What's left behind after a slaughterhouse used for a hundred years has stood empty for twenty. Where so much blood has been spilled that it's soaked into the earth itself, deep beneath the foundations.

The smell, strangely, comforted him, though he knew instinctively what it was. It reminded him of childhood summers spent on his grandparent’s pig farm. His first pails of blood, the excitement of his first butchering, the almost sexual thrill as he drew his sharpest knife over the throat of the trussed animal, hearing the gurgling squeal that he had thought back on so often since. Everyone has moments that define the person they will become. That was one of his.

When he opened the door the smell hit him almost like a physical wave. He felt the hair on his temples shiver with the air as he stepped through into the darkness.

Just shifting of air pressure or something, he thought to himself, the first touch of unease creeping in as the door seemed to slam shut behind him, though there hadn’t been a breath of wind at his back when he entered the dilapidated structure. The smell was almost a tactile experience; filling his sinuses, the air surprisingly warm and almost seeming to rush past him in waves, though he knew that couldn’t be the case. It seemed to weigh down his limbs as he stumbled forward, losing his footing now, crashing to his knees with what should have been a jarring thud, but was a surprisingly springy surface.

The earth must be thick, he thought, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, unburdening himself of his bundle as he shoved himself back to his feet, unnerved at how the ground seemed to give away to the pressure of his hands and knees. It reminded him of that safety tarmac type stuff you saw in children’s playgrounds. It felt almost….furry, not at all what he expected from a packed earth floor. He wanted desperately not to be touching it with his bare skin.

He nearly tripped again over the bundle laid haphazardly at his feet as he staggered further into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the sudden blackness, much thicker than he expected. The dirt crusted windows seemed to let no light in at all, and except for the odd faint beam from tiny holes in the seemingly ancient wood of the walls, nothing lit his path. Walls that seemed closer now he was in here, though he could not clearly see how far anything was from him.

The smell, and somehow, the heat, intensified the further he headed towards what he thought was the centre of the structure. He wondered if there was a compost heap somewhere within generating heat, though he knew that smell was not the smell of compost no matter how he tried to rationalise the situation he now found himself in. The old barn, once so welcoming, now oppressed him, the very walls seeming to weigh upon him.

He saw what he thought was the outline of a supporting beam and stretched out questing arms, seeking to lean against it, catch his breath a moment, figure out what to do with himself and his bundle, of shame and of filthy, secret joy. Cobwebs brushed passed his face in what seemed like droves, never sticking, only sliding over his nose, eyebrows, hair, lips, and indeed, a few stuck between his lips as he noticed now a crunching beneath his shoes, his heavy work boots grinding what he supposed must be stones, or perhaps even the bones of small animals underfoot as he reached up to pull the cobwebs from between his lips, gummy with sweat and dried saliva from his fevered dash to the barn after he had done...it.

They did not come free easily, seeming glued in place, and he was surprised that they did not fall apart as he pulled and peeled them from his skin, remaining in one piece like thread or...hair? He still could see very little as he reached the strut and leaned against it, panting now, this thick, fetid air heavy in his straining lungs. He turned back to face the door, or at least that's what he thought, but could not even make out an outline of light around its edges.

Surely no old door could be so flush, he thought, as to block out all suggestion of light. Even the faint tendrils he saw before seemed to have disappeared, the walls solidifying completely, the air now so heavy he couldn’t seem to pull a full breath, and he began gasping, though it helped him little, if at all.

The strut at his back, like the floor, did not feel as he expected. Rather than a hard square exterior, the surface seemed to give a little and was warm. It felt like flesh. Another gust of foul air, no longer comforting, only oppressive, ruffled the scant hair on his head, and the scraggly hair of his jawline. He thought to recoil, to bolt for where he thought the door to be, but the strength seemed sapped from him, his muscles folding in on themselves as though made from ribbons of butter. His legs would not move, his force would not muster.

More strands, cobwebs or he truly began to fear, hair, wrapped around his face, and his hands as he raised them to his face trying to wipe and pull them away, tangling in his fingers, tightening around his neck, creeping into his mouth, spiky strands trying to poke their way down his throat. The tickling had him coughing and then gagging as the opening of his mouth allowed more strands to force their way in and his knees buckled, his own hands now gripping his throat, fixed in place as the strength continued leaving his body.

He couldn’t make a sound, other than a helpless gurgle, but he was aware of every second of his body being...absorbed into the ground, disintegrating and sinking until nothing remained of the bad man but a greasy patch on the earthen floor, and a slightly fresher metallic smell mingling with that of rotten blood.

When light returned to the old barn, now a dirty, unremarkable old barn again with a fresher looking patch of earth towards its centre, the bundle was gone, and the laughter of a child pealed out over the gurgling of the streams once more.