The Mortal Burden
Book II
Chapter 4
Part XIX: The Inn of the Laughing Ghost
The innkeeper was an attractive woman, one that had been hardened by the events in her life. Strong, but sadness lingered behind her bright blue eyes; this made the woman seem older. “I wonder how many people she had lost; how many she had loved and how many of them had perished?” Clayden asked himself.
May, her dress soaked to the skin in opaque glowing green, hurried up the old wooden stairway to the room in haste. The inn was at least three hundred years old, the foundations had been sinking, and the oak slowly decaying. Dry musky air proliferated throughout the inn, imprinting itself into Clayden’s memory. The scent of stale beer, food, and liquor wafted from the closed empty tavern area across from the check-in counter.
“Thank you so much for letting us inside at this hour, we’ve been traveling all night through the storm.”
“I open up at six anyway, no harm done,” she replied with a slow drawled accent and an icy stare. Long white curly hair flowed down her ample chest, caressing her ample cleavage, her hair cascaded down her back, over her nightdress and down to her shapely ass. Her skin glowed a very pale white, illuminated by the candlelight, and her slanted eyes glared a piercing deep blue. These people, who lived in the cavern system, rarely got any sunlight. Exotic yet eerie to those who existed out in the open.
Caves of the living ghosts, as they were referred. The settlement stretched for hundreds of miles inside the earth and through the inside of an ancient mountain range. Homes and businesses of granite, marble, and sandstone all endlessly winding inside the safe, perhaps the only last real refuge humankind has known over the centuries. Adapting and slowly evolving into a new species of humans.
There was no safety for the majority of humanity; those who wanted to live out in the open had to be willing to fight for their freedom.
For hundreds of years, the bulk of the human race moved around in city-sized military caravan communities, always mobilized for fear of Titan attack.
The wandering finally ended with the invention of the fortress-megalopolis, almost always built in the ruins of the earth’s greatest cities that were ravaged to depletion by the forces of devastation. Huge supplies of metals from fallen skyscrapers, foundries, and other buildings were plentiful in the old cities, the foundations, the bones of the living fortress-megalopolis. Humankind began to rebuild from the ashes, and for what? It’s all so futile, he reflected.
“How much would you like for 48 hours?” He asked the inn owner.
“Do you have anything to trade?” She replied grinning, glancing hard at his watch. He begrudgingly unclasped the watch and handed it to her.
“Could you dry my clothes, and find my companion some clothes better fit for traveling?” He asked as he handed her some silver; he credited out his account for silver at the last trading settlement. “You can keep the change,” he whispered to her, catching a glimpse of her curvaceous form and then looking into her intense gaze.
“As you wish,” she turned slowly, with candlelight in her hand glowing off her pale skin, walking back to her quarters on the other side of the closed bar. She left the door open a crack, setting the candle down on her nightstand. Clayden stood motionless in the darkness as she lay on her back softly onto the bed.
He watches, shackled by the future that holds him hostage.
Was this the wrong path? The caverns of the living ghosts?
Passing through the underworld of the dead.
Written ~ 1997. © Jacob A. Pickard 2025. All rights reserved. This work is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, republished, excerpted, or used for academic, commercial, or derivative purposes without written permission.
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