These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  “I can’t,” I repeated, shaking my head.

  “If you don’t, your brother will stay there forever. You are his only chance.”

  I stared into the canyon. For as far as I could see, it was nothing special, only a narrow path through the rock that seemed to widen out the farther along it went, gently going uphill. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remembered?

  “If you go in, if you go and look for him,” she said, “I will convince the others to follow you. They’ll be along soon to help you find your brother.”

  “How?” I asked, but I already knew.

  “I convinced you, didn’t I?” she said. Her words were like those of a mother to a toddler, finally letting him in on her secret when it is too late for him to escape bedtime.

  I sighed. She had convinced me. It was true. I was standing there picturing my brother, and there was no way I could turn and leave him. Not now. The village was gone—there was nothing there for me. Miho was gone. My brother had destroyed her life, and she wouldn’t be coming back for me. Even Abe—surely the revelations about what my brother had done, the pain he had distributed to our friends, had turned him away from me. I had no one besides my brother, and if I didn’t go find him now, I would have no one, forever.

  I didn’t even say anything. I took one step, then another step, then another, and before I knew it, I was inside the canyon. I was leaving the village behind, leaving Abe behind, leaving Miho behind. I was going to find my brother. I was returning to the suffering city.

  The dread of it filled my stomach like a ball of lead. My hands were sweating. My tongue felt scorched from the fire, swollen and dry. I could still smell smoke on me, and I wondered, too late, if I should take things with me: food and water and supplies. But I kept going, one step after another. The sounds of the burning city vanished, and all that remained was a gray, filtered darkness, the pattering of heavy raindrops at the tail end of the storm, and a sense that everything had turned to bitter ash.

  PART TWO

  16 The House

  I EXPECTED MY first steps into the canyon to be difficult or heavy, as if the terror would be waiting for me as soon as I crossed over some imaginary threshold, but even though the light was dim and smoke followed me in from the burning town, I found the going strangely easy. And quiet. I knew the way in led uphill, into the mountain, but it felt like I was walking downhill. My senses were confused, so I turned around and looked back toward the opening. There was the split in the mountain, a dark line of nearly black sky between the shadows of the cliffs, the space that led down and out into the plains.

  Was I actually doing this? Was I actually going back into the mountain?

  The farther I went, the darker it became, until I couldn’t see the difference between the cliffs on either side, the sliver of sky above me, or the boulders that lined the path. I kept tripping over dead stumps of trees. There was a short stretch of what felt like tall, brittle weeds that rustled and snapped off when I meandered through them.

  I thought it might be best if I waited until morning to keep going, so I felt my way to the side of the canyon, waving my hands in front of me. It was narrow at that point, but the dark was so thick I couldn’t see from one side of the canyon to the other. I found a series of breaks in the rock wall and cleared the ground of larger pebbles, sweeping them to the side with my bare hands. Even then the ground remained rocky and hard. But I was exhausted. Hearing everyone’s stories, running through the fire, and my last conversation with the woman in my house weighed heavily on my mind. I fell into a fitful sleep, worried about Miho and Abe and everyone else. Worried that they had already left without me. Worried that they were following me.

  When I woke up, an anemic light illuminated the narrow crag of sky at the top of the canyon, the color of blue-gray smoke. Everything was completely still. I realized that what I had been walking on was not dried-out weeds but rubble-strewn ground covered in old wasps’ nests. A surge of panic filled me. There were hundreds of nests scattered along the canyon, so many that it was nearly impossible to walk without stepping on them. In a panic, I walked quicker, trying to avoid them.

  But when I did hit them with my feet, their gray, honeycombed surfaces peeled apart like ash or tissue paper and floated around, lighter than air, so that I left behind me a wake of shimmering, sheer flakes hovering in that liminal space. I saw nothing alive among the remnants of the nests, nothing moving. As I walked farther into the canyon, they thinned out until there were only one or two here and there, hidden among the boulders or resting in the cliffs. I had a distant memory of walking through this same area when it was full of wasps, when they filled the air with their writhing, their buzzing, but it was too far away in my mind to grasp properly.

  The tiniest of movements caught my attention, over along the edge of the cliff. One of the dead hives had twitched, but not in a way that was consistent with the movement in the wind or any other kind of natural trembling. I changed directions, drifted over toward the movement, but I lost track of where it had come from, so I stood perfectly still, close now to the right-hand canyon wall. I waited.

  Again, the same twitching, and I saw where it came from. I moved closer. One of the gray wasps’ nests sat precariously on a boulder that was about waist height. It shifted again, and a tiny black wasp crawled out from under the nest. I glanced around, a bit afraid that this was not the only one, that I might now find a million other lonely wasps crawling out from under those million dead wasps’ nests. But no. Nothing. Only this one last wasp hovering above its dead nest, then landing again on the surface, spinning, exploring, and crawling back under.

  It gave me a lonely feeling. It would die. I left it there, peering over my shoulder a few times with the strange sense that it might follow me, but it didn’t. For as long as I could see the nest, it was dancing as if in the wind, but I knew better.

  I remembered my dream again, the one in which I lied for my brother. Adam was clearer to me than he had ever been. I could see his face as if he was standing right in front of me. Wait. Was he standing right in front of me? Something seemed to be moving in the shadows, something with form, something human. I walked toward it, up the canyon. The place smelled of smoke and dust, and I could see a wind blowing up above the canyon walls, but the air down where I was remained still.

  The shadows shifted, and what I had seen was gone. But I could still envision his face. I felt like I had found my way in among nameless things, as if all that I had forgotten would now come back to me. It was exhilarating and new, and again I had the sensation of walking downhill, even though I knew the path was heading up into the mountain.

  The sky brightened as I continued, and the air cleared a bit, seemed more breathable, but my eyes were still watering from the dust and the lingering wisps of smoke. The canyon widened gradually, so that at first I didn’t notice the extra space. But there were trees all around me, tall and thin, and they made it difficult to see both sides of the canyon. All of this transitioned into an even wider space that felt more like a forest than a narrow chasm.

  That’s when I saw the house in the woods.

  I stopped for a moment, leaned behind a tree, and peered at the house only fifty yards or so in front of me. It was covered in weathered wood siding that was gray and split by the dry air. The windows were dark, and the front door looked like it might be partially open, but I couldn’t tell from where I stood. From the chimney, a narrow, twisting thread of smoke rose up into the sky.

  I stayed there for a long time. I sat down, waiting to see if anyone would show themselves. I peeked around the tree and pulled back again. But there was also a huge sense of relief building in me, even in the midst of the fear—after waiting for my brother for such an incredibly long time, I was finally doing something about it. I was no longer sitting in my own never-changing house at the edge of the plains, wondering if he would be the next one to come out.

  There was no way to pass the house without going within view of the windows. If
someone was in there, they would see me. I could sneak from tree to tree, but then the house would be behind me, and I still wouldn’t know if anyone was in it or if they had seen me. Or if they were following me. Going farther without knowing what was inside that house unsettled me more than the thought of walking up and knocking on the door. I had to search the house before I could pass it by.

  I stood up and went out into an open space between the trees, where I had a clear view of the front porch. “Hello!” I called out.

  The resulting sound was alarming. I should say the lack of resulting sound was alarming. The canyon swallowed up my shout in an instant. It was the polar opposite of an echo, as if I had not even said anything. The sound of my voice died the moment I stopped shouting, the “o” of “hello” cut short. It sent a shiver down my spine.

  I took a few steps closer to the lonely house, walking under some low-hanging branches. The trees, while being alive and having leaves, drooped in the heat and the stillness. I reached up, pulled down a leaf, and realized it was brittle, even on the branch. It crumbled in my hands.

  “Hello!” I shouted, and again my voice died in the air. I was closer to the house now. The light reached its peak in the sky above me, and I nearly forgot I was in a canyon.

  The door of the house creaked open a bit, an abrupt sound that set my heart racing. I felt my muscles tense instinctively to run. I steadied myself by reaching over and holding on to one of the trees. The bark disintegrated under my fingers, and the fragments fell to the ground without a sound.

  If it wasn’t for the house, I felt like I could have lost track of which way I was going. I looked out from behind the tree again. I was still thirty or forty yards from the house, but I saw a woman come out to the porch. She wore a black dress, and her long, dark hair was up in a tight bun. She peered out into the woods as if looking for something specific.

  I opened my mouth to shout again, but I wondered if she would even be able to hear me. I gathered my courage and walked toward the house and the woman. She watched as I approached, but she didn’t say anything. I got closer, so close that I could see a thin layer of dust covering everything—the rails, the wooden porch floor, the front door handle. Her narrow feet had left a path through the dust from the door to where she stood. The inside of the house was dark.

  Above us, the light was fading. I needed to get moving. I needed to travel farther before the darkness fell again.

  “Hello,” I said, and when the word was swept away, I said it louder, trying to lodge it in the air. “Hello.”

  She nodded. Her face was plain, and once I was close I could see she had dark rings around her eyes. Wrinkles radiated out from their corners. She gave a weary sigh, closed her eyes as if she had already had enough, and crossed her arms, not in a defiant way but in the way small children sometimes cross their arms when they are cold.

  “Hello,” she said in a wispy voice. “Who are you?” Even though it was a question, it came out more as an exasperated statement. Who are you, and why are you bothering us?

  I swallowed hard. I hadn’t expected to see anyone on this side, at least no one besides Adam, and certainly no one living here, this close to the entrance. Why would anyone stop here? Why would anyone live here?

  “I’m Dan,” I said. It gave me a breathless feeling, talking in that quiet place where any words spoken were caught up in an unseen river and swept away.

  “Dan,” she said quietly, as if she could decide everything she needed to know about me simply by saying my name. “Dan.”

  “What happened to the wasps?” I asked, and immediately I wondered why that particular question had escaped.

  Her eyebrows raised, and I thought I could almost see a smile gathering at the corners of her mouth, an amused expression. It felt mocking. Or something else, something I couldn’t put a finger on.

  “The wasps?” she asked, tilting her head back and appraising me. “The wasps are gone. We are nearly at the end. Yes, nearly.”

  “The end?” I asked, but she ignored that question.

  “In the next strong wind, more and more of their fragile nests will be swept away. Dan.” I had the feeling she was trying to decide what to do with me. “They crumble and are blown away like dust. From dust they have been made . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  A creaking came from inside the house, along with the slow knocking of labored footsteps and a rhythmic thud, thud, thud. If anything of the grin remained on her face, the tiny hint of a smile that my questions had nearly brought out of her, it vanished at the sound of those footsteps, and a deep sense of dread was pounded into me, deeper with each wooden knock. I considered running back the way I had come, back through the trees and the dust and the lifeless wasps’ nests, back through the narrow part of the canyon and down into the plains. Could we begin again? Could we rebuild our town and return to what we had?

  A man came through the door. He wore a red flannel shirt faded to almost pink under denim overalls covered with rips and snags and holes. Neither the man nor the woman wore shoes, and their feet were cracked, calloused, and cinnamon colored from the coating of dust. He had a white beard, a bulbous nose, and gray eyes. Red varicose veins crisscrossed under the translucent skin of his cheeks and seemed to continue into the whites of his eyes, which were bloodshot and irritated and had large bags under them.

  He clenched his jaw—I saw it in the way his beard bulged around his cheekbones and his lips bunched up each time, the way lips will scowl on the face of someone who has no teeth. He leaned on a weathered gray cane. When he saw me, he breathed hard, taking in great gulps of air and blowing them out through his nose like a winded horse.

  “Hello,” I said, but he didn’t move from his spot just outside the door. He didn’t stop that labored breathing. He hated me. I knew it as clearly as I had ever known anything, but I had no idea why.

  The woman looked at the man and waited. When she seemed to accept the fact that he was not going to stop all that blustering and blowing, she turned back to me. She might have been beautiful once, a long time ago, but her hair had been pulled so tight, and apparently for such a long period of time over and over again, that she had bald spots above her ears and a bald line down her part. She had a strand of a scar that ran from the corner of her left eye almost to the edge of her left ear, a shallow scar not easily spotted at first, but when the light hit it in a particular way it flashed like a vein of silver in rock.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said, looking at me with a question in her eyes and then glancing away quickly. Was that a bashful look? Had she expected me to recognize her?

  “Does your friend have a name?” I asked, surprised at the forwardness of my question. I was getting used to the fleeting nature of my own voice in that stifling air, and somehow it made it less intimidating to speak. The words were gone almost before anyone heard them.

  He seemed to be calming down, not because of any kind of acceptance of me but because he appeared to be growing tired. “His name is Karon,” Sarah answered.

  We stood there for an awkward time.

  “Karon?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “I thought everyone had left.”

  When Sarah spoke, it was with great reluctance. “Come.” She turned and walked through the door.

  The man didn’t look back as he followed her into the house, his cane louder against the wooden floor. It seemed his anger at me had been transferred from his heavy breathing and blowing to the force with which he thrust his cane against the floor. Thud. Thud. Thud.

  They left the door open to me, but I hesitated. I could still see the rock wall of the canyon hidden among the trees. I took a few steps away from the door to the edge of the porch and glanced toward the back of the house. There, farther into the woods, I could see the other side of the canyon wall. I couldn’t see the top of either side of the canyon, because the canopy of the forest was high and thick.

  “What should I do?”

&n
bsp; A whisper of a breeze moved through the canyon, only a few seconds’ worth, but enough to lift the fine dust and swirl it around. The brittle leaves seemed to whisper, “Shhhh.” The dust settled all around me, on my shoes, my arms, even my face. I closed my eyes, reached up with both hands, and wiped my skin, finding a thin layer of the finest powder.

  When I opened my eyes, the woman was standing in front of me. I jumped.

  She almost smiled again. “Come,” she said, but this time she didn’t turn around until I moved to follow her.

  17 The River

  A GREAT SADNESS filled the house. There was an emptiness, not only in the corners but even in the areas where we stood or sat. Even when the rooms were full of us, they felt vacant. The sadness coated everything, like the dust or the shadows that deepened as darkness fell.

  I followed Sarah through the front door into an old kitchen, the counters warped and yellowing around the edges, the cabinets misaligned with doors that didn’t close quite right. Beyond that was a kind of dining area, as sparse as you can imagine, with a small round table and four chairs. The walls were yellow, whether by choice or due to age, I couldn’t tell.

  Karon had already sat down, his mouth scrunched together, his old, watery eyes looking past me through the door that Sarah had left open. She walked in a kind of glide, never in a hurry, and pointed toward a chair, indicating I should take a seat. But I didn’t sit down right away—I put my hands on the back of the chair and stood there. I watched her sit down, quietly, calmly.

  The two of them were quite a sight.

  “Why are you here?” I asked again. I realized in that moment that they had given me the seat that would leave my back facing the still-open door, and something else followed me into the house along with the dust and the sadness and the emptiness—a pinprick of fear that started in my gut and moved outward, threatening to make my hands tremble. It was the same fear I had felt ever since the woman had come into my house. Was she out there somewhere?