Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I take one step forward, and a charred section of root crunches beneath the soles of my hiking boots. The crunching seems very loud, though I suspect that’s only another illusion.

  “Why is it you keep coming back here?” she asks. The way she phrases the question, I could pretend I’ve never heard her ask it before. My mouth is dry. I want to remove my pack and take out the lukewarm bottle of water inside, but I don’t.

  “It could open wide and eat me,” I say to her. “A wide carnivorous sky like that.”

  There’s a pause, nothing but a stale bit of breeze through the leaves of the trees surrounding the lightning-struck ring. Then she laughs, that peculiar laugh of hers, which is neither unnerving nor a sound that in any way puts one at ease.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” she says.

  “I know,” I admit. “But that’s the way it makes me feel, hanging up there.”

  “What you describe is a feeling of dread.”

  “Isn’t that what happened here, that St. Crispin’s Day? Didn’t the sky open its mouth and gnaw this hill and everything on it – the tree, the house?”

  “You listen too much to those people in the village.”

  That’s the way she says it, the village. Never does she say The Village. It is an important nuance. What seems, as she has pointed out, dreadful to me is innately mundane to her.

  “They don’t have much to say about the hill,” I tell her.

  “No, they don’t. But what they do say, it’s hardly worth your time.”

  “I get the feeling they’d bulldoze this place, if they weren’t too afraid to come here. I believe they would take dynamite to it, shave off the top until no evidence of that night remains.”

  “Likely, you’re not mistaken,” she agrees. “Which is precisely why you shouldn’t listen to them.”

  I wish I knew the words to accurately delineate, elucidate, explain the rhythm and stinging lilt of her voice. I cannot. I can only do my best to recall what she said that day, which, of course, was not the first nor the last day she has spoken with me. Why she bothers, that might be the greatest of all these mysteries, though it might seem the least. Appearances are deceiving.

  “Maybe there were clouds that night,” I say. “Maybe it’s just that no one noticed them. They may only have noticed that flash of lightning, and only noticed that because of what it left behind.”

  “If you truly thought that’s what happened, you wouldn’t keep coming here.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I say, though I want to turn about and spit in her face, if she even has a face. I presume she does. But I’ve never turned to find out. I’ve never looked at her, and I know I never will. Like Medusa, she is not to be seen.

  Yes, that was a tad melodramatic, but isn’t all of this? The same as it’s cliché?

  “It’s unhealthy, returning to this place again and again. You ought to stop.”

  “I can’t. I haven’t…” and I trail off. It is a sentence I never should have begun and which I certainly don’t wish to finish.

  “…solved it yet? No, but it is also a riddle you never should have asked yourself. The people in the village, they don’t ask it. Except, possibly, in their dreams.”

  “You think the people in The Village are ridiculous. You just said so.”

  “No, that is not exactly what I said, but it’s true enough. However, there genuinely are questions you’re better off not asking.”

  “Ignorance is bliss,” I say, almost mangling the words with laughter.

  “That is not what I said, either.”

  “Excuse me. I’m getting a headache.”

  “Don’t you always, when you come up here? You should stop to consider why that is, should you not?”

  I’m silent for a time, and then I answer, “You want me to stop coming. You would rather I stop coming. I suspect you might even need me to stop coming.”

  “Futility disturbs me,” she says. “You’re becoming Sisyphus, rolling his burden up that hill. You’re become Christ, lugging the cross towards Calvary.”

  I don’t disagree.

  “Loki,” I add.

  “Loki?”

  “It hasn’t gotten as bad as what happened to Loki. No serpent dripping venom, which is good, because I have no Sigyn to catch it in her bowl.” The story of Loki so bound puts me in mind of Prometheus, the eagle always, always devouring his liver, a symbol for the hungry sky. But I say nothing of Prometheus to her.

  “It is the way of humans,” she says, “to create these brilliant, cautionary metaphors, then ignore them.”

  Again, I don’t disagree. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  “But it did happen, yes?” I ask. “There were no clouds that night?”

  “It did happen.” She is the howling, fiery voice of God whispering confirmation of what my gut already knew. She has been before, and will be again.

  “Go home,” she says. “Go back to your apartment in your city, before it’s too late to go back. Go back to your life.”

  “Why do you care?” I ask this question, because I know it’s already too late to go back to The City. For any number of reasons, not the least because I have climbed the hill and looked at the silent devastation.

  “There’s no revelation to be had here,” she sighs. “No slouching beast prefacing revelation. No revelation and no prophecy. No ןיסרפו, לקת, אנמ, אנמ (Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin) at the feast of Belshazzar.” She speaks in Hebrew, and I reply, “Numbered, weighed, divided.”

  “You won’t find that here.”

  “Why do you assume that is why I keep coming back?”

  This time she only clicks her tongue twice against the roof of her mouth. Tongue, mouth. These are both assumptions, as is face.

  “Not because of what I might see, but because of what I’ve already seen. What will I ever see to equal this? Did it bring you here?”

  “No,” she says, the word another exasperated sigh.

  “You were here before.”

  “No,” she sighs.

  “Doesn’t it ever get lonely, being up here all alone?”

  “You make a lot of assumptions, and, frankly, I find them wearisome.”

  It doesn’t even occur to me to apologize. A secret recess of my consciousness must understand that apologies would be meaningless to one such as her. I hear those nimble legs, those tiny feet that might as well end in hooves. There are other noises I won’t attempt to describe.

  “Is it an assumption that it is within your power to stop me?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course that is an assumption.”

  “Yet,” and I can’t take my eyes off what’s left of the charred tree, “many assumptions prove valid.”

  She leaves me then. There are no words of parting, no good-bye. There never is; she simply leaves, and I am alone at the top of the hill with the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill, wondering if she will come next time, and the time after that, and the time after that. I pick up a lump of four-hundred-million-year-old granite, which seems to tingle in my hand, and I hurl it towards far off Mount Passaconaway, as if I had a chance of hitting my target.

  4.

  One thing leads to another. I am keenly aware of the casual chain of cause and effect that dictates, as does any tyrant, the events of the cosmos.

  A lightning-struck hill.

  A house.

  A tree.

  A Village hemmed in by steep green slopes and the shadows they cast.

  A black lake and a man who died in 1674.

  I had a lover once. Only once, but it was a long relationship. It died a slow and protracted death, borne as much of my disappointment in myself as my partner’s disappointment in my disappointment of myself. I suppose you can only watch someone you love mourn for so long before your love becomes disgust. Or I may misunderstand completely. I’ve never made a secret of my difficulty in understanding the motives of people, no matter how close to me they have been, no matter how long they have b
een close to me. It doesn’t seem to matter.

  None of it matters now.

  But last night, after I climbed the hill, after my conversation with whatever it is exists alone up there, after that, I made a phone call from the squalid motel room. I have not called my former lover in three years. In three years, we have not spoken. Had we, early on, I might have had some chance of repairing the damage I’d done. But it had all seemed so inevitable, and any attempt to stave off the inevitable seemed absurd. In my life, I have loved two things. The first died before we met, and with my grieving for the loss of the first did I kill the second. Well, did I place the second forever beyond my reach.

  If I have not already made it perfectly clear, I have no love for The City, nor my apartment, and most especially not for the career I have resigned myself to, or, I would say, that I have settled for.

  Last night I called him. I thought no one would pick up.

  “Hello,” I said, and there was a long, long silence. Just hang up, I thought, though I’m not sure which of us I was wishing would hang up. It was a terrible idea, so please just hang up before it gets more terrible.

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “I’m not entirely certain.”

  “It’s been three years. Why the fuck are you calling me tonight?”

  “Something’s happening. Something important, and I didn’t have anyone else to call.”

  “I’m the last resort,” and there was a dry, bitter laugh. There was the sound of a cigarette being lit and the exhalation of smoke.

  “You still smoke,” I said.

  “Yeah. Look, I don’t care what’s happening. Whatever it is, you deal with it.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”

  I agreed.

  “Will you only listen? It won’t take long, and I don’t expect you to solve any of my problems. I just need to tell someone.”

  Another long pause, only the sound of smoking to interrupt the silence through the receiver.

  “Fine. But be quick. I’m busy.”

  I’m not, I think. I may never be busy again. Isn’t that a choice one makes, whether to be busy or not? I have, in coming to The Village, left busyness behind me.

  I told my story, which sounded even more ridiculous than I’d expected it to sound. I left out most of my talks with the thing that lives atop the hill, as no one can recall a conversation, not truly, and I didn’t want to omit a word of it.

  Whether or not each word is of consequence.

  “You need to see someone,” he told me.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “No. Not maybe. You need to see someone.”

  We said goodbye, and I was instructed to never call again.

  I hung up first, then sat by the phone (I’d used the motel phone, not my cell).

  A few seconds later, it rang again, and I quickly, hopefully, lifted the receiver. But it was the voice from the hill. Someone else might have screamed.

  “You should leave,” she said. “It’s still not too late to leave. Do as I have said. It’s all still waiting for you. The city, your work, your home.”

  “Nothing’s waiting for me back there. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “There’s nothing for you here. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “I’m asleep and dreaming this. I’m lying in my apartment above Newbury Street, and I’m dreaming all of this. Probably, The Village does not even exist.”

  “Then wake up. Go home. Wake up, and you will be home.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said, and that was the truth. “I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter any longer.”

  “That’s a shame, I think,” she said. “I wish it were otherwise.” And then there was only a dial tone.

  You can almost see the hill from the window of my motel room. You can see the highway and a line of evergreens. If the trees were not so tall, you could see the hill. On a night eleven years ago, you could have seen the lightning from this window, and you could have seen the glow of the fire that must have burned afterwards. Last night, I was glad that I couldn’t see the hill silhouetted against the stars.

  5.

  The three times I have visited the library in The Village, the librarian has done her best to pretend I wasn’t there. She does her best to seem otherwise occupied. Intensely so. She makes me wait at the circulation desk as long as she can. Today is no different. But finally she relents and frowns and asks me what I need.

  “Do you have back issues of the paper?”

  “Newspaper?” she asks.

  “Yes. There’s only the one, am I correct?”

  “You are.”

  “Do you have back issues?”

  “We have it on microfiche,” and I tell her that microfiche is perfectly fine. So, she leads me through the stacks to a tiny room in the back. There’s a metal cabinet with drawers filled with yellow Kodak boxes. She begins to explain how the old-style reader works, how to fit the spools onto the spindles, and I politely assure her I’ve spent a lot of time squinting at microfiche, but thanks, anyway. I am always polite with her. I ask for the reel that would include October 26th, 2001.

  “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?” asks the librarian.

  “Eventually, I might. But not yet.”

  “Ought never have come here. Can’t nothing good come of it. Anyone in town can tell you that. Can’t nothing good come of prying into the past.”

  I thank her, and she scowls and leaves me alone.

  I press an off-white plastic button, and the days whir noisily past my eyes. I have always detested the sound of a microfiche reader. It reminds me of a dental drill, though I’ve never found anyone else who’s made the association. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone how they feel about the click-click-click whir of a microfiche reader. One day soon, with so much digital conversion going on, I imagine there will be very few microfiche archives. People pretend that hard drives, computer disks, and the internet is a safer place to keep our history. People are fools. At any rate, the machine whirs, and after only a minute or so I’ve reached October 26th, the day after the lightning strike. On page four of the paper, I find a very brief write up of the event at the crest of the hill. One Tree, as it seems to be named, though the paper doesn’t give that name. It merely speaks of a house at the end of an “unimproved” drive off Middle Road, east of The Village. A house had recently been constructed there by a family hailing from, as it happened, The City. The world is, of course, filled with coincidence, so I make nothing of this. I doubt I ever shall. The house was to be a summer home. Curiously, the family is not named, the paper reporting only that there had been three members – father, mother, daughter – and that all died in the fire caused by the lightning. Firefighters from The Village had responded, but were (also curiously) said to have been unable to extinguish what must have been a modest blaze. I will only quote this portion, which I am scribbling down in my notebook:

  Meteorologists have attributed the tragic event to “positive” lightning, a relatively rare phenomenon. Unlike far more commonly occurring “negative” lightning, positive lightning takes place when a positive charge is carried by the uppermost regions of clouds – most often anvil clouds – rather than by the ground. This causes the leader arc to form within the anvil of the cumulonimbus cloud and travel horizontally for several miles before suddenly veering down to meet the negatively charged streamer rising up from the ground. The bolt can strike anywhere within several miles of the anvil of the thunderstorm, often in areas experiencing clear or only slightly cloudy skies, hence they may also be referred to as “bolts from the blue.” Positive lightning is estimated to account for less than 5% of all lightning strikes.

  The meteorologist in question is not named, nor is his or her affiliation given. I do find it odd that far more space is devoted to an attempt to explain the event than to any other aspect of it. Also, it appears to have been cribbed from a t
extbook or other reference source, and deviates significantly from the voice of the rest of the article. There is, reading over it again and again, the sense that explaining the nature of lightning was far more important to whoever wrote the piece than was reporting the deaths of the family or even the general facts of the case. A single anonymous source is quoted, a resident of High Street (in The Village) as a witness to the lightning strike. There is also mentioned a “terrific booming from the sky” that occurred an hour after the strike, and I can’t help but wonder why the paper went to so much trouble to make plain that there was nothing especially peculiar about the lightning, but records another strange incident in passing which it makes no attempt to explain.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” the librarian asks, peering into the small room. I notice for the first time that the room smells musty. Or maybe it’s the librarian who smells musty.

  “I did,” I reply. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I do my job. I do what the town council pays me to do.”

  “Then you do it well,” I say, determined to inflict upon her a compliment.

  She grumbles, and I leave while she’s busy removing the spool and returning it to its yellow Kodak box. I step out onto the tiny courtyard in front of the library, and it’s just begun raining. Cold drops pepper my face. I stand, staring up into the rain, and consider calling the editor, apologizing, and asking for a second chance. Telling him there really is no mystery here, so it could be a great little piece debunking a rural myth, a triumph of science over the supposedly miraculous. I could return to The City, to my apartment, and wait for other jobs. I would find a way to forget about whatever lives at the top of the hill. I would tell myself I’d imagined the whole affair, mark it up to weariness, depression, something of the sort.