Tales From The Tangled Wood: Six Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out

by Steve Vernon

  Harley loaded as much goods as he could cram into his shoulder bag. Then he rolled his bike between the wagon and the little building. He felt safe. There was nothing out here but the dead. He could not sniff a trace of man stink.

  Then the big shooter ripped Harley’s bike in two.

  “Hell!”

  Harley dove for cover.

  A big ugly mean shooter poked out of the little building’s front side.

  It hadn’t been there before. He would have seen it. That must mean that someone lived in that little stone house. Someone mean and someone sneaky.

  Someone who didn’t stink of man-stink.

  Maybe a machine?

  Harley still didn’t know what a machine looked like – but whoever was in the little building he looked to be a pretty stubborn asshole.

  Harley wiggled in close to the stone building, tucking himself in the shadow of the big shooter’s barrel. Then he reached up quick-like and grabbed that barrel – intending to yank it from its user’s grip.

  Instead, he only burned his hands.

  “Shit.”

  Now what?

  He was burned, bikeless and mad as hell.

  But what could he do?

  If he moved from this position he would be back shot for certain sure. No, there was only thing left for him to go. He had to get this big shooter asshole to come out of the safety of the little stone building.

  Maybe he could talk him out.

  “Hey asshole,” he said. “Come on out. I want to talk with you.”

  The asshole in the little stone building said – “Please deposit one quarter in the basket.”

  One quarter?

  One quarter of what?

  Harley stared at the stone building’s little basket. Maybe the asshole wanted some food? There couldn’t be all that much room in that little stone building for supplies.

  He poured some of his dried food into the basket. He added some dried fruit, just to be sure.

  “Come on out, asshole,” he cajoled. “I won’t hurt you.”

  The fruit and the grain spewed out of the basket.

  Maybe the asshole wasn’t hungry.

  “Warning!” the asshole said. “Attempted vandalism will bring reprisal. Please deposit one quarter in legal tender.

  Tender?

  Okay, if the asshole wanted tender then tender he would get.

  He tenderly poured a little more grain and dried fruit into the basket. He couldn’t tell if it was a quarter – or if the asshole meant that he wanted the basket a quarter full.

  So he guessed.

  This time the asshole spewed the food back out in Harley’s face – which really pissed him off. A soft wafting of smoke drifted up from the basket. It smelled differently than any of the smoke the rider had ever smelled before.

  Maybe it was real tobacco?

  Harley had heard tell of such a thing.

  “Warning. Warning,” the asshole said. “A third warning will bring reprisal.”

  Okay, so the asshole did not eat but he did smoke.

  Maybe he drank as well.

  Harley unslung his skin full of hard drink.

  He took a sip and shook his head sadly. It was good stuff and a shame to waste it on the likes of the asshole but he didn’t see any other choice. Besides, if the asshole drank enough then sooner or later he would need to step outside of the little stone building to have a leak. It only stood to reason. There wasn’t enough room in that little stone building for a pot to pee in. Even if the asshole stuck it out the door Harley figured he could grab it just long enough to cut it off and finish the deal.

  He pulled his hunting blade out of his boot.

  He was ready.

  Then, with his left hand, he reached up and poured the entire skin full of hard drink into the little metal basket.

  There was more smoke.

  Sparks flew.

  The asshole must REALLY like his hard drink.

  Then the asshole spit the hard drink back out of the basket, soaking Harley but good.

  “Warning. Warning. Warning,” the asshole repeated. “Third warning brings a reprisal.”

  The big shooter barked hard, as strong as ever.

  It blasted what was left of Harley’s bike and the barter wagon as well.

  Harley squeezed in close to the little stone building, keeping beneath the shadow of the big shooter. He was safe but he was mad as hell.

  That was GOOD hard drink.

  Harley unscrewed the lid of the tin can full of go-juice that he had taken from the shot-up barter wagon. He reached up and poured it straight into the basket.

  He knew how to get desert crawlers to come out of their hole.

  He lit his last smoke and dropped it quickly into the basket.

  “Smoke that, you stonewalling asshole.”

  Then he jumped back and rolled himself behind the shelter of the shot-up barter wagon.

  The big shooter tracked him before the blast went off. The shooter kicked back and fired its last burst into the air, barely missing that damned road cleaner that was still flying overhead. Then the little stone house puked fire.

  Harley grinned.

  The asshole was finished.

  The big shooter dangled uselessly as a limp dick.

  Now what?

  He had not bike and nothing to drink and damned few supplies left. He still had his luck charm, though. It might help him out of this mess. It might even help him make it into the city.

  He rubbed the charm, liking the feel of the shiny metal disc.

  There was a funny looking bird etched on one side of the metal disc. The bird did not look one damn bit like any road cleaner that Harley had ever seen.

  There was a man’s head engraved on the other side of the disc.

  Maybe it was the god of the machines.

  Harley started walking.

  Fuck.

  He stared at what waited for him on the other side of the bridge.

  He could see a second little stone house with a second little metal basket and second big shooter. Probably a second asshole in the little stone house as well. He might even be the first asshole’s brother.

  The little stone house just sat there like it had grown up out from the bridge.

  It hadn’t been there before.

  Harley was sure of that.

  Where the fuck had it come from?

  Harley didn’t know.

  All that he knew was one undeniable fact.

  That big shooter was pointing straight at him.

  “Please deposit one quarter in the basket,” said the second asshole.

  Harley had just enough time to fling himself into a pile of rubble as the big shooter opened up. He lay there, stretched flat out, tasting the dirt on the top of the bridge. A cold nasty death stink arose from the river below.

  So here he was.

  No bike, no go-juice, no hard drink and no shooter.

  There was nothing but him and the bridge and that second little stone house.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder.

  The road cleaner was still up there and he had friends with him. The big black hungry birds were circling patiently.

  Harley stared past the ugly birds towards the open sky. He clutched his good luck charm tighter. It had belonged to his old man – it was all that Harley had left to remember – and he would be damned if he would ever let the machines get this last shiny silver memory.

  The sun hung heavy and fat and full above him.

  Harley stared at the silver quarter in his hand.

  It was going to be a hell of a long hot day.

  Something In The Pine Resin

  “So how’s the fishing?” Angus asked.

  “Bad as always,” Zeke said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  As far as Angus knew Zeke was one of the oldest men working on the Sydney Harbour dock. He was always down here, up at crow-piss and either fishing with a hand line for mackerel and whatever else cared to bite, or sm
oking one more cigarette.

  “Are they biting then?”

  “Not on anything that I have been dangling,” Zeke said. “But they’re out there. I can feel the pull.”

  “How can you feel a pull if they haven’t bit?” Angus wanted to know.

  Zeke snorted out a gout of amused cigarette smoke, like a fussy old dragon.

  “You can feel an awful lot without coming anywhere handy to touching.”

  “You want to throw that back at me so I can catch it?” Angus asked.

  One corner of Zeke’s mouth fish hooked into a smug little grin. He liked talking to Angus because he could always tell that Angus was doing his level best to listen. He didn’t just smile and nod the way the other young folk did.

  “What about that Ferguson girl you were looking at down to the Fireman’s Ball?” Zeke asked. “It seems to me you did one heck of a lot of touching without getting three feet and a rat tail handy to the hem of her skirt.”

  “I didn’t even look at her,” Angus said.

  “You weren’t looking at her,” Zeke said. “You were looking straight into her. If you’d found the nerve to ask her for a dance you might have done a whole lot more than look.”

  Angus blushed the color of sunburned roses.

  “I can’t dance,” He muttered.

  “She wouldn’t have cared,” Zeke said. “She knew you were yearning for her. That’s worth a lot more to a young girl or even an old one than all the fancy jig steps you care to hot foot out.”

  Angus thought about that. It made sense as did much of what Zeke said if you squinted at it long enough.

  “Yes sir,” Zeke said. “There’s an awful lot of magic hiding behind a yearning. Puts me in the mind of a story my granddad used to tell me. Sit down and I will spin it out for you.”

  Angus didn’t really want to listen to one more of Zeke’s tall tales. He’d more than his share of them over this summer. Whenever he wasn’t working yard work for his dad Zeke was down here passing time. Most of his friends had gone to Halifax or Toronto or even the Prairies. Dad didn’t make enough at the Sobey’s grocery store to afford a Play Station and Angus had pretty seen every movie that old movie store had nearly twice. The closest thing he had to entertainment was listening to old Zeke stretch his yarns.

  But even that was getting old.

  “Come here and give a listen,” Zeke said. “This here happened back before your granddad’s granddad first cut teeth. It might have been right to this harbor or maybe some other bay along the way but I can tell you that this is a Cape Breton story, no doubt about that.”

  Zeke passed a hand out towards the restless ocean water as if he were old Moses himself getting set to part the Red Sea.

  “It seems there was this old woodcarver. He worked hard for his dollar, let me tell you son. He spent his day bent and toiling in the close beamed coffin of his wood shop. Happens this day he was carving on a figurehead. You don’t see them nowadays, but back when things were good and people better a ship just weren’t a ship without a figurehead staring out the way before you.”

  “What were figureheads for?” Angus asked.

  “For luck, maybe,” Old Zeke said. “For luck and for company.”

  “They weren’t nothing but wood,” Angus said. “How’s a chunk of spruce wood going to keep a fellow company?”

  “You’re showing your ignorance,” Old Zeke said. “In the old days the Greeks would paint eyes upon their biremes so that they could see where they were going. The Norsemen would carve a dragon’s head upon their longboats and the Brits and the French and us – well we would carve a figurehead.”

  He patted the wood grain of the piling he was leaned up against.

  “There’s more to a ship than just timber and trunnels,” He said. “And there’s more to wood than just what you pounds. Feel her, boy. There’s a tug in the grain of the wood. There’s a touch of the sea in every plank. That’s how wood keeps the water out.”

  “I always thought it was just because they built it well,” Angus meekly said.

  “Feel it boy,” Zeke roared.

  Angus touched the piling.

  “Can’t you see the current moving through the grain? Can’t you feel the hum and the whir of the world, whirling inside each winding of the wood’s grain?”

  Angus slowly nodded. He could indeed feel a tug in the timber.

  “There’s an ocean hiding in every cell and a river hidden in every track of wood grain,” Old Zeke proclaimed. “Open your eyes and your ears and close your galloping bucket mouth.”

  And then he went back to his tale-telling.

  “Well sir, that old woodcarver he sure loved his work. Fact was, it was all he had left in this old world. The act of carving and creating was all the love he ever needed.”

  “So you’re saying he was lonely,” Angus said.

  “Being alone ain’t the same as lonely,” Old Zeke said. “Me, I’ve got nothing but the fishes and the seagulls and these days even the fishes are staying away but I spend my day happy as you bet; listening to the waves gossiping with the shoreline and them old gulls singing fish-fish-fish.”

  He spit into the water.

  “That’s for luck,” He said. “Now let me tell my tale.”

  He went on telling.

  “You see him now, in your imagination. All gray and weary like a run-hard wolf. His backbone carved into a kind of question mark that only his work could answer. His hand and his ironwood mallet swinging in a rhythm that matched the waves. Klok-klok-klok. Each swing working that curved steel gouge just a little deeper into the timber. Each cut echoing in the hunger drum of his empty stomach. Each swing rasping against the space that worked between skin and bone. Each blow, a jarring reminder that another precious second had slipped away as he slowly unwrapped the woman that was trapped within that jack pine log.”

  Old Zeke slapped his palm upon the timber of the dock.

  “It was hard old work but he loved it, sure. Something in the pine resin made the cutting seem slow but he didn’t mind one bit. This was his last piece of wood and he figured the pain would increase the savor.”

  Zeke fixed his gaze on young Angus and the boy felt the tug of the man’s sense of rightness burning behind his eyes.

  “Imagine Jesus himself carpentering up his own crucifix before he dragged it up that hill,” Zeke instructed. “Imagine Noah hammering his ark and the undertaker hand planing his own final casket and you’ll have half a notion of the pure undeniable rightness of the woodcarver’s creative sense of purpose. The wood and he were partners in an ongoing act of beatifying self-petrifaction.”

  Zeke paused, as if pondering his next words.

  “Only he didn’t think of any of what he was up to in those kinds of terms. Rather to him it was nothing more than a thing that needed doing and thereby doing well.”

  He cast the hand line out again and let the tide take it.

  “Without meaning to,” Zeke went on. “His labour and his loving devotion endowed a kind of secret silent life within his creation. Her unpainted eyes glowed with a patina of understanding. Without movement, without any sign or trace of life, she learned to breath.”

  He took another long thoughtful puff of smoke. He tapped the dangled spindle of ash into the sea with a practiced twitch of finger and thumb.

  “And with every breath she softly sang,” He went on.

  He stubbed his cigarette out against the wet wood. He paused to hand roll himself another, shaking out the strong Drum tobacco that he favoured into the shroud of the cigarette paper and rolling it up with an ease that spoke of a lifetime burning cancer, one stick at a time.

  “What did she sing?” Angus asked.

  Zeke’s eyes lit up as the cigarette winked into life.

  “It wasn’t words, you understand,” Zeke tried to explain. “It was more of a kind of feeling. A yearning for what she couldn’t have.”

  Zeke looked out at something in the water. It might have been a gull, it m
ight have been a fish or it might have been a dream of what had never been.

  “She sang of the rivers of ache that yearn between the trunk and the plank. She sang of the forest that mourned for the tall knots that had once bound up the sacred weave. She sang of a freedom that she would never know.”

  Angus shook his head, thinking of Sally Ferguson and the way her eyes danced whenever she seemed to be looking his way.

  “The old woodcarver heard nothing, you understand,” Zeke went on. “He was lost in the rapture of work and creation, like some old storyteller spinning out a yarn with all of his feelings caught up in the stream of the words spilling free. He heard the sea wind whistle up from the beach strand and down his chimney, turning the gawp of his empty fireplace into a tuneful joke. He heard the klok of his steel gouge digging into the wood. He heard his sweat spilling like tears of salty rain.”

  Angus heard a gull. He looked but the bird was nowhere in sight.

  “She sang with the patience of an empty beggar’s bowl, her silent tones fleeting like gulls over the waves, like grain over knotwork, like the recurring currents of need and want and abso-fucking-lution as the old carver poured out an ocean of inspiration and perspiration. He worked her features, drawing on every sense of birth and belonging he ever knew. Here was his dead wife’s corner-quirked smile. Here was his mother’s calm Irish dignity. And here was the forgotten memory of a fish girl he’d seen in a market some twenty years past.”

  Angus was still thinking about Sally Ferguson.

  And Old Zeke kept on telling.

  “Inspiration and invention were scattered all about the little wood shop. His wife’s memory curled like a cat by the side of his cot. His mother hid in the scars lacquered across his shoulders and the back of his head. As for the fish girl, he wore the shadow of her memory as close as his skin, bearing it gently in the anchor-heavy cup of his tool worn palm.”

  “So he loved her then?” Angus asked.

  “More than that,” Zeke said. “He yearned for her.”

  He blew out another puff of smoke, staring off into a memory that only he could see.

  “He’d seen her just the once,” Zeke went on. “In a crowd at the marketplace. Life and a fistful of necessary chores forced them past each other, neither aware that for a single half of a half heartbeat in time the two shared one quiet straining note of absolute love. It was more than most are given in an entire lifetime.”